Andreas Klinger, Head of Remote at AngelList: What the Concept of Work Looks Like in the Future

Andreas Klinger is the Head of Remote at AngelList, and previously part of the founding team of Product Hunt. In this conversation, Andreas and Anthony Pompliano discuss the future of work, the rise of remote work, best practices for managing remote teams, and a list of actionable productivity hacks that Andreas has seen work well in the past. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

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• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:25Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 4:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Andreas Klinger is the head of Remote at AngelList and was previously part of the founding team of Product Hunt. In this conversation, we discuss the future of work, the rise of remote work, best practices for managing remote teams, and a list of actionable productivity hacks that Andreas has seen work well in the past. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 5:23Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Andreas here. We are recording this on a nice rainy day in New York City, so thanks for braving it and coming on.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Hey, folks.

• 5:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Cool, man. We've got to know each other over the last year or so, couple of months, whatever it is. I'm super intrigued by, you are probably one of the people who are most bullish on remote work and kind of where the world of work is going. So maybe let's just start with kind of your time at Product Hunt and kind of that story, and then we'll get into where the remote work focus came from.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  So quickly about my background, I was, I did a bunch of stuff, which is not that interesting, but lately I was the founding, part of the founding team of Product Hunt. I was a CTO there. We sold to AngelList roughly two and a half years ago for the distributed team, people from pretty much most of the regions. We usually hired between West Coast and Eastern Europe. After we sold to AngelList, I joined for one year Coinlist, the crypto team, did like VP of Engineer there. And since beginning of this year, I kind of focus on my main passion, which is kind of promoting remote work as a concept. And especially now as in the Bay Area, it becomes, we have like this critical moment where we have enough people.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Starting to understand that it's actually a viable option and in many cases even a better option. So what I'm kind of trying to do is my little part to make this a little bit faster.

• 6:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. So let's talk about Product Hunt, how the team there worked, because I think a lot of people, they kind of saw it as, you know, a project, really not even a company at first. And then from afar, it looked like there was this group of people who started all just helping out, right? But nobody in the beginning realized that, I think Ryan said multiple times, that he was really working out of a coffee shop. Right? And kind of people all over the world were contributing to this. So maybe talk a little bit about how you got hooked up with that founding team and then kind of where the decision to build a remote team versus kind of a more centralized team in a single office came from.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think it's pretty much spot on. Like all of us believe that this is a side project. When I joined, like I was actually working on my own startup and then ran out of money. Like I literally forgot that I had to pay taxes. And I was like, okay, I need to go back to freelancing for a few months and then continue. And Ryan at that point was a bit of advising and helping and I was so embarrassed and like gave him a call and I was like, that's bad, you know, I'm an idiot, but I will go a few months of freelancing, make some money and come back. And he was like, do you maybe want to like help me a bit because I think this is going somewhere at some point? And I was like, sure, but I don't think you can pay me. But it's fine. I will work for free. And or like whatever you pay and on the side work for clients who pay proper rates.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Weirdly enough, I, it was like from day one, constant like firefighting and all this kind of stuff. And like, we had like a huge growth spurt in that time. And I never really got to work on any other clients. A few weeks later, all of a sudden he was like, I think we can get into Y C. And I was like, dude, like, no, I received my rejection from Y C like a few weeks ago. They had they started the cohort, it's done, you know, like maybe later. And he was like, no, I think we can get in. Two partners, independent of each other, actually approached him about it. Didn't know about the other one. It's like, okay, maybe we can still get in. So we got into Y C all of a sudden. I think I can raise money. They're like, okay, I spent so much time in my life not raising, like messing up by raising money and focusing on that instead of the product.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  And right now the product works, like let's focus on that and don't get distracted. He's like, no, I think I can raise a million. I'm like, oh, please, no. Please, not all, not all, not that again, you know. It's like, how much do you have even committed so far? He's like, more than a million. I'm like, okay, I think we can raise money. So all of a sudden, this thing that all of us believe to be a side project that we really wanted to do had budget and we could actually focus full time on it. And at that point, we were already remote, but more out of the fact that we got everybody involved who kind of we liked and was able to help. And then I started hiring some of the best people I know, which don't happen to be in the same small city. And at some point, I was like, do we actually do this intentionally or not? Or like, are we continuing this way? And

• 9:44Speaker 02

  because I already ran remote teams at that point, but it wasn't really like an intentional decision at that point. It was more like an it happened because it happened because kind of like that's how the setup was. And we decided, yes, this is an intentional decision. We actually managed to raise money from Anderson Horvitz at that point. And I remember like this, we had like this internal party where we like get a bunch of people together, celebrate the fundraising. And a friend of mine who is a VC told me like, hey, this is amazing. You raised some money. Now you can get an office and get everybody over and finally become a real company. And I was like, okay, that's maybe, maybe no, maybe we are already a real company. And oddly enough, the same friend is now promoting remote work on Twitter. So I think we're now at this tipping point where it's kind of like becoming

• 10:30Speaker 02

  aware for the Silicon Valley area that's usually living in their own bubble.

• 10:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about two things, right? So one is, um, you backed into one of the best pieces of advice I ever got, which was if you keep your personal burn rate low enough, you can always accept opportunities that maybe can't pay you as much in the short term, but long term can be quite lucrative or valuable. And so when you said to Ryan, hey, I'll work for whatever you can pay me and then I'll kind of figure out how to make money, you know, the rest of of my time, uh, it really allowed you To, you know, kind of grab an opportunity rather than if you had said, hey, look, I gotta get paid, you know, a hundred thousand dollars and I have come from this big corporate job and you just, you can't afford me. Maybe talk a little bit about, you know, had you always spent your life,

• 11:16Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, kind of with that mindset or was it more just serendipity and that's how where you ended up?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  I think I was in a fortunate position at that point because we completely tanked our previous startup and I had like a huge summer between burnout and midlife crisis. So very fortunate position to be in because it also allowed me to, I literally sold everything I had and had like one piece of luggage where everything was in and I was constantly like living between cities I know that are cheap and like, like constantly trying out new stuff. I was like trying out new projects and all this kind of stuff. So by default, I was really, really cheap at that point. It was ridiculously cheap. If I look now back and like look at my Excel sheets from back then, I'm like, how did this even work? Like, how did I get enough nutrition? You know, like how did?

• 12:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What cities? Huh? What cities?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  That was Berlin back then.

• 12:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Berlin.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but back then Berlin was ridiculously affordable. Nowadays, it's a bit more expensive, but like still. And honestly, I think I could not have done that if I wouldn't have been that dirt cheap at that point. That being said, when you grow up and you get like a family and everything, it's like a little bit different of obviously like more responsibility and everything. But I think the general fact here is true. Like if you have, if you manage to be on a low burn rate, you have more opportunity and that would always be true, especially for founders.

• 12:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then the second thing is this balance between focusing on fundraising and kind of taking a bunch of time away from that of building the product or just focus on building the product. It feels like, again, as I watched this kind of play out from afar, you guys focused on the product, the product took off and people really liked it. And then the fundraising interest came inbound, right? So you didn't have to spend time going outbound and taking a bunch of meetings, etc. It was more of you built something people wanted and investors recognized that and then they came and beat the door down to invest.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  It was the complete opposite, like the startup I did before. We managed to raise around, I don't know, 1.5 million or so and we need We were back in Europe and we got like every bad advice that you can give to a team. We did literally everything wrong. Uh we had at some point, we had a business plan, like nobody writes a business plan, but like we had a business plan in two different languages. We had a financial model that could do balancing and like the craziest stuff. We had multiple pitch decks, multiple variations. I was so good in like pitching it in so many different ways. But we didn't spend enough time on actually building the product because we were like kind of advised to focus on that, you know? So, and that in comparison to Product Hunt.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Like in the first startup, we had an answer for any question that we see might answer, uh my, my askers, but literally any question answered. We had at some point, we had a flow chart where our whole process, back then we produced garments for a vertical integrated e-commerce store. And we had a flow chart that explained our process, which was uh four meters long and but like on a font that's barely readable. Uh there's a photo with me next to this flow chart and the flow chart is roughly more than twice my size. And at Product Hunt, we, I experienced what the difference is if you have actual traction. Like traction literally solves every problem, especially when it comes to fundraising and we were in this ridiculous position to be the one hyped company at Y Combinator back then.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  And um anybody who has ever been to Y Combinator, there's always like one or two companies that stand out in that batch, you know? And if you're one of those, you literally get overrun with offers to invest.

• 14:43Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And, and part of the uh traction solves everything is just there's an inevitability of success, right? So that's where the hype in the Y C batch comes. It's like, oh, of course they're gonna win, right? Um and so employees wanna work there, partners wanna, you know, work with that company, uh investors wanna invest and, and um it definitely reduces the friction to building a company, but you still have to stay disciplined and focused, right? So it's not just, oh, you've got a little bit of traction in the beginning, guaranteed you're gonna win. Um it really does come down to can you figure out how to um, you know, to, to kind of scale the product and, and continue to build a product that people want uh without getting distracted?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Uh absolutely. And the other thing which most people don't tell you, it's, it's extremely terrifying. Like I remember regularly looking at our charts, everything going up to the right. And I was like, I don't do anything different right now, or at least I feel I don't do anything different with the companies where nothing worked. So maybe I have absolutely no control over this and maybe it stops tomorrow and I don't know how to make it start again. And sometimes you unlock something where you understand your actual growth mechanic. And like later on, we managed to do that. But early on, it was kind of like jumping in and just keeping this thing afloat and just like, like swimming with it as much as we can. And to be frank, this is, this is terrifying in a way, especially early on.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  It's terrifying and maybe in a good way, but still. And the other thing which I didn't know back then, and now that I invest myself a little bit more, a lot of investors actually just try to get into these deals to do like sticker collecting, you know, just prove that they have access.

• 16:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Buy logos.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Buy logos, exactly. And it's kind of almost like to this point, like there used to be this saying, like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM or something like that, you know? And it feels almost like with a lot of VCs, it's kind of like get into the hype deals, especially if your fund isn't that credible yet, you know, that's like the one number one thing to build up credibility, have these logos and all this kind of stuff. So sometimes it's less about a judgment about you even, then it's a judgment about the current moment of VC. And nowadays that I'm investing myself, I kind of see that. Back then I was kind of like, had the blind founder POV almost on it.

• 16:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And the part to me that around this terrifying feeling, right, is I've been a part of a couple of products or companies where they've just absolutely exploded in growth, right? You know, they're hitting the tops of whether it's the App Store or some other, you know, metrics that are pretty identifiable and quantifiable.

• 17:19Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to continue to iterate and improve the product, but you also don't want to mess it up.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so it's like, hey, look, this is working. How far do we actually go to improve it versus if we make a change, it could hinder that growth? And then the second thing is, I always joke about, um, you don't understand, uh, what you describe as a terrifying feeling until literally the servers are like melting. Right? And it's literally growing so fast that it feels like you have to keep spitting up, you know, whether it's AWS instances or whatever, to actually keep this thing working. Because you don't have the pleasure, um, and kind of the benefit of having all the systems in place of a, of a larger company. You don't have the headcount. So you have to do things that I think is more kind of, um, scrambling to keep things together. Uh, which on the outside looks like, wow, that company's growing really fast.

• 18:07Anthony Pompliano?

  On the inside, people aren't sleeping. There's a lot of kind of stress, right? All that stuff's going on. So I'm assuming that that's what you guys were dealing with too. And then you add on the remote layer on top of it.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. The other thing is also, in my opinion, there are teams that scale with a code base that wasn't meant to be scaled and there are teams who don't scale and there's almost nothing in between. And, uh, we also had this like in the beginning and most of our problems were homemade. It was just like, we didn't do our homework properly. We didn't have the time, right? And so we constantly had like performance problems for like completely things that can be done properly, but we didn't have the time for it.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  So yeah, it's, it's, uh, I highly recommend, I wish everybody in the world has one like this 15 minutes of ridiculous growth, you know, in the future. I, I, it's, it's a very important experience to learn. It also kind of like, uh, lets you learn a little bit about what are the things that you actually need to have under control? So what we did extremely aggressive was E B testing a lot. We did a lot of like, uh, feature flag rollouts, a lot of stark launches, a lot of beta testing. We, it was to the point that we shipped, we tried to, we had a very aggressive, uh, shipping cycle. We had, we basically had this idea of having public announcement about new features and products every, I think back then it was two, two weeks, two and a half weeks, something like that.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  With the idea of like, even with product feature A doesn't work right now, we wanted something else to kind of show, to, to give this expressive feeling of hype as well to keep this going, right? So we were very aggressive about that. And I remember at some point, we we tried out features and products which were literally just a link and a type form, you know, and just to see if there's something. And then if yes, double down on it. And we had so many of those in peril. And I personally think this is how any startup should operate nowadays.

• 20:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's the narrative, right? It is that inevitability of success. And I recently saw a number of venture capitalists on Twitter talking about like, the way that you raise capital with a deck, they were talking about is around the narrative. So the world exists in this way today, we're going to do this thing. After we do this thing, the world's going to change. And here's what's going to look like in the future. What you guys were doing, I think, was you were iterating so quickly. And there was this feeling of like, even though it was only every two weeks, it felt like every day there was an announcement, right? Just because it was happening so rapidly. And you could quickly see and kind of let your mind expand into what could this become, right? So is this today just a way to discover

• 20:49Anthony Pompliano?

  products? Could one day they help with hiring? Could they help with this and that? And you really kind of saw the test as if you were paying attention, hey, they're testing to figure out where the demand is. And then when you would find it, it seemed like within weeks, you would roll out the actual, you know, functional product. And and then that was a whole nother part of the business that, you know, didn't exist just a couple of weeks ago.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. Talk about the experience of combining forces with Angel List and kind of what the with the logic there was.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  So the interesting thing with Angel List was that they were culturally and like by their goal as a company, very much aligned with us. So Angel List, this overall mission of following the arc of a startup. So you're kind of like, you find your co founders, you have an idea, you launch, you raise money, you hire people, and you sell the company at some point. And Angel List is very much like trying to help startups with all the high impact moments of this journey. So Product Hunt was kind of like this moment and then your launch. And that was kind of like this part that really fit well. And one thing that we always were like struggling with it. So we we monetized through subscription, we monetized through

• 22:03Speaker 02

  ads and all this kind of stuff. And we were like in a good shape that we didn't basically die by default. But we were always like, okay, technically, the biggest angle to this would be through investment and this kind of like, basically monetizing the hype and all this kind of stuff is like into investments and all this kind of things. So for us, the whole partnership or merge with Angel List came almost like kind of natural. I was originally actually against it because it was like, no, we raise more money and we go like go crazy. Looking back, that was actually the best thing we could do at that point. Because team wise and culture wise, the teams overlap really well. And a lot of the people who were at Product Hunt now lead teams in Angel List and

• 22:46Speaker 02

  and so on and so on. So I think it's a, I think this was like one of the best decisions we did as a company easily.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  The the interesting thing that I also believe is what's kind of like shows how good this fit is is like how many people of Product Hunt in the end also like started their own fund. Many of them through tools that Angel List provides. So I think there's like a very, very well aligned culture and people fit.

• 23:12Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so you today serve as the head of remote at Angel List. Describe a little bit about what that is and then we can get into some of the actionable advice around remote work.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so technically, it's so the amazing thing about this title is that nobody knows what this title is supposed to mean. And by now, I actually just keep it because it's so confusing. It's kind of like it sounds big, right? I think a better title, looking back, would have been head of remote products. So Angel List has the largest job board for startups. And it's also the largest job board for remote work in startups. But barely anybody knows and it's a, there's a lot of functionality that just doesn't work well with remote teams. So my job is basically to make sure we align the product into the right direction, that it actually works for remote teams and remote candidates really well. And so it's actually more like head of remote products, right?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  And this whole angle of like being in charge of the remote culture of a company, which a lot of people associate with is actually what I not really, I'm not really paid for that, you know, that's not my job. Uh, nowadays, what I actually think is even though if I don't do the job of a head of remote, that like this cultural aspect, I believe that's a very valid job for a lot of larger teams that are either remote or remote first. Um, and for example, at GitLab, there is Darren, who is now the head of remote there, whose main job is to make sure that internally they work more and more efficient. And it works for everybody that like any learning they have at some part of the company can transition to the rest of the company so that the team works best possible way all remote.

• 24:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so let's get into kind of why is this becoming so popular, right? This, this idea of remote work. Um, I think a lot of folks would say remote work is the equivalent of the future of work. Uh, and we're seeing, um, really the startups, I think, have kind of pioneered here. And now you're seeing some of the larger companies jump in as well. But just like, what's the, what's driving this trend? Is it more technological? Is it societal? Is it a mixture of things?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  So personally, I think there's nothing particularly new about this. What happened now is more that in the big tech hubs that usually were very bullish on having everybody in the same place, and that's mainly San Francisco Bay area, a little bit New York, that they are now like seeing as an alternative. And they now have enough, the DVCs especially now have enough, as I would say, data points to have alternative pattern recognition in like, okay, this can actually also produce a large company like GitHub, GitLab, Zapier. There's like enough data points. Yeah, they can, basically they can apply the typical pattern matching now. And that is more what changed. That is, that's more like why it's perceived now as like a hype topic. And I also think we are now in a weird moment of time where it's perceived as a thing.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure in four years from now, we, like, we couldn't have a podcast about remote work. It would be kind of like talking about smartphones, you know? It's like, why do you call it smartphone? It's just a phone. And the same way in four years, like, why do you call it remote work? It's just work. I just happened to work for a company in Boston, you know? And if you look at the underlying trends, um, more people working online, more people working in digital knowledge work and more people working internationally with international teams. All of that have the logical conclusion that remote work is like by default. And I think we're now at this point where we don't even, even if we think we work non-remote, we actually most of the time already work remote. So many people are checking their email on the way to work, are working on Friday from a coffee shop,

• 26:43Speaker 02

  are working when they are like on a business trip and working like all nighters or whatever there. And technically, all of that used to be called telecommuting. And all of that technically is remote work. So we're now switching actually from a binary equation of like remote work, yes or no, to more like a spectrum where it's no longer about, are you working remote or not? It's more like on this two by two grid of how far away are you from the next hub, like the next headquarters? And how distribute your teams across time zones of the people you work with? So basically, how asynchronous do you work? So axis one is basically how easy would it for you to be come to come to a headquarters? And axis two is like how asynchronous is the team you're working in? And I think this will be more the discussion in the future.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  So the discussion will be more like, like, how asynchronous do you want this team to be? Do you want to hire people in more than, let's say, five to eight hours of time zone difference? Is this something you actually want to aspire to? You think, no, this is like going to kill our productivity? There's remote teams that require everybody, like InVision requires everybody to work on Eastern time zone. You know, and that by default excludes a lot of people. There's most remote teams only hiring their own country. American remote teams are notorious for only hiring in the US and best case in Canada. Most remote teams are actually best case hiring in their own time zone roughly, you know? So there's a lot of already now like this, this is almost like a spectrum discussion already now. And I think this is like where it's going.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  And we're kind of like in this weird moment of time where remote work is kind of like a concept that we still intentionally can talk about. And then in future, it will be much more like, okay, I have people in different time zones and I have to find ways that the synchronous work works better. We will focus more on these angles.

• 28:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so as you get into the remote work, I agree with you that, you know, four or five years from now, it's just be work. But there's a lot of

• 28:41Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't want to say fear, but kind of tepidation in terms of people just immediately going from 100% centralized, everyone comes into an office to, let's say, 100% remote, right? And so a lot of this is around building a business. And what I want to do is spend some time just on the actual advice of if I'm a entrepreneur or a manager and I want to start to either bring on people into a remote work kind of scenario, or I want to build my team 100% remote, things like, you know, how do you see people running meetings, right? So that's kind of like an easy one where, yeah, there's conference calls and things like that. But if you have folks who are in different geographies, different time zones,

• 29:22Anthony Pompliano?

  etc., you can't get everyone to walk into the same conference, you know, table and hold a meeting. So like, what are some of the best practices you see there in terms of just meetings for remote teams?

• 29:32Speaker 02

  I think one of the important parts is here to understand where you currently are on the company. Like, if you think of it like as a spectrum line or whatever, and where you want to be. And so, for example, a typical problem is hybrid setups, you know, and that can be eight people in the office and two people in that team not being in the office and trying to call in into the meeting, and then pretty much being like screwed, right? Like, it's hard to understand everybody. You're constantly out of the loop in communication, etc.

• 29:58Anthony Pompliano?

  They're kind of like second-class citizens.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Second-class citizens. And that's what a lot of people associate with remote work. And the problem you have here is that if you're in the office, it's very, very easy to talk about something and very annoying to write something down. If you're remote, it's very easy for you to write something down and very annoying to like talk synchronously about something, at least for a longer time. So what's happening is not that like one is better than the other, it's just on different communication layers by default. So what you need to be in the, for example, in a hybrid team is you need to be very intentional about the bridge between this. And the problem is that humans will always tend to the thing that's easy. They will always go for the thing that's like just more approachable and easier and like, basically, we all are lazy by default. So

• 30:42Speaker 02

  There you need to be a little bit more aware of that either by discipline and discipline usually doesn't work for most people or by setup and for example in hybrid teams what I recommend for example if the whole company isn't remote first or isn't all remote have a critic like have sub teams where in this sub team a critical amount of people is remote so that this team needs to work remote first that they by default do their discussions in like hangout calls and not over the table that they by default need the process to be optimized for the majority of the team versus of the two people who happen to be in the office so for example you it's very common that you have your infrastructure team remote that you have your customer care team remote like and this kind of like sub team approach works really well because that way

• 31:25Speaker 02

  you got like the learnings you can bring into the rest of the company other things here is if you cannot do that for example because for example you need to do like your all hand meeting where the majority of people happens to be in the office what I highly recommend is have the people who do talk call in so that everybody's on the same communication layer that everybody can ask questions the same way that everybody hears and understands the same way so if you know that there will be like two or three people who give a presentation or like who will talk discuss something the majority of the time have these people call in so that you have the same layer for everybody and there's a few

• 32:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Even if they're in the office?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Even if they're in the office I know I know teams where it's literally like everybody goes into the meeting room and like two people go into the phone booth you know and that's by intention and that's I think creates a better culture internally.

• 32:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it and the tools that you see people using for let's say these meetings that involve folks that are remote whether 100% or some in the office Google Hangouts obviously I'm assuming is a big one are there other tools that you see people using that you think are are pretty positive?

• 32:28Speaker 02

  So in general I think most teams don't have a tool problem I think most teams have a process problem we used to have Skype and HipChat and email and that worked good enough now we have Slack and Zoom you know and email and it works good enough you know there is in reality more process problem that being said there is always like a little bit of iteration around tooling and like there's always like lessons to be learned like what I'm a big fan of is like recording meetings and then having automated like while you take notes live you automatically are timestamp to to parts in that video there's like grain.co that does like something like that there's a few other companies that do that. A big fan of that kind of approaches, but in general, it's much more about like having a process. So for example, it needs to be important that somebody takes notes.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  It needs to be important that it's very clear what the decisions afterwards are. It's very clear what like who is the action, who like takes the action item, like who owns it and so on and so on. And that necessarily has nothing to do with remote work. That's just management one on one. The problem you have in most remote teams is you can't as easily monkey patch or like hotfix, bad management. Like in or bad processes in in a co-located office. If you have a bad process about something and there's constantly people a little bit unclear. You just, I don't know, quickly talk about it in a meeting and like come on the same page and then you're dispersed. You can't that easily do that in a remote team. So what you end up doing is you are thinking about more intentionally about your processes.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  And which in general is good. But if you're like yet super small and early, you know, you need to be careful not to over engineer those processes. So otherwise you are basically yeah slowing down because of that, obviously.

• 34:11Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And a lot of what we've talked about so far is with synchronous meetings where everyone's there at the same time. Um, I know that there's some remote teams who either through time zone or personal preference. Uh, they feel a need or want to hold asynchronous meetings, meaning that uh, how do we share information and communicate? But we're not there all at the same time. What have you seen there is kind of the way people are doing that or doing it well?

• 34:33Speaker 02

  This is like the one thing where I think currently the most iteration is happening in in tooling and product. It's usually much more around uh, proposals and documents and like having specific communication around those and coming together like. Co-create a document and that's usually what's happening more. Um, and there's multiple teams who have uh, like all the folks distributed everywhere. Um, and some of them do it religiously, like Dewist is one of them. I would say more more aggressive ones that have all the team anywhere. What I noticed though is in most of those teams and most of those companies that are extremely distributed. Even in those teams, the sub teams who work with together a lot tend to be roughly in the same time area.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Like roughly five hours overlap, three hours overlap, worst case. So like some overlap has to happen. Um, so like the mobile team maybe or whatever team. Or like the management team, leadership team, they're roughly in the same time zone area. Because it's just, you otherwise lose too much time around this. The other counterintuitive thing is like, I highly recommend that remote teams meet as much as possible. If you like, you have a sub-team and you have a project kickoff, a larger one, like get everybody together. You have a company and like you you've figured out that you pretty much hit the wall with something. Get everybody together.

• 35:52Anthony Pompliano?

  In person.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  In person, even if you have nothing and it's just like. Celebrate or or not even that, like just being human. Get everybody together, like do offsites, quarterly, half year, whatever you can do. Uh, that by itself is usually the biggest lever for any process problem in reality.

• 36:09Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Um, and then in terms of, uh, how do you think about, um. Documenting information and sharing information, so not necessarily meetings, right, where you and I need to talk. But, uh, more around this process stuff, right? So, uh, I'm going to, uh, put notes into the code, right? But I also have non-technical, uh, areas of process or commenting, etc. Like, like, how do you see teams doing that today?

• 36:35Speaker 02

  So the. The biggest learning I had here is, for example, as an engineer. You know that you are building your code to support whatever you have now. And that in six months, if the thing actually scales, if the thing is actually worth your time. You will refactor the parts that face problems. You might even refactor all of it, but usually you refactor the parts that have problems. And that's also true for management. You are, if your company is growing, you will refactor how you work every six months, like as a rough nutshell. So whenever you feel like you hate process problems, you hate that the fact that people are misaligned. You will hate, you hate the fact that there's communication problems, there is constantly misunderstandings or whatever.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  All of these kind of problems don't go away. They're just getting replaced by other process problems on the long run. And you just need to accept that almost and need to basically say, okay, what works for now? What is good enough for now? Do that, make it explicit. That's the most important part, like make it explicit to the point that the things that your team already is doing, it should be aware that this is like we do this intentionally. And these two or three things, we don't like, we don't care as much. Like if you want to do them, do them, you know, but like these few core rules we expect you to do, make this very explicit. And when you start, like wait for problems to happen. And when you start seeing those problems to actually pop up and cause trouble, try to address these specific problems individually.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  And again, like refactor only that part of the process. One of the biggest risks that you can do as a company is kind of like mentally masturbate about like how your company should operate. And they come off this really, really complex answer for every question that might ever be asked, like this big Gantt, this big flow chart I mentioned at the beginning, right? And do that for processes. That's the biggest and like, that's the easiest way to wreck your company in my experience.

• 38:30Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And you mentioned management, right? The kind of, I know you've given a number of talks on like managing a remote team. How does that differ from managing a non-remote team?

• 38:39Speaker 02

  So personally, I think that remote teams have, I usually say like five X the process needs. And I say five X the process needs because it sounds really nice in a tweet. In reality, it's more like I would say three X, but that doesn't sound that retweetable. But main thinking here is if you are a team of, let's say, five, you roughly act as if you would be a team of 15 to 25 people in a co-located team. If you're a team of like 10 people in a remote setup or remote setup, you roughly act as if you would be 30 to 50. And that goes on and that at some point you hit like this logarithmic scaling point where if you're like 200, 400 people, you don't work as if you would be more than 1,000 or something like that.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  And so in reality, you have like a little bit more awareness around processes and you need to be, I think like the biggest learning here for me was like you manage processes and you lead people versus you manage people.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  I think this is the biggest learning I had here. So you kind of like wanna get to the point that people can self-manage and make decisions on their own.

• 39:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, so explain this. You said you manage processes, but you lead people.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Elaborate on that.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  So your job as a manager is to define the processes and like how you expect people to work internally. And process isn't like this, this huge chain where 20 people have to hand over something. Like we have this very negative connotation with the word process in startups. It's almost like a word people try to avoid. A process just means explicit expectation. So for example, in an engineering team, I might expect that the people, when they start working, the first thing they do is that they review code of other people. And I expect them to do that before they do their own stuff. And the reason I expect them to do that is so for example, that other people are as unblocked as early as possible. Right? So if you have people working across multiple time zones,

• 40:33Speaker 02

  there will always be somebody who has reviewed your code before you come back next day. Right? And that's an explicit expectation. That is not a complex handover, that's just an explicit expectation, that's a process. And these kind of processes, you want as few as, uh, few as possible, you know, but very, very explicit and everybody in your team needs to be aware of like what are your expectations? And you regularly need to tune them, re-engineer them. Like you basically figure out that some of them don't work for you anymore. Your team scaled now, it's like too hard for you now to review every code. You know, like now, how do you prioritize here? How do you expect people to make that? And that's again, I can make this expectation explicit. And so in reality, as a manager, you manage processes. Your, your, your job as a manager is not to make decisions.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Your job as a manager is to figure out, together with your team, what decisions need to be done, who does them, and make sure these decisions are made. And ideally, you want the most capable person in your team to make the decision wherever they're most capable about. And to have a process where this person is actually enabled to make these decisions, run with these decisions. That's your job as a manager. So you need to set up a team where everybody can actually run with the problems they have, like run with the problems and solutions they have and are enabled to actually do that. And what we call, what I usually call optimizing for single-player mode. So they need to be able to run the game on their own. And it doesn't mean like never work with anybody else, but not being dependent on other people unless they want to.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Imagine you're running Mario and you press jump and all of a sudden it's, okay, thank you for pressing jump. Please wait until the other person comes online. This would not be a very popular game for Nintendo. So the goal is like, how can you be as autonomously as possible? And then pull in people for quality work and pull people in for things where you actually want to pull them in. And this is kind of where like your job as a manager comes in, like how can you enable people to do that? And the sad truth here is as a manager, every problem in your company, every mistake that anybody does is ultimately your fault. And so it's very easy to blame your engineering team if something goes wrong, to blame whoever if something like, blame your CTO if something goes wrong.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  If you're in some way of fashion, and we have this weird term of like being above somebody, right? Like if you're managing them, that area somehow, it's ultimately your fault. Because you either did not create the right context for those people to succeed, you did not hire the right people, you did not fire the wrong people, it's in some way, form of fashion, your own fault. And that's kind of the thing that you need to learn as a manager.

• 43:13Anthony Pompliano?

  What you're talking about is really giving people the autonomy to do the things they think are best, right? You have to really trust them, they've got to essentially be successful on their own. And you add up all those individual successes and it makes the team successful. But that's all built on the premise that you hire the right people, right? And so how do you think about any changes to the hiring process when teams are remote? Given this kind of more, you know, autonomy-driven work style versus maybe if they were coming into an office? Is there a change?

• 43:46Speaker 02

  So I think about this a lot actually because I'm head of remote products at AngelList, right?

• 43:51Anthony Pompliano?

  You're supposed to have all the answers.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I hope at some point, like in five years maybe. My, so my biggest learning here is actually that.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Kind of if you hire across bigger regions, usually your typical hiring pattern recognition breaks down. So you might not know the university this person went to. You might not know the company they worked for. You don't know. You might even struggle understanding cultural differences. You know, like, why is this person? Why does this person look pissed off all the time in this call? You know, and that's just no Germanic person. Yeah, I, I, that's just me, you know, resting bitch face, you know? It's just like you struggle maybe with these little differences. And especially, for example, if you're used to hiring in tech hubs, it kind of breaks down if people don't follow these patterns. Um, my number one lesson learned here is give them actual work and see how they actually work.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  So that can mean, for example, for engineers, that can mean give them a small project that you pay for, you know, or do pair programming together with them, you know, or maybe combine them, like let them do a small project. And then later on, do one hour more programming where you ask them to extend this little thing with another little thing, you know? So you actually see how they work. And this is true for engineering. This is true for marketing. This is true for every area. And in my experience, this works best. I know teams that go as far, like Webflow is notorious for this. They do interviews that are more about figuring out if this person would be a good cultural, like, people fit, you know? And then afterwards, they literally just pay this person to work with them for a week. And after the week, they give them an offer, which is, in my opinion, crazy.

• 45:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Who can take off a week and just like work at some other company to see if they want to like work there, you know? But it works for them really well and.

• 45:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that part of the test? Can, are you willing to take a week off? Or do you think that's just a?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe not. You know, they also offer, and by the way, this is like half a year old information, maybe they changed this. But they also do this thing where you can do two hours in the evening and work with them two hours a day for like literally a month. Um, and in their experience, the people who do this like over a month are almost like a definite hire all the time, you know, and who actually managed to do this for a month. And I, I get it, like if I do this for a month, I'm committed. I want to join, right? And it works really well for them. This is an extreme case, you know, but you can't do this like lo-fi. Like, I strongly believe in remote work on, on, uh, contract for hire. Give somebody a project, like, work with them on something real, you know? And, um, agree on a rate that's not like their

• 46:31Speaker 02

  extreme amount for freelancing and it's not like as low as like the full-time hiring broken down to a few days, you know? But somewhere in between, so it's fair for both sides. If it works, put a contract afterwards.

• 46:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and as part of this, so this kind of, um, project-based hiring, uh, does this work both for technical teams and, uh, non-technical hires? Or is it more technical focused?

• 46:52Speaker 02

  So I primarily hire technically in my life, so I can properly tell. But I know people who do similar stuff for sales roles and marketing roles, uh, where they basically give them a typical task that would happen in, in their company, you know? And it seems to work quite well.

• 47:06Anthony Pompliano?

  What are some of the biggest mistakes you've seen, um, on the employee side, right? So, uh, we've talked a lot about kind of managing, but if you're that, uh, person in the remote team who's sitting, uh, there's no one in your city, right, that work at your company, so you're fully remote 100% of the time. What, what are some of either the mistakes you make or the things that you can do to actually, um, make the team work better? Right? Cause you, you've sat in that seat before lately. What were some of the things that you did? Um, either good or bad, uh, that you think people should, uh, should, should be aware of?

• 47:39Speaker 02

  There's multiple things, like, one angle is like in the end you're a manager of one. Like, you need to manage yourself, you know? And that goes, that starts with like, understand when, when and how you're most productive. How you actually as a human being operate. There's people who like to get up at 6:00 AM, work for a few hours, go to the gym and then work for a few hours, you know? There is people who like to work in the evening, like, understand that part, you know?

• 48:03Speaker 02

  There is the angle of, um, I personally do not recommend working from home. There's a lot of people doing that and doing it very successful. If you work from home, get a dedicated area for that, you know? I personally, what I recommend is rent a small office together with a few friends who also work remote. Um, because for me at least, this is what I personally prefer because it creates the separation between work and rest. And I also have, uh, not as distracting as a coworking space, you know, but not as isolating as being completely only at home. And I especially with like a little bit of an ADHD, I have a problem of, um, setting boundaries. So it literally could happen that I will get up in the middle of night and continue working on something.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  And if my desk, as it used to be, is like next to my living room, I will constantly do that. Um, so that kind of like management of one, uh, on the management of teams, it's super important that you, you, you kind of like this whole thing about like understanding where processes break down and like trying to fix them. It's also like in a part, a co-owned responsibility of every employee in reality. Every effective team has people who are very, very intentional about their own productivity, very intentional about the team productivity and do not expect other people to just fix it, you know? At least, uh, figure out like how it could be improved and, uh, do all these kind of things.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  It's, there is no magic bullet solution to this because every company as they scale has completely different needs in process, different, completely different needs as a company. Also like different people when they work together have completely different needs. So there is no like magic silver bullet, there's more like this general responsibility of this individual people.

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• 51:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And I guess the idea of if me, you, and you know, three or four friends all work remote for separate companies, coming together into an office space. One, there's like kind of the economic argument for it, right? Two is more what I would consider like the psychological argument of just separating work and rest and all that. But three is also that there's probably a huge benefit because I get to see, you know, how are you interacting with this remote team? And kind of what are your best practices? What tools are you using, etc.?

• 52:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. A friend of mine, he's, he's working for a company, one and a half days a week. And it works really, really well. And I don't know how he's doing it, and I'm trying to learn that. You know, I really don't understand it, but it works really well.

• 52:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What's he do the rest of the week?

• 52:24Speaker 02

  I'm trying to figure out. He does a lot of open source, so I think it's that, you know. But whenever he comes to that office, he's working roughly one or two days. So yeah, people work very different. It's very important to learn from that.

• 52:37Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What, um, as you started to, uh, to do more investing, obviously, uh, one of the themes that you're really excited about, or maybe the, the major theme is this remote work.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, there's a lot of people building tools, a lot of people building, uh, products for this space. Like, what are the themes that you think either one are, um, important or two are, uh, where the value is going to be created over the next, you know, five, 10 years?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  So for context, I, um, recently announced, uh, Remote First Capital, which is basically me plus

• 53:09Speaker 02

  right, 60 people right now, 70 people maybe, uh, investing together in startups that either, um, improve remote work or leverage remote work in a unique way. And the interesting thing when it comes to that is a lot of people think instantly about communication tools. And I, me too, like communication tools is obviously an important one, but it's almost like the most boring thing you can invest in when it comes to remote work right now.

• 53:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. Why is it so boring?

• 53:37Speaker 02

  It just has like a lot of other opportunity. We're right now in this moment where we have access to global, highly skilled talent and, um, we're like, almost like in a very fortunate time right now. There's enough international talent working globally and not enough companies actually leveraging that. So you can create really, really new angles to multiple problems right now. And this is nothing that's crazy future out there discussion right now. Nowadays, if you go to a hospital and you do an x-ray, there's a high chance that this x-ray won't be looked at at the off, at the, at the, at the hospital.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  It will be looked at like somewhere else by some people who specialize on that, you know, and that's normal by now. And there's. I strongly believe that remote work is like we're thinking of this tech angle. You know, there's multiple other angles like larger classical enterprises bringing their operations remote. Governments bringing their administrations and operations remote. What currently is happening is everything is polarizing towards single few hubs worldwide. So to the point that these single hubs are more important than the rest of the country. Like I know a lot of people who moved to New York but don't think of moving to the USA. Or like move to San Francisco or like or move to Bali and so on and so on. Like to the point that like this individual hub becomes more important than the rest of the area.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  Which leaves the question is like what happens to all the other regions? What happens to all the small towns, small villages and all these kind of areas everywhere? And remote work is an interesting answer to that. And there's like the whole concept about like local remote. So you have a hub in a small town where they do like, for example, it's like traditionally like an oil hub. And they bring their operations administrations to the region around. So that not everybody has to commute to a one hour or something to the main office. But can work most of the time from home. And so but I strongly see like a strong angle here. And I believe this, for example, geo arbitrage, which we usually associate with outsourcing. But just by the fact that there is better and different talent worldwide.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  I believe there will be a lot of interesting, unique things coming up. Another thing is like flexibility. So you recently got a kid, you have, for example, you're currently studying. Or you have a disability and you need like to adjust your work life to that. And I think remote work will become the default angle to that. I recently invested in a company that offers 10 hours a week. Work placements, basically internships, fully remote in marketing. And the idea is that you as a student need practical experience as early as possible. The other angle here is like if credentials globally break down. If you don't know how to evaluate somebody from Nigeria or from somebody from Latin America.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Or even from the rest of the USA if they don't, didn't go to Stanford, you know. Actually evaluate them. I one company invested in is doing job applications for pull requests. So as an engineer, you literally get access to the backlog of a company in a code sandbox environment. And you can do small tasks focusing and showing actually, hey, I'm a useful contributor contributor. And at that point, the company knows nothing about you. They don't know your your skin, your face, your gender nor your your background, your nothing. They only have seen your code. And there's a multiple angles to that. Other big aspect here, I think there's a billion dollar company easily built, if not multiple.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  The whole concept around global payroll and global benefits. And I think that's kind of like the Stripe opportunity of our generation. When Stripe came, and I ran an e-commerce company at that point.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  It kind of came into a market where you either were working with local shitty providers and multiple of them in a very complex, painful process. Or you worked with some few suppliers that are internationally and global that are just hard to work with as a startup. And there was almost nothing in between properly. And then Stripe came and made it one click and like focused on the experience, convenience, all this kind of stuff. And made it really like simplified or reduce that whole complexity for you as a user. And I believe in payroll or benefits, there is a billion dollar company easily in that area. The and there's multiple angles to that. There is this whole angle in remote work if if I can.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  For example, like let's not think about like engineering, but let's think of customer care. So.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Uh, for example, I want to onboard a team and I have a few tools to use and I have like my cockpit. I almost like download this thing and I have all my SaaS tools in there. And this is like a company also recently invested, but they're doing that. But like the bigger angle here could be on the long run. What if in the morning I get up and I have like five or eight different companies I technically work from work for. And I just picked a task that currently fit into my day and do those. And it becomes almost like a fluid marketplace. And there's like a lot of decentralized concept in crypto around this. This is like a huge angle to me personally as well and and so on and so on. I can talk about forever for this.

• 58:51Anthony Pompliano?

  What else?

• 58:52Speaker 02

  What else?

• 58:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I know you got a bunch of ideas.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  I I have literally a huge list of companies I actually I want to invest in. And if I don't find them, then I will build them on my own, it feels like. The biggest.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  I personally believe also like one of the biggest opportunities we have right now is in private equity going all remote. And I say this with knowing almost next to nothing about private equity, so please correct me at any point.

• 59:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and just to clarify here, because I know that is something we want to spend a lot of time on, private equity in this sense is not like private investing, meaning venture capital as a company is being built. This is much more taking a company that already exists and trying to scale it, grow it. I come in, I buy your company, and then here we go. Right? Yes. All right, go ahead.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  So we right now have a wave, and I highly recommend somebody, let some listeners here, please do that, let me know, I wanna, if there's a way I can invest in a private equity, I don't know if legally can do that, but like, I wanna do that.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  So there is this, right now, this phase where we have VCs investing in a lot of companies that will be winners of a niche, but not really VC cases, right? So at some point, you have like, you had millions of fundraising before, you build up a structure that's very costly, very inefficient, you know, because you scaled really aggressively, you hired a lot of very expensive people in tech hubs and so on and so on. And then you hit like a ceiling, and you're kind of like, okay, to actually break through, we either need to completely pivot, we can raise for that, or we need to just accept that and just like continuously do that, but like our cost structure doesn't allow that. And I believe there will be a lot of PE companies focusing on that, buying, for example, SaaS companies, like there's kind tiny capital doing that very successfully, there's Think3

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  doing that very successfully, like buying SaaS companies either in a certain area or like in general. And then offering the team to either stay or not, their choice, but more importantly, replace people for all remote hires. And I'm not thinking of like cheap outsourcing, I'm thinking more like to run an well-defined, smaller startup, you don't need 100 people, you know, you might only need a handful of people, but those need to be the best possible people you can get for that company. And for example, if it's a hosting company, you know, you might wanna get like a few ridiculously good SaaS admins, where you know that, you know, you can hire one person over there, one person over there, and it's like much easier if you do that on a global scale, you know, and you hire the best possible people for, I would say, global rates, than

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  hire some random people that just happen to be in the same town and charge ridiculous amounts. And I strongly believe that the future of this kind of private equity at least is going completely all remote. There's already now companies like Think3 who have, it's run by the folks who do crossover and they have around 3,000 to 4,000 people under management.

• 1:01:45Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a lot.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, fuck yeah, it's a lot. And all remote and the vision of the founder there is to at some point hire, buy a company every day. Because you have infinite supply of ridiculously talented people who want to work on this kind of projects, right? And that will be a big one. Another big space I personally see will help governments go remote, especially around administration and so on and so on. And how do you do that in a way that's actually secure for a company, for a government? And how can you do that in a way that the companies or corporations that are notoriously bad with trust and processes, how can you help them to basically learn to trust in this angle here?

• 1:02:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Let's go back to the private equity thing for a second, because to me, that's a really interesting idea of basically I take a company who either one is not optimized for remote work but trying, or two, they don't, they haven't even tried yet. And you have two aspects, right? So if I buy your company and then I put it into this model, one, I can probably drastically reduce costs, right? By, hey, rather than pay that engineer in San Francisco, I can pay an engineer from another part of the world. They're getting a great salary, given kind of the cost of living. But then two, also you're dropping costs. So there's kind of like what I would consider more of the mercenary type approach to private equity, where you're stripping out costs. But then there's also another

• 1:03:11Anthony Pompliano?

  part of it, which is growing, right? If all of a sudden, I say, look, I actually am not going to get rid of any of the employees. I want to keep everyone I currently have. But moving forward, as we hire more and more people, I want more resources and I'm going to do it on a more cost-effective basis, right? And so it's less about stripping costs at that point, and it's more about turning a company from a centralized corporation to this remote work. Do you think that this is more about the capital? Encouraged to do it, or do you think that the person or group who does this is going to be um, someone who's really, really familiar with the processes and the experiences of um, building remote teams?

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  So both. Um, the, the angle here is if you have, like, so first of all, you can buy any company anywhere. It doesn't matter where they are. Most likely you will focus on certain time zones, like the classic one would be like West Coast to Eastern Europe, you know, and like Africa, Latin America included. You, um, so you hire them anywhere and you might have people in your company who are just like super experienced already doing, for example, fixing their accounting, fixing whatever typical problems you have at that stage, fixing customer care setup and all this kind of stuff. And they come in and help setting that up properly. And this is what they enjoy. They kind of like enjoy this troubleshooting period, you know? And

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  we think a lot about like salary and like costs and it's true, like, uh, you can hire cheaper, but that's more because San Francisco and New York is disproportionately expensive, in my opinion. Uh, but it's not like cheap outsourcing, as many people think of it. Uh, experienced talent that's highly qualified and is able to work online, you know, and it's you and it's somebody that you can actually easily find online will be somebody who has multiple offers and there is a market for that, you know? And they will expect international salaries. They don't care what the local salary in Bulgaria or Nigeria or whatever for a senior engineer would be, you know? They expect an international salary. So it's sometimes surprisingly expensive. And I know people who pay for

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  San Fran, uh, Eastern European sysops, uh, people, four hundred K, five hundred K, you know? And

• 1:05:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause there's that global expectation now.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. And these are people who are some of the best. And if you are, if you're acquiring these kind of companies, you might wanna have some of the best people joining you.

• 1:05:26Anthony Pompliano?

  It's almost like a skill-based income, uh, or salary versus a geography-based.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  Yes. Uh, yes and no. So yes, in general, yes. Um, I personally, I'm always like getting a little bit of like hate on Twitter for this, but I don't believe in the fact that everybody should earn the same salary worldwide.

• 1:05:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, why?

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  Um, on the long run, maybe, you know, but, uh, right now I strongly believe in decentralized problem, uh, solutions. And the market is a decentralized solution. If there is a certain market rate for a certain Task skill person, that's the market rate. And that being said, I strongly believe that senior engineers globally are expecting global salaries. So it will be, let's say, sixty to one hundred sixty K, right? And that's an expectation they will have as a senior engineer.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  But that's nowhere in comparison to typical San Francisco salaries, for example. And there's very, very few teams that do salaries on the same scale, that actually hire in ridiculous spaces like San Francisco, but also in super low-priced areas like Nicaragua or Nigeria or anywhere else, you know? They, because it's really hard to keep this internal balance. Like, it's hard to keep an internal balance. If you do, for example, same salary, you have somebody in an expensive country who can't just like move tomorrow. You know, he can't just like tell his family that he's moving somewhere else cheaper, or she's moving somewhere cheaper, who works for an okayish living,

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  and somebody else who gets the same salary who buys a flat every year in cash, you know? So what you actually want to get to is to the point that people of comparable experience and talent have a comparable lifestyle, which is, should be ideally off-the-chart amazing if they're amazing talent, you know? But I do not believe a flat-rate salary in a company can achieve that that easily, unless you really, really aggressively either just believe that and don't hire many people, that's great, or if you limit where you actually hire, and you only hire in the US and Canada, for example, and some Western Europe countries.

• 1:07:34Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. A lot of teams in crypto are pretty decentralized and work-based, just given the nature of what they're building, the ethos of the industry, et cetera. Are there any companies in crypto or not that you kind of say, look, you know, from what you see from the outside, you think they're doing a great job and kind of serve as role models for folks listening to this that maybe want to kind of look at how somebody else is doing this?

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  So in, like, more the meta level here, what we had...

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  Like right now, companies like Google and Facebook are almost like remote team in denial. They, if you, if you happen to work in Google, it's very likely that you don't even seeing the people you work with regularly outside of a video conference room, right?

• 1:08:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And you may be on the same campus.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, because it's like no point like going there, it's just too much effort, right? So you actually happen to always see them in a video chat anyway. It's almost like remote team in denial and that any company above, I would say 800 people is like basically set up like a remote first team usually, unless they manage some magic I don't know about.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  So we have a lot of the learnings or the patterns that work in remote teams really well in these kind of companies and I also strongly believe that the next generation of Googles will actually take a lot of the learnings that come from decentralized organizations, DAOs and you name it, and take those learnings because if you have a company with several thousand people, it's almost like it's internal market of decisions and it's internal market of talent. And right now, we don't reflect that we have like very rigid systems and I strongly believe that there will be multiple crypto companies that manage to have learnings here, where they, not what they built, but how they build it will actually be the more interesting product for other companies to pick up.

• 1:09:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and do you feel like that's only applicable to the crypto companies? Or do you think that that's applicable outside of crypto?

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  What exactly you mean?

• 1:09:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, so like those learnings, you said specifically crypto companies will be built that way. Um, do you think that not crypto companies?

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  This will be, like, I, I, I think some of the biggest takeaways, similar, we had the summers of the biggest takeaways from open source, were really useful for companies that don't work open source the same way here. How a lot of these decentralized organizations actually work will be in some cases more important than actually what they worked on and like companies like the next generation of Googles will actually take those patterns and like apply them, they will have internal systems for decision, like decentralized systems for decision making, decentralized systems for identity or decentralized systems for talent markets and all this kind of stuff. Although the company itself isn't consider themselves like to work on any decentralized product.

• 1:10:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your take in terms of if I'm a team and I want to find somebody who wants to work remote, what are the best practices there? Is this, let me go and tweet a bunch on Twitter and hope somebody sees it? Is there things at AngelList that I should be using? Are there other tools? How do I find that talent? Or vice versa, if I'm the talent, how do I find the companies that are looking to hire remote?

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  So, from the company POV, it depends on the stage you are, right? So, early stage, the best thing you can do is leverage your network. The good thing is if you're working remote, you don't limit to your network, it just happens to be in the same town, right? So, hire the people that you trust, or people you trust they trust. That's the number one advice for any startup. And I personally believe there's nothing magical or unique to remote work. It's just like right now, it's a kind of tipping point moment for us, you know? But that's true in any case for startups. Afterwards, what I highly recommend is actively reach out. So, use sourcing tools like on AngelList, we have Source or AList, or on LinkedIn, there's LinkedIn Recruiter, and there's multiple other tools where you actively can search

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  for specific kinds of profiles, you know? And intentionally approach those people with a very concise pitch, why and what, why are you doing what you're doing and what would they be doing, you know? I have very good experience of this. And the other one that is completely under-leveraged, in my opinion, is employer branding. It's when you say like tweet a bunch, right? This kind of stuff, like tweeting, blogging, or just being present in your community, you know, is one of the least leveraged hiring tools that a lot of companies do. If you have a strong brand and you have the setup that people can technically work remote from you, you would have more inbound than you can manage. Because right now, there's an arbitrage more opportunity.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  Right now, there's more people wanting to work remote than there is companies offering quality remote jobs. So, if you can actually leverage this moment right now, you will have an unfair advantage. And like startups are only about unfair advantage. Right now, on AngelList, if you are opening a job listing and you open it up to remote, you will have four X the applicants. If you have a good brand, you would have Multiple times of that and you might have it even without posting it on any job board. I know teams that are forty people of companies that you have never heard of who have several hundred applicants for each job they open and they usually take down jobs even without having found anybody

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  just to manage the inbound. So you basically open up the job for like one week and then close it again because we have enough applicants if you don't find it in this pool of four hundred, it's us, not them, right? And so, yeah, that's my personal advice here.

• 1:12:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. What are the dangers of a remote work, right? So everything we're talking about is kind of the positive impact and the benefits, but are there any dangers that you foresee or things that people should should watch out as kind of like potholes in the road?

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  So personally, I think you need to level up as a manager a lot. And that's the lag work that a lot of teams don't want to do or can do. And it's kind of like personal limitations where you see yourself and all this kind of stuff. You need to level up as a manager. You need to be more aware about how you work with people, how you want to work with people, how you do process and all this kind of stuff. That's the biggest mistake that I constantly see. On a more meta level, like what I believe in future might be an interesting problem, and that's not a, I have nobody heard this yet, but I this is kind of like the boring dystopia I'm waiting for, is fraud in remote work. So you actually hire somebody and

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  that person turns out not to be the person that you like that you hired, you know, it's actually this person outsources to somebody else, you know? Or I'm literally waiting for some of my portfolio companies to tell me that they had a employee who literally deep faked video or something like that. I'm just waiting for that. I have, I know companies where like one friend of mine, he has a team of like one hundred fifty people and there's one employee who's one of his earliest who nobody in the team knows how this person looks like or sounds like. They've never spoken, the next super shy person doesn't want that, you know, there's many reasons most likely for that. But otherwise, super happy and engaged in the team, but they have never talked to that person. So

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  they see it kind of like from their point of view, so then being as inclusive as they can. And I'm almost like what if this person is literally not a person, but a group of people who shares salary, you know, like this is the kind of dystopian future I'm waiting for and hoping for in a weird way. But for the moment, we are right now. Become better managers.

• 1:14:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's a really interesting way to look at it in terms of manager here. Going back to what you said earlier about managing processes and leading people. It's by becoming better process driven and documentation and and really learning how to unblock those that you work with, you become that better manager, right? But it's almost like the the macro effort is, hey, you've got to be a better manager. The micro effort, though, is very action oriented things that, um, look, it's, you know, kind of tedious, hard work, but if you do it correctly, can be incredibly empowering for a team.

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's almost, uh, as a remote team, you're forced to do that kind of stuff. And there's so many angles to this. There is what a lot of team do wrong is the whole opinion versus decisions. It's not clear who actually makes a decision here and everybody adds opinions and it's a lot of people confuse their own opinion with like, that's actually a decision. The classic one is you have like one co-founder who is technically not part of that team, but like adds their opinion is pissed off that people don't follow that. So opinion versus decisions, uh, or in general, like decision layering, like who makes what kind of decisions. A very common problem is that inexperienced startup founders do drive by management where they focus on problems that are fun to solve because they're easy and small instead of

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  focusing the annoying problems that they are supposed to do, but don't like because they start the startup because they like programming and whatever. And now they have to do fundraising and like fixing whatever board problem, you know? So instead they jump into a team and do like drive by management where they give like a lot of opinions and decisions, throw them in and then everybody's confused. And when the first question is asked, the founder's already gone, you know? That that's a very common anti-pattern I see, uh, sometimes even unintentional, just by the fact that the voice of a founder is has a lot of weight and especially across multiple cultures, that can be a huge problem. So what a lot of remote teams actually do, for example, here is they add hashtags where they say, um, FYI or suggestion or recommendation or plea or request.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  And they have internal wiki page where it literally says what each of them mean. So if I say this, I don't expect you to do whatever. But if I say that, I expect you to do what this one thing.

• 1:17:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and some of this, the nuance is almost lost, right? When you're not together every single day. And so having that clear communication kind of strategy almost, right? And process clears up a lot of that. What happens when that breaks down though? Right, like in terms of like conflict resolution? How have you seen teams who, where maybe the best solution would be? Let's sit down face to face and have a conversation. You can't do that because you're geographically limited. How do those teams do conflict resolution?

• 1:17:33Speaker 02

  I wish I would have like a simple answer to that. I think that's literally the hardest challenge that you have as a manager. It's kind of like, everything is easy but people, you know? And as soon as you have multiple people, you have like N X N problems here.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  The things that I saw at work is usually all people in your team come with the right intentions. And they just, so it's much more like, it's kind of like person plus context is output, right? And usually it's more context problem that people face. And it's more the fact that something isn't clear. It's not clear who makes a decision. It's not clear how you actually want people to make decisions, where you prioritize and all this kind of stuff. So in a lot of cases, it's actually the fault of the manager above and not the actual that people don't like each other. The good thing in remote teams, if you don't like the other person that much, you don't have that much context area if you don't want to, right? So in most cases, it's much more about fixing that context, how you make decisions and like what kind of decisions are made.

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  And if all of that breaks down, like I still recommend like fly people together. There's like a few problems that can't be fixed if people meet each other and just actually understand how they are different. And very often it comes down to cultural differences. Like I'm Germanic, I give feedback as direct as you can imagine, you know? Which in California is considered borderline autistic, you know? So you need to learn the balance in between sometimes.

• 1:18:59Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And as part of this conflict resolution is you really only have a fairly professional relationship. And if you take remote work very literally, right? So You and I, the only times we talk is preset meetings and maybe we communicate over Slack. And then we might have an asynchronous meeting or two through like a Google Doc, let's say, right? So that's the only way that you and I as two members of a remote team interact. You lose a lot of the kind of humanity of those that you work with, right? Or that that personal relationship, if that's all you do. The way that that's solved, I think, in terms of a traditional company is you run into each other in the hallway or in the in the company kitchen. You can go get drinks after work, you know, there's kind of offsite events.

• 1:19:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, there's all these things that can happen, whether intentionally or not, that provide more of the the humanity side of that personal relationship. What have you seen teams do there, even if they can't get together in person? Like, what are some of the things that they can do to to just drive deeper personal relationships and and kind of build team, if you will?

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  So first I will say something about the general premise here.

• 1:20:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  I strongly believe that you can be very, very lonely and very, very isolated in a very full office.

• 1:20:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  And you can be very unhappy in, like, you can have a very productive work experience and a horrible human experience, although you sit next to everybody. And I I know people who are literally lonely, although they sit like in a very full office. And that does not like, so this is not necessarily like something to do with remote work. It's much more about how the company of company culture is set up.

• 1:20:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, that's that's a very fair point. Good point.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  And I also see like a lot of people were in a remote team where the people actually have very, very strong personal relationships to each other, you know? But not just because they sit next to each other, but because they intentionally want to have that. So it's kind of like, comesy comesa. The angle here, what people are trying to do here to to have like a little bit more like a human angle. There is multiple things that people are trying, and I don't have a perfect answer for this. There is the classic one is like Donut, where you just get people together for like a video chat. That's nothing to do with work. There's other teams that try to do like once a week, they have a discussion that's about nothing, you know, and just like get together, you know?

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  There is other teams that intentionally do offsites once a quarter to have this kind of interaction. There is teams that buy everybody in the team a Nintendo Switch and have like this Slack bot that announces when somebody is playing so that somebody else can join as well. People are experimenting with this a lot right now. Um, I don't think that there is yet a magic bullet, but I also believe that there is not really a magic bullet in offices. Like a lot of the things that we do, we kind of cargo-cult it in, like, like office, um. I don't know, in Halloween, everybody comes dressed, you know, and like everybody has like a funny whatever. And that's terrifying to me personally, for example, as a Germanic person, you know.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  So I think we're still learning here, um, and also like in remote teams, like people are still learning this.

• 1:22:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, makes sense. Uh, what's your thoughts on Bitcoin and crypto?

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  I actually looked up when I bought my first Bitcoin before I came here.

• 1:22:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  Uh, let's, let's say it like this, I instantly received afterwards an email by Coinbase that they bumped up my uh, daily allowance to buy Bitcoin, I think like sixty BTC per day or something like that. Um, I think the first Bitcoin I bought at like seventy dollars and the next.

• 1:22:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Seventy.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah, and the next one at like around three hundredish, I think.

• 1:22:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:22:40Speaker 02

  Um.

• 1:22:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Horrible, horrible decisions.

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I remember back then I was living in Berlin and a friend of mine basically pushed me to, to buy Bitcoin and I was like, yeah, cool, I'd do that, but I literally don't have the money to buy food, you know, and so maybe food is more important and I only buy like a little bit of Bitcoin. Looking back, I'm quite fat nowadays, you know, I could have just like bought less food and bought, bought, bought more Bitcoin back then. Um, personally, like I have a, a long take on, on crypto because obviously like we all work in this industry in the summer angle. But, um, I'm personally still super bullish on multiple decentralized solutions.

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  And I still believe there is like a lot to come and we are almost like generation zero yet. And we, there was like a disproportionate media hype around it. And I, what I personally like now is that we are in a phase where people are almost like shut up and get back to work. And I honestly believe right now is kind of like generation one, almost like we're getting that to the point where a lot of more interesting companies are popping up.

• 1:23:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it it almost feels like 20 years from now, we'll look back and people will be like, you you guys are doing what, right? And the example that uh that I I actually recently wrote about this, um I went back and I screenshot a bunch of the early uh consumer web uh websites, you know, uh Netscape, Amazon, etc. Uh and even things like, you know, URLs compared to IP addresses.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Uh and today, if you look at like digital wallets with these, you know, random string of letters and numbers, but eventually that can get solved with something that's more um, you know, human readable, if you will.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  I honestly still believe that it's offensive that I have a telephone number.

• 1:24:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  I had, I mean, this is obvious, like, why do I have a telephone number? Like, there's millions of solutions for that nowadays, and I have a freaking telephone number. This is like having an IP address for my website. This is bizarre. And more importantly, which is complete, it breaks completely down because so many apps actually rely on you having a telephone number, and when you switch them regularly, as international people tend to do, you pretty much are screwed unless you're losing Google Voice or something. So, yeah, we we will look back at the current generation, almost like as we look back to the times before the first dot com, uh even before the first dot com uh crash, I think.

• 1:25:04Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And then, uh, outside of Bitcoin, any thoughts there, or or mainly your focus is on Bitcoin and the decentralized companies?

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

  So for me, the three things I'm personally super bullish on, and I'm not like you the experts and everybody listening to this is an expert, I'm I'm a bystanding person that was given a microphone. Uh, my personal opinion here is um Bitcoin because of the brand and the public recognition, um, multiple other coins because of uh privacy, drugs, and everything else.

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  And I am personally super bullish on markets of markets. So basically saying there will be always commodity resources that will have providers with spare capacities that will sell on their own marketplace. And that an easy example, like an easy example to frame this would be, for example, storage. It's like the classical one, right? So you have all these providers who have their own storage capacity and selling is on their own marketplace. And there will be spare capacity that they will sell on decentralized markets of markets. So basically a marketplace where, or like a market, were intentionally set up that nobody can actually screw the system and nobody can skew the system once they get like critical amount.

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  And there is solutions nowadays in crypto trying to do that, like five coins. And like there will be solutions otherwise in the future. And that's where I'm personally most bullish on because this is nothing where you have to consumer facing angle. Like the problem with consumer facing angle is always you will have somebody nailing down doing a brand and doing marketing and UX and UI. And that person can at some point skew the market again.

• 1:26:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think you're right in terms of again, goes back to process, right? Process inside of the company can set you up for success or set you up for failure. Same thing with these marketplaces, decentralized corporations, et cetera. It's almost like they'll preset the rules and if they're thoughtful about how they do that, they can prevent a lot of the bad stuff from happening that I think people are worried about right now.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  It's, it's, I, I strongly believe that sociology, game theory, system theory. We, we not yet include enough of this in how we think about business.

• 1:27:19Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Before we wrap up, I always ask us some rapid fire questions. What, uh, what do you think is the most important company in crypto?

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  In crypto, I I would like to ask you this and then invest, actually.

• 1:27:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin, this would be my answer.

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, like if you consider Bitcoin a company, yeah, definitely. Even even for anything, just for the brand recognition.

• 1:27:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  Because my mother knows Bitcoin.

• 1:27:43Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  And that's worth something.

• 1:27:45Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to hear a wild story about moms and Bitcoin?

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:27:48Anthony Pompliano?

  My uh, but my mom knows that, you know, I'm into Bitcoin, doesn't really kind of fully understand it, whatever. And the other day Bitcoin crashed, uh, two days in a row, almost 10% both days. So it drew down pretty aggressively. And I got a message on the second day from my mother that said, uh, I want to buy some Bitcoin. How do I do that? And so I immediately called her and just said, what are you doing? What are you talking about? And she said, uh, well, I figure it's on sale.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:28:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And I literally was like, she may be smarter than like 90% of crypto, you know, Twitter or something, right? Bitcoin Twitter. And I kept talking to her about it and she goes, well, like, she's like, everyone is saying how the price is going down. She goes, when you buy clothes, when the price goes down, then you want to buy them. And I just sat there and I literally was amazed. She knows nothing about investing, you know, in terms of the the traditional investing or anything. But it was just this mentality of, uh, it's almost like the the ignorance that she had to, uh, the price movements and and all this stuff was the drawdown was so severe that it kind of made the more mainstream news, which is the things that she would look at.

• 1:29:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And when that happened, she thought like, oh, I should buy one now while they're cheap. Um, and it reminded me that, uh, was it in 2017 at the at the top of the market? She also asked me one, uh, if I'd give her one for Christmas. So there's only two times my mother and I have ever talked about Bitcoin. And one was at the the top of the market in 2017 for Christmas. And the second time was after like a 20% drawdown.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  You you're trying to get out of this question, but did you give it?

• 1:29:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I did not give her a Bitcoin, no.

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  What are you giving your mother this year for Christmas?

• 1:29:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I haven't decided yet.

• 1:29:33Speaker 02

  But it's not going to be a Bitcoin.

• 1:29:34Anthony Pompliano?

  It is not going to be a Bitcoin and and the thought process is, uh, no, it it's more of, um, she, uh,

• 1:29:43Anthony Pompliano?

  It's self-preservation because she would call me every day because she would watch the price, right? And then call me and say, what's going on? And so if I don't give her one, then I'm not the person that she's going to call if she has a Bitcoin. So if she buys it on her own, then she'll only have herself to question.

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  I cannot watch the price every day. Like, how does she do that? Like, your mother has like a high

• 1:30:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, she doesn't today.

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  Okay, fair enough.

• 1:30:04Anthony Pompliano?

  But if she had one, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:06Speaker 02

  Please, please don't. Like, the last thing you want is your mother to be stressed.

• 1:30:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, well, stress would, stress would not be the biggest concern, the biggest concern is she would keep calling me, asking me questions. Uh, what's the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  The most important book?

• 1:30:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  There's a lot of them.

• 1:30:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I figured. I know you read a lot. So you gotta pick one or two of them.

• 1:30:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So first of all, if people try to get into reading, one thing I would highly recommend is don't read all this business BS books. There's so many books that tell you about something, whatever, and it's, it's always like a hype book of the day. Usually, it's very, very hard to use those to get into reading. What I highly recommend is pick something that you're passionate about, and that's basically almost like a, I don't know.

• 1:30:53Anthony Pompliano?

  That's interesting.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like, almost like, how do you call like a habit you're ashamed of, you know, like something like where you're kind of like dirty secret kind of, you know? Uh, so I read a ton of sci-fi. And it can be from horrible military sci-fi that's written by somebody who is obviously doesn't like young people, you know, up to completely bizarre sci-fi about complex interstellar systems that are doing whatever crazy stuff that's hard to articulate, up to, um, multidimensional sci-fi, like, just like cyberpunk, whatever, you know, like you name it, um, space operas and so on and so on. Like, I love sci-fi. This is what I read most.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  Um. If I would recommend though books that I think everybody should read. And the most influential book for me was uh How to Win Friends and Influence People. Mm hmm. And I. Dale Carnegie. It's almost like to the point that I it's almost like. It should be given to people, like kind of like you you have a driving license test, but to become a human. And it's almost like you should read that to get like your license to be allowed to interact with other people. And it almost felt back to me when I first time read it, I was like. Oh shit, I'm a horrible person and I'm like, I also realized how horrible I was as a first time founder. Like how much of my own problems I just put on other people and like how horribly interacted with people. So that's a book I almost recommend everybody to read. And a part of that.

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  I I can't talk about forever about this, like if you if you wanna interesting take some politics right now. Uh, the Dictator's Handbook is a is a gives you like an interesting angle to. Think of politics in a game theory POV. Uh, the idea is kind of like, why do politics happen the way they happen? And although it's like, we think it's wrong, you know, and we think these people are doing something bad or whatever. Because it works in their game and highly recommend that one. Um. I have a ton of books like that. All right, one more. Uh, Naco Economics, uh, How Truck Cartels Operate. And that's all of them intentionally are books that are fun to read. None of them is like a drag to read, you know, you can read like there's millions of books that like like. Uh, uh, uh.

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  High Growth Performance or Why We Sleep and all these kind of books, like books important to read, you know. But these are books that are, you can read them for fun. And you don't need to learn anything and it will be still like good, good for you to read and like amazing to read. Naco Economics is one where it explains how Naco uh Naco um Cartels basically operate. And how the actual economics behind it operate. And how little uh the like or or how counterintuitive the effects are of people of things that we do to stop it. And how little it actually matters. So for example, if you burn down most of the uh. For example, in cocaine, the coca leaf fields, which is like very common practice in Venezuela or Colombia and so on. And so on. Um. It has almost no effect on the price because it doesn't matter.

• 1:33:52Speaker 02

  What happens is that just more farmers are forced to do it, you know, uh, before it was in so on and so on. Or if you if you block them at the border, it doesn't matter for the price. The price almost doesn't change for this kind of stuff because the whole, how the economics are set up to the point that it's uh, something like cocaine, if it would be legal, would be something that I think is comparable to uh, uh, premium coffee in price, something like that, you know, um. It's it's ridiculous like.

• 1:34:19Anthony Pompliano?

  It's almost like the more you destroy it, probably the price goes up.

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  Obviously, yeah, and how how much more hurdles you throw in it like. It goes very well into the uh, uh, system theoretic uh, concepts behind it and what's happening around it. So like, that's one I highly recommend and there's like multiple more. If you wanna like talk sci fi, I can't talk forever.

• 1:34:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Aliens, speaking of sci fi, believer or non believer?

• 1:34:42Speaker 02

  There is nothing to believe.

• 1:34:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean?

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  It's statistically impossible that there is no other life out there. And it's almost like a given fact that we already know, like even in, I think, yeah, whatever. It's like on a on a life in general, like organic life in general, is almost like a given fact that this exists. Intelligent life is statistically impossible, it doesn't exist, given the scale on the universe. Like, I think we are human, are just, we cannot comprehend how big the universe actually is. And we cannot come like it's for us to, just our brain doesn't work on that scale. Our brain doesn't work, uh, the same as we cannot handle exponential scale of factors and all this kind of stuff. We cannot comprehend how big the universe is. So there is no question if there's intelligent life out there or not, you know?

• 1:35:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It it feels to me like, um, I always go to the ocean first, right? So we can't comprehend how vast and deep the ocean is, let alone space. Right? Like, like the ocean is nothing compared to just the our solar system, let alone the, you know, the galaxies, et cetera. And most humans can't wrap their head around the ocean. And so it's like on such a minute scale, the ocean, well, of course, they can't think of space.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? All they think about is like, what's the next planet next to us, right? They think of this, oh, that's our next door neighbor, how come we can't get there?

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  A fascinating thing here is, um, humans don't think of distance as, um.

• 1:36:09Speaker 02

  Like a unit of distance, they think of it as a unit of time. So for example, uh, America used to be far away, uh, the, the wide west used to be far away. And the more we had like, it was becoming more and more normal. We had different ships. We had railroads and so on and so on. It becomes like more accessible from like months and years to get to the other side, two days and two hours, like later on two hours. The same is true in space. Uh, right now it's for us incomprehensible to, to. It used to be incomprehensible to go to the Mars. Nowadays it's becoming like an achievable thing. With, uh, different systems in future, either different rocket systems or different other setups like, like skyhooks and so on and so on, you name it.

• 1:36:48Speaker 02

  Uh, it will be shorter and shorter time and, um, to the point that we think of distance as time. The problem we have though still is even if all of the currently foreseeable futures in technology work, it's still. The next solar system is still incomprehensible far away.

• 1:37:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh yeah, for sure.

• 1:37:08Speaker 02

  And so on and so on. Like this is a forever discussion now.

• 1:37:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, uh, the, the thing I'll say is, um, in the United States, if you ask somebody how far away is that? Right? So let's say I said to you, you know, how far away is, uh, another part of, uh, Manhattan?

• 1:37:20Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Americans would answer in time.

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:37:24Speaker 02

  All humans do.

• 1:37:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, well, and the only places where, uh, you know, my, my girl, uh, fiance now is, uh, from Bulgaria, right? And, uh, uh, much closer to where you're from.

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:37Anthony Pompliano?

  There's still a lot of people who answer in kilometers, right? And so it's very funny to me.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  Because they assume a certain transportation by default.

• 1:37:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. And so it's in the U S, you can't do that, right? Cause you don't know, you know, Manhattan alone. So we could take a cab or they could take the subway or they could walk, et cetera. In other parts of the world, you, you have to assume, right?

• 1:37:57Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and so it's just interesting, even here on earth, when you ask people, uh, simple question like, how far is that place? You get different types of answers, like, like the structure they use is different, uh, which obviously changes when you start getting into space and Mars, et cetera.

• 1:38:12Speaker 02

  I think the best example for this is LA. LA is almost like the thing where s- space and time don't work the same way as everywhere else. Something is really close on a map and you need to get there forever in a car because the traffic jam is so bad.

• 1:38:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:26Speaker 02

  I know, uh, to get back to the original topic for a second, like I know remote teams that only hire in LA, but they're fully remote. Like small teams though, you know, but it's, I know actually four of them. And all of them like 10 or less people and they consider themselves a fully remote team, but everybody's in LA. Because it's just too much pain to actually go to the same area.

• 1:38:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It's lost time, right? This is kind of the, the promise of autonomous vehicles, et cetera. Is that can we free up that creative time, et cetera? Um, to wrap up, I always let somebody ask me a question. What one question do you have for me?

• 1:38:59Speaker 02

  I would, I wanted to ask you, when are you going to propose? But I failed by like one week, I thought, two weeks now. Um, what is the craziest thing that you think you can get through at your wedding with your wife? That you can actually pull off that she's okay with? That still will potentially blow everybody mind? Because I know that you have like 25 ideas and like

• 1:39:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I do.

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  Four of them are illegal, five of them are like borderline dangerous. And like the rest is like forbidden by your wife, a future wife, so.

• 1:39:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So she made the mistake, uh, and told me that one of the Bulgarian traditions, uh, at some weddings, um, and there's this whole gypsy, non gypsy, you know, all this stuff in, in Bulgaria. Um, but one of the traditions is that they have a live dancing bear.

• 1:39:44Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Balkan over there.

• 1:39:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And so for me, um, I don't know if I can pull it off in the US, but at some point in the celebrations, whether it's actually at the wedding, after the wedding, a celebration in Bulgaria, et cetera. I think I can get a bear there. And if I can get a bear, then, uh, I feel like that anchors you on, uh, if you have a live dancing bear at, at an event, uh, there's a whole bunch of other things you can do that don't look as ridiculous as having a bear. And so that's probably the one that I'm focused on at the moment because, uh, you know, how could, uh, a, a beautiful woman from Bulgaria turn down a Bulgarian tradition?

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  I, I honestly don't think it's that hard to get a bear in Eastern Europe for that kind of stuff. That what you need to make sure is like in your main treatment and all this kind of stuff. I think that's will be harder. Uh, I have been to Bulgarian weddings and now you're joking. Uh, and I think there will be like a few listeners from the Balkans here, like a lot of them, I guess. Balkan weddings are next level, you know, and I think they're like, I think Indian weddings are crazy, but Balkan weddings are basically Indian weddings with like too much alcohol and like completely crazy, you know?

• 1:40:51Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite part of that entire part of the world is uh, there's one mentality uh, that just, every time I hear it just cracks me up and it's uh, at some point at an event, they say uh, "Okay, get rid of the alcohol and go get the beer and the wine."

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 1:41:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, and they're talking about getting rid of the liquor and then getting beer and wine. And to me, the first time I ever heard it, I just started dying laughing. I said, "Excuse me?"

• 1:41:17Speaker 02

  I have um, like, when I grew up, I had like Russian family friends who's, who said that they started like when they came to rest of like a Western Europe, they were actually excited about finally drinking healthy drinks like beer.

• 1:41:32Speaker 02

  So yeah, it's a, it's a thing.

• 1:41:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Oh, if I get a, if I get a bear to uh, to any event as part of these festivities, then uh, then I'll be happy. So let's see what I can pull off.

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  Um, personally, I'm super excited about your wedding and I'm super excited about the fact that you're doing a Bulgarian wedding, a proper one. And I'm also super excited that you still don't comprehend what you're getting into with this. And I hope that somebody in your fiance's family is actually taking this as like, basically a wild card to go all out bonkers and just like freak you out about this.

• 1:42:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Not only is somebody in her family, I'm sure she's doing the same thing. So we're gonna see how this plays out. But uh, I, I think uh, we are probably gonna end up having two uh, two separate events, one in the United States and one in Bulgaria. So the uh, something tells me the Bulgarian one's gonna be a bit crazier.

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  I wanna come to the Bulgarian one. I don't even care about the US one. If it's close to any Bulgarian wedding I have been to, like it's.

• 1:42:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe that's what we'll do is we'll have an open invite. Anyone who can make it to Bulgaria can come.

• 1:42:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, honestly.

• 1:42:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, man. Listen, thank you so much for coming in and uh, and doing this. Um, I think uh, a lot of people are gonna find this super valuable. Uh, and then we'll have to uh, to do it again as uh, as you kinda continue to uh, good off his path of remote work and uh, and the work at AngelList.

• 1:42:46Speaker 02

  Cool. Thanks for having me.

• 1:42:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.