#884: How to Spot 10-Year Trends and Build Billion-Dollar Companies — Kevin Ryan of DoubleClick, MongoDB, Business Insider, and Many More

Kevin Ryan is one of the leading entrepreneurs and investors in New York. Often called the “Godfather of NYC tech,” he is the founder and CEO of AlleyCorp https://alleycorp.com/, a New York based venture capital firm that incubates and invests across healthcare, AI and software, consumer tech, deep tech, and more. Kevin is also the co-founder of several notable companies including MongoDB, Business Insider, Zola, Gilt Groupe, and Transcend Therapeutics. Earlier in his career, Kevin was the CEO of DoubleClick, which he helped grow from a 20-person startup to a publicly-traded company with more than 1,500 employees. This episode is brought to you by: Eight Sleep Pod 6 https://www.eightsleep.com/tim/ which cools or heats each side of the bed, with custom elevation and snoring reduction, and wearable-free sleep tracking: EightSleep.com/tim https://www.eightsleep.com/tim/Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: Shopify.com/Tim https://shopify.com/timMomentous https://livemomentous.com/Tim high-quality creatine for cognitive and muscular support: LiveMomentous.com/Tim https://livemomentous.com/TimAG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/timTimestamps: 00:00:00 Intro from Tim 00:01:25 Kevin Ryan’s entrepreneurial track record 00:03:40 Spotting long-term trends and turning them into businesses 00:06:33 Designing gatherings and trips for great conversations 00:11:42 Second-order thinking and the missed YouTube opportunity 00:17:47 Gilt’s rise, shrinking moat, and knowing when to sell 00:22:06 From Dilbert to DoubleClick: early lessons and fast decisions 00:27:52 AlleyCorp’s model: start narrow, then scale 00:32:26 Recruiting founders and building Business Insider 00:38:28 Recognizing a business crush and choosing what to build 00:41:44 Investing in nuclear energy 00:43:26 Taking money off the table and keeping funds small 00:47:15 Ping-pong and the value of coaching 00:49:05 Making time for family, fitness, and vacation 00:51:52 Psychedelics and the origins of Transcend Therapeutics 00:54:20 Methylone, PTSD trials, and navigating the FDA 00:59:57 Transcend’s public-benefit mission and giving back 01:05:46 Deep tech, robotics, and the next wave of opportunities 01:11:35 Failed startups, MongoDB, and knowing when to persist 01:15:06 A more caring society: inequality, taxes, and opportunity 01:17:26 Immigration and attracting the world’s best talent 01:20:04 Why Kevin is bullish on New York * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers across all disciplines. My guest today comes from the world of business, Kevin Ryan. He is one of the leading entrepreneurs and investors in New York, which is an understatement, often called the godfather of New York City tech. He is the founder and CEO of Ally Corp., a New York-based venture capital firm that incubates and invests across, catch this, healthcare, AI and software, consumer tech, deep tech, and more. But investing is just part of it. He is also a co-founder of several notable companies, including MongoDB, Business Insider, Zola, Guild Group, and Transcend Therapeutics. What do those all have in common? They are completely different industries.

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  Earlier in his career, Kevin was the CEO of DoubleClick, which he helped grow from a 20-person startup to a publicly traded company with more than 1,500 employees. We get into a lot here, so without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging and tactical conversation with the one and only Kevin Ryan.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 1:10Speaker 03

  No, we're seeing an appropriate time.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 1:26Tim Ferriss?

  Kevin, thank you for making the time. So nice to see you.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Happy to be here.

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  So I wanted to just give people a scan at 30,000 feet of the landscape, meaning your chronology, for a second. So this was prepared by the robots, so don't believe everything you read, but let's just go through some of the basics. I'm not going to spend too much time, but please indulge me for a second. So 1985, graduates from Yale, I think that was economics, begins his career at Prudential Investment Corp. All right, New York and London. 90, 1990, earns his MBA at INSEAD, subsequently works at Euro Disney in France, then United Media. We're going to come back to all of that. 1995 helps launch the blank website. I'm leaving that blank for a reason, we'll come back to it. And then after that, DoubleClick, that's where if people interview, and I know you

• 2:13Tim Ferriss?

  don't do very much media, but in the few that I've seen, that's where a lot of people start. We will not start there. Goes on DoubleClick, sells for 1.1 billion. Ryan steps down, 2007, found Ally Corp. We're going to spend a lot of time on Ally Corp. Co-found Guild Group, Business Insider, 10 gen later renamed to MongoDB, then co-founded Zola, a wedding registry company, and Nomad Health in 2015, a marketplace connecting clinicians with temporary healthcare jobs. I'm trying to give people an idea of the breadth of fields. 2015, Axel Springer acquires control of Business Insider. I've got some numbers here, but who knows, 442 million, something like that. Hudson Bay buys Guild Group, before it announced $250 million deal. MongoDB in 2017 goes public on NASDAQ 10 years after its founding.

• 2:57Tim Ferriss?

  I know there, there's a lot of stories behind that. 2021, we met, I guess, or had dinner next to each other two years prior to this, roughly. Co-found Transcend Therapeutics, developing new medicines for psychiatric conditions. We will certainly talk about that. 2023, skis 101 kilometers to the South Pole. So that stands out as an outlier. Then June 2026, Otska completes acquisition of Transcend, 700 million upfront, plus up to 525 million contingent on future sales. July 2026, announces Ally Corp's 335 million, second fund focused on backing companies at their earliest stages. I think you're doing a lot more kind of deep tech investing also. This is a crazy bio, Kevin.

• 3:41Tim Ferriss?

  There are so many reasons I wanted to chat and learn from you, and I wanted to start, we're eventually going to get to things like recruiting and talent scouting, but I wanted to talk about trends and gazing into the crystal ball, looking into the future. So I've read that you sometimes do an exercise of listing trends on a whiteboard. Throw 20 trends up, and I'm going to read a bit, this is from foundersjourney.org. So one exercise I do is to list 20 ideas on the board of trends that I believe are going to exist for 10 years, and then what are the implications that come out of that? And you can look at societal trends, healthy eating, automation in restaurants, gig economy, and this is where I think I misstep. So first, I get the first part. You ask, if I bet that's going to continue for 20 years, the market's going to grow

• 4:26Tim Ferriss?

  by 5X. He asks, what will exist that doesn't exist today? So sometimes I miss that second step. But could you perhaps just walk me through how you think of trends and spotting opportunities in those trends? And it strikes me that I think that 10 years is important as opposed to like one or two years, but could you speak to that?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, first of all, 10 years is important because to build an important company, unfortunately, you can't do it in two or three years. It does take 10 years. And so you've got to bet on a long-term trend. So if it's something that is hypey today and is going to be done in two years or started five years ago, you're too late. And it's very hard. I've gotten it wrong many times, but sometimes you get it right. So DoubleClick was internet advertising, was going to be very important. And that trend, we absolutely got right. Unstructured data in databases was Mongo, and that was a 20-year trend. Psychedelics was a very important trend. I became a big believer that that, you know, would be significant for mental health and that we are five years into that 10-year trend. Nuclear energy is something that we made a bet on, a very significant bet on, two

• 5:30Speaker 01

  and a half years ago, and are incredible company there. The creator economy is something that we made a bet on several years ago and have an extremely successful company there. That's a trend that is continuing. There are other trends out there, and more specifically, value-based care is a trend. Value-based care is a way the government has structured it so that you can go to multiple hospitals or doctors' practices and work out ways for them to reduce their costs by focusing on a specialty often. And if you reduce their costs, then you can share in the savings. And so we have multiple companies there.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  And sometimes there are trends, I'm not able to think of the right way to benefit from or the right product. Longevity and this focus, still haven't come up with the right thing. I have a conference called DOC, which is in Napa Valley in October, that is longevity and science. And so that's to learn more, but I don't have a product idea yet on that.

• 6:33Tim Ferriss?

  Why do you do events? Are the events opportunity and talent scouting mostly? I understand that learning is sort of a bedrock beneath both of those two, but what was the impetus behind an event like that?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I have four now, and some of them are linked to my business. So Deep Tech New York, it's 450 people talking about the most fundamental deep tech trends that are happening out there, material science, things like that. Then I have one, Digital Health New York, which is next week, then DOC, and then I have one that's called Odyssey, which is just ideas. It's less commercial and just getting 100 very smart people together. And I look at that as more intellectual nourishment. I don't think of it as directly generating business. If I meet fascinating people in different areas, good things will happen. Some of them may be business-oriented, and some of them may not be.

• 7:24Tim Ferriss?

  Could be dragging a 100-pound sled behind you.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:26Tim Ferriss?

  In Antarctica.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, for example, I'm leading 20 people as part of Odyssey to China in a month, and the theme is what does China do better? There are things they do worse, but there are things they do better.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And I haven't been in a long time. I don't do a lot of business in China, so I just felt like I need to see that. And so I'm bringing heads of VC firms, a bunch of interesting people on that trip. We did one, took 16 people skiing that are off-peace skiers, I have a place in Val d'Isère, fascinating conversations in the afternoons. I'm going to take 30 people to Switzerland on a hiking trip next May. Anytime I'm surrounding myself with great people and we structure in a good way that these conversations are happening, then I'm going to get a lot out of it.

• 8:10Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so I had planned, but plans change when the conversation gets flowing, on hitting early chapters, and I want to hit early chapters. But before we get there, I remember sitting next to you in Portugal, whenever it was, 2019, and the first thing I thought was, good God, what does this guy do for exercise? I mean, you take, seem to take, unless your genetics are just like Usain Bolt or something, fitness, movement, exercise very seriously.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:40Tim Ferriss?

  And we'll probably get into what that regimen looks like a bit later. But when you organize these trips, so I organize a few trips a year for friends. How long are the trips? In the case of, say, the hiking, off-peace, like you got to check some boxes before someone's going to be like avalanche-ready and so on. In the case of the hiking trip, how do you think of composing the group? How long is the trip? What goes into creating that?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  So the hiking trip is three or four days. It'll be probably 30 people, and my structure will be probably a four-hour hike, sort of eight till 12, which is a good-sized hike. You can go longer, but four, maybe five. And then the afternoon, we'll have sessions. So there'll be someone talking about climate change. There'll be someone who's talking about nuclear or whatever is happening that we think is interesting or consciousness. And so you should feel like you had great content, you got to know other people, you had great conversations, and then at dinner, a lot of that comes together. And you get to hopefully come away knowing 20 of these people who've been selected, because they come from different walks of life, but are doing something very interesting.

• 9:47Tim Ferriss?

  So with 30, does that mean that you would have something like 10 who end up getting up to speak?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:53Tim Ferriss?

  And at dinner, is that structured in any way? And the reason I ask is that there can be unstructured events. One of the characteristics of dialogue that I really enjoyed in the early days, when it got bigger, it changed.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:05Tim Ferriss?

  Also didn't realize I was in Peter Thiel's secret society when it came out in the media, who knew?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:11Tim Ferriss?

  In any case, in the early days, I remember they had very small tables, four to five people, and there would be a question at each table, and someone would have to take the responsibility for effectively acting as moderator. And there was frequently assigned seating to ensure that you would get exposed to a variety of folks, and I thought that was... Really an astonishing way to squeeze a lot out of a few days. But in this case, if it's unstructured, how do you think about seeding and grouping people? Right? Because if it's just one long, like red wedding, Game of Thrones thing, then if somebody's at one end and the others and someone's at the opposite end, they're not going to interact necessarily.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Is it Jeffersonian or like?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  At thirty, it's too big to have one conversation. So what I would generally do actually is in the first two nights have seeding so that it forces people to mix it up and maybe on the last night, not do it. So then you can say, you know, the person I really want to catch up with is this. And you should have that opportunity of someone you spend some time with. On my bike, I have an annual biking trip where we just classic four days. Do a lot of mountains last year in the Douro Valley in Portugal, might be in Italy, things like that. There's only eight of us and each person has a topic that they, one meal is going to be a 20 minute conversation that you're going to lead. And it can range from very early on, we were talking about crypto and it wasn't so obvious. Good topic when you are relatively well off.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  How do you handle money with your children? Always a tricky issue and all of us had kids. So wide range of topics.

• 11:42Tim Ferriss?

  On the trend side, personally, I remember, for instance, way back in 2008, 2009, I met Toby, who was still CEO of Shopify and they had 10 employees, something like that. Got very lucky, ended up becoming the first advisor to Shopify. But in part, the reason I committed to that is I thought, okay, one year, two years, who knows? But in 10 years, will there be more people online? Will there be more e-commerce? I feel like that is a no brainer. Toby and his team, Harley and everyone, were also very focused on being basically first movers on mobile. And I was like, okay, well, will there be more mobile phones, more broadband? I mean, that seems obvious, of course.

• 12:26Tim Ferriss?

  And so ostensibly, someone will probably win a decent part of that market. Sure, why not? Give it a shot, right? And there's a lot of luck involved with these chance encounters. But I feel like you, over time, have probably developed a more sophisticated lens or kind of multi-dimensional lens of looking at trends. So if you're, say, hosting a company offsite and they're imagining where different industries are 10 years from now, can you walk through maybe common pitfalls or mistakes that people make when extrapolating trends or forecasting? Are there any follow-up questions or frameworks that you use to hone in on something that might

• 13:09Tim Ferriss?

  be an opportunity or disqualify something that is shiny, but is actually a suicide mission?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  One of them, again, if this were formulaic, we'd all be doing it and it would be easy. So there's definitely some gut feel and some instincts, some guesswork in here. But I'm always thinking about, let's imagine Shopify does very well. Who else works with them and supplies them? So that's a second order. And so let's think about that, like the people who are providing the fixed and troubles to data centers are doing very well. And how does behavior change? You know, what does that mean? Sometimes that has a result that people will stop doing this and be doing more of this.

• 13:49Tim Ferriss?

  Do you give an example of that?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Well, I'll give you one example in second order that we sat down in 2003 and didn't quite do it and thought about bandwidth price is going down and they were going down. The reason there was no video in 2003 is because it costs about $10 per thousand to serve content and you could get about a dollar in advertising. So that model doesn't work. But we looked at the trend and thought, you know, by 2005, 2006, they're going to cross. And we should have started YouTube and we didn't. And it's not a coincidence that YouTube started in 2005 and then crushed it. And that was the second order that led to a company that today is worth $300 billion.

• 14:29Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good acquisition.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 14:33Tim Ferriss?

  Incredible acquisition.

• 14:37Tim Ferriss?

  Many of you know that I've battled sleep for decades. I've had onset insomnia. I'm constantly hot because I'm a little meat cube and the list goes on. But I've used Eight Sleep for many years now, since the beginning, and man, it is a godsend. People have experienced up to 34% more deep sleep. And by people, I mean customers, HRV improvements of 13% on average. They've transformed more than 1 million nights of sleep for their customers. Eight Sleep just released the Pod 6. I'll explain what it is and it is a major upgrade. But first things first, right? The Pod is a cover that fits over your existing mattress, kind of wraps it, cools or heats each side of the bed independently. As I mentioned, I run super hot. My lovely partner tends to run cold.

• 15:20Tim Ferriss?

  With the Pod, we each get the temperature we want and need for good sleep. No more fighting over the thermostat, no more pulling the blanket off, putting the blanket on, sticking one leg out, all that nonsense. Fixes all of it. Now to the upgrades, the Pod 6 Hub, the latest and greatest that runs the temperature system is 50% smaller than the Pod 5 and fits under most bed frames. The thermal engine reaches your set temperature 20% faster. So the bed is ready whenever you are. And the cover embeds nine times the number of biometric sensors, tracking things like heart rate, HRV and sleep stages with no wearable. The Pod 6, check it out, starts at $1,999, the lowest starting price Eight Sleep has ever offered.

• 16:02Tim Ferriss?

  Use code TIM at eightsleep.com/tim for up to $200 off of the Pod 6. Spell it all out, that's eightsleep.com/tim and use code TIM. This episode is brought to you by AG1, which I have taken for more than a decade. Man, it's coming up on close to 15 years, I would say. Longtime listeners have heard me call it my nutritional insurance and that is exactly how I use it. The news today is they just launched AG1 Pro, designed for people focused on performance and longevity. I'll be traveling soon. I'm actually packing today and I'm throwing a bunch of these in my bag to cover my bases while I'm on the road. And I have noticed, perhaps some of you have, that it is harder and harder to put on muscle and to keep on muscle.

• 16:47Tim Ferriss?

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• 17:30Tim Ferriss?

  Get your free AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in the welcome kit at drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one. So D R I N K A G, the number one, dot com slash Tim.

• 17:48Tim Ferriss?

  So it won't be labor this, but I think it's, well, number one, deeply fascinating to me. If we look at, for instance, guilt group and maybe you could give just a brief description of, of what it was, why don't we start there? Just very brief, what did guilt do?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  It's a good news and bad news story. So this was an unusual one where I spent a lot of time in France. I have a French passport and everyone in France in 2006 knew Vant Privé, which was basically guilt of France. And they were doing a billion dollars in revenue, doing this concept of flash sales where during the day, at one moment, they would have discount merchandise of high-end brands on sale. So the equivalent, if you had time to go to a sample sale, which you don't. And I remember walking by a sample sale in New York and there were 200, mostly women in line. And I remember thinking, you know, the person who lives in Philadelphia or Austin, you don't have sample sales. It's really the New York brands and there's a lot of people who'd like to be in that line. And these guys had figured that out.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  So I started it. It became a phenomenon. So in our second year, we did 175 million in revenue, which is crazy. And, you know, it's merchandise, you have to buy it and package it and sell it and return it, things like this. And we did an incredible job of providing that. So in year four, we were doing $500 million in revenue. This is quite a while ago. And then the problem was, which does happen, is the market changed on us.

• 19:18Tim Ferriss?

  This is the part I wanted to ask about.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah. And so what happened was when we started it, let's use Marc Jacobs. Marc Jacobs did not have a website in 2008, 2009, because they sold to Bloomingdale's and people like that, they were wholesalers. Why would they have a website? They got a website, they started discounting their own things.

• 19:35Tim Ferriss?

  You had been filling that gap.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  I had been filling that gap completely. And at the time, Macy's had a terrible website. They at least got it too mediocre by 2011, 2012. And so did other department stores, then Farfetch'd was there. So all of a sudden I'm competing with a lot of people for that merchandise. It got a little commoditized and we couldn't figure out a way around that.

• 19:57Tim Ferriss?

  So this leads to my question, because you have to take shots on goal. And sometimes the competitive landscape or the evolution of the competitive landscape is difficult to glean. But did that experience with guilt inform how you think of durable capitalization on trends? In other words, like how you capitalize on that window, but avoid getting?

• 20:25Tim Ferriss?

  Crowded out when you have 10 other people do effectively the same thing.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it gets back to, do you have a moat? And we were trying to get to be big enough that we would have that moat. And we got to be quite big, but not big enough. I mean, I was talking to Theory once and they had 20,000 items at the end of the season to sell. I could buy a thousand.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Good, but doesn't move the needle for them. And so I just didn't quite get there to have an impact on the market. So it's hard to know exactly how big you're going to get, how fast, how much success you're going to have over your vendors. And so we almost got there, but didn't. And one of the lessons there, you know, I went to the board and said, I think we should sell the company. And everyone was like, well, we were worth a billion dollars. We thought we could sell it for 400. It's disappointing. I said, we have a pulling knife here. And so we went out and we only got $250 million. Saks came in and paid for it. And three years later, they said, I'll sell it back to you for 5 million. So.

• 21:24Tim Ferriss?

  Better late than never.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. It wasn't a great sale, but it was a lot better than it would have been. Because I just didn't like where things were going. And the conclusion has been that I haven't touched really e-commerce since then. You know, it's solved. Startups have to solve a problem, even if you don't realize that problem is there. When you see it, you're like, oh yeah, that is a problem I had. And right now I can't, I mean, I can get anything delivered to my house in like 27 seconds. I can return it. It's inexpensive. So I don't know how to do better. I don't have any ideas. Whereas in many other fields, you know, cure for cancer, nuclear energy psychedelics. There are things to be built that have not been built that will improve the world a lot.

• 22:06Tim Ferriss?

  Let's wind back the clock as I promised listeners earlier. So we're going to get to the helps launch the blank website. Before that, we have Yale Economics, Prudential Investment Corp.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yep, investment banking.

• 22:18Tim Ferriss?

  Investment banking, Insead, Euro Disney. Was there anything that you learned or developed in those chapters? That then helped you when you moved to United Media? Like, is there anything sort of crucial or critical?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  The key thing is I was quite financially oriented and very comfortable. I've always been very comfortable with numbers and understanding fundamental trends and the business. And that is a component of business and life. And so all of that was business. And then I went finance and then going into operations at Disney. So we had to manage hotels and it was a, it was a exciting project. We launched Euro Disney, you know, 15,000 hotel rooms, 50,000 people every day. Huge project launches one day. So I learned a lot about that, but I decided I didn't want to work for large companies anymore. So I thought there's a lot of training. Wasn't incredibly enjoyable. I then wanted to go back to New York. I got a job to be the CFO of 180 person division of United Media. For me, that was a big job. I was managing 50 people.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  I managed all the operations and the finance. And it was a turnaround. Made a lot more money. For me, it was a huge step up. And I was now CFO and COO.

• 23:29Tim Ferriss?

  What is the blank that I'm leaving out here?

• 23:31Speaker 01

  I still remember, I read an article in Business Week that talked about a thing I did not know, which was called the internet. You may have heard of it. And I remember reading that thinking, oh my God, that is incredibly cool. Like we can all be in touch with each other. We can send each other messages. We could buy things. And remember, there's no browser at the time. So by 95, I launched, because we owned a lot of intellectual property. And one of the things was Dilbert. And so I launched the Dilbert website, which became extremely successful. And the reason was there were a lot of tech people who could use the internet without a browser. And so we had enormous traffic. I started selling advertising, which was a hardcoded ad just up there. IBM was the first person, they took it for two weeks. I made up a price on the spot.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  I mean, how do you price something that's literally never existed? And we did our own merchandising. So we started selling t-shirts and ties and things like that. And so a year later, we had a very successful business. I went to the parent company and I said, this internet thing is going to be big. And we have a head start. So why don't you give me, I was thinking as a loyal corporate citizen, give me a couple of million dollars and I'll build up an internet division. We could do it for other companies. And the disturbing thing is the guy I was talking to was very nice, smart, traditional media guy. And he said, no, because we're going to wait for the next internet.

• 24:49Tim Ferriss?

  What's that even mean?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  I don't know. First of all, I know you don't know what you're talking about. There is no next internet. And, and the disturbing part is I remember thinking, you're just really too old for this. And he was exactly the age I am today.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  61 or 62. And a very successful executive and other things just wasn't in touch with what was happening right at that moment. So I then concluded, this is not my future, but I believe in my thesis. I thought this might be, and it turned out to be true.

• 25:19Tim Ferriss?

  Was that a gut feeling or were you tracking numbers outside of traffic? What made you?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  No, I could see at that time, if you're around in 96, it was just early, but starting to boom. Companies were starting, more and more people were online. No one was getting offline. They were starting to buy things. They were starting to use maps. You could just see it worked. I mean, the things we take for granted now, that you can buy something from anywhere, see content from anywhere, that never existed. And now I saw that, I'm like, this is a no brainer. Everyone in the world is going to be doing this. So I think it was like your point on, is e-commerce going to grow? Yes, it is. It's just better. It was a sort of, it was a no brainer. And so I said, I'm going to go out and start an internet company. I met, I mean, it was a very tiny world at that point. People in Silicon Valley wanted to bring me on to join existing companies.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Like, I don't know if you remember Exite, a bunch of companies like this.

• 26:10Tim Ferriss?

  Drove by them on the 101.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And at that point, I had a year of internet experience, which made me one of the most experienced people at the time. So people were super excited to have me join and do something. And then I ran across two guys who had started DoubleClick six months before. And who were very smart, very technical. And I still have great relations with both of them. And so they said, why don't you come join us? And I wanted to stay in New York. I thought that was going to be a successful company. And so I joined. I was the 10th or 12th person. I started for a couple of months as CFO, became the president and then became the CEO.

• 26:42Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think contributed to that ascension to CEO? What skillset or otherwise contributed to that?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  I felt like a founder. Technically I'm not, but I felt like I was. And so I just was a team player and wanted to make this company successful. And I adapted extremely quickly to making decisions very, very quickly. You have to make your decisions faster than other people. Because if I wait, so for example, we opened offices in 25 countries in those first three years.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And our competitors were only in six. And when I went to Microsoft or Procter and Gamble, we do business in a lot of countries. We need to work with you. And then once you had all them, smaller players were like, well, Procter and Gamble and Microsoft, everyone working with you, so we'll work with you. So we just ended up almost dominating our space. And I think I did adapt to that of fast decision-making, understanding the numbers, willing to take risks. We were in 20 countries before our first country was profitable. Like if it never worked, you'd be like, what were you doing? And we made some mistakes along the way, but in general, we built the world leader. DoubleClick today as an independent company would be worth 100 billion.

• 27:53Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to talk about that. Not exactly building the parachute on the way down, but the Ally Corp model, let's just say, especially in the first few years. Because I hesitate to put it under the label of incubator, because it's different in a lot of ways. Unlike say a Y Combinator, it's not a bunch of people coming in with their own ideas that you select. Then you take a tiny percentage for a tiny amount of money and teach them how to pitch a demo day. It's not what you do. And I guess my understanding is, I guess in the early days, you and your partner are putting in maybe 500K each into each company. Acting as co-founders.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:36Tim Ferriss?

  Building each for about six months as a proof of concept and then going out to raise venture. Is that a fair description?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Maybe a year.

• 28:44Tim Ferriss?

  A year, okay.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  But we really built the product, generally launched the product and then went out to raise money. And so we were really focused on those companies. And we did three and then we did another batch of threes. We did a total of six. Three of them were hugely, hugely successful. Gilth Business Insider and Mongo.

• 29:02Tim Ferriss?

  After the formation of Ally Corp, when were those founded?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  All between 2005 and 2008. And the last three were started in the same year.

• 29:11Tim Ferriss?

  At that time, were you doing eight companies a year or did that end up later? Much later.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Because there was really only two of us. And my, at the time, my partner, he's retired now, but Dwight Merriman is one of the most brilliant technical minds that we've seen. So he's really the brains behind the DoubleClick technology and the Mongo technology, along with one other person. And so, you know, we had this great partnership where everything technical, he really handled. I didn't even worry about it. And then everything on the business side, finding the CEO, you know, building it, raising money, things like that. I focused on that.

• 29:44Tim Ferriss?

  It seems like you have a number of incredible strengths and I'm sure there are more. But there's the trend opportunity identification. There is recruitment of talent, capital formation, being able to raise money. In some cases, a lot of money, depending. And.

• 30:07Tim Ferriss?

  As you mentioned with DoubleClick, right, getting to 25 countries before the first is profitable. Because when a larger company wants to partner with you, they're going to want that global footprint. And you raise the capital necessary to reach that critical mass, escape velocity, choose your metaphor. And I'm wondering how you think about that when, in the, say, first three to five years of Ally Corp, when you were founding companies, and some of them took longer, obviously. MongoDB, I think, stands out as an example of that. But let's just say with Business Insider, for instance. I listened to an interview you did with Sam Parr and Sean Purry. And you mentioned how in the beginning, you had a handful of people covering everything.

• 30:50Tim Ferriss?

  We could talk about the problem and the gap that that addressed, but just for the time being, I think this is worth spending a moment on. So in the beginning, you had a handful of journalists handling everything.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  They were only handling Silicon New York technology.

• 31:02Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, they're handling New York technology.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  It's important to start narrow.

• 31:05Tim Ferriss?

  So they handled New York technology. And then at a certain point, though, I imagine, right, they were spread thin. But then, once you got the traffic that allowed you to hire more, and so you could stair-step it in a way that I think a lot of people would be hesitant to. But ultimately, that allowed you to dominate space.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:25Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm not delivering that in a very eloquent way. So maybe you could explain it. I'm just wondering how that type of thinking manifests in other companies that you start.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And Gilt and Business Insider, even though they're very different businesses, we did the same way, which is that Gilt started with one sale a week of women's clothing. And then we went to two, and then three, and then five. And then, maybe a year later, added men's, and then kids, and then travel, and then home. And in Business Insider, we started because you, it's better to do one thing really well than a bad job on everything. And so we started with only three people, so we discovered New York tech. It wasn't that big, but we did a good job. And then expanded and had a Wall Street vertical. And then added another vertical. And then, as we added more people, they would add a vertical, eventually defense, retail, things like that. And, you know, we then got to 600 journalists at one point and did a great job.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  And, you know, we have, roughly when we sold thereafter is we had six people covering defense. That's great coverage.

• 32:25Tim Ferriss?

  When you and Dwight were putting in the initial million dollars, split 50/50, presumably you're taking, I don't know, 30-plus percent of the company, something like that.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Day one more, and then it gets diluted down.

• 32:37Tim Ferriss?

  Right, exactly, right. You're planning for that dilution with the later raise. In the early, let's just call it the 2005 to 2008 period, how did you get very, very smart, capable people to quit their jobs and come run these companies?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  And they have to believe that, one, the idea is a great idea. They have to believe that we are adding value and that there's something here, and that we should do it together. And those are the things they have to believe, and then we can help them. And so we had just sold the company in New York City that was the most valuable startup company ever created at that time. So we had credibility, they thought, you know what, we're going to get you in to raise money and help you do that. And we did, and we were able to do that. So that was the pitch. But we've, you know, Henry Blodgett is a perfect example. He was, you know.

• 33:24Tim Ferriss?

  Business Insider.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Business Insider, he's an incredibly talented person. At the time, had a mixed reputation because of what had happened on Wall Street years before. But a great writer.

• 33:34Tim Ferriss?

  And just for clarity, he basically said he was uncomfortable with something that was standard practice, right? That was his sin.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I stand by what he said and did, actually. But he came on board and we, I knew him a little bit, but brought him in. And after 30 minutes, he's like, this is a great idea, we should do it.

• 33:50Tim Ferriss?

  What did the pitch look like?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  So the idea is so simple now, you won't believe it. There was no business news site that was online, that was inherently online. And at the time, Wall Street Journal and Business Week did not update their sites during the day.

• 34:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  And so.

• 34:07Tim Ferriss?

  Got to wait for the paper.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  And so all the things we did, and we're not maybe the only ones, but we were one of the very first ones, are standard today. Meaning, we posted multiple stories as it built, got more information, had punchy headlines, tested our headlines. It's just hard for people to switch mediums. So Business Week doesn't worry about their headline in the magazine. Is it a good headline, give them more revenues?

• 34:30Tim Ferriss?

  Doesn't matter.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter.

• 34:32Tim Ferriss?

  Care about their cover, but they don't care about the headlines of the articles.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  And so we would try four headlines, which was incredibly innovative at the time, for five minutes apiece. And then see, oh, this one is pulling better. Let's use that one. So all these things are absolutely standard today. And Henry was very good. I mean, he's incredibly talented. And we got Peter Kafka, some people are still very significant journalists today. We got them early on in their careers. But it took a long time. I mean, it took years, but luckily, we had enormous growth. Also, it was hard to raise money for it. Our strategy was, we're never going to do marketing. By the way, you've never seen it have for Business Insider. We're going to write stuff that's so good that eventually we'll have 100 million units. And everyone's like, that's not a strategy.

• 35:16Tim Ferriss?

  Hope it's not a strategy, right?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  And that is exactly what happened.

• 35:23Tim Ferriss?

  Now, guess what I did just before breakfast? I did what I do every morning. I took some creatine. Today, I took five grams. If I'm sleep deprived, I might take 10 or 15. And I have used Momentous creatine for a long time, as it's been one of the highest quality creatine options available on the market. That's exactly what I used this morning. Now, Momentous has taken that quality that they're already known for even further with Signature Spec creatine, their most advanced version yet. Signature Spec is manufactured in a pharmaceutical facility using reverse osmosis water purification. You can hear those birds in the background, man, I'm striving for healthy over here. It's verified through a six-stage testing process with four independent agencies, delivering 10 times fewer impurities, two to five times tighter heavy metal limits,

• 36:07Tim Ferriss?

  and added PFAS, that's the forever chemicals you don't want, and microplastic screening. That's the Momentous standard. The ultrafine powder also mixes cleanly with no grit. Super, super easy. Creatine supports strength, power, lean muscle, and recovery with growing research on enhanced memory and cognitive performance. I take it mostly for the cognitive stuff, but it's great for the gym, too. So if you take creatine every day, like I do, make sure it's the best. Do not cut corners. Head to livemomentous.com/tim and use code TIM for 14% off. That's an interesting percentage. For 14% off of your first one-time order or a total of 35% off your first subscription order. That's livemomentous.com/tim. That's live moment, O-U-S, momentus.

• 36:52Tim Ferriss?

  livemomentous.com/tim for between 14 and 35% off with code TIM. As some of you might recall, I launched my own limited edition coffee a few years back. It was delicious, it was a blast, but that's a story for another time. Here's why I'm bringing it up. I needed and wanted an online store that would be beautiful, fast, and reliable. Plus a checkout that wouldn't scare people off at the finish line. So I used this episode's sponsor, Shopify. I've known the team since 2009, when they had something like 10 employees. And I was using it back then. Many of the most successful startups I advise today also use Shopify.

• 37:31Tim Ferriss?

  From fast-growing new companies to some massive juggernauts, they all use Shopify. I started my first online business back in 2001. Back then, it meant late nights, a lot of broken code, emailing tons of customer support emails, and headaches after headaches after headaches, hoping the payment page wouldn't stop orders, drop orders, the whole nine yards, right? In contrast, my Shopify store got up and running well within a few hours, ran 24/7 without drama, and Shop Pay, the easiest checkout on the market, got customers from add to cart to paid in seconds. Shop Pay lifts conversions by up to 50% relative to guest checkout. So it really smoothes the way. I use it all the time when I'm buying stuff.

• 38:16Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're ready to make your first sale, check it out. Go to Shopify.com/tim and start your free trial today. One more time, that's Shopify.com/tim.

• 38:29Tim Ferriss?

  Now you have, how many full-time employees do you have at Ally Corp now?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  23, 24.

• 38:34Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so still not gigantic. All right. When you go back to yesteryear, back when you and Dwight, and maybe there were one or two other people, how did you do the opportunity analysis to decide on what you were going to launch? Like, how did you stress test what seemed?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it was just the two of us.

• 38:52Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, great. So how did you choose what to do?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Literally just sitting there in the conference room, brainstorming ideas, talking about it, thinking about it. Sometimes we'd go months and had nothing. And then you have to just trust at a certain point that it'll be no different if you met someone who's single and is out there dating and said, how do I know this is the person? You have to hope you know when you know.

• 39:13Tim Ferriss?

  What does it feel like to know with some of these ideas or any others, but preferably earlier examples? What does it feel like?

• 39:21Speaker 01

  I recognize it because I start with a business crush, meaning there's an idea and I can't stop thinking about it. And then a week later, I'm still thinking about it. And I'm now I'm thinking, oh, my God, this would be good. And we could do that. And we could have this person. And it's, it's just building in my mind. And I'm falling in love with my idea intellectually. And if that sticks with me for like, two weeks, I generally do it. Like, I don't actually spend more time. I know if I feel it and see it, because there's no sense doing a business model. I mean, you know, who knows how many people are going to be looking at Business Insider? If you don't know that, you don't know anything. The question is, are people going to read their business news online? Can we do a better

• 40:06Speaker 01

  job than the established players? And can we do it differently? Do we have a vision for that? In the beginning, I want someone who is going to focus on product. I don't need a finance person. I don't need marketing. I need a great product. And Business Insider was a great product, which is why we got to 100 million. And Gilt was a great product.

• 40:25Tim Ferriss?

  Also, Business Insider was, in a sense, in your sandbox, because presumably it's dependent on advertising, right? So like, you knew that, once you had the eyeballs, you could

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's

• 40:37Tim Ferriss?

  develop that as a business.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  You know, it's harder to get the eyeballs than it is to sell advertising. If I hand you 100 million uniques, you just go out there, hire a guy to sell advertising, and he'll sell. Getting 100 million uniques is 90%, 95% of the job.

• 40:50Tim Ferriss?

  At what point in the process are you like, you know what? I know exactly the person at Union Square Ventures, or fill in the blank, friendly VC, who would love this idea if we can show proof of concept?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I don't think that way. And I'm always wrong. Sometimes I'll think, I bet this person would like it. But the way to do it, once we got to raise money, then at the time, we would go out to 20 firms, 25 firms, and half the time, the person I thought wanted to do it, didn't want to do it, for whatever reason, and someone else fell in love with the idea. So I don't preset that. I'm always, always shocked by it.

• 41:27Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. The fundraising is, we'll solve it later.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:30Tim Ferriss?

  Kind of situation.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  I never pre, also, I never think about exits. We need to focus on the product. Do we have a product that everyone wants to use? If you solve that, everything else follows. You can raise money, you can hire people, you can do everything.

• 41:44Tim Ferriss?

  When did you guys, and I'm going to mispronounce this, invest in Valer Atomix? Is it Valer?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Valer.

• 41:51Tim Ferriss?

  Valer.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:52Tim Ferriss?

  I had a 50/50 chance. That's V A L A R.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:56Tim Ferriss?

  When did you guys invest?

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Nuclear company, three years ago.

• 42:00Tim Ferriss?

  Three years?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Not even three years ago.

• 42:01Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So, this is, right, they

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Small modular nuclear reactor.

• 42:06Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. So the next gen nuclear reactor. How did you approach this? Because, you know, nuclear is, pun intended, hot.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  It wasn't hot.

• 42:16Tim Ferriss?

  It wasn't?

• 42:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 42:17Tim Ferriss?

  Because fusion was kind of on fire. I mean, there you had the Commonwealth Fusion Systems at MIT, and you had Sam Altman raising his SPVs. I guess I'm wondering how you decided on that investment.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so this came directly from my deep tech team. So it wasn't my relationship. But we just thought, like always, that there's an incredible team idea, and that they're going to execute well. It was at a $20 million valuation, three years ago. They just raised, it was announced publicly, from Sequoia, at $6 billion. And they have been crushing it. Where we got lucky is that the US government was not behind nuclear at that time. And I'm not always the biggest fan of the Trump administration, but on psychedelics and nuclear, I think they're right on both. And they have moved both of them forward in a very substantial way.

• 43:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I hope you talked to some nuclear folks when you're in China, because they're crushing

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Crushing.

• 43:11Tim Ferriss?

  energy production.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. By the way, most people know France is, must have 70% of its energy for 50 years from nuclear. Absolutely no problems. Great thing, stable. I am convinced that this should be an important part of our, our energy future.

• 43:26Tim Ferriss?

  Do you guys, as the companies, the portfolio companies are raising money, I mean, that's a crazy markup, right? I mean, just amazing markup. Does Ally Corp take money off the table in these large rounds along the way strategically? Or do you guys just park it and wait until the end? How do you think about handling that?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  We've done it once so far. And in the past, I would personally take some money off the table, especially the QSBS enabled money, which can make sense.

• 43:58Tim Ferriss?

  That's a small business exemption for tax purposes, for people listening, under whatever the asset cap.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Yep. You get $10 million tax free. And so, but in general, now, we think it's a good idea for a smaller fund like us, in rounds, four or five years in, to sell a third of our position. So, over the next year, we will be hedging in some ways, and we'll go out there, even though we feel good about these companies. But I think that's a sensible thing. It returns some money to everyone. It returns some money to the team. And, you know, some of these will do really well, some won't. So I think that's a good idea.

• 44:32Tim Ferriss?

  What does your LP base look like?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  It's very small. I'm the largest LP. And then we have mostly family offices, and some institutions, some small endowments. So we have maybe 40 or 50 LPs.

• 44:46Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, you have a spectacular track record. And the second fund, correct me if I'm getting this number wrong, or correct me if Astra's getting this number wrong, July 2026, 335 million, second fund, something like that?

• 45:01Speaker 01

  The first fund is, at the end of this quarter, will be roughly at 60% IRR. And my family office, the fund you were talking about before, also is a 60%. And the 335 million dollar fund is in that ballpark. We haven't had anything to date in our three sort of funds that's been below 50% IRR. So we've been very lucky. We've had some great companies, and things are going, going really well.

• 45:25Tim Ferriss?

  You could raise a huge fund if you wanted to, right? And maybe you could do more follow on investing. Maybe you could have a separate fund for growth rounds, et cetera, et cetera. Why not do that? What are the reasons for not?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  What I like to do, and what I think we are very good at, and the team like to do, are build companies. Whether we start them, most of them we're investing in, and we think a lot of the true value add is in those first five years. There are plenty of funds that are big. We're not trying to collect assets. You know how VC funds are typically 2% and 20% on the upside? Big funds focus on the 2%, we focus on the 20%. I don't want to be in that business of accumulating assets. Our funds will get bigger, but it'll be because we add verticals, we add some time, we might add a geography at some point. But I want to keep doing what we do well, and what we find fun. I got to wake up every day and

• 46:22Speaker 01

  feel like, I love what I'm doing. And I think we're, in our own small way, helping to change the world. You mentioned Zola, there'll be, I don't know, 150, 200,000 couples this year, who will use a wedding registry. That was an idea I had 12 years ago. That's great. The nuclear company, I had, I sat down and had drinks with the governor of New York three weeks ago. She's doing a great job. And one of the things you want to talk about was nuclear. And how we can bring that to New York State, because we need to lock down and get more energy costs, and bring down costs of energy, and help data centers. And we're, and we're a part of these things. And psychedelics, I hope there are, we're sitting here 10 years from now, I hope 100,000 people who have PTSD have been helped by

• 47:04Speaker 01

  methadone, because we discovered that compound, and, you know, are going to help bring it to market.

• 47:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we can chat about methadone. It's a beautiful molecule. And we will talk about it. Before we get there, I want to take a break from some of the investing stuff just for a moment. How did you end up pursuing a serious level of ping pong?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  We just started in high school. I played, I had a table in the basement. So I was one of the better people in my neighborhood. And then we had a high school tournament, and then I sophomore year, and I won that. And I realized I was pretty good. Then they had a regional tournament. So I went to that, and I won that. And then I finally found the state level tournament, and I got my ass handed to me there. Then I started playing in New York, because New York has great ping.

• 47:45Tim Ferriss?

  Was that the defeat that you needed? You were just like, oh, okay.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:48Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Well, I just didn't play enough. I didn't have a coach. I was just playing in my neighborhood. So then I found a ping pong club that doesn't exist anymore on, right near here on White and Walker, found a guy named Moussa, who was the 14th in the Olympics in 1992. He's from Nigeria, the freak of nature. And started playing with him. So then I played some tournaments. And then when I went on the board of Yale, I called up the ping pong team and said, hey, can I come play with you? And they're like, sure. And then I went and played with them and realized that I could hold my own there with the varsity team. And so I would go play with them. And I still do, when I can get up to New Haven. And so I just like to play with, you know, I'm not incredible, but I'm, I'm pretty good.

• 48:30Tim Ferriss?

  How often do you play? And what kind of coach or coaching do you have?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  So I actually weirdly still play with Moussa, and then with another guy as well. My son is pretty good. And so he and I, he's 28, he's in New York. And so we'll be playing tomorrow, actually. So I probably play every two or three weeks. I just love it. I, it's incredibly

• 48:49Tim Ferriss?

  Seems like it's great for your brain.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  The Chinese will all say, and I think they're not wrong, that it's unbelievably good, because brain is hand eye coordination reacting extremely quickly, and subtly. And so that's got to be very good for you.

• 49:05Tim Ferriss?

  Talking about the brain, we are going to get back to methadone. But I want to talk about vacation first. Got a quote here.

• 49:16Tim Ferriss?

  Again, feel free to fact check. This is attributed to one Kevin Ryan. I think everyone should take four to five weeks of vacation. I would rather have somebody who works 47 weeks in the year pretty intensely. And then it says, knowing that a CEO's will be influenced more by his behavior than by policy, he takes eight to 10 weeks off annually now. But you're not entirely off the grid when you take that time. So can you tell me what your split looks like? And was it the same in the early years of Ally Corp? Like, how long has that been the case?

• 49:44Speaker 01

  I told all my CEOs, it was when I was building DoubleClick, obviously, as you heard, pretty intense. And we went public 24 months after we started, just another project.

• 49:54Tim Ferriss?

  Different world now.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it was a good old days. And I knew I had to change my life. And I could only do three things. That family, I took my kids to school.

• 50:03Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. So you're burning the midnight oil on that one. And that led to the realization?

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I I've never burned out at all, because I paced myself. And so I needed to be working hard, spending all the time I needed to do with my family, and staying in shape. Everything else I cut by like 80%. And that's costly. That's time with friends. I used to be guy who do the cool cultural things all over. You know, I used to watch my twenties sports on Sunday afternoon, all gone. I prioritized those three things. And then, you know, eight years ago, my kids went off to college and things. And I could layer in new things and different things and have more time. And so some ways became more interesting. I didn't ever want to be in a situation where my kids are 18, and I thought, Oh, my God, I didn't spend time with them. And we did spend, you know, at

• 50:50Speaker 01

  least four to five weeks vacation, doing great things together, great memories. That's extremely important. Today, I spend eight to 10 weeks out of the office. I do work every day. But sometimes it'll be two to three hours, just keeping things moving. I can do that. And sometimes it's, you know, a full day. Like, I'll be week after next, I have a wedding in Ibiza. So I'll be there for four days. And the first five days before that, I'll be in my house in France. And so in the morning, I will be doing intensive sports, credible biking there. You need to come at some point. Great biking, tennis, swimming. And then I have already blocked out that I'll do the three hours, nine to

• 51:31Speaker 01

  12 New York time, locked in for meetings. And then one of the days, I'll also do the night shift. So I'll do eight hours the next day. But that's an amazing day. If I ski in France, back by three o'clock, and then work from three till 8:30, and then have a great dinner. It's an incredible day.

• 51:50Tim Ferriss?

  That is an amazing day. How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. What did that do for you?

• 51:56Speaker 01

  I reached the age of 54, which was eight years ago, and had never thought about psychedelics at all. Certainly never tried anything, and didn't know very much. Read the Michael Pollan book. It was on the New York Times in 2017, 10 best books of the year, which is something I always go over to see what I should be reading there. Read the book, and it literally did change my mind. It was called How to Change Your Mind. And I realized later than most people that I was wrong, that these medicines could be very useful for people. And that there's a lot of academic results, even at the time, that showed that they could help PTSD and depression and anxiety. And at the time, I was still on the board of Yale. So I went and I realized at Yale, and I think you talked to John Cristel at one point.

• 52:41Tim Ferriss?

  Interviewed John Cristel on his work on ketamine foundational work with respected depression and much more. Also, I've had conversations with Ben Comendy, who I'm so happy for.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  I just spent a week in the desert with Ben.

• 52:54Tim Ferriss?

  Never met him in person.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Oh, you.

• 52:55Tim Ferriss?

  Only phone.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Fantastic. And so John Cristel is great. I'm trying to get together with him in the next couple of weeks. Realized Yale had done amazing work. Got him all there. They have a Yale Center for Psychedelic Research. And I just became persuaded in terms of long term trends. I wasn't thinking about investing at all at the time. I was just thinking, this is something I am persuaded that most people don't realize is going to be very effective and very important. I'm probably one of the bigger donors to the Yale Center for Psychedelic Research, doing great work. Then in 2021, I decided in talking to Ben Comendy, who was a professor there, that the next phase was going to be a for profit phase. And it was the right thing. And the reason is, it takes, whether we like it or not, it takes

• 53:41Speaker 01

  roughly $200 to $250 million to get one compound through the FDA process. And I wish that were less, but it is what it is right now. And we're not going to be able to raise that money from a nonprofit point of view, even though you contribute, I contribute, but it's not going to be enough. And so then I said, you know, we should look and see if we should start a company in this space. And then worked with Ben, and the guy in my team, who was on the Ally Corp team, Blake Mandell. And so we worked on the idea, came up with this methalone, largely due to Ben, and then said, let's start this. We think it has very promising. Blake spun out of Ally Corp, which sometimes happened to be the CEO of the company. And then we started the company.

• 54:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, methalone, for people who don't know, I want you to hold me in check here. But methalone, if I were describing it, I had my first methalone experience, probably 2015, early. But it had to basically fall off the back of a truck. It was very, very hard to find, even on the underground. But an incredibly beautiful, gentle experience, and maybe the soft spoken, shorter staying cousin.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 54:48Tim Ferriss?

  MDMA. So rather than coming in, and you're like, when's this guy gonna leave? Six hours. It's more like, wow, that was so pleasant. Came over, didn't overstay his welcome. So I'd love to hear how you landed on methalone, or just whatever you'd like to share about methalone specifically, because I think it is, it was just the bullseye. I mean, what a good choice. What a good choice. In terms of the horse to bet on. Let's start there. Let's start with methalone itself, because it's one that many people will not be familiar with.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And even more so at the time. From a business point of view, and impact to society point of view, we wanted to find something that people didn't know about, but had some preliminary results that meant that we thought there was a, you know, that it could be impactful. And so what most people didn't realize at the time, that it has some advantages over MDMA. And by the way, I think MDMA is fantastic, both recreationally and therapeutically. The results in the trials were very good. But there are some advantages. And so what you were referring to, put another way, you can take methalone once a week in our trials. You actually can't take MDMA once a week. It's a little bit more toxic, depletes your serotonin a little bit more.

• 55:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Sasha Shulgin would say, if more than four times a year, it loses its magic.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:58Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe a lot of people become resistant.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:00Tim Ferriss?

  Nonresponsive.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  And so sometimes, a slightly softer substance has advantages. Also, you tend not to have the downer that some people have on MDMA.

• 56:11Tim Ferriss?

  And the duration of action is much more compatible with healthcare as we know it.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it had those advantages. And we still don't know until you do a full double blind study. And so then we started that process, or raised the money, and the results ended up to be incredible.

• 56:26Tim Ferriss?

  And the results, this is within the indication of PTSD?

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Yep. We have a patent for PTSD, depression, and anxiety, which is very valuable. So no one else can use it for 20 years in these three categories. But you can only start with one indication, because it's $200 million each time. And at the time, if you remember two years ago, we went through a period in psychedelics where it was the desert period. It was hard to raise money, wasn't easy. So there was no way we were going to be able to do all three.

• 56:54Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think part of the reason it was hard to raise, there was stigma, but there were plenty of enthusiastic capitalists who wanted to make something happen. I think there were a few common mistakes. One was assuming it would be easier than it is to get something that lasts four to six hours. Let's just call it. You have to prove that it can be scalable as a treatment. You can deliver a certain quality of care. But what does that mean? You have extra nurses, you have extra people, and suddenly, the cost is very out of reach. Separately, I would say, the combining, we saw this with Lykos, the combining of psychotherapy.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:36Tim Ferriss?

  Right? The bundling of psychotherapy. And then you put it in front of the FDA Advisory Committee, and they're like, we don't know how to evaluate or standardize psychotherapy. And since we don't.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:45Tim Ferriss?

  No pass. I mean, there's a lot more to that story, as you know. How did watching the ecosystem, maybe seeing some of the early unforced errors, inform how you guys approached?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Oh, it definitely did. And there's a, you know, a saying there, early worm gets the bird, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

• 58:04Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So sometimes it's better to be the second mouse.

• 58:09Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning gets smashed.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Smash. The cheese is still there. And then you can.

• 58:16Tim Ferriss?

  So it's like the iPod.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  So we tried to learn from what we saw out there and change certain things. I think also the FDA has changed over time. And the Trump administration has sent a signal that they would like this to happen. And I think, as you know, I mean, you were super early in 2015. But now, I would imagine that huge percentage of your random friends have tried psychedelics.

• 58:40Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sure. Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  In 2015, that number must have been small.

• 58:43Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it was small. And unless you happen to be like me, living in the Bay Area, people were pretty, mom's the word about it.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:51Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, there's some, I think maybe the pendulum in some cases swung too far. It's like, if I have to listen to one more trip or word about neon crocodiles, this is like listening to somebody's dreams every morning. You know, it's like, okay, I get it. At the same time, yeah, it was very different. And. I mean, look, I don't want to take us too far afield, but even though I did a podcast on I began in 2015.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Did you really?

• 59:14Tim Ferriss?

  I did, yeah, with Martin Polanco and Dr. Dan Engel, looking at some of the work that was being done in Mexico. But it was way, I mean, it was early days.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Wow, you were early.

• 59:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, first 100 monkeys shot in the space, right? I was not going to sign up for it, but I never would have guessed that I began would have been the one that gets mentioned in the Oval Office as an executive order is being signed.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:39Tim Ferriss?

  And in retrospect, though, it makes a lot of sense. And I have to imagine the application of PTSD to this politically immune group. Like, if you're on the left or the right as a politician, you cannot say fuck the veterans, that the indication of PTSD also, as sort of a tip of the spear, has that benefit.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  It does. And one thing I haven't mentioned here is that we set up Transcend as a public benefit corporation.

• 1:00:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, I wanted to talk about this, yeah.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  And that means that the initial shareholders had committed to give 10% of their gains to what is essentially a foundation and that Blake and I will be giving out that money. And so we will be giving $20 million in the next nine months to causes linked to psychedelics. And so we're in that process right now. I've hired a part-time person to do that. But it has come up because we focus on veterans for PTSD for political reasons. We being the entire industry. The number one source is sexual assault. And that's why our trials were actually 60% women, because more women have PTSD than men. And I think it's a little bit undercovered. And so we're going to look into some causes and support that and try and see if we can

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  give some of that money out into that area.

• 1:00:54Tim Ferriss?

  So I guess a few things. The first is kudos to you, and I want you to correct me if I'm wrong, but like a public benefit corp has its charter, its stated mission. I've interacted with a number of them. But ultimately, I remember one of the questions I had for somebody else running one of these. I was like, well, if you change your mind later, how are you held accountable? And he was like, silence, right? And I was like, you can kind of break the rules and get away with it. So the fact that you guys are following through means a lot. How are you thinking about, and I'm sure it's not just an open casting call, because you'd get a million wackadoodle things in your, in the inbox that somebody would have to comb through. How are you thinking about how to allocate that 20 million?

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  So we're still thinking about it. We already have 50 organizations that I'm not meeting with companies.

• 1:01:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you seem like a busy guy.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. But Nicolas Boalot, who's the person who is in charge of this, has been meeting with people. We're assembling it, looking at the world, there's going to be a big PSFC meeting in October. And then we're going to start.

• 1:01:53Tim Ferriss?

  This is the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, although now they've,

• 1:01:59Tim Ferriss?

  they've expanded beyond just the science, but in PSFC.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  But it's the largest collection of donors in the psychedelic space.

• 1:02:04Tim Ferriss?

  PSFC.co, I think.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Did your great work. But the point is, what we're going to look to do is not make, you know, 500 grants, but make like 20 and have real grants. Most of these organizations are small. So, you know, there's a good chance we'll be the largest donor to the psychedelic industry in the next 12 months, just for 12 months. And I don't have the full answer to that yet. We're starting to think of where can we have impact? What can be done that other people are not doing? We probably won't give as much to pure academic research. You know, even in Oregon and Colorado who have legal psychedelics.

• 1:02:40Tim Ferriss?

  Or at least decriminalized.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Well, there's a program in each state that is legal to give it out and be able to do it.

• 1:02:46Tim Ferriss?

  Right, with the sort of parallel structure, yeah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. But not even 0.5% of people with depression or PTSD have been able to access this yet. One of the biggest challenges we have is too expensive. And, you know, one of these I am interested in is trying to show that group therapy works as well. So I think maybe even better in some cases.

• 1:03:09Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe even better. My bet would be better.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Same here. There's a reason that AA does it in a group setting, because you get support from other people. And you've probably been in some group ceremonies and they can be very powerful. FDA has been very nervous about that. That's a whole new thing. How do you monitor that? So we need to get to the point, we need to bring down the cost, is the bottom line.

• 1:03:30Tim Ferriss?

  What would your hope be for the for-profit ecosystem? Would your hope be that more people would follow in your footsteps? If so, how can they, as the better version of themselves or the best version of themselves, ensure that when incentives get really tempting later, they don't change their mind?

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  On the public benefit.

• 1:03:52Tim Ferriss?

  On the public benefit corp? Exactly right. I have been incredibly disappointed with how many centimillionaires, billionaires have had their lives changed by these things, but have in no material way supported the ecosystem or the science upon which ultimately a lot of their work depends. It's been personally very upsetting to me, as someone who put like 20% of his entire net worth in at one point. That is not to say that I think academia is the cure all, for all the reasons you said, like the market-driven solutions for the very expensive FDA processes involved. Incredibly important. What do you think can be done to encourage people?

• 1:04:34Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, you're doing a great job by doing it, right? Just showcasing it. And I think a lot of good will radiate from that. Any thoughts on how to encourage more people to get involved?

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  I don't know how to, you know, force them, but one of these I know I'm doing is I'm actually having a series of conversations with people and talking through who have called me. And what I'm doing, I'm going to be speaking at the smaller PSFC group to give an example of why we did it this way, what we did. You know, we did it for a couple of reasons. One, at the end, we thought it was fair. Two, it reminded everyone in the company that this is a mission-driven company. Yes, at the end, it may be a good exit, but we are doing this and everyone needs to join this company because they want to make the world a better place and we want to help these people who have PTSD. There are 10 million people and it's a real problem. And then eventually depression as well. And so everyone joining knew that the original shareholders, board members, chairman

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  had already committed to do this and we're going to put their money where their mouth is. And I think we just have to push everyone on this to do it. I don't know a better way to force them.

• 1:05:43Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'm so glad you're doing it. I hope more people follow suit. A friend of mine who's a VC, he's very successful as an angel, joined a venture capital firm, very well-known, did incredibly well. And a while back, he started kind of stepping back. And I've had people suggesting I start fun forever. And I, for a host of reasons, am not convinced I'd be good at it or particularly enjoy it. I don't know. But he said, oh, early-stage ventures dead. And I was like, what do you mean, early-stage ventures dead? And what he meant was, if your bread and butter is a lot of consumer-facing tech, he's like, I just made a clone of Twitter in 12 hours as a non-technical person using vibe coding and X, Y, and Z.

• 1:06:28Tim Ferriss?

  Ultimately, that's not enough to just displace X. But is the deep tech focus because there are more defensible moats in deep tech? Or is there more to it?

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  It's partly that, but it's also partly that world is changing. So in that consumer idea you're talking about, you know, there are 164 soft drinks. The odds of you coming up with one that stands out is pretty slim. Whereas the changes that are occurring or have occurred in solar or wind or geothermal or nuclear, you know, there are going to be billions and billions and billions of dollars of contracts signed to produce energy. Robotics, the same thing. We're seeing extraordinary developments. We're getting 10x and 100x improvements in robots, which will change the world. I actually don't see the same thing in e-commerce. Healthcare can be done better in this country.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  We spend a lot, we don't have great results, complicated issue. But that's why, you know, we really do what I call traditional software. AI is one group, healthcare is one group, and deep tech is one group. Those are our three areas of focus. We have dedicated teams, but we do more deep tech than we did four or five years ago. Absolutely. That's the one that's grown the most for these various reasons. And it's intellectually interesting. You learn a lot. Space, we have an investment in space, a company called Portal that can help move satellites from one area to another. And there's just a whole ecosystem that's sort of a second order implication of having 10 times more satellites, which we'll have.

• 1:08:04Tim Ferriss?

  On the robotics side, what are some second or third order effects that might present opportunities? Because investing in someone who actually, like a Boston Robotics, way beyond my pay grade. But I'm like, maybe if that's where the focus is, I'm saying this in a very simple way. But if a lot of people are focused on that, maybe like the second or third order effects are more neglected.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26Tim Ferriss?

  So let's look at the movement and societal shifts. And are there going to be more robots in 10 years? Yeah, I think so, right?

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  A hundred times more. I mean, this is one where it's literally going to be somewhere between 100 and 1,000 or 10,000 times more. And so I think the business opportunities are going to be in very vertical uses. A textile factory, things like that, or a car factory or things like that. And so, and those are happening right now and they're going to continue to happen. Where it's harder is in things like a restaurant, because robots are best early on when they can do one thing and do it really well. When they have to chop vegetables, take the garbage up the stairs and go to a nearby deli to buy a product that we need. Humans can do that quite well. Robots, that's tougher. So single use is the best way and factories are the best way for that.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  So that's going to be colossal in every single factory.

• 1:09:19Tim Ferriss?

  Are you still bullish on robot massage? And to what extent are you looking at? Unfilled jobs.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Tim Ferriss?

  As a, maybe one criteria.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  I am bullish and we're, you know, we were an investor in Escape, which is doing that. That's a product that's still evolving, but it's going to work. I remember as of two years ago, there were 17,000 unfilled jobs in massages in this country. And you must have gone to a hotel like I have and you arrive, you're like, yeah, can I get a massage tomorrow afternoon? Like, mm, totally booked up.

• 1:09:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. How about three days from now?

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:55Tim Ferriss?

  And you're like 9:00 AM and you're like, no.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  I'm not going to be in the hotel or you say 8:00 AM or 9:00 AM. No way. No one works at that time. 7:00 PM, no one works. If you had a machine and 25% of people prefer to have a robot. Some people think it'd be much better to have a person. There are a lot of people that don't like to take their clothes off, don't feel comfortable with it and feel better about a robot. So just another example of something you wouldn't think of. It is a solvable problem and we're probably 70% of the way there to solving.

• 1:10:27Tim Ferriss?

  Any other jobs with lots of unfilled positions that make for appealing terrain?

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Again, we haven't solved the restaurant one and that's a big one.

• 1:10:37Tim Ferriss?

  I wonder, I mean, to what extent, man, I'd love to have a conversation with Travis Kalanick about that. Man, he is more than anyone I know. So he put a lot of thought.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he is industrializing, so he has a better chance of doing it. The truth is, most restaurants are big mom and pop shops and so it's harder to do that. But yeah, I mean, we're watching customer support. We had an incredible call where one of our AI agents was on the phone with someone. And after 15 seconds said, I'm sorry, would you be more comfortable in another language? And the person said, well, actually, yeah, could we speak Spanish? And he goes muy bien and then just handles the rest of the call in Spanish.

• 1:11:18Tim Ferriss?

  What a cool example.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  And if you listen to it, it changed completely the call because she had trouble explaining. It was a medical thing. She had a lot of trouble explaining in English. And then right away, no issue and solved the problem.

• 1:11:31Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. It's coming fast. It is coming so fast. If you think of an example of one of the companies, ideally one that you co-founded, that was like pushing a boulder downhill, it's like, wow, this is really. Things just fell into place in a sense, ideally not just through luck. And then one that was pushing a boulder uphill. I'm wondering what the biggest differences, like what comes to mind and what were the differences between the two?

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  I'll give you a good uphill one, which I'm still disappointed at. We realized that we're going to be a lot, it was basically Shopify for healthcare companies. Cause we were building these healthcare sites and we found we were building a lot of the same things. Scheduling for time, and this is three, four years ago. Scheduling information, all the stuff, didn't matter whether it was for your cancer care or your back problem.

• 1:12:26Tim Ferriss?

  Lot of repeating features.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  And it has to be HIPAA compliant, which most sites are not. So we set up a company to be Shopify for healthcare sites. For whatever reason, we put $6 million in, eventually didn't, just didn't get there. People were reluctant to sign up. They didn't see someone else. Maybe it wasn't good enough execution. Felt like that should exist and we never pulled it off. And then had to make a decision to close it down.

• 1:12:48Tim Ferriss?

  Doesn't seem like you were too early. Are the reasons unknown?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  They are unknown for me. Did we not do a good enough job? Did we have to wait just another year to get the first 10 marquee clients and that was enough? Obviously, most companies at the time were reluctant to outsource to someone else. So I still don't, I don't know. And sometimes you don't know. It's not, it's still not quite a playbook there.

• 1:13:12Tim Ferriss?

  No. DoubleClick was public 24, no, 48 months?

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  No, no, it was public for seven years.

• 1:13:20Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sorry, after it's forming?

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. 24 months after we started.

• 1:13:23Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, there's like market conditions and all that stuff also. But then you have something like MongoDB, that was a decade before IPO. Why was that?

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  The, first of all, we didn't have any revenue for three and a half years. And if you're taking notes, don't do that because it made it hard to raise money. It's a hard product. It's also, if I said a database is like a pacemaker. If I said to you, I've got this startup pacemaker idea. Do you want to try it? And you're like, no, no. Call me when a thousand people have used your pacemaker for two years. But if everyone says that, I can't get my pacemaker out there. So it took us a long time and it gave away for free for a long time. Used for inexpensive things and then slowly got there. So even after eight years, you know, we were doing 40 million in revenue, which is not that much. But the usage was growing dramatically. The product worked. The product was getting better.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  And today it's worth, I don't know, $30 billion and it's an incredible company.

• 1:14:21Tim Ferriss?

  What are your personal rules for what you do when a company goes public? What is your policy for holding, selling a portion, selling all? How do you think about that? Cause I know some angels, so they're like, look, public market, not my game. As soon as it goes public, I'm going to sell 50% and then just let the rest ride and they keep it really simple.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  I definitely don't have a policy. I hold it as long as I still feel this is a great investment and I think it's going to grow for a long time. At some point you do need to get money if you have a firm to invest in other things. So I did not sell in the first year or two when it was public. And then the price went up and I just slowly started selling and I still have shares today. But I've sold a big percentage of it over time.

• 1:15:05Tim Ferriss?

  We're going to land the plane now. So Kevin, if you could put anything, metaphorically speaking, on a billboard to get a message in front of millions, billions of people, we can just pretend that they all speak English. AI, you know, AI can figure it out. But what might you put on that billboard? Could be a motto, could be a quote, could be anything non-commercial. Does anything come to mind?

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  So I'll give you something different than you think. I would love the United States to be a more balanced society and a more open and a more caring society. That we take care of other people. I'm not worried about our startups. Our startups are doing great. Technology, funding, all that's great. Lots of entrepreneurs. I do worry long-term about the income inequality in this country. I don't think we're addressing that issue. I think the ability for people in this country to move up the ladder statistically has been diminished. And I think all of this is going to catch up to us and it's not right. People have schools that are bad. They don't have support. We're going to have this transition. There is no doubt. We can debate the time we're going to lose jobs to AI.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  And I don't think we're in a good position to help people have successful lives. So I would like the country to be thinking about that.

• 1:16:19Tim Ferriss?

  So whether we're at the highest levels of state government or you're in the Oval Office and it's like Kevin Karpunch, you get to pull two levers. What are the levers? To try to make a bit of progress in addressing some of the issues you just mentioned.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  One that's going to lead to, we're going to have to address the budget deficit at some point. We don't know where that point is, but it could be sneaking up on us right now. We're going to have to end up having a more equitable tax system where the wealthy pay 30% taxes, which they don't right now. We have to decrease that budget deficit because that decreases the interest rate, which impacts everyone to do that. And then we're going to have to just agree that we're going to do a better job of helping people go to the right colleges, get the right degrees. I don't mean necessarily college rates. I mean professional training, retraining, things like that. We have to get to the point where a higher percentage of people are doing well and they, and they feel like their kids are going to do well.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  When families don't feel like their kids are going to do better, they get desperate. And they go to the far right or they go to the far left and neither one of those solutions is going to be the right solution. We're going to have to get more immigrants in this country.

• 1:17:29Tim Ferriss?

  How do you think you do that? Because I agree with you. And I mean, I've seen so much headache in say recruiting in Silicon Valley and this, that and the other thing. It's, it's wild. I mean, this is a country of immigrants. So how do you think you tackle that?

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  The message has come down in the last several years from the president that immigrants are bad. And I just find it unfathomable. And everyone in Silicon Valley that has been supporting this has made their money backing immigrants.

• 1:17:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It's pretty gross.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  I mean, look, should we have unlimited people coming over the border? Absolutely not. No one's saying that. Should my companies have trouble getting PhD people in AI to come from other countries to come to the United States? How is that a good idea to stop those people from coming in? We should be opening our doors and saying, you have a master's in AI, computer science, something like that. Of course you can come work here. Come work here. You think they're going to go on unemployment? I doubt it. They're going to make $500,000 a year and they're going to join some company. And three years later, they're going to start their own company, employ 5,000 people. I mean, as you said, we're all immigrants. This should be the country where the most talented people in the world are coming to right now.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  And we shouldn't take 100 million of them, but we should take, you know, a million of them, 2 million of them. Population is going to be going down. That has some negative impact on us. We should be supplementing that. This is our entire history. Our immigrants do great. Now, the data shows our immigrants from Haiti do great, from Nigeria do great, from Kosovo do great. They're just scrappy people who want to work their ass off in whatever they do and I want more of them. And that's a contrarian view today.

• 1:19:16Tim Ferriss?

  I agree a hundred percent. I mean, I've seen the same thing where it's like, okay, let me get this straight. You're going to keep these PhDs in X, Y, and Z out of the country. And guess what? They are talented. They're going to get used with great leverage, and they're going to create something incredible. The question is, is it going to be here or not?

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. At Yale, we're seeing pressure on not getting academics in, on some academics feeling not comfortable. You know, we had a one who left for Oxford and Cambridge, people left to go to Canada. That should not be happening. The Premier League in English soccer is the best league in the world, not because of English players, because they have Norwegian players, they have Egyptian players, they have people from Ghana. Basically, they don't care. They want the best people. And that's what we have always been and need to continue to be.

• 1:20:04Tim Ferriss?

  Kevin, before we wind this to a close, anything else you'd like to say? Anything else you'd like to point people to? People can find Ally Corp online, of course. It's spelled as it sounds, alleycorp.com. I'll include the LinkedIn and Ally Corp X and all these things in the show notes. Anything else you'd like to?

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  The only thing I'd say, and the fact that you're in New York for a month or two, makes the point that New York is just booming. And, you know, we had an incredible summer with the Knicks and the World Cup and the US Open, but the restaurants, the startups, I could not feel better. You know, we're very focused on New York, but I see so many people moving from Europe, coming to New York, starting up companies. Mongo was run by someone who was an immigrant. Datadog was started by French entrepreneurs. Those are the two most valuable tech companies here. Despite what I said, we're going to get more people coming here. New York's going to be very, very successful.

• 1:20:57Tim Ferriss?

  It's on fire. Yeah, it's really on fire. I mean, my home base is Austin. Austin's a boomtown for

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:21:03Tim Ferriss?

  a million different reasons. That's not going to slow down anytime soon. But New York is New York. There's just, you know, having grown up as a New Yorker, it continually blows my mind. But this particular season, this season of New York has been

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Tim Ferriss?

  just on fire. It's really exciting.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  And the higher level thing is, the more I go, I spend a lot of time outside the United States, but the United States, from a business tech point of view, is just crushing it. And we all see this, but the future industries, and we have to worry about China because China's doing a lot of great things, but we're doing a lot of great things. And everyone in Europe and Latin America looks to us and is both concerned and impressed.

• 1:21:40Tim Ferriss?

  Well, thanks for the time, Kevin. Lovely to see you. And for everybody listening, we will have links to everything in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast, the one and only Kevin Ryan. Just type in his name and everything will pop up. And until next time, be a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. And thanks for tuning in. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the

• 1:22:24Tim Ferriss?

  coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 1:23:09Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, which I have taken for more than a decade. Man, it's coming up on close to 15 years, I would say. Longtime listeners have heard me call it my nutritional insurance, and that is exactly how I use it. The news today is they just launched AG1 Pro, designed for people focused on performance and longevity. I'll be traveling soon. I'm actually packing today, and I'm throwing a bunch of these in my bag to cover my bases while I'm on the road. And I have noticed, perhaps some of you have, that it is harder and harder to put on muscle and to keep on muscle. I am a young 40, 80 years old, and I've noticed that change. So past a certain age, you may

• 1:23:51Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:24:33Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:25:18Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:25:58Tim Ferriss?

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