EP 22: Crypto Debate with Shaun Maguire & Zach Weinberg + Interview with Papa Founder Andrew Parker

(00:00) Intro (02:57) Introducing Shaun Maguire (09:52) DARPA to cyber security (15:41) Paying in Bitcoin (17:27) Wife’s family fleeing their country for safety (27:27) Crypto in autocratic nations (31:20) Middlemen (35:30) Investing in equity (36:28) Blockchain video games (37:36) Uniswap (40:33) Future use cases (42:56) Following where young people are excited (49:27) Introducing Andrew Parker (51:15) How Logan and Andrew met (55:12) Andrew’s background (57:30) Telehealth – MD Live (58:52) The idea for Papa (1:02:19) State of health insurance (1:04:12) Pals (1:07:17) Papa members (1:11:54) Size of Papa (1:13:40) Justifying Papa to health plans (1:16:41) Impacting outcomes (1:19:23) Market of Medicare vs Medicare Advantage (1:21:49) Family care (1:24:07) Employer healthcare plans (1:29:00) Fundraising (1:35:31) Miami tech (1:38:27) Papa.com (1:42:13) Closing 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cartoon-avatars/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb... https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=00fe3494b43a4e4c&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0... https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://instagram.com/cartoonavatars 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/cartoonavatars 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@cartoonavatars About the Show A Saturday morning podcast hosted by Logan Bartlett (Partner and Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures) covering the tech news with his friends and other people with industry expertise. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:04Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the 22nd episode of Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett, and this is your longest continuously running tech podcast hosted by a VC with his entrepreneur friends. And thanks, everyone, for joining. So what you're going to hear on this episode is another installation of the crypto use case debate. We are not going to do this every episode. I promise we're running to the end of this, but this is a conversation that Zach Weinberg and I had with Sean McGuire from Sequoia, and we went into a bunch of the different use cases. And so definitely an interesting conversation. And then on the back half of the episode, you're going to hear a conversation I had with my friend Andrew Parker, who's the CEO of a company called Papa. We are not investors in the business. I just happen to think Andrew's

• 0:48Logan Bartlett?

  a funny guy. He's raised money from SoftBank. He is sitting in the intersection of a lot of interesting trends in the healthcare market and health insurance. And so we go into a bunch of that stuff and a really fun conversation. So I guess a little programming note as well. Zach, at this point, has become a recurring character. He has committed to do that going forward. And so I'm not exactly sure what form factor this this whole thing's going to take. We've obviously evolved quite a bit since we since we got going, but really appreciate everyone bearing with us. And as we kind of figure this out and excited to have Zach even more on board going forward. And so excited for you to hear the conversation that we've had with with Sean and then the one with Andrew Parker as well here now. How are we doing today, guys?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  I didn't realize you're so handsome, Logan. I mean, I never watched the podcast, so I'm very impressed.

• 1:38Logan Bartlett?

  Normally, I have to pay people to to say nice things about me. So

• 1:42Speaker 01

  You got the hat on, so maybe you're covering up a bald spot or something.

• 1:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, no, people always

• 1:46Speaker 01

  No, it's actually pretty nice hair you got.

• 1:48Logan Bartlett?

  You know, I actually do have a like, I've always had a widow's peak as a child, or like even when I was young. And and now people will be like, your hair is receding. And I'm like, no, I'm just, that's the way it looks. That's the way I am. So no, well, I appreciate the compliments.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  What am I, chopped liver, Sean? Like, just sit here, we make fun of you?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  You're like, eight out of 10. Logan's a nine out of 10. I appreciate that.

• 2:14Logan Bartlett?

  Zach, I will say you have far more views and screen time on Twitter and the internet of late than I do. So it doesn't surprise me. I think Sean's probably had your clips of you.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  I think also Zach, you just never smile. Like, the only time I see a smile is like just a little smirk when you're getting those Web 3 memes out there, you know, like.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  I'm mostly just, yeah, mostly angry all day. Like, I just am pissed, you know, from 8 a.m. till 8 p.m. That's basically it.

• 2:45Logan Bartlett?

  It did stop at night. That's, I figured it would just go right on through. It would be 24 hours a day.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  No, 8 o'clock, you know, kicks in and I get very happy for about 45 minutes and that's about it.

• 2:57Logan Bartlett?

  So Sean, thanks for doing this. So I think we're gonna, I mean, let's keep this broader than than just crypto. I would love to kind of touch on, I don't know, your background and getting into venture, working at Sequoia, markets, all that stuff. And then maybe the tail end, we can, we could do crypto as well, because I have a feeling that would derail the conversation if we tried to do it in the reverse order. But so you're in, you're nice enough to do this. It's late in London, so you're hanging out over there this summer?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we opened a London office two years ago. We hired an amazing badass woman, Luciana Alexandru, to join the team and hired a couple more people, kind of, that were newer to venture capital. They're incredibly talented, George Knotts and a couple others. And Matt Miller moved over. But we've been trying to get people to spend time out here, you know, and just explore the ecosystem, build cultural ties, all that. And so spending the summer in London is pretty nice.

• 3:58Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's impressive. You guys have been able to scale and grow to the extent you have. And so you're spending all summer over there. Maybe walk us through your path into venture and, yeah, how you ended up at Sequoia and then we can go from there.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  This is a long story. I'll do my best to keep it brief. I'm from Southern California. I was obsessed with computers as a kid. I built my first computer when I was seven. Just absolutely grew up on the internet. I... I went to public school. I absolutely hated it. I got renamed to Joel my second day of seventh grade. Wait, you got renamed to Joel just by like assholes in in school just decided to be her Joel? Totally fluke thing and I know the guys afterwards, but so the tenth, my second day of seventh grade, a 10th grader is standing on a planter and I'm walking through a sea of people. Because my school is 7th through 12th grade and so I was like prepubescent, you know, it's like that's when you go through puberty.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  And he just pointed at me through a sea of people and he said, "You!" And I'm like, "Me?" It's like, "Your new name is Joel." And I was just like, "What?" And I just kept walking. But there's the Terramina family. Uh, there were five kids or four kids in the school. And he had a brother in my class and he told all of his friends that they should like go to my teachers and tell my teachers that I prefer to be called Joel. So they went to all my teachers. They told him I prefer to be called Joel. I showed up at like one of these classes. They didn't call my name on the roll call. This is back when there's paper roll calls. It's like, you know, this is, we're getting back there. And they don't call my name. I go up to the teacher. I'm like, "Hey, you didn't call my name."

• 5:39Speaker 01

  They're looking there and I like I see my name and Sean is crossed out and it says Joel. I'm like, "No, no, no. My my name's not Joel. It's Sean. It's Sean McGuire." And a kid yells out from the back of the class, "My name's not Joel. It's Sean McGuire." And then everyone laughed and I was like, "What is happening?" I picture like the O'Doyle family from Billy Madison, like yelling at you. That is exactly what happened. And so it just kicked off a whole cascade of like, I would get in fights. Like I just said, "You're all fucking morons." Like I would, they like, I would go protect when they would try to bully other kids. Like I would go get in fights to protect these kids. Like I just made it my duty to like fight these kids and.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  I just, it made me super disillusioned with school. I was pretty gifted in math. And I had a teacher give me a zero on an Algebra II test because I didn't show any work. And I told the teacher, like, I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, just ask me any question you want. They're like, no, sorry, you get a zero. And so I went to the principal, the principal wouldn't change the grade. And so I just stopped going to school and basically just stayed home and did my own thing. I got an F in that Algebra II class, which, you know, I have a PhD in maths from Caltech. And I think it was a pretty good, pretty proud of that. But so anyways, I just didn't really go to school, left early by taking this thing called the California High School Proficiency Exam, went to community college. But this is an incredibly important phase of my life because I had a realization that like you don't learn in school.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Like in school, there's insane context switching. You know, if you're trying to learn how to build a computer, you don't do it by having an hour to build it and then switching to English class for an hour and then history class for an hour. Like the way you actually learn to do something like that is having four days straight where you're just obsessed in a room trying to make it work. And so I basically was able to unplug myself from the matrix, which was very freeing and turned out to be amazing for me. And also just gave me an alternative perspective my whole life. And I've kind of done things different than everyone else my whole life and just like some of the other things.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Was the life goal to become a Sequoia partner so that you could call out the family you just referenced publicly on our podcast?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. I thought I'd be a math professor, like or physics professor. That's what I thought for a very long time. And when I was doing my PhD, I got recruited to work on a DARPA project.

• 8:04Logan Bartlett?

  Hey, I'm sorry. So you went to community college and then, and then from there.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  I went to USC for two years. I got a bachelor's in math. Then I went to Stanford, started grad school in machine learning and then moved to Caltech to do a PhD in physics.

• 8:22Logan Bartlett?

  And so then the DARPA thing is happening while you're at Caltech. Yeah, got it. And so you went from the community college to USC, that, that old pipeline, community college.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  That is a, that is a very common pipeline. I did it kind of with a different path. But yeah, very, very common path.

• 8:40Logan Bartlett?

  So now DARPA is recruiting you.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, I was recruited for the football team. Varsity.

• 8:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. The, the, the side door at USC as we, as we know all too well.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. This, the side door, you know, um, absolutely. It's the only way I could get in.

• 8:55Logan Bartlett?

  So, so now you're, you're 24 Caltech PhD. And I assume more focused on school than you were, uh, when the O'Doyles were pushing, pushing, uh, Joel around.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  But yeah, I mean, like at Stanford, I had over a four point, I was pretty motivated. I had over 4.0, you know, I was taking more than the max number of classes. Call it eight classes a quarter or something like that, you know, like taking all the hardest graduate classes. Like I had a chip on my shoulder and I think that's really healthy. But there's something that's very important in between there that I didn't say, which is I basically took a year and traveled around the world. And so I've been to about 95 countries, um, living.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Sean, this feels like your, uh, dating profile here.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Part of why I dropped that in there is it's actually important for the crypto story. Um.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  I enjoy travel, extensive math background.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Thinking about black holes and, uh, you know, fancy, fancy wines.

• 9:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So, so, uh, you went to go work at DARPA, right?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so, so I got recruited for this pretty crazy project at DARPA. It was related to the war in Afghanistan. Basically it was about 10 of us that were given pretty much unprecedented access, um, to the DOD. And we, this was at, this was 2010 to 2012. It was an inflection point, you know, machine learning, data science. Like it was the beginning of big data. And we had a really broad mandate to kind of work on basically whatever we wanted, whatever we thought would be the highest impact. It was very experimental and, you know, I spent four months in Afghanistan as part of that. We did insane stuff. I mean, like, I think work we did made the front page of the New York Times at least five times.

• 10:33Logan Bartlett?

  And so, um, maybe, uh, you would start from a just market standpoint. I would love to hear how you ended up, uh, so you were security by background and math or your PhD was in what?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  I was a hacker as a kid, and so I had a lot of computer experience, um. And my PhD was in black holes, like what happened inside black holes, you know, quantum gravity, the same kind of the continuation of the questions that Stephen Hawking originally asked that made him extremely famous, like what happens inside a black hole?

• 11:09Logan Bartlett?

  Got it. And so I want to get to how you ended up in crypto, but maybe, maybe just start with how, so you ended up investing in some stuff related to enterprise, but ultimately kind of made your way into crypto. What was the intrigue that, that you had that sort of drew you in?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  I've been in crypto for a very long time, basically since the beginning, through many different paths. And crypto in the beginning was Bitcoin. The first is that I was doing my PhD when the Satoshi white paper came out. And, you know, your job as a PhD student is just to read papers, like that's what you do. And the Satoshi paper was one of the most interesting kind of math, computer science papers of that vintage. And so pretty much everyone around me, like we all kind of read the paper and talked about it and didn't know what to make of it, but just thought there was some interesting ideas in there. I didn't buy any Bitcoin at that point, but I, I got exposed to it and thought a lot about it. And then when I joined the DOD,

• 12:13Speaker 01

  it was a huge conversation topic. Like we would, you know, at DARPA in 2010, there were, I was in the information innovation office, a very small thing. There may be 20 people on my floor and it was some of the most brilliant people in the world, like Mudge, Peter Zachin, one of the most famous hackers of all time, started The Loft and this guy Dan Rolker, who funny enough is like the VPN, OpenSea now, but he was running software at SpaceX before and, and the people I was with directly in this program, he became my co-founders, you know, Matt, Tim, Joe Meyerowitz, et cetera. And so we would talk about Bitcoin all the time. It was just a fascinating thing. We would talk about what you can do with it and what, you know, ramifications for.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  For war, for terrorist financing, things like that. And then with my company, we actually used Bitcoin all the way back in the very beginning, like in 2013.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  So the way we would figure out companies' networks is we would basically scan the entire internet. So we would send, like, we literally wanted to know, our first step was to know every single device on IPv4, every single device on the public internet. And the way we would do that is we basically had servers all over the world that would send crazy number of packets to every IP address. And you had to send, we would send like thousands of packets to each IP address because some of them would get dropped. But most importantly, like, you have every device, if you send the right message, like the right string, like, who are you or what are you device? Or are you a Cisco whatever type of router?

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Like, there's always a diagnostic message you can send where it will then say, I am this. And so we wrote all these packets. And when you're sending that number of packets, people will blacklist you. Like, a good sysadmin will realize, like, oh, these are these freaking morons from, you know, California that keep scanning us. Like, we're gonna blacklist all of their IPs. And there were a bunch of, not a bunch, but there were a few, like, server farms in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia where you could pay them anonymously using Bitcoin and they would run computation jobs for you and then send traffic. And so in 2013, we actually started to use Bitcoin for that purpose.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And then, maybe two years later, we deprecated that because we had enough, we like set up our own infrastructure all over the place. But this is very important because if people knew that it was us sending the traffic, we would get blacklisted.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And so, anyways, like, for what it's worth, it's a kind of crazy story. We, I think it was like $15,000 worth of Bitcoin when we stopped that program that we had in the wallet and we forgot about it. And in December 2017, when the price ran up to, you know, just under 20K, we had to have an emergency board meeting because like that... Bitcoin was worth almost our revenue for the year. And so we had to figure out, what do we do with it? Do we distribute it? Do we uh keep sell it and keep it on the balance sheet? Like, what do we do with it?

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Well, you I thought you had paid it out already. This is the Bitcoin you had left or the Bitcoin you had paid out?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  We had probably fifteen thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin in twenty fifteen dollars that became worth, you know, mid, like roughly five million US dollar.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  When you were pay you were paying these other groups in Bitcoin, was it like individuals or were they companies or what was the, who were the groups?

• 15:50Speaker 01

  The the groups were like

• 15:55Speaker 01

  kind of very janky data centers is the way I would describe it. And you, you know, they'd have websites like, I don't know the legal structure behind it. It was like, there's a website, you send Bitcoin to a wallet and then they would send packets on your behalf.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Got it. Do you validate that like they're not on the terrorist watch list or KYC stuff for the vendor? Or you just kind of ignore the who are we paying question?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  I mean, we were paying them order hundreds of dollars. And I mean, Zach, I know what you're trying to do, like you're trying to catch me, but I think that's

• 16:30Speaker 02

  I'm honestly not trying to catch you. I just anytime I hear like, I'm paying some third party in Bitcoin. My first question goes, do you know who they are? You know, are we like legally paying this group that were, you know, sending

• 16:43Speaker 01

  I had been working in terrorist financing for years before that. And I'm pretty sure we were not paying terrorists. I'm pretty sure we were paying like Ukrainians that were really smart and needed to make a living. And they had, they found a niche business.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're I'm pretty sure you're right. That would make sense.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  I I can't trace all the way to the bottom, but the dollars we were paying was on the order of hundreds of dollars at the per month at the time, literally just to send

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like an irrelevant amount of money that didn't make, I totally get it.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we weren't paying him enough money to where they were going to go like use our two hundred dollars a month to go do something really

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I get it.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Or maybe they buy some McDonald's hamburgers when McDonald's was still in the area.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  And Zach, I respect you a ton. So I have no idea. Like, I don't know your views on crypto. Like, maybe you, maybe you absolutely hate all of crypto, or maybe like it's only web three years, people showing things that are clearly like get rich quick, quick schemes. Like, I, I don't know where you are on the spectrum. But like, for me, my wife's family from Iran, they're Persian Jews. In 1979, they tried to kill both of my wife's grandfathers and they basically had to leave the country. One was luckily on vacation in Israel, but they lost all of their assets, all of their bank deposits, their real estate, etc. The other grandfather tried to stay to try to, the rest of them left, but he stayed to try to get money out. He got thrown in prison, he was there for nine months, and then was able to escape,

• 18:11Speaker 01

  ride on horseback from Tehran to Istanbul. But they lost everything. Even today with Bitcoin, like, if you have Bitcoin and you put it in a wallet and you own that wallet with remembering 24 words, you can go anywhere in the world. And as long as you, you know, have your mind and like, you know, you've not been put in prison or whatever, you're mobile, like, no one can steal that Bitcoin. And that alone, like, even that to me was pretty revolutionary. And that's something I really believe in. And I'm happy to talk about like terrorist

• 18:51Speaker 01

  applications or all sorts of things that are major or, you know, North Korea trying to skirt, you know, currency controls and like, I'm happy to talk about all that. But just that core application is what motivated me the most. And it's something that with my family background and also my experience of back, back in 95 countries and seeing the way a lot of people live, I just can't even get to tell you how important that application is to me. And that's, but that's really the, the core thing. I believe it.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that one is always interesting to me because I feel like.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Obviously, I kind of in a way fundamentally agree. Like, that's an important, I mean, being Jewish myself, right? Like, talk about persecuted pretty much everywhere you go in history. My, uh.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Jewish as well, first of all, I'm just a stealth Jew. Yeah, Sean McGuire, you're hiding it well.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I could, the amount of hiding I could possibly do with the last name Weinberg. Face, the face like this, and if I turn to the side, the nose like that, it's like, not gonna work. Uh, my, my, I actually think that use case has always been interesting because people, I think, tend to take this idea of like, I can escape with my money, which I want to talk about like, logistically, how that works. Um, and then conflate it with this like broader, almost idealistic state of I can use a non-local currency, like a digital version, let's call it Bitcoin for a second, but it could be anything

• 20:25Speaker 02

  on a day-to-day basis, which I think is very much not true. Um, the first one I think is, is an interesting case of like, alright, there's this like 48-hour, 72-hour window where theoretically, like, I want to escape, right? And step one is I have to get as many of my assets as possible into Bitcoin or some alternative, right? I have to get into Ethereum, which I guess my first question in all this is always just like, how? How do you get your local, yeah, you see, I'm going with this, like, how do you get your money into Bitcoin? Assuming you, assuming you haven't done it consistently upfront. If you've done it consistently upfront and you have savings and you've actually hadn't, you know, you needed to,

• 21:08Speaker 02

  you know, you had the Bitcoin already, I understand that you don't have to do anything. Where do you get the main set of dollars? Like, how do you get it in?

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, first of all, I would hope that some people have been getting it in consistently before, similar to how a lot of people store gold and other kind of precious metals and things for this downside case. Second of all, just as a personal anecdote, like this is exactly what happened to my wife's family. Like my wife's grandfather, the one that stayed, he actually loaded like all of their jewelry and valuables into three trunks. And he tried to smuggle all three trunks out of the country in different methods.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the classic escape mechanism is like you buy diamonds with local currency and you kind of like hide the diamonds.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  And and obviously, all three were intercepted. And so none of the three trunks made it out. But there was this 48 hour period of like trying to get every selling all their assets, you know, trying to, you know, add 50 cents on the dollar, putting it in, you know, trunks of valuables, sending it out, hoping they'd make it out. They didn't make it. But that is actually, I think, exactly what would happen here. Like, let's say hypothetically, you live in a country where like, let quite literally, let's say you're a Persian Jew. And, you know, there were 200,000 of them in Tehran at the in Iran at the time. And in a population of, I don't know the population of Iran at the time, but call it 20 million to call it 1%. Let's say that everyone in Iran, on average, had 1% of their net worth

• 22:37Speaker 01

  in Bitcoin. You're 1% of the population. That's a lot of Bitcoin that's slated in the country. If you go and just start peer to peer in 48 hours for 50 cents on the dollar, instead of exchanging for, you know, your valuables for diamonds, like literally giving the title to your real estate, or, you know, giving a car or whatever, instead of exchanging that for gold or diamonds, if you're exchanging it for crypto keys, where people are literally

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Like I go, I go to you and I say, here's my car. Hopefully you have some savings, which, as you know, most people don't in these countries as a function of the fact that it is like an autocratic asshole on the top of it, right?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  That's not true, though. People have savings, just not as much relative to other places. And Iran in 1979 was actually a very prosperous place.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Totally. No, no, I agree. That's like an interesting use case going back to Iran, but.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  And I'm just thinking, so would you rather, like, quite literally, if you're in that scenario today, would you rather try to convert your assets into, say, diamonds and gold and precious metals that you can try to, and maybe some dollars that you can try to smuggle out? We have to ship it into Trump and people can intercept it at the border? Or would you rather get it all in a crypto wallet where all you have to do is remember a 24-word password?

• 23:56Speaker 02

  I mean, my concern, if I were in this situation, and thank God I am not, is that at a certain point, owning crypto in many of these places, if people are consistently escaping, will be illegal by decree, right? In many cases, it probably already is getting close to that. And then I've got to go and convert my physical assets, house, whatever, into crypto, which means I've got to go to other people, locals, probably, that I know, or maybe kind of pseudo-know, because no one individual has enough savings to like really match. I've got to go to like a bunch of people to do this. And then each one of them.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Isn't that exactly what was happening in this example, but instead of?

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. No, no, I agree.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  And this is literally someone that was on the kill list that was going to their Muslim friends, but they're their friend, and so it's just.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  I'm not suggesting either of these are good situations, to be very clear. But like, each one of those is now a digital transaction that is recorded and monitored by the local government, because it is like definitionally recorded.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  How is it, how is it record, like, it's recorded if you're using Coinbase or centralized exchange. It's not recorded if you have your crypto in a wallet that they don't know about.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  But like, you think there's going to be hundreds or thousands of people in these countries where Bitcoin is illegal that have unknowable wallets that the government doesn't just like show up and check?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  I'm not saying there'll be hundreds or thousands, but I'm saying Bitcoin is the first way to actually accomplish the goal I'm setting out.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  No, I just think of it as like the risk I introduce by going to, and let's just call it 100. I don't, it doesn't matter, but I have to go to like 100 unique individuals.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  You don't have to go to 100 people. And just like, I mean, there's so many, like, you know. If if everyone on average has 1% of their net worth, if there's one person that's really wealthy, that like maybe you go to one person like.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Right, and then that person sends me.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Your people.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  That person sends me Bitcoin, right? And then a bunch of other people do, and I have to hope. And again, this is unfortunate. I'm not.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  I have to hope, hold on. I have to hope.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  But also, but also we're getting in the weeds now because.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Well, but that's how this is actually how it happens for somebody, right? Because they have to get the Bitcoin to be able to escape.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  But Zach, if you go all the way back to the beginning, you had made a premise that if you don't have Bitcoin to begin with.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  And. No, and I'm suggesting even if they do, let's say they do. I'm I'm gonna give you the assumption that some people could, you know.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I'm saying, let's say you as the individual, let's say you as Zach, the the Jew in.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Iran.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  In Iran or wherever in the world. Let's say that you're already holding 20% of your net worth in a Bitcoin wallet where you have the.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Key to it, then you you can you can now leave the country.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  By the way, illegal for me to do that, to be very clear, right? Like in these situations, that would probably be illegal for me to own.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  I mean, it was illegal to be Jewish in a lot of places in the world. Like, you can't help it. And it's like.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I I definitely can't help being Jewish. I can't help holding Bitcoins. Those are not the same things. But like, my point is more when when, and look, I'm I'm not, I this is a use case. This is a use case that can work. This is.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Zach, in not like in Nazi Germany, it was illegal. So my my family were German Jews. And go back, they left in the 1800s. It was illegal to get married. Um, if you didn't get permission from the local council only as a Jew, you had to pay a tax every time you cross between.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  No, look, I understand, like, you can't persecute. No, the laws are, the laws are definitionally not fair. I think it's a great, I do, I really do. I really think it's a great thing for the very small subset of people during the window in time in which they are trying to escape. Because it's like a one-time thing, hopefully, per person that happens not on a consistent basis, happens infrequently. Right? I believe it is a good thing that they have an alternative to trying to buy diamonds and smuggling them in their coat. I agree with that. I like, I really hope it works. I worry about the government being able to monitor transactions because they control the internet. And they see everything that goes on either through cell phones or through the actual physical wires,

• 28:12Speaker 02

  because it's an autocratic nation that doesn't have any laws that can monitor you. Like, I just kind of worry about the logistics of this. Like, it's hard. And by the way, by the way, it's fine. I, I agree. Like, this is an interesting use case. It's kind of like, almost the only one where I'm like, okay, that makes sense for this little window.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  That was like, my goal was to get, find the, at least one, because it's a spectrum. And now we know that you're on the spectrum.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely on the spectrum. No, I love, I, I, I, I will, I will fully readily say, if somebody is trying to escape, I, and they have a better mechanism to do so, owning Bitcoin or Ethereum, or frankly, anything that has at least some semblance of stability out there. And I agree, there will always be some like blockchain that has some semblance of holding it. Nothing's, not everything's going to zero, clearly. But this isn't like a nice alternative for them. My worry is like, okay, that makes sense. Where's the rest of the market that we're holding up in these use cases that are supposed to be more on a consistent basis? Because that is the, that's like the one time use case, right?

• 29:21Speaker 02

  You hopefully only have to use that one time. And then eventually you want to get your Bitcoin back to fiat in the country that you escaped to, right? Because you want to use it.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  I mean, similar to how if you hold gold, you want to get it into some fungible thing that you can go use in that new place, like if you make it to the Palma Center, America. Anyways, uh, glad, glad that we're in agreement on it.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  We nailed it. Logan, podcast over. Zach admitted there is a use case in Bitcoin that makes sense. Okay, yeah, sounds good. That works for me.

• 29:53Logan Bartlett?

  I, I, I knew, I knew you were on board with the smuggling out of autocratic nations.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  I'm on board.

• 29:59Logan Bartlett?

  The question is just how big is, is, you know, I mean, obviously, there's been, uh, from a, from a, from a, uh, quality of human life standpoint, like, it's amazing that this can exist, right?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I think we probably agree on like at least 90% of things, even in crypto, and probably even more than that outside of crypto.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Maybe the part that.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Is frustrating about all of this is like then people take these logical leaps to the next set of conclusions, which are just like generally not true or accurate. And then we have, you know, what I think of as the hype cycle. Because people take this idea that like, well, if one person could do it, imagine if all it's just like, that's just not how this actually plays out in any way. So my, my, my issue with the whole thing is not the like alternative for an individual. I actually think that's fantastic and I'm glad we have it. It's this idea that we've invested like, I don't know, $90 billion or something in an industry where that money could have been gone, like spent on more interesting, useful things in the long run.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Companies, you know, could have gone to you.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Could have been in like, I don't know, a biotech accelerator started by like a former tech founder with some other folks like that and maybe one of those or, you know, anything else really, uh, not just biotech. So, but yeah, look, having an alternative for an individual like hard, it's hard to argue that that's not a good thing.

• 31:20Logan Bartlett?

  Sean, one of the things that in these use cases that we're talking about, like there's a lot of either technical acumen required by people to be able to do this, or a lot of middlemen and brokers to enable some of this stuff, right? And inevitably the on-ramp, uh, as, as things get easier, you need companies behind them for the on-ramp to exist, right? To like lower the barrier so that it broadens out, which then leads to centralization inevitably, right? Uh, because now those people control, you can see it with, you know, OpenSea, right? When people are, you know, claim that they've been hacked.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  The moxie, the moxie posts, the Jack Dorsey comments, look, I, I agree with 90, and moxie's very much, I agree with 95% of all of that. Um, I would just say, and we can table the web three conversations, I get a crypto conversation, move on to something else. I would just say.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  I think you guys know now what motivated me into the space. And with everything else, I, you know, at Sequoia, we've tried to, we haven't made nearly as many investments as other people. We try to be very principled. We mainly invest in infrastructure. Like totally acknowledge the centralization and totally acknowledge the weird dichotomy of, of like, if you want to have mass onboarding of people, it's going to create a lot of centralization. And that is a weird kind of perverse thing.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Would you, because now I can move away from, you know, I get your take on it, like, would you invest your dollars as Sean, not Sequoia partner Sean, but just Sean, Sean or Joel?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  I was gonna make the error.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  As an LP in like a crypto specific venture fund? Like, would you put your money into it?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Trading firm, probably, you know, I was now going to say you're the best and that that's a completely different beast, you know, you're.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you're there, you're not betting on the ultimate outcome. Yeah, you're betting on the volatility.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Volatility.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  And in terms of crypto funds, like,

• 33:38Speaker 01

  I mean, like, I, trading is in a different category and it, but like, it is also a different category of utility.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  I would invest in Paradigm. I think they're really smart. And I would invest in Sequoia because I think we have, we're patient and have a long-term view on all this stuff and we're, you know, I.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Well, one of the benefits of investing in Sequoia is you get the rest of the portfolio. It's pretty damn good. Uh, I too would invest in Sequoia.

• 34:12Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, both of you come out in favor of investing in Sequoia, Sean.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  You're like, oh, Sean, would you invest in the, in the best performing venture fund in the history of the world over and over? Like, yeah, of course.

• 34:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  I mean, one really interesting thing you said, and it's funny because I, I, I do think this distinction is very unclear to a lot of people is the difference between the like crypto trading and hedge fund types where. They take effectively no opinion on the final outcome. They just trade the volatility and you know, it's, it's like a money-making machine.

• 34:44Logan Bartlett?

  On margin at times and sometimes, you know, get, get out in front of their skis, but yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Well, I don't, yeah, some do, some don't.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  People with zero risk management experience are, eh.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  But that's like, to me, so interesting because there's a lot of people making money in crypto as LPs in the trading firms that look a lot more like Citadel as a trading.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  I was an algorithmic trader at DRW in 2008 and like.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Some of my smartest kind of math-oriented friends, it's really funny. You talk to them and they're like, yeah, I, the trading in crypto is amazing. And then you're like, cool. What use cases are you interested in? They're like, the retail idiots. That's the use case I'm interested in. Cause like, I can make a ton of money.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  You don't know where the yield comes from. You are the yields.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  But I do, two more things to say that are short points are like, one, I do think that there is real innovation happening in the space and like all of, like, those people are often not very quiet, actually. Like, like it's the loud, get rich quick people that are, that are like, you hear the most of. Um, but there's real innovation. I think like from a computer science perspective, it's pretty easy to argue that both Bitcoin and Ethereum have very interesting properties. Like from a computer science perspective. Ethereum is a shitty distributed computer. It's like.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like a horrible distributed computer, but it works. It works. Yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  It's eight orders of magnitude worse than AWS. Like is it eight orders of magnitude more efficient?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I always hear, I, I hear the like, smart people are building cool stuff. There is cool stuff getting built. I, I consistently hear those words. Uh, and then I never hear any details that actually are interesting at any scale besides kind of like.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Give me some examples if you want.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, be great.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  I would say there's three things and more, but like there's a few things on top, on top of Ethereum that I've found really interesting. So one is a video game called Dark Forest, zk.game, created by an MIT dropout, brilliant math kid, Brian Gu. And it's, first of all, like, it's just really fun to play. If you're a hacker, if you're a weird hacker, like, it's, playing it was the most fun I'd had playing a game since like the, since I first played Counter-Strike, and I didn't mention, but I was a professional Counter-Strike player as a kid. And the game

• 37:13Speaker 01

  is like, it literally fully runs on a blockchain. Like, the whole thing, and it's not running on Ethereum, maybe way too expensive. It's running on a side chain of DAI, a stablecoin, this thing called X DAI, but the whole game is running on a blockchain. So every action you want to take in the game, you have to pay a fee, like, you're paying to operate the blockchain. Another one that I think you'll probably disagree with, but with Uniswap, like, I think just what it is, is absolutely fascinating. Like, this is a, in some sense, it's a company where, and I'm not saying Uniswap is the company, but Uniswap, the protocol that runs it.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, we actually talked about it, we talked about it yesterday with a guy, John, who brought it up as like a cool use case. It's like the most, I hate to keep using libertarian, but it is the most libertarian trading system ever created, which is like crazy.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Imagine, imagine you create a company where like, you create a company and you launch it into space, or like, you know, like, on, when we sent, like, Voyager space probe into the outer atmosphere, or sorry, into the, like, outer solar system, it's like, you write the software on there and it's just gonna go play.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, and just does its thing, totally.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Forever. And Uniswap is that, like, when you ship the code, when you launch a smart contract. This is just a coin vending machine that's gonna exist forever as long as Ethereum exists.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Logan, what did he call it? He was like, it's like the biggest gambling house ever created. He had some funny phrase for it.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  It's a casino that you're launching in the space that's like never, that that just cannot, you cannot change the trajectory. You can launch Venus, you can swap V3 or you can swap V4, V5 and hope that people will start using that instead of the old ones. But like, this thing is just gonna exist forever and that idea that you can have like a business that makes money and like, does something? Like, I just think that's an insane idea and you can have the thing spit off cash into a wallet that you own where no one knows you are. It's not what they did, but I'm just saying intellectually, it's a really, it's, it's a, it's pretty, there's all sorts of problems with it. But intellectually, it's a pretty fascinating thing. And then the third one is, and like, so overhyped.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  I have so many issues with it, etc. But like with MFTs, I do think there's some really interesting properties. Like the idea that an artist, you know, like you have some digital item and you can program in future revenue royalty streams forever. That like, you know, anytime my Van Gogh painting sells, it's, it's digital, only the digital copy or whatever, sells like, my estate is gonna get 1% fee every time it sells forever. Like, that's a, I just think that's a fascinating thing. And I'm not saying that's a big utility, but I'm saying it's a, these things really have captivated my imagination. And I just think we're so early into all this and I'm not gonna come here and show any one particular program, any one particular thing.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  I think most of it's gonna go away. Most people are idiots, but like, I do think there's some really interesting innovation there.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  I wanna, I wanna contrast that little piece with probably, and I know you didn't do the fundraising, but like, what the LP story was for all these crypto funds is like, we just described like, you know, a hundred million dollars of market cap total. Uh, and we raised.

• 40:33Logan Bartlett?

  That's what I think is interesting in this is, and this is sort of where I struggle is I agree with your, certainly your example of, you know, your wife's family having to deal with that, right? Like, that's amazing utility and I don't know how big that is, but uh, you know, it's kind of people that live within authoritarian regimes that have money that are able, you know, whatever. And so we can debate how big that is. And then there's the, there's the wallet as a social identity thing, which I'm not totally sure how the incentive structure would play out to get there, to get to that state that like people would, but let's say we can get there, that's, that's great. And then there's the three examples you just, you just laid out, which I think are all super cool.

• 41:18Logan Bartlett?

  And then there's the idealized state of like what this could all be way in the future. And like, I think that's, uh, it's awesome if there's more checks and balances on government or whatever it is. Like, I, you know, I can imagine all that. In between, I think this is where I struggle is just like how much capital and hype has gone into the ecosystem? It's hard for me to foot that with, and it sounds like we're kind of saying similar things that like, hey, this might not be the biggest market today, uh, but there's some use cases that are either super addicting or super cool, like Uniswap or that game you've played. And then there's other use cases that are maybe small and niche, but super important, right? Which is your wife's family fleeing Iran.

• 42:03Logan Bartlett?

  And then there's the stuff way in the future that could be, but you know, it's hard to say how we get from here to there. Is that fair?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is fair. And I would just say that like, look, we raised a $500 million fund when as Sequoia, we like, look at the size of funds of individuals, like

• 42:21Logan Bartlett?

  Your Indonesia fund is bigger than, uh, than that, right?

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Like, like we did that intentionally, obviously. We do everything intentionally. That's point one. Point two is like, we can trade in the fund. And so, you know, like the market cap for trading is very, very large. And then three, I think what we're all saying, but I just want to emphasize is like,

• 42:48Speaker 01

  I

• 42:50Speaker 01

  I think there's, there's some really fascinating experiments being run and some really brilliant people going into the space. And like, as I mentioned early on, like I, I built my first computer when I was seven in 1992. And I just feel the same feelings I had in the early days of computing and internet. And it's like, I don't know what that counts for, but on a 20 year timeframe, I think following where really smart people go and where young energy, like enthusiasm goes is oftentimes a pretty good strategy.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  I keep hearing that. I keep hearing them. Oh, look at all the young people doing this thing. But like, a lot of young people make very dumb decisions at the end of a bull market. Right? Like, that one bothers me.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  We can, let's narrow this to IMO gold medalists. Like, let's see where they're going. And IMO gold medalists, it's a very different metric than Harvard HBS grads where, you know, Harvard HBS grads have had a very different signal than IMO gold medalists. Like, I would say the number one gainer of everything of where IMO gold medalists is going, of every sector in the world over the last five years has been crypto. And Ramp, by the way, Ramp has a few. So, so there's, yeah, it's Vitalik and then it's the Woo brothers over the, yeah. And then the subcategory within that is in zero knowledge proofs.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  And something that I, like, having a PhD in math and physics, and I didn't say, but I have three master's degrees. Like, I've had a, I've, I started PhD and I've done it in math department. It's like machine learning, statistics, like robotics.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  We would be talking about these computer science ideas 15 years ago of like zero knowledge proofs, you know, all sorts of like homomorphic encryption, et cetera. And these are kind of in holy grail ideas in computer science. And not only are we now finding applications of these ideas, and I'm not saying they're like commercial applications today, but we're finding actual applications and we're also putting them into production. And it's just incredibly intellectually interesting. And that's attracting literally some of the smartest people in the world from like a math genius perspective. And so let's instead of saying follow the HBS grads, let's say, follow the IMO gold medalists. And I think that's a decent strategy.

• 45:19Logan Bartlett?

  Well, I, and I think we agree, like, listen, there's cool tech here. I don't think anyone would say like, these are very cool, like Uniswap's amazing, right? And the computational problem. And so I would never push back and Vitalik seems brilliant. I think the, uh, the concern or the question in all of this is at what cost? Both to the dollars that are going in as well as the other problems that could be solved. And so it's one of those things, it's almost like, what if you're wrong? Like what, why be a cynic here, right? It's, it's one of these things that, hey, if it works out, it's great in the future. And that's.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  So I actually like, look, I think it's my job, it's my duty to call bullshit on things. And I have tried to, when I think that something is a scam, like I try to call it out.

• 46:06Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, it's a shame, honestly, I, I was making jokes the entire time while the NFT run up and all that stuff. And people internally can tell you, I was definitely a, a cynic on pushing back on some different things. It's a shame that like this kind of manifested itself at a point. I almost wish we were having this discussion, uh, six months ago. It feels like we're punching down and dancing on the grave a little bit when the market is where it is, you know?

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Well, you know, uh, we were told that we get to read, write and own. And I was promised read, writing and owning things for a very long time through a very big press machine. That turned out to not know what it's talking about, as evidenced by some of the recent clips that show they literally don't know what they're talking about in this space. Shocking.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Well, news splash, the hype, the hype machine, you know, yeah, almost never knows what it's talking about.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Uh, God, I, I.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  And I look, I genuinely think the criticism has been good, like Aaron Levy, Moxie, Jack Dorsey, you guys, like, I think the criticism, you feel 99% right. But I think that there's a real chance that this is a very important. Trend like like new technology over the next 30 years. And so it's just, we got to balance.

• 47:25Logan Bartlett?

  You know, by the way, that's, that's what I respect the most about the people that are coming on and having this conversation. Cause it's tough to do this right now. Like it would have been when, when the market was up, it's really hard to do it. And so now I think is the best time to be doing this because let's have a conversation when the bullshit's out. And let's see who genuinely believes in this stuff. And so I guess I, I respect your willingness to come in and do this because it's hard. One, it always sounds better to be a cynic than an optimist, right? Just because if there's a 20% chance this works out, then you know, there's 80% of chance.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  The probability is not in your favor.

• 48:02Logan Bartlett?

  The probability is not in your favor. And two, uh, I think this is the right time to be defending this stuff. Cause I know there's a lot of people doubting everything that we're talking about, right? And so it feels like, hopefully this is becoming an elevated platform for the people that really do believe it. Like, let's convince, let's convince the, you know, people that are a little at the margin, right? And, you know, eventually this will find out, right?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  The market will tell us.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Logan was concerned that the kids that sold weed in high school were going to be richer than him. And that's really why I'm here is to make sure for you, Logan, that that does not happen. So.

• 48:40Logan Bartlett?

  I appreciate that. Yeah, no, I, I, it's, I mean, that's, that's back to Sean, your, your fraud versus smart people thing. That's a, that's the spectrum of stuff that I, that I had. It's really the PhD students like yourself. And then the drug dealers are the two people that seem to be into it.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  That's basically the two phenotypes in the space, but I'm just kidding.

• 49:03Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, it's kind of true. Yeah, that's what's led to the rhetoric being as, as negative as it has been, but.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  You're right. You're right.

• 49:10Logan Bartlett?

  I really appreciate you doing this.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Last thing we'll say, guys, like, um, thanks for having me on and I hope we all become friends. Like, you know, I, we all have a lot in common and, you know, I genuinely hope to see you guys in real life someday and do all that.

• 49:23Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. Let us know when through New York. Thanks for doing this, Sean.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 49:27Logan Bartlett?

  See you, man. Andrew. How we doing?

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Wonderful.

• 49:30Logan Bartlett?

  Thanks for doing this.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me. Very excited to be here today.

• 49:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally. I, uh, so you just got back from Israel?

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Yes, I went, I actually went to Capri for three days with 40 friends. Um, and then I went to Israel for nine days.

• 49:45Logan Bartlett?

  Without 40 friends?

• 49:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe next time.

• 49:48Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, next time.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  With my girlfriend, Romy.

• 49:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, well, uh, how was Israel?

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Israel's amazing. You know, Jewish guy from South Florida. I've never been there before. Always talked about doing birthright, but, um, my girlfriend's born and raised in Israel, so she's a good tour guide. Went all over, all over.

• 50:04Logan Bartlett?

  What is it that Romy's family calls you? There, there's a Hebrew word for something?

• 50:09Speaker 03

  Uh, satlan, which is effectively, I think, means goofball.

• 50:12Logan Bartlett?

  Goofball?

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, for, for lack of a better term, but, and I, actually, when I met her family this, this trip, I go up to her mom and I go, Romy says I'm a satlan. And her mom literally lost it.

• 50:20Logan Bartlett?

  That's amazing.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  Um, so that was pretty fun.

• 50:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, well, uh, well, thanks for doing this. I, uh, I, I wanted to, we were down in Florida together for Miami Tech Week. And we had three straight days of dinner and, uh, I, I wanted to have you on for a couple of reasons. One, I think you're fun to hang with. We've gotten to be buddies.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Thank you. I'll take that.

• 50:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 03

  You're fun to hang out with.

• 50:42Logan Bartlett?

  Thank you. Thank you. Uh, we'll just compliment each other for an hour here. Uh, two, your business is, I think, fascinating, uh, which, which we, we can talk about. You've also, um, you've been a OG Miami guy for a, uh, predating the, uh, the new influx, uh, which I would love to get your opinion on. Uh, you've also raised from some interesting people in the venture ecosystem. So, uh, SoftBank and Tiger and among others, right? So I, uh, yeah, I think we'll play the hits. We'll go through a bunch of that stuff, but maybe we'll start out. Um, how do we know each other?

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Well, so I've known of your fun for a while. Uh, you know, as you said, I'm from Miami and Miami Tech wasn't a thing five years ago when I started Papa. And I never heard of Redpoint or most of the venture capital funds. I never heard of Y Combinator, uh, but after that I, um, did try to raise money for you. We never met. But I saw you on Twitter, which I am not on Twitter. I'm.

• 51:34Logan Bartlett?

  You're kind of on Twitter. I mean, you're like literally on Twitter.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm, I'm technically on Twitter.

• 51:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, you have a Twitter account.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  I have a Twitter account, but my tweets are quite limited. Uh, however, for some reason, I thought you were cool, talking about hip hop, talking about venture. Seemed like a good guy and I just, I actually just looked at it. We should, I looked, I was trying to figure out how we, how we met each other. And let's see if I can pull it up here. It's kind of weird, actually, because I've only used Twitter for two real purposes, and it was to meet you. And it was to meet the mayor of Miami.

• 52:05Logan Bartlett?

  Equally important people.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  So one more than the other.

• 52:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. Thank you.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  And I, this is like a cold, cold email effectively. I said, you a comedian or a VC or both? Funny tweets, would love to meet, love hip hop and company building. Let me know. You responded in minutes and we've been friends ever since.

• 52:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I, and then you, so you spent time with our early stage team when you were raising your series A.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  Probably a couple of the series, but yeah, for sure. A, I actually remember waiting like 45 minutes downstairs at your office and I'm like, are they coming? Like I've been waiting here. I'm seven minutes into waiting and they're like, you're in the wrong building, so.

• 52:48Logan Bartlett?

  I was like, we're going to cut that out, by the way, us keeping entrepreneurs waiting. No. And then you, when you were raising, raising a growth round, either from Tiger or SoftBank or something, you came to me and said, hey, I'm raising, what do you think? And I said, your business is too complicated. It, it, it seems too hard to execute on and.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Not, not wrong.

• 53:09Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it is complicated. I was like, I like these little software things that don't actually involve moving people around and you know, managing all the, the complex logistics that you have to do, but it's amazing what you've been able to, able to build.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, just for high level Papa is a platform that connects older people and families to what we call pals. They provide companionship and assistance. They drive you, they help you around the house. They teach you to use technology. They'll maybe set you up with the ability to watch this podcast. And all of it's through health insurance, through Medicare Advantage and Medicaid and employers as a benefit. It is complicated. In fact, I don't think any of the venture capital funds understood it. They all tried to put us into this, like we're Uber, we're a marketplace. And yes, to some degree, we have those elements, but it's very complex. We do visits in like the middle of nowhere Idaho. It's not, you can't get like network effects in the middle of Arkansas, you know, kind of far out from a city. So we have like a different platform in every city, pretty much effectively.

• 54:06Logan Bartlett?

  It's wild and I think it's all kind of held together. The reason in my mind it works versus, you know, there were all these Uber for right babysitting or for, you know, whatever laundry or all these things and inevitably people would take someone off the platform, right? That was what they would do. It's like, hey, I would, but your business is kind of held together because you monetize through payers, right?

• 54:31Speaker 03

  I used to love when the VCs would ask me like, oh, isn't there disintermediation? And I go, well, no, it's free. So why would they do that? But we have an interesting kind of phenomenon happening because it's free to the members and the pals know that we do have examples where the pals like, why don't I come over tomorrow? Why don't I come over for Wednesday? You know what? Why don't I just do every single day for the rest of my life? I'll come over twice. And so I don't know what the term would be. We could come up with one, but it's interesting. It's the opposite problem because every time someone uses it, we get paid by the help plan. We effectively are, that's our costs.

• 55:04Logan Bartlett?

  24 year olds just hanging out with 75 year olds every day. Yeah.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. And we used to be college kids and now we're really anyone get to go through the process. Personality is a big part of it.

• 55:12Logan Bartlett?

  So I want to get into the business itself because I think that's, that's fascinating. But, uh, so you went to, you grew up in South Florida, went to Florida State.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 55:22Logan Bartlett?

  Which is not the, I don't know how many entrepreneurs in the tech world are.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  Founder of Spanx went there.

• 55:27Logan Bartlett?

  Is that right?

• 55:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Which is pretty cool. She was on Shark Tank.

• 55:30Logan Bartlett?

  Is that right?

• 55:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. So.

• 55:31Logan Bartlett?

  There's some seminals out there in the.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. She sold a company for quite a large sum.

• 55:35Logan Bartlett?

  So how, uh, how'd you?

• 55:37Speaker 03

  But yeah, it's pretty limited to be honest.

• 55:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So, so we have two. Yeah. Uh, so take me to like your entrepreneurial journey. I had heard you mentioned you were, you applied for 400 jobs or you were rejected from 400 jobs? I don't, I guess.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  Both.

• 55:50Logan Bartlett?

  I guess both. Yeah.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  I don't think you could do one without the other. So, uh, you know, I grew up in South Florida. My dad's an entrepreneur. My grandpa's an entrepreneur. I recently realized every one blood related to me is an entrepreneur and some, and I don't even like that word to be clear, but I don't know if there's a better way to explain it, but some are jewelers, some are, you know, doctors, some own huge health tech companies and other. And so I've just always been part of like, what I thought is the, I didn't realize getting a job was like a thing.

• 56:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  And so I went to school for finance. I did fine.

• 56:18Logan Bartlett?

  Sounds like you weren't very good at getting a job.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was not. Well, they all told me I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I didn't know that I needed to pay rent, like I needed to have lunch, like. So after college, that was a little bit of a struggle. I did do, I got one job. I got two jobs, actually.

• 56:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, but one.

• 56:34Speaker 03

  Well, I got, no, I got two jobs. So one of the jobs that I got was with Raymond James.

• 56:39Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, I didn't. Okay.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  And the interview process was to try to get contact information of people in your area. And I remember like I was being absurd with it, but I like ran with a guy that I saw running and like in real time with the pen, trying to get his phone number. And they told me I got more phone numbers and contact information and like the history of them doing this assessment. So I got that job. Uh, which wasn't really what I wanted. And then I got a sales job doing, which was terrible, actually. Door to door, 110 degree weather in Florida, humid in a suit, asking small businesses if they wanted to buy a $400 phone system. And they could only buy it if they had the other piece, which, which is like an insane.

• 57:17Logan Bartlett?

  You don't seem like a suit door to door guy. I think, I think you've manifested the Nike and Papa hat and all.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  This is me.

• 57:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I, I think.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  The real me is here.

• 57:25Logan Bartlett?

  The real you has come out. And then you went to go work at a health tech company?

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Yes. Uh, my dad actually started a telehealth company called MD Live. Telehealth wasn't a thing. This is 12 years ago. Um, it wasn't a big company. I just so badly wanted to be in a startup and it was right there. So it was my dad, uh, you know, this head of sales, this guy Chuck, a few others, uh, Justin, our lawyer, and then, you know, a few others and me.

• 57:50Logan Bartlett?

  It was, I'm glad you didn't count that one in like the jobs you got, by the way. That's why, that's why I was laughing.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 57:55Logan Bartlett?

  I was like, you're working with your dad. I don't know if that's the same. Yeah.

• 57:58Speaker 03

  If you met my dad, you would know that that's harder than most of the $400.

• 58:01Logan Bartlett?

  So, so, but you joined early. You were what 12, 15?

• 58:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, under 20 people when I was part of the company.

• 58:07Logan Bartlett?

  And it, huge success, right?

• 58:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, uh, I was a salesperson. The company recruited 400 people. It sold to Cigna for a large sum, uh, about a year ago. You know, I've since left, but it was, it was a good outcome. It was a lot of learning there. I mean, we were early in telehealth. We had to explain to people what telehealth was. And then we had to explain to them, you gotta buy us. Uh, and people didn't really get it. You know, and all the telehealth companies that exist now. They wouldn't have been possible before because we weren't allowed to do asynchronous. You weren't allowed to send medicine in this way. It was very specific. Um, but learned so much there. And then I came up with this idea to help my grandpa.

• 58:45Logan Bartlett?

  What year was that?

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Uh, so technically I came up with the concept of Papa in, uh, 20, end of 2015, so early 2016.

• 58:52Logan Bartlett?

  And so the original idea of Papa, like, how did it come to you that you were gonna go do this?

• 58:59Speaker 03

  So I had an idea, which I think is not that smart, but it kind of evolved, which was, um, an on-demand assistant. I was not technical. I don't know how to code. I just, you know, I'm kind of a scrappy hacking founder in, in the early days at least. I've evolved. I've advanced. Um, and so I thought about like on-demand assistance. It would be a simple app. You press a button. It would call me at first. I would go help you with various services.

• 59:22Logan Bartlett?

  For, for consumers?

• 59:23Speaker 03

  For anyone. Just was not focused on seniors. But then one day I called my cousin. I said, you always have good ideas. I always have good ideas. Let's meet at my house right now and come up with ideas. Five minutes into that, I'm talking about my on-demand assistance app. He's talking about our grandpa Papa needs help. And we're like, what if we pair Papa with on-demand assistance? He's like, we could use college kids. He loved college kids. And I said, oh my God, it's genius. And then we created Papa Technologies LLC that same day, which is like a 1990s, like IT telecom company of some sort. Uh, put my life savings, which at the time was pretty minimal and started building an app from developers that we hired in Argentina.

• 59:59Logan Bartlett?

  Papa was what you actually called your grandfather too, right?

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  Yes. So my grandpa from Argentina moved here, you know, right as my mom was born, like 62 years ago. Uh, he's since passed and he was the inspiration for Papa.

• 1:00:13Logan Bartlett?

  Um, and so take me through how the idea evolved. Were payers at the center of the monetization model originally? Uh, like what was the early days? I know at one point you met a co-founder through LinkedIn, kind of cold.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we had the idea, Papa, I was still working at MD Live. It was more of a fun thing. Like, we were really building the app, but like, that took like six to eight months. And we're so excited we have the app and like, no one used it, obviously. Like, we're, you know, begging friends, like, literally begging, like, stop calling me, like, I don't even have grandparents. Why are you asking me?

• 1:00:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  Do you have uncles? Do you have neighbors? Like, do you got anyone?

• 1:00:46Logan Bartlett?

  Do you know old people?

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Do you have any old people in your vicinity? Uh, we did get, uh, one-

• 1:00:52Logan Bartlett?

  Going over to the villages, just like going door to door, yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  I, well, the door to door sales experience came back and it's like, wow, it's actually, you get used to getting, getting a lot of knows.

• 1:01:00Logan Bartlett?

  Florida's a good place for old people, though, so.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  It's a good place now, everyone realizes. The old people, they're early adopters.

• 1:01:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. Ahead of the curve. Famously, old people ahead of the curve on things.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  Old people are very innovative, so don't, don't forget that. Um, so it, you know, started very slow and, but then what happened was, I was kind of, hit my, you know, end of MD Live. I felt like I learned a lot. I grew, the company was pretty massive at the time.

• 1:01:25Logan Bartlett?

  How many people?

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, four hundred people, thirty million members had access to MD Live, telehealth had exploded.

• 1:01:33Logan Bartlett?

  And you guys were monetizing through payers there as well?

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  So my job was selling employers and payers and employee, so that's all I knew. So I don't know anything about consumers or Facebook ads or anything like that. So I wanted to go after payers, but at the time, there was no way for them to pay for it.

• 1:01:47Logan Bartlett?

  I wanted to go after payers is like, that, that's a, uh, really, a small market of people that are willing to bang their head against the wall trying to sell to payers.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  It's funny, though, because to me, it's more just like natural, because that's what I did.

• 1:01:58Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  I have no, I didn't know what a cohort analysis was. I don't know what the hell CAC is. I, you know, I don't know any of, I didn't know any of those things. I just knew how to sell and convince people that this is a value. And I knew that it was something they needed. We have a new network of care that could help people. That can be deployed, that's not clinical, and there's shortage of doctors and nurses now. Whole new network. Hundreds of years, there's been doctors, nurses, caregivers, and now there's pals.

• 1:02:19Logan Bartlett?

  So what, uh, maybe take through the state of health insurance, just, just to help crystallize why this part of it kind of holds the business together. And this was, this was, uh, when we were talking about it, I was like, okay, so on one side you have old people. On the other side, you have college kids and on the third, you have health insurance plans. And so it's a three sided market essentially. And I was like, all of those things sound bad to me. Like health plan sounds bad, old people sound bad, young people sound bad. So that was what, uh, and moving people around, not being able to sell it over the internet via software. All those things sounded bad to me. So.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  If I was only smarter.

• 1:03:02Logan Bartlett?

  Listen, you figured it out. God bless you here.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Sometimes I say being naive is one of my greatest skills.

• 1:03:06Logan Bartlett?

  It's amazing.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  So we, we built a simple platform that allowed us to request pals or onboard pals, which are the companions. They do drive too. So there's a lot of elements. They're driving, they're growing the house. There's trust. Obviously there's safety and quality. Um, and then of course you want to make the economics work. So we were hiring pals and we do of course now, and our system does it automatically. And then, uh, we work with health plans today. So today pop has a hundred managed care organizations, which is what like someone that's been a pair, uh, spaced for 20 years or 10 years would say, um, which pay us a membership fee effectively for their members to have access to Papa. And we enroll people over the phone. They could use the app, whatever, you know, is most comfortable. And a pal shows

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  up every week, once a month, once, not at all, depending on the need. And the reason this works and the reason how plans buy us is what you're talking about, which is really the shift in healthcare from like use based care, like fee for service. Like every time I go to the doctor, I pay or my insurance pays to value based care, which is I'm, you know, the health plans are getting paid money by the government to manage my healthcare. It's a very interesting.

• 1:04:12Logan Bartlett?

  So my grandmother has access to Medicare and so you will sell into Medicare or private health insurance plans and say, hey, you should use Papa and we'll send.

• 1:04:30Logan Bartlett?

  Anyone but people that we've vetted out to spend time with my grandmother and you can help on these people. What are the qualifications of the people that you're sending?

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  A pal is like a professionally nice person. We remove the no bathing, no toileting. It's an extension to the family. We used to call it family on demand. But you know, are they a good driver? Do they have a nice personality? Are they trustworthy? Are they caring? Do they self-select into this? Are they, do they have any experience? Are they a family caregiver themselves? Maybe they had a parent or a grandparent that they cared for. So it's evolved beyond college students that we have nursing students, but the qualifications is you went to and you became a pal. And then we monitor it and it's all through, you know, logistical technology and we're starting to use AI even to understand like who's going to likely use it, when they're going to use it, why they're going to use it. And the reason the health plans love it is because a pal goes to the house and they're like, wow, you haven't been to the doctor in five years. Do you want me to take you to the doctor? You don't take your medicine. And the person complains about, you know, having an issue.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  They're like, I need to go to the hospital. And the pal's like, well, did you know you have telehealth? You know, so the pals become this connective tissue for healthcare. And if you're a health plan and you get paid a certain amount of money to care for someone, you want to make sure to do that in the most effective, least costly way. But then we also want to make sure they're getting cared for. So the government like gives you these requirements that you have to hit. And so it's a very balanced system that allows for high quality and good experience. And then Papa, the pals, or as I call them, the ninjas, have been purposely built to like, support that, that kind of value-based care initiative.

• 1:05:58Logan Bartlett?

  It's a value-based care. Basically, we're shifting from, hey, just getting paid for doing a service to let's actually try to bend outcomes and change. And so, hey, if this, this grandmother is not taking her medicine, that is going to put her in the ER. And, you know, who, who knows? Maybe she's diabetic.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  Or she could die.

• 1:06:20Logan Bartlett?

  Or she could die. And, and the cost of someone being on life support or whatever is just infinitely higher than it is to send someone over to the house for a couple hours a day.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Exactly. And it's so nuanced. So we're using data to understand personalization. What happens to a 90-year-old person today? Their whole life can change tomorrow. They fall. They break a hip, suddenly they can't get up. Uh, they're not able to get to the grocery store. They can't eat healthy food and you know loneliness is really the underlying problem, but you know, there's many like little aspects to that. And so we've been to members' houses where the pals, you know, they're a complete hoarder. It's a disaster. And they're in an unsafe environment and there's animals that are dead. Like sometimes it's bad. Most of the time they're hanging out and helping out. They're getting groceries. They're making them happy because when you're happy mentally and physically, you're going to be living longer and you're going to have a healthier life.

• 1:07:10Logan Bartlett?

  So a- average age of a pal is?

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  Now it's about thirty.

• 1:07:14Logan Bartlett?

  Thirty. An average age of a what do you, customer? I don't know.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. So our average older adult, we call them members, uh, is about seventy-five, eighty. Uh, but today we've expanded, not today, over the course of the last couple of years, we've expanded to family care.

• 1:07:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:29Speaker 03

  So we'll go spend time with a mother that has three kids that's trying to get a job and is on Medicaid and can't get to the doctor because they don't have a car. A pal will help provide that service. Or we work with large employers, their employees who have family members, older or younger, or themselves that need help. So we're doing kind of more people helping people.

• 1:07:45Logan Bartlett?

  I want to get into the, the, uh, the working mom situation, uh, in a second, but on the, so I mean, my grandmother is in good mental capacity and I think, yeah, uh, eighty-nine, uh, and I think could handle herself with a stranger coming in, right? But how? How does that work? How do you get people comfortable? Like some people have early onset dementia, or maybe they have all-on dementia and you don't do bathing and, and some of that stuff as well, but so how do you get people comfortable that like this random person's going to come into the house?

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  The secret thing is the pal. I mean, if I come to someone's house and I'm a pal, Papa's core values be a pal, one of our core values, literally you have to do visits. I did visits two weeks ago. I took this old guy to, uh, to get a new passport, actually.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  You know, if you're a nice, friendly, kind person and you don't seem like a doctor. So I'm, it's a paradigm shift. My grandpa jumped out the window when a home care professional came over. He bit a person, you know, he had dementia, he had passed away from Alzheimer's later. Uh, but then when we got him a pal, which was Just like me, kind of had every guard went down. He's like, oh, Logan's coming over. I get to hang out with Logan. You're not a nurse. You're not a doctor. You're not there to prick and prod. You're not there to you make you uncomfortable. You're just there to hang out and help out. And so we just not, we've just seen members love it like they're just very accepting. With families, there's a higher level of like, who's coming over and why? Uh, and that's why our brand and our quality, you know, speaks for itself.

• 1:09:14Logan Bartlett?

  And so initially, uh, it would, you, you couldn't promise that the same person would come back necessarily, right?

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, before it was like a random pal, but now it is actually a preferred pal.

• 1:09:25Logan Bartlett?

  And so they're not taking them off the network because of, uh, because they monetize through the payer side. So there's no incentive to be like, hey, you know, grandpa, uh, give me 40 bucks, right? And so, so these people are in the house and what, what are the typical? What's the typical length of time that they're doing it? All that stuff?

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. The average visit is like two and a half hours. So it's quite a bit. In fact, I think we're one of the highest utilized healthcare services. And the secret there is that in telehealth days, you had to be sick to use telehealth. You have an acute need. I have a cold. I have a cough. I have a pink eye. With Papa, you have to have an unmet social need. Like almost 100% of people have some version of an unmet social need. So maybe you're lonely, maybe you don't have a car, maybe you don't have food, maybe you just want to talk to somebody, maybe you want to know how to use your benefits. A pal could help with all those things.

• 1:10:10Logan Bartlett?

  And so how, how are you vetting the people? I know it's your approval rate is high, single digits, something like that of people that apply.

• 1:10:19Speaker 03

  Of the pals.

• 1:10:20Logan Bartlett?

  Of pals.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Um, so what's interesting is we have to vet the pals, but also not forget that we also have to vet the members.

• 1:10:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  To some degree, it's much harder. Um, they're semi-vetted because they're tied to the health plan and at least you know more about them. Uh, but the pals, less than 10% of those that apply get on. And we've just been getting better and better at understanding like who is the right pal. Frankly, the best pals right now, and it's becoming more of the majority are ones that are like family caregivers. Like my stepmom, whose kids just went to college, she has been a family caregiver. She's the best. And she likes helping people and she wants to make a little bit of extra money, for example.

• 1:10:54Logan Bartlett?

  And so are they doing this on demand or does it end up being scheduled? How does it actually work?

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Like Uber, you have an app and I could look and see that there's visits in my area. Most visits are scheduled 24 to 72 hours out in advance. And the way we found is pals go in and they're like, here's my schedule, boom, boom, boom. They accept all the visits out to their calendar and they're they're treating it like like a mini business now. It's very cool. Um, and something really exciting and they're very passionate about it because think about this by removing bathing and toileting. I've now unlocked a whole new network of supply that did not look at this industry before because they couldn't and now they can. And they don't want to be Uber drivers. They don't want to do DoorDash. You know, my stepmom's never gonna do DoorDash, but she wants to do something. And so that's why Papa's been really successful on the supply side. We're not having this like great resignation problem. Our CAC has come down like so much and it's honestly, the mission driven

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  aspect of it is is very powerful and I think more powerful than ever before, both for pals and for our employees and it's pretty awesome.

• 1:11:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's super cool. So, so how how big is it now on each on each side?

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  Uh, we have a few million members that have access to Papa through health plans. Uh, not everyone uses it all the time, but uh, that's who has access and we get paid for those. And then we have about 35,000 pals on the platform. You know, one pal does like 30, supports 30 active members. So because these members have a certain amount of hours they get from the health plan, it actually makes for a better marketplace and drives for better, allows for a better unit economics because one pal has the ability to support so many. We don't need over saturation of supply like most ride sharing companies do because if I press a button, someone's gonna be out there right now. But for us, it's like, hey, can we do a visit? Let's do Wednesdays at nine. And then pal could pick it up.

• 1:12:40Logan Bartlett?

  So you have this, uh, so it's it's it's all 50 states now?

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  So we are doing visits in like 41 states. And normally you can't scale a marketplace like this, but we know, I know right now, it's actually this big. So Papa's business model is very intense. All of our business, like 80% of it is decided on one day.

• 1:13:00Logan Bartlett?

  What do you mean it decided on one day?

• 1:13:01Speaker 03

  So we sell mostly to health plans. They have to file benefits with the government the first Monday of June, which I call FBD, which is filed benefit day. And if we are not in the box this big, we're out for a year.

• 1:13:12Logan Bartlett?

  First Monday of June, so two weeks.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  It just happened. And so.

• 1:13:16Logan Bartlett?

  Congratulations.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  Well, I didn't tell you if I did well or not.

• 1:13:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  We did pretty freaking good. And it's awesome because the same, every customer renewed, you know, they want to keep growing and we're helping more people. And at the same time, we're improving our, our business metrics. Like it's hard to grow and improve metrics at the same time, but because ours is sales driven and ROI and value driven, that, that actually isn't true for us.

• 1:13:40Logan Bartlett?

  How, so how do you justify this to health plans from an ROI standpoint? Like intuitively preventative care makes sense to me, but then the question ultimately becomes like,

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Logan Bartlett?

  how do you show the ROI on this? How like, how, and so I'm sure you built out complicated models and,

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:13:56Logan Bartlett?

  but essentially you're selling in some ways like anti loneliness, right?

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  What's like, does anyone really care?

• 1:14:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  I mean, I, people care like anecdotally, but like, what does that mean? And these are businesses.

• 1:14:08Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Health plans are accounting firms with doctor networks.

• 1:14:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  That's literally what they are.

• 1:14:12Logan Bartlett?

  I, I'm sure they, they can polish it up and make themselves really empathetic, but like, if it's not working for their members to bend the cost curve, they're not going to keep going.

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  What's nice is, is the way Medicare Advantage is set up is it allows for you.

• 1:14:28Logan Bartlett?

  Maybe, maybe explain Medicare Advantage.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  So Medicare Advantage, about 28 million people, so like, um, you know, two thirds or a little less of American older adults sign up for Medicare Advantage. So they sign up with Himana, Aetna, United, Blues, Cross Blue Shield, one of these plans. And maybe it's a $50 premium, $100 premium. Medicare Advantage effectively took the concept of employer benefits and offered it as a Medicare solution. So that if I'm an older adult, I could pay a little bit more, even nothing. And I get gym benefits, I get telehealth benefits, I get behavioral health solutions. You know, and then this health plans, every time I sign up, the government gives them $10,000 to $12,000 a year to care for that person.

• 1:15:07Logan Bartlett?

  So Medicare Advantage is basically, people generally know Medicare, but Medicare is health insurance for older people and Medicare Advantage is serviced by private companies.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  Privately administered and government sponsored.

• 1:15:20Logan Bartlett?

  Government sponsored and it's been, how long has it been around?

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  It's about, not the exact quote, but I think like 12 to 15 years.

• 1:15:27Logan Bartlett?

  And people really like it.

• 1:15:28Speaker 03

  And it's supported on both sides of the aisle from my understanding.

• 1:15:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  Uh, because it works. It drives better outcomes. It's lower cost for the, uh, for the country. It's helping people and people like it.

• 1:15:39Logan Bartlett?

  All the reasons that private business is good, but funded by the public government.

• 1:15:45Speaker 03

  In fact, it's a good model that like maybe the US mail system should consider.

• 1:15:48Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. We don't need to go down these rabbit holes. Yes.

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  That's my next business.

• 1:15:52Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's another podcast for all the political related.

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  What's great about it is so why do they care about Papa then? Well, I can't get paid by the government if you don't sign up for my help plan. So people like the fact that their health plan is offering this companionship service that could help with various things. So it's a marketing benefit, retention benefit.

• 1:16:08Logan Bartlett?

  But, but, but that doesn't, you know.

• 1:16:09Speaker 03

  No, it really moves the needle.

• 1:16:11Logan Bartlett?

  It does.

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  Cause every time your grandma signs up for a help plan, that help plan now just got $10,000. And if Papa was even a portion of the reason, that's pretty valid.

• 1:16:18Logan Bartlett?

  So, but how do you show that? Like how?

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  It's very difficult. So that's like kind of, they, they will market two to four things and we're one of them. So we get to take some credit.

• 1:16:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:16:29Logan Bartlett?

  But are, have you been able?

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  And then what we do, well, what we do is we say, you know, why are you with your help plan? Would you leave your help plan if you didn't have Papa? And so we have shown that people that have Papa have like a 70% higher chance of staying with their help plan.

• 1:16:42Logan Bartlett?

  Sure. Makes sense. But, but on the, I assume you're impacting outcomes.

• 1:16:46Speaker 03

  So that's, that's the service though.

• 1:16:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So, so, so that is great. And that's motherhood and apple pie. And I, you know, that's, that's nice cherry.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  It's pretty meaningful though.

• 1:16:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally. But it's, it's, it's a, uh, social good aspect of this and it's a marketing benefit and all that. My assumption, and I assume what health plans also are excited about is your ability to actually bend, uh, change outcomes and bend the cost curve. And so have you been able to get to the point that you can demonstrably show, hey, if someone has a member show up once a week or, you know, whatever, twice a week? These people are, uh, will be serviced at a. Lower total cost to the health plan overall.

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  So we are doing studies as we speak. We've done a couple of other ones that are just about to come out. But there was one plan that saw, for example, a $500 per member per month reduction because of Papa. And it's because some people are using the ED as their loneliness solution. And everything we go to the ED costs a thousand dollars to the health.

• 1:17:39Logan Bartlett?

  ED is.

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  Uh, sorry. It depends on who your.

• 1:17:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. In this context, they're not going to the erectile dysfunction.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  They're not going to that for sure. Well, maybe, but that could be the reason. Uh, ED is emergency department. Yeah, yeah. Versus ER emergency room. Anyway. Uh, so avoidance of these things. And we've been able to prove it.

• 1:17:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  And so, but now we're going a step further and saying, okay, we help with marketing and retention, which is great. We help reduce costs, which is great, but we also do things that bring value to the health plan of the member and extend the life. So for example, we want people to go to their annual wellness visit. Well, the health plan says, here's 100,000 people that haven't done that. Throughout your relationship with Papa, can you make sure that Logan goes to the annual wellness visit? Which is going to the doctor and getting your blood work done. And so the pal facilitates that. But that's worth money to the health plan that has a reduction. Or they want someone to learn a new telehealth app that they have because this person keeps going to the hospital because they have cold and a flu. The pals are not directing care, but they're like, hey, did you know you could use your iPad to talk to a doctor?

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  And that saves them money. So there's so much nuance. Or if we go to someone's house and they're social or they're food insecure. You know, people are living on crappy food, like really bad food, like worse than any fast food restaurant or, you know, spam type. And or they're not eating at all. And so they wither away. They get weaker. They fall. They get sick. So a pal comes over, helps them with food. And we track all of that. And then we get credit for it. So we've been able to prove, you know, three to one in some plans, four to one in some plans. We had one plan that was eight to one ROI. Uh, because it's relatively inexpensive.

• 1:19:10Logan Bartlett?

  I believe it. I figuring out the data, I'm sure is the stuff you guys are working hard on.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  We work with the health plan's actuaries.

• 1:19:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17Speaker 03

  And, uh, we sell to the health plan presidents and markets. And then they have to get their actuaries to approve because they're big accounting firms.

• 1:19:23Logan Bartlett?

  So Medicare Advantage is incentivized for this because it's private. I mean, they run like a business, right? They might get paid on the other side by the government, but they.

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  They operate as a normal business.

• 1:19:33Logan Bartlett?

  And so what percentage of your, uh, market today is Medicare versus Medicare Advantage versus?

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  So Medicare, uh, zero. Which is a fee for service. So when you're Medicare, you go to the hospital, Medicare will pay for that. But they don't, they're not really managing your health outcomes. They're just paying for sick care, not healthcare.

• 1:19:50Logan Bartlett?

  Which is a shame.

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Which by the way, people talk badly about American healthcare, which there is good and bad stuff. Something that all countries that I personally, not I haven't talked to all countries, but the 10 countries that I had some interactions with their health systems. They all like the idea of value-based care.

• 1:20:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  So they'll, they will shift to that. They pay for it no matter what. We don't always do that. Um, so there's some fixing there.

• 1:20:12Logan Bartlett?

  It just leads to weird incentives of like, hey, you know, I, I, I'm just going to go to the ER. Why do I, it, it just messes up the whole model.

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  It's at its core, broken.

• 1:20:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  Uh, so a personal example, I went to the doctor, they're like, your, uh, filtration rate is high. You have chronic kidney disease. And I'm like, what? No. And then they send me a nephrologist and he goes, you may have one kidney. He looks me right in the eye and I go, should I be like super nervous about this? And then he sent me to get my kidney checked and like 20 minutes later, they couldn't find my kidney. And then they ended up finding it and I'm like, this was just them pushing me around so that they could bill my insurance. But if you're getting paid a lump sum of money, you're not going to just send me to unnecessary tests. You're going to take care of me because you're rated on. So the health plans are a business and they do get bonuses.

• 1:20:57Logan Bartlett?

  Where was your kidney? Was it just like hiding out somewhere?

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  It was hiding behind my big ass ribs, according to the lady.

• 1:21:02Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, but, but everyone, each person in that step, uh, along the way got paid for seeing you. And so it's the reason of always incrementally going to get another MRI or whatever. It's like, hey, who cares?

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  And it also increases costs for us. When you get a 1200 dollar bill for like a little screw that you got or little stitches. It's because not everyone's paying.

• 1:21:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Speaker 03

  And so you gotta take the cost. Someone's gotta take it. It's gonna be you.

• 1:21:24Logan Bartlett?

  And so, so it's, uh, young, healthy people will end up being overcharged because they need to make up money on ER visits or whatever.

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  Every, uh, the average hospital in New York probably given a billions of dollars in charity care every year.

• 1:21:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  And you know, there's, it's, it's unfortunate. We didn't want to help people and that's why value-based care is so good because you are incentivized to help them. Not incentivized to just get them to do things unnecessarily. So it's, actually I believe it's a beautiful thing.

• 1:21:49Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, now you're doing family care as well.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  So we always wanted to go beyond older adults and then we do family care. We don't do babysitting, but like parent helper, you know, mother, father helper.

• 1:21:59Logan Bartlett?

  And, and, and that is better. Again, all these little things that like babysitter sounds like a good idea, but the bar to have someone actually in your house alone with your kid versus.

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  And the risk is high. And honestly, our goal is to improve health outcomes and to provide value to family caregivers. And yes, babysitting is, is definitely a need to some degree for sure. It's just in terms of the impact we can make, we, we find it's going to be better when everyone's involved.

• 1:22:28Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and also the, the liability associated with it and the bar and that honestly.

• 1:22:32Speaker 03

  We don't want to deal with the liability of babysitting.

• 1:22:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. It's versus if I'm in the other room and my kid's over here and I have, you know, Andrew playing with the kid in the other room, that bar is going to be lower and I can work from home or whatever.

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  Sadly, it's like kid, dog, grandparents.

• 1:22:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Animals in the middle. Uh, yeah, that's good. Um, well, that's exciting. So when did you roll that out?

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  So actually you asked me earlier if I like, always thought I was going to go after health plans. Um, I, I did, but at the time there was relatively small. So my actual first strategy was not consumer, which that's what we did actually. Um, it was employers as a benefit. That was also what I did at NB Live. The problem with employers is that you could be in New York, your parent could be somewhere else, your kid could be somewhere else. Um, so network is like impossible. How am I, you know, if you go to a large employer, that's everywhere. These people could be anywhere.

• 1:23:22Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and also employers, people switch their jobs and therefore switch their insurance. And so it versus Medicare Advantage to some extent.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  You switch, you do switch.

• 1:23:30Logan Bartlett?

  You switch Medicare Advantage?

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  You may switch because the other company is poppin'. You don't.

• 1:23:34Logan Bartlett?

  People switch Medicare Advantage frequently?

• 1:23:36Speaker 03

  Every year.

• 1:23:36Logan Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:23:37Speaker 03

  They, they can every single year.

• 1:23:39Logan Bartlett?

  But I assume the turnover at, at an employer level is much higher than.

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  I don't know, but if I had to guess, it's not as great. It's not much different.

• 1:23:46Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:23:47Speaker 03

  Um, in fact, it could be higher Medicare Advantage. A lot of switching happens.

• 1:23:50Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  And there's these interesting companies that push, uh, you to sign up for a Medicare plan. And like every year you're getting to this website and they're like, sign up for this plan, sign up for this plan. And there's a lot of that's. Like a lot of back and forth where someone will be like, oh, this year will go with this health plan, this year will go that health plan. And it's, it's, so that's why the marketing part is very big.

• 1:24:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  Because of competition. If someone has Papa, they don't have Papa, they get nervous. The health plan gets nervous. Uh, but the employers, so the problem was like, can we fill these visits to this, this Papa's platform allows us to fill visits in any place really in the United States within like a day or two. It's pretty amazing. Um, and we're proud of what we built there. Uh, but on employers, we couldn't do that because it was just so hard to build network that way. But now that we're everywhere, we just signed up. Um, two months ago, one of the largest banks went live with Papa. Um, recently we have like a huge insurance carrier offering it to all of their employers, all of our health plan clients are looking to offer it to their employer clients. And that's really something special that we have is all these contracts with large payers. We're providing so much value to their members.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  They're like, hey, could we just roll this into our employer products?

• 1:24:56Logan Bartlett?

  And that, that is a benefit that they're offering for the most part.

• 1:24:59Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:24:59Logan Bartlett?

  Like you don't have to justify the ROI to the same extent of changing outcomes.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  It's diff, it's a little bit different. Yeah. The outcome is there if it's a, from a healthcare perspective, I mean, it's there more naturally, but in terms of who cares about it. Uh, is if it's a health plan that's fully insured, I'm now at risk for the employee's health.

• 1:25:17Logan Bartlett?

  Explain, yeah, explain fully insured.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's two ways for employers to get insurance. You know, if you work for a large employer, you probably are self-funded. Like Google app, every big employer, even if you have a thousand employees or more, because kind of the risk profiles you're saying. When Logan goes to the doctor, I'll just pay the 150 versus paying thousands of dollars for, for health insurance that he doesn't need.

• 1:25:38Logan Bartlett?

  I don't want to be pulled with the general population. I think that we're big enough. And our, our employee base is generally healthy enough that I would rather take our group rather than pay for a random basket of everyone.

• 1:25:52Speaker 03

  And that's exactly what effectively Medicare Advantage is.

• 1:25:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  But for older people.

• 1:25:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Speaker 03

  Except for instead of. Google being the Medicare Advantage Plan, you know, they're the employer benefit plan. Um, and they're taking risk and these are the three biggest costs for employers. Healthcare is one of the three biggest, uh, as you can imagine. And so fully insured means that the insurance carrier is holding the risk. Self-funded means the employer is holding the risk. Healthcare is just a bunch of risk management. That's really what it is.

• 1:26:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Speaker 03

  And Papa fits so well in a world where you're holding risk because you could use Palace to reduce risk in many areas.

• 1:26:29Logan Bartlett?

  In preventative ways.

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  And so if I'm an insurance carrier and I have a bunch of employers that are fully insured, I would like them to use Papa so that they can have a good experience, so that they're not stressed, to reduce the burden. I mean, imagine you have to take your mom to the doctor. The doctor's an hour away. You have to take a whole day off of work. And like you're balancing your, your parents. It's tiring in heart. Um, and so family caregiver crisis in America is real. It's getting worse. There's like a huge shortage of caregivers. And so really I believe Papa is the way to solve this.

• 1:26:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's amazing. Um, yeah, the, uh, people blame boomers, but there's a lot of them and they're getting, uh, they're getting old.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  They're getting old and you know, they've done a lot for this country and a lot for us. We wouldn't be here without them.

• 1:27:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, quite literally.

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  We all, all of us came from a boomer in some way, shape or form.

• 1:27:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. But it is, I mean, in general, like at a very macro level, and we were talking about tweeting at Elon Musk. But there is like, we do have this population problem, right?

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  The third person I tweeted at was Elon Musk.

• 1:27:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Speaker 03

  And hopefully my record so far is pretty good. I got you to respond. I got the mayor. So Elon, if you're watching, uh, I, we saw that the, you know, he kind of posted that, uh, the birth rates are coming down dramatically, which there's various reasons. I don't want to get into the details. I'm not qualified to, but, uh, what's interesting is people having less kids in general, we're seeing what's happening in other countries as well. Um, and if that's happening, who's going to care for these people as they age? Who's going to care for us?

• 1:27:51Logan Bartlett?

  Old people up, young people down.

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  And guess what? These older people, um, have a huge portion of the spend in, in the United States and in the world, and they're pretty well off. And so it's a big market, pretty untapped. We do have a dream one day of being consumer. I think that's more of a fun concept. Uh, maybe we'll do it again, but maybe to launch other countries. Uh, now that we have this platform that automatically deploys awesome people anywhere we want. One day.

• 1:28:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, well, we don't have enough time to go into other countries, healthcare systems and the incentives and all that.

• 1:28:20Speaker 03

  I will say that the UK has a lone chief loneliness. Oh, no, they have a minister of loneliness.

• 1:28:26Logan Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:28:26Speaker 03

  Which is a very doom and gloom UK way of saying, you know, which I would say we have a minister of companionship.

• 1:28:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, chief loneliness. That's a.

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  It's a minister of moments.

• 1:28:35Logan Bartlett?

  Minister, that's for insults.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a, it was a one way inbox. I actually emailed them and I don't know, they're probably pretty lonely themselves.

• 1:28:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, uh, good. I, I appreciate you going through all that. Normally I don't like giving, you know, spend that much time on a business, but I, I, I think you, you just sit at such an interesting inflection point between all of the stuff in our healthcare system, right? And trying to bend the cost of care. So thanks for talking through any of that. Yeah. Uh, fundraising. So take us through your fundraising history.

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  Uh, so I first raised $500,000 by going around Miami, which was not a tech, uh, world at all.

• 1:29:12Logan Bartlett?

  What year is this?

• 1:29:13Speaker 03

  Uh, 2017. So I quit in May of 2017 and the next morning started my road, my personal road show around, uh, Brickle.

• 1:29:21Logan Bartlett?

  It's probably far harder than now. Keith would just force feed you money. Her boy would just like jam it, jam it down your pockets, but.

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  Maybe if I was around, yeah, exactly. If I was like a new startup now, yeah, maybe, maybe.

• 1:29:30Logan Bartlett?

  Five years ago, though, you're just going around.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  No, no, I never heard of Keith or any of you guys. So, um, and I didn't really know the venture world at all. I just thought when you start a company, you raise money. I, I just thought that was intuitive. So.

• 1:29:41Logan Bartlett?

  How, how was, how was, uh, the previous business funded?

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Uh, through initially, um.

• 1:29:48Logan Bartlett?

  Self-funded.

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  Light self-funding, but my dad had a, built a big movie distribution company, um, that sold right before Netflix. You could have made Netflix, Dad. And in fact, actually at MD Live, we spent so much time building a video codec. Cause there's not like off the shelf tools. We could have also been Zoom. I mean, there's so many funny, interesting like technologies that we had to build to. It reminds me of the Twitch story.

• 1:30:09Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  How they had to build that. Anyway.

• 1:30:11Logan Bartlett?

  Well, it worked out.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  So on the funding side, uh, raised a half a million dollars. I met some guy at the gym. I met someone at a small 10 person Miami dinner. Um, 10 of my friends invested, you know, 10, 20 grand and it was, you know, it was fun. And then I went to Y Combinator, which I'd never heard of Y Combinator in my life. I thought, why would I do Y Combinator? I could make VCs of my own, but I made that up. I didn't know any VCs. Um, and so I figured it's impossible for me to get a Y Combinator. Yeah. How'd you, how'd you even know Y Combinator exists? So I started to come with my cousin. He ended up going back to work and before the company really started to grow too fast. Um, and then I was by myself. I raised the money and I, uh, was looking for smart health tech people that lived in Florida. I met this random guy. He said, you should meet this guy Alfredo.

• 1:30:55Speaker 03

  And I'm like, okay. And he goes, you could help Alfredo sell his startup. And, you know, I was just trying to be nice. There was no intention of the thing. Sounds cool. Okay. Sounds good. We met and Alfredo's business wasn't working well. And I said, what are you good at? He's like, well, I'm like an operator. He built a platform in Venezuela. He just moved to the United States and, you know, I'm good at marketing. And he showed me his website that he had in Venezuela, which wasn't making him any money, but it, it had like 40,000 views on it right then and there, like in real time. And for me, like a scrappy sales guy with no skills in that way, I said, do you want to be my chief operating officer? And he goes, well, how much can you pay me? And I said, I could pay you 30 grand plus, uh, plus equity in, in the new business.

• 1:31:36Speaker 03

  And he says, let me talk to my wife. He comes back the next day. He goes, I'll do it for 33 grand. I go sold. Wow. Quite a negotiator.

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  Hopefully he's not the one negotiating with payers. No, he's definitely not, but he's been my, uh, co-founder and he's amazing. And without him, we wouldn't be here. So right around that time, we, we got into Y Combinator. He goes, we should apply to Y Combinator. And I said, sure. It was two weeks, three weeks late. I uploaded a video, the wrong video by accident. And then when you take it off, you had to re-upload. And so I forgot about Y Combinator. I thought that was a crap shoot. I never got into anything. I'm a Florida State Seminole. I'm not a MIT, Stanford, Harvard kid. 400, 400 job rejections. Yeah, exactly. My resume wasn't really the typical. And, you know, so many people apply. So I'm just like waking up one morning, checking through my emails and I like deleted an email and I'm like,

• 1:32:28Speaker 03

  dude, that's a Combinator. I went into my deleted inbox, said you got an interview. I called Alfredo who like barely knew me at the time. I'm like, dude, we got an interview. And once we got an interview, we, we knew it was ours to win because we're. Pretty good talking about Papa.

• 1:32:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So you did that?

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  Did that, raised money from uh initialized capital, uh Lexus Ohanian and Gary Tan, uh and then uh uh Ashton Kutcher's fund as well, uh which was cool, you know, just initially was so cool to have that experience. Demo day was amazing, like almost every VC was interested in that that stage, not you guys, I don't think you were there.

• 1:33:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  I'd like to say you weren't there.

• 1:33:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Speaker 03

  Maybe you

• 1:33:04Logan Bartlett?

  Play as well.

• 1:33:05Speaker 03

  People like this kid seems stupid.

• 1:33:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  Um, and then we raised series A from Canaan, series B, a year later from Comcast, uh C, not too long after that from Tiger and then D uh from SoftBank.

• 1:33:19Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard of SoftBank and Tiger.

• 1:33:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're pretty popular.

• 1:33:22Logan Bartlett?

  How uh, give me your your fundraising from SoftBank story.

• 1:33:28Speaker 03

  Uh, so first of all, very big honor to get an opportunity like meeting Masa, just like as a side thing is super cool. He's, he was very much listening to everything I was saying and like my business model, he right away was impressed by the business model.

• 1:33:41Logan Bartlett?

  Someone reached out to you from SoftBank and then said, hey?

• 1:33:45Speaker 03

  We met through various ways over the years, um and I was fortunate to meet Lydia, who's uh on our board and uh Angela, who's board observer, they've been awesome and just, you know, compassionate people that have also built, you know, been behind thirty, forty billion dollar companies, you know, so really great honor. It's tough, you know, trying to raise money, but it was during that interesting time where it was less tough than it is definitely today.

• 1:34:09Logan Bartlett?

  What, when was this? When was the?

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  Uh, September of twenty uh one, we closed, so good timing.

• 1:34:15Logan Bartlett?

  So uh, and and so you go, I I've heard that uh Masa will meet everyone in person. Did you go to Japan?

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, it was still mid COVID. That's one of the things I, Masa, if you're listening, I'd love to come hang out with you in Japan. Um, but it was a very good experience and for me, like, I love building the business, but these moments are special too, you know? Uh, it was really cool and what's great was Masa has a story about his own personal need that he has. And so it just made me feel really special about what we were building because no matter who you are in the world, you have family or you may have family that has a need and it doesn't matter where you live, what your status is, you, the needs are affecting you the same way. And so Masa actually had some pals for his family in in a way, uh so it really resonated and I was so excited. I jumped right in the pool after. I knew I did a good job.

• 1:35:03Logan Bartlett?

  Is that right?

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, and Tiger as well. So was Tiger, do you have a board member from Tiger?

• 1:35:10Speaker 03

  Uh, no, but Jay is involved in Scott and they've been awesome. They've been very helpful to me and I'm, for me, I take things differently, I think, than other founders. I'm very much excited that we have so many smart people that want to help me. Not every piece of advice is perfect, of course, but that's true with everything. I take it all as data points and I think for the most part, I've been felt very supportive.

• 1:35:31Logan Bartlett?

  So you've, uh, you're born and raised in South Florida.

• 1:35:35Speaker 03

  I was born New York, actually, not too far from where we're sitting. Well, I believe, I'm actually not sure where we are, other than this amazing, the unique apartment.

• 1:35:42Logan Bartlett?

  You walked two, you walked two miles to get here, so I.

• 1:35:45Speaker 03

  After 1.8 miles, the sweat started to come out, so we took a second.

• 1:35:49Logan Bartlett?

  So born in New York, but raised.

• 1:35:51Speaker 03

  Raised in Florida. Um, I was at this event with Alexis Ohanian, who's amazing, great friend, great investor. Uh, just great person. And we were at this Miami event, uh, e-merch and him and I were the keynote. And this was like an event that like was the Miami event, but it really, you know, never was as big as it is now. And it's like, so cool to see how it's progressed. And we're on stage and I'm saying, my mom was there and I go, you know, my mom never gets to see me. This is so cool. And I was just on stage like talking like this. And I go, you know, we moved here in 1992. People always ask like, when did you move to Florida in the pandemic? And now I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm an OG. I moved to Florida and it wasn't me though, it was my parents. They were really forward thinking. We moved in 1992, which is the same time Hurricane Andrew hit. I go, so two Andrews, one was more destructive than the other.

• 1:36:37Speaker 03

  And, you know, let the audience decide. Um, but I love Florida. I went to San Francisco for Y Combinator. It's just, I'm a, I'm a South Florida guy. I love New York too, by the way. That would be my second place. Uh, but East Coast guy. And I didn't care about Miami tech being in Miami. I like my friends not all being tech.

• 1:36:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  You know, my world is not tech, tech, tech. It's people really, which is also part of what I do in a living for a living. Uh, but it is fun. I mean, I'm definitely like the token Miami guy now.

• 1:37:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  Um, I think during Miami tech week, I was on like seven panels.

• 1:37:07Logan Bartlett?

  Is that right?

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  Um, something like that. And it's Miami. It's awesome. Miami's always been awesome.

• 1:37:12Logan Bartlett?

  I, I, I love Miami. I, uh, yeah, I, I came out as a Miami enthusiast a couple of months ago. I kept it pretty quiet for a long time, but now I'm, now I'm, it's known, it's out there for a while. I, I, I didn't want to publicly proclaim that.

• 1:37:26Speaker 03

  Well, before Miami, Miami, no, it's amazing.

• 1:37:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's great. Uh, so what, what's been your perspective on, uh, some people have gotten a little defensive about people coming in and appropriating, you know, parts of Miami culture.

• 1:37:38Speaker 03

  I mean, yes, I think that probably is happening to a degree, but who cares? And guess what? Miami doesn't care.

• 1:37:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  Miami doesn't really care because think about it, the tech scene, yes, it's great. It's growing. It's awesome. It's cool to see these smart people and being at a coffee shop, I like to think about like what's happening on the ground. Like you do hear like AI, you hear something about NFTs more than that, probably more than AI.

• 1:38:01Logan Bartlett?

  Maybe not today.

• 1:38:01Speaker 03

  You hear vent, you know, now you hear silence.

• 1:38:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:38:04Speaker 03

  You just hear nothingness.

• 1:38:05Logan Bartlett?

  You hear crying.

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:06Logan Bartlett?

  Just sobs.

• 1:38:07Speaker 03

  Tears.

• 1:38:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  Tears of, tears of sadness, but Miami is, is really great. And I like that the VCs are seeing it. And I was a little worried about everyone coming to town trying to, but to be honest, it's really impossible to change Miami.

• 1:38:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Well, now you get to see me, you know.

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now our friendship has, ever since that initial.

• 1:38:25Logan Bartlett?

  Blossomed, blossomed from that tweet. Papa.com.

• 1:38:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:30Logan Bartlett?

  So before you were what? Join Papa?

• 1:38:32Speaker 03

  Which I, I literally to, to build a company and hate the whole time, the website name, like so much is tiring.

• 1:38:39Logan Bartlett?

  Did you think about like Papa.co, Papa.io?

• 1:38:41Speaker 03

  I thought about all that stuff. All was taken. So join Papa.com. This was like the time where join blah, blah, blah was the thing.

• 1:38:49Logan Bartlett?

  And were you thinking of the, the members? Uh, like who was joining Papa?

• 1:38:54Speaker 03

  It was more, yeah, I guess it was the members.

• 1:38:56Logan Bartlett?

  Members.

• 1:38:58Speaker 03

  What's terrible is because join Papa like really works too, like as a sentence. So people started calling the company Join Papa.

• 1:39:04Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  And that's when I like lost my shit.

• 1:39:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  Um, we obviously wanted Papa.com right away. It was a parked website since 1999, this guy owned it. Uh, every time I would email him, who had it on Sado.com for like $4 million. And I go, hey, I'll buy it for a thousand dollars.

• 1:39:20Logan Bartlett?

  And I would guess Papa or the, or the dot com is probably more important to your business than it is the average business for people to find it, right? Much easier, I go to Google for the most part to start my search of finding a website, but like I would, I would guess being able to say the dot com to an older person to get familiarized with this is just like.

• 1:39:40Speaker 03

  It's older people, it's help plans. Um, it's pal's even, imagine I say my company's Papa. And you're just going to go to Papa.com.

• 1:39:46Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:47Speaker 03

  You're just going to do that. Uh, it, it definitely has helped dramatically. It's helped with conversion on the pal side, which I didn't expect so much. And you know, the help plans and older people, they don't know about co or IO or dot.

• 1:39:58Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:58Speaker 03

  Like, yeah, if you're a SaaS company that's doing some funky stuff with that, like that's fine. No one cares.

• 1:40:03Logan Bartlett?

  So this guy was just squatting on it.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  Since 99 or something.

• 1:40:06Logan Bartlett?

  It wasn't like a sugar daddy website.

• 1:40:07Speaker 03

  It was nothing. It literally had nothing on it. And so I would be like, okay, a thousand, he goes six million. Every time I asked said 2000, he went seven million.

• 1:40:14Logan Bartlett?

  You're like, this is going in the wrong direction.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  This is not working.

• 1:40:16Logan Bartlett?

  Did he know who you were? Were you talking directly?

• 1:40:18Speaker 03

  No, I emailed him from my Florida state email.

• 1:40:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  Or whatever, uh, that I for some reason still have.

• 1:40:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:25Speaker 03

  Uh, and so I just kind of gave up on it. And then we got Papa.co four years later.

• 1:40:33Logan Bartlett?

  So what year is this?

• 1:40:35Speaker 03

  2020. And then we, this, the Papa.com never went down and, and he stopped responding. We hired brokers and he just stopped responding. I don't know what his goal was. Um, we started offering like some real money, not, not what nearly what he asked. And so when we got dot co though, it was terrible for us. Because now people were just naturally go to com and com was a dead website. So they thought our website was dead or down and they moved on. And so it actually hurt us more than we thought. However, the guy's like, oh shit. They bought Papa.co, I'm never going to sell it to Papa.com because they're, you know, the Pope didn't buy it. Papa John's didn't buy it. Who am I going to sell this to? It's only one other Papa that could do it. So he lowered his price to.

• 1:41:15Speaker 03

  Something incredibly low compared to where it was and I bought it now on a website like buy now button.

• 1:41:22Logan Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I was so happy and it was like such a cool moment and it was.

• 1:41:28Logan Bartlett?

  When was this?

• 1:41:29Speaker 03

  Realistic, you know, relatively fair pricing. Um, this is like six months ago.

• 1:41:34Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. And now we've redone the website and now it's funny because I was proud of myself for having the worst website in the history of digital health platforms and like consumer friendly tech companies, terrible website. And now we finally have like a real.

• 1:41:50Logan Bartlett?

  Why were you proud of that?

• 1:41:51Speaker 03

  Well designed. Well, because our growth was so significant. Yeah.

• 1:41:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, like it doesn't matter.

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  I was proud because we were able to do what we did with something so rudimentary. And I was just excited and I'm seeing the payoff of what happens when you put some, some dollars into it.

• 1:42:05Logan Bartlett?

  That's awesome. So Papa.com.

• 1:42:08Speaker 03

  Papa.com, P A P A dot com.

• 1:42:10Logan Bartlett?

  Awesome. Uh, anything we didn't hit?

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  Think that's it. No, it's been a good hangout. I'm on the infamous podcast.

• 1:42:17Logan Bartlett?

  I, I, I, it's, uh, it's been wild. I, uh, we, we talked about this even, I guess that it started, uh, when we were down in Florida. Um, I was doing it, but I'm not doing interviews really, uh, when we talked about it.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  I remember, I remember you told me you don't know if your audience is going to care about me. And I said, well, I'm pretty funny. I think I'm kind of entertaining, but then they, ah, I don't know.

• 1:42:37Logan Bartlett?

  We'll see. I'll, I'll let you know on the website analytics if people care or not.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, my mom will watch it.

• 1:42:43Logan Bartlett?

  I honestly, we have, uh, that's all we need. No, I think this is, this is awesome. I appreciate you going. I mean, your business is obviously fascinating. How much you've been able to grow. I, uh, it's just, it's incredible to me how you've been able to manage, uh, to pull health plans. Um, and individuals, college kids and now, you know, broader group as well as, uh, senior citizens all into one.

• 1:43:06Speaker 03

  It's been, uh, really, really cool. Now I'm hearing people saying like, oh, we could be like the Papa of like in health tech, in senior care for sure. And the silver economy, as some people call it.

• 1:43:17Logan Bartlett?

  Silver.

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  Uh, which I hear some people are offended by that, but older people don't care that much.

• 1:43:21Logan Bartlett?

  I, I, yeah. That, that generation, yeah.

• 1:43:24Speaker 03

  They don't give a shit.

• 1:43:25Logan Bartlett?

  They're used to calling each other like very, very slanderous words.

• 1:43:28Speaker 03

  They invented, you know, just don't call me late to dinner.

• 1:43:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh, any, any individual story just before we wrap on, uh,

• 1:43:37Logan Bartlett?

  Something you're proud of with the business, an outcome or a person?

• 1:43:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we've been growing to 300% year over year. Our business model is great. We're helping people. I mean, we've saved literally people's lives. This year, we'll do 1.5 million hours of companionship, which I like to say it's equivalent to 114 years of human connection. And we just continue to grow and honestly, we're building a good culture. I think everyone at Papa likes Papa, but if you don't, you know, Slack me, open Slack policy. But, you know, in our business, culture matters even more because we literally provide companionship as a platform. And so if we can't be good companions internally, like, I don't even know what we're doing.

• 1:44:17Logan Bartlett?

  Thanks for doing this.

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:44:19Logan Bartlett?

  Thanks for tweeting at me.

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:21Logan Bartlett?

  We've come a long way.

• 1:44:22Speaker 03

  Twitter is helpful.

• 1:44:27Logan Bartlett?

  So that'll do it for the 22nd episode of Cartoon Avatars. Thanks to Zach Weinberg for joining. Thank you to Sean McGuire for jumping into the ring, as well as Andrew Parker for coming on. And thank you, everyone, for listening. Next week, we'll be back with the 23rd episode. It's to the guest I've wanted to have on for a while, and so it should be a really interesting conversation. And so look forward to everyone hearing that. Have a good weekend all.