Sriram Krishnan, Angel Investor: Lessons From Silicon Valley's Top Thought Leaders

Sriram Krishnan is an Angel Investor currently focused on writing and investing in early-stage companies. Previously, he was Senior Product Lead at Facebook, Snapchat, & Twitter. In this conversation, Anthony and Sriram discuss his time growing up in India, how he met his wife on Yahoo Messenger, what he learned from Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel and Jack Dorsey, why organizations are systems, where his obsession with memos came from, and who the greatest basketball player of all time is. CRYPTO. COM-----The only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users and download the Crypto.com app today to earn $50 USD using the code ‘pomp2020’ when you sign up for one of their MCO Visa Cards. TAXBIT-----Refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial. 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?

  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. Sriram Krishnan is a longtime friend and currently focused on more writing and investing in early-stage companies. We previously worked together at Facebook where we both led product teams, and Sriram later went on to be a senior product lead at both Snapchat and Twitter. In this conversation, we discussed his time growing up in India, how he met his wife on Yahoo Messenger, what he learned from Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel, and Jack Dorsey, why organizations are systems, where his obsession with memos came from, and who the greatest basketball player of all time is. This conversation was a lot of fun, and we dug deep into a number

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  of fascinating topics that I think you will enjoy. But before we get into the episode, I want to talk about the three sponsors for today. The first is Crypto.com. As you guys know, they're a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. They have a vision to put cryptocurrency in every wallet, which is frankly why we are all here. Crypto.com also happens to have the best URL, Crypto.com. Their 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. These guys have been a longtime sponsor of the Off the Chain podcast, and they keep launching new product after new product. So do yourself a favor and go to Crypto.com to check them

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

  out. Again, that's Crypto.com, the place where mass adoption is occurring. The second sponsor today is TaxBit. TaxBit helps you pay your taxes. The IRS recently released new tax forms for the 2019 tax year, which require all taxpayers to attest to whether they traded cryptocurrency during the year. If so, you must file an IRS 8949, which reports your capital gains and losses. I don't know what that form is, but it sounds important. So TaxBit automates your cryptocurrency taxes, enabling you to effortlessly track, calculate, and report your transactions. You can easily connect your exchange to securely sync your transactions and run them through TaxBit's tax engine. That's right, now you don't have to know-

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What that form is either. You can generate your completed tax forms with a single click. Founded by tax attorneys and CPAs, TaxBit is the most trusted cryptocurrency tax solution in the market. You can get 10% off your tax plan today with a free trial by going to www.TaxBit.com/invite/pomp. Again, that's www.TaxBit.com/invite/pomp. My favorite part about TaxBit is they've got live support with experts whenever you need it. The experts are on hand who have experience facilitating thousands of crypto tax filings and IRS crypto tax audits. Go get help. TaxBit.com/invite/pomp. Let them know I sent you.

• 2:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, the third sponsor is eToro. As you guys know here, these guys have been longtime sponsors and they're absolutely killing it. They started out offering stocks, commodities, traditional currencies and cryptocurrencies to users around the world outside the US. Last year, they jumped across the pond and they launched in the US and got started by offering cryptocurrency trading. But it's not just any crypto exchange. They've got two core concepts they pioneered. The first is social trading and the second is copy trading. Social trading is the laying of a social network over an exchange. That's right. You can go and click on any asset on the platform and immediately access a social network or feed around that one asset. Take Bitcoin, for example. When you navigate to that page, there are thousands of people sharing information, charts, graphs and opinions

• 3:33Anthony Pompliano?

  about Bitcoin, its price movements and future outlook. Same goes for any other asset on the platform. But then they came up with this copy trading. So let's say that you find someone in the single asset social feed that you think is really smart or has a unique view on investing. Rather than simply wish that you could invest like them, you can click the copy trader button and eToro will automatically mirror your portfolio to that trader's portfolio. They buy an asset, you buy it. They sell it, you sell it. It's pretty cool to see a crypto exchange that have both social trading and copy trading all in one location. So eToro is now up and running in the US and continues to grow at an incredible rate. They're so impressive that I even invested. Here's a little known secret. eToro is actually larger than Robinhood. Just don't tell anyone in the US. They don't like to hear that.

• 4:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So head on over to eToro.com and sign up for an account. Let me know what you think about social trading and copy trading. And when you hit etoro.com, let them know that Pom sent you. Now finally, don't forget, Off the Chain is not only a podcast. I really enjoy recording all of these episodes, but I also write a daily letter to our investors. Most people would keep these letters confidential and private, but I allow anyone to subscribe to read the letters every morning. You can simply go to offthechain.substack.com and sign up today. Again, that's offthechain.substack.com. Go sign up today. Now, let's get into this episode with Sri Ram. He absolutely had a fascinating perspective on the world. I really enjoyed this one, and I hope you do too.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pom 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 Pom 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.

• 5:17Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have a special treat for you today. Sri Ram is here. We were just joking about, he is the only person that has worked at two companies that I've worked at, and I think he's the only person that I directly worked with at Facebook that's been on the podcast. Those were very fun days, so we got a lot to talk about. Thanks for coming to do this.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, and I hope your audience is prepared for all the embarrassing Pom stories.

• 5:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know if there's any of those, but we'll see. All right, you've got probably one of the most fascinating stories in technology that I know of. You were born in India, and then you end up working at Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter, all in pretty important leadership roles. How do we get from India to Silicon Valley?

• 6:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Other than to get on a plane at some point.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  I just got lucky a bunch of times. You know, it's really hard. I think sometimes when you look at this post fact, you you build a narrative for it yourself and you try and connect the dots. But each of those was random and serendipitous. Like a lot of people, I was born in Chennai, in India. It's a sleepy little city in the south of India, which surprisingly has a lot of tech people coming from it, like Sundar is from there. There are many other folks from there. I convinced my dad when I was in high school to buy me a computer, which was a fairly big deal for him. It was expensive and I had to convince him that it would be productive. And I taught myself how to code. I was not very social. I just kind of sat at home every single night.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  And there was, we couldn't really afford dial up internet most days. So I would just, you know, open up a Visual Basic book or a C plus. I just taught myself how to code. Really liked it. And once, you know, I went to college, I would start writing things online. And I think I was lucky to be the recipient of multiple big bricks, which just happened to be serendipitous. And in college, I had my first big one where, well, I think the biggest one was I met my now wife back, all the way back in college. We've known each other for like, you know, seventeen, eighteen years now. And I'm going to tell you a sentence which doesn't mean what you think it means. We met online. And the story is, and it's not because we swiped on each other.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  We, back in two thousand and two, we had a friend who wanted to build a website. He did not know how to write code. He added the two nerdiest friends he knew on Yahoo chatroom. So this really tells you how old this story is, back when Yahoo chatrooms are a thing. And we were supposed to build a site. The site now got built, but we would chat with each other every night from like eleven P M to like five A M. And we just chat. We didn't even know how we each other looked like.

• 8:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And you guys had never met each other in person?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  No, never. Didn't even have a photo.

• 8:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And the two people were you and your wife?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Yes. And we just chatted every night. And after a year, we met in person and that's how we became friends. So.

• 8:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And where, she was at the same school or?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  She was at a different school. She was in a different city. We are from the same city, but she was going to school in a different city. And so we were just like, only talking for a year, we had the outreach. So, but. Back then, you know, I was starting to write blog online. I would write about Microsoft technologies. And this is my first big break where at the time, you know, Microsoft was launching Visual Studio Express, which was meant to be an addition meant for students. And what they would do is they would do this conference and they'd send an exec and they would keynote demo. And they would get a local student to come on stage and to compile hello world. And to be like, ta-da, and now you as a student can use it too. But the Microsoft India team didn't really know many students at the time. And because of some stuff I had written online, somebody sent me a cold email from Microsoft saying, hey, would you like to come over to Bangalore and then do this thing?

• 8:58Speaker 02

  And at the time, you know, I was, you know, sitting in my bedroom in Chennai and never been on a flight before. I was like, this sounds great, of course. And I went in, did this demo for this VP. And at the end of it, and my, my now wife, Arthi, but she was also there. And he said, you kids should come work at Microsoft. I was like, well, great, but we live in like nowhere land and you might have been in a different galaxy. And long story short, he puts in touch with recruiting at Microsoft and we became like product managers there. So.

• 9:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so when you first get introduced to the recruiters at Microsoft, are they immediately vetting you as potential employees? Or is there like a, you guys are like, hey, how does this work? Like?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  We, we had a weird experience because, you know, the exec we met, who so much, he was now a fantastic VC at Madrona Ventures. He actually invested, he actually put in money in my wife's company 10 years later. So it kind of brings its great circle. He, he didn't know who to send a couple of random kids to. It was not his purview. So he put us in touch with, you know, the folks who do, kind of do a lot of these sort of senior people recruiting or exec recruiting at Microsoft. And so we kind of had this weird alternate interview loop. I think at the time, they were not really hiring a many product managers or program managers, Microsoft call out of college. So we kind of had this bizarre loop where they went like, oh, we don't really know what to do with these two. Let's get them in and then they hired us.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  And so that is kind of my, that's kind of our big break into tech. So got into Microsoft and.

• 10:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And in India or coming to Seattle?

• 10:31Speaker 02

  In India for a short time. But flew to Seattle a couple of years in and have been in the US ever since. Yep. And for the first five years of Microsoft, I worked mostly on cloud computing. So before Windows Azure was named Windows Azure, it was this side little skunkworks project for Microsoft, which was kind of a bunch of crazy data center distributed computing people. And at the time, I was really interested in distributed computing. I had written my own version of PAXAS and, you know, the Byzantine General Problem Solutions. And I was really into this space. So I basically knocked on the door and I said, hey, I would love to work on this, you know, whatever you want me to do. So I, I was very lucky to be there at the right time, right place. Joined as a PM, spent five years there on Windows Azure through the launch.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  It was a fantastic experience because you got to see this company, you'd be like, okay, how do we compete with Amazon? How do we build a cloud platform? Microsoft is fantastic, um, yeah, but both Arti and my wife, Arti and I, we loved Silicon Valley. You know, our first date was to watch a, I hope I'm not in trouble, a bit oriented copy of Pirates of Silicon Valley. Back in like, you know, uh, two thousand two. By the way, still the best Steve Jobs movie of all time. And, and we were just these random kids, you know, being like, someday we want to be there. I know it sounds like a cliche, but it was really true. Uh, and in twenty eleven, we got our green cards and became permanent as a United States, which was a big deal.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Because this meant that, you know, we could actually leave Microsoft and go do other things, start companies without a whole amount of paperwork. Which is, it was really hard if you were not a permanent citizen. And so we left Microsoft, had a long chat with like Satya, you know, who I was working for at the time. And said, we're gonna go do this thing. Came down to the Bay Area. And we looked at each other and we said, look, there are two of us. One of us should do the crazy startup, you know, and one of us should get a job which pays a paycheck. So Arti, my wife, you know, is still the amazing founder and entrepreneur in the family. You know, she went off to launch two startups, one of which, you know, she went to Y Combinator. I believe she was either summer or winter thirteen. She launches e-commerce company called Lumoide.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  They, they did a fantastic five year run. They sold a couple of years ago. And she now, by the way, works at Facebook. But me, back in twenty twelve. I was like, well, one of us, she's doing off there, building a company, but she was kind of shipping box out of her bedroom and being really scrappy. And I should get a regular job. And I had a lot of friends who had gone from Microsoft to Facebook at the time. And this is a very interesting time for Facebook because Facebook had just gone public. And if you remember, the stock was getting crushed. I think they had IPO'd at around fifty.

• 13:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Down like twenty two or something, twenty five, right?

• 13:05Speaker 02

  It was a disaster. Like, I mean, it didn't even trade for the first few hours and because I think, but the deeper question was people asking where, look, all of your traffic is switching over to mobile, you know, you could see the numbers, you could see the writing on the wall. Uh, I think the wall was already here, um, but all of your monetization was still dominantly.

• 13:26Anthony Pompliano?

  On what?

• 13:26Speaker 02

  On web, right? You know this. I mean, you were there. Uh, and so the big question that market had for Facebook was like, can you monetize mobile? Can anyone monetize mobile? Now, of course, but now when sitting here in twenty twenty, this all sounds crazy and silly, but that was the big question then. And at the time, you know, I told myself, you know, look, Facebook, I want to work on consumer apps. I work on data centers, but I want to work on regular consumer apps. And Facebook knew, felt like they knew something which the rest of the world didn't, uh, and I wanted to go learn that. And once I joined Facebook as a PM, I told myself, I know nothing about mobile. I know nothing about advertising. So let me go work in this space. So this was probably the second, like, luckiest thing I ever did, uh, outside of the Microsoft, uh, job.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Because it was absolutely, you know, early twenty thirteen, working on mobile ads inside Facebook was the perfect, right time, right place. You know, I just got very, very lucky. You know this, you were there.

• 14:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and, and so a lot of people don't know this story because this isn't like the sexy story of Facebook through those years. But, uh, you joined in beginning of thirteen, give or take. I joined in the beginning of fourteen and, uh, we both worked on the ads team. Doing different things, but, but, uh, I remember going to meetings and, um, the people that I remember being in the room, uh, specifically are, uh, you, Michael Sharon, Mike Kudak, uh, Boz, you know, all, all these people who now have gone on to either do different things or, or. Um, you know, continue to do great things at Facebook. And I literally remember looking around the room sometimes and being like, holy shit, right? Like, there's a lot of smart people in this room who are the best in the world at what they're working on.

• 15:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And the story that I always tell people is, uh, the first time I ever saw an ads is going bananas. Uh, sign in inside. And so, uh, for those that don't know what that means, if you think of the shape of a banana, it looks like every startup graph, right? It just goes up into the right. Well, the thing at Facebook was it was literally growing so fast in terms of ad revenue, the, uh, the, uh, mobile ads, et cetera, that literally it looked like it was bending backwards on itself, right? It was just explosive growth. And so it's just a really cool thing to live through and, and kind of experience alongside so many great people.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  It was, and honestly, it was each of these things, you can only look back in retrospect and be like, well, I was very lucky. I could have joined a different company. I could have picked a different team and I would have missed out. So, you know, I can't claim I was, you know, someone smart. I just was in the right time, right place. But I think if you look back then, you know, today, Facebook ad seemed like, you know, this huge dominant, you know, uh, amazing platform. But back then, you know, on mobile ads on Facebook, we, we looked at Google and we were like, wow, we have this huge mountain to climb. And we were still building the basics. We were still building the basics of targeting, the basics of measurement, the basic of how, you know, the ad auctions work. Uh, we couldn't even get ads to show up on mobile feed properly for a while.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  So, uh, it's interesting because I think now, you know, Facebook is such a, it, it, it, it seems incumbent in power. But back then, it wasn't a given. You know, we were just like a bunch of people and we knew everyone, a small group of people, um, who.

• 16:38Anthony Pompliano?

  We all fit in a conference room.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:39Anthony Pompliano?

  For the most part, like Mike Udack sat in the corner. I'm going to call him out right now. And he would sit up on the filing cabinet, right? With his microphone. And, and the other 25, 30 people would sit in the room and everyone, that, that was it.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  It was, and you know, and I think, I still think I probably learned the most interesting lessons in those few years at Facebook.

• 16:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What were the lessons that you learned or took away?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  It's interesting. So I have this, you know, This weird trajectory because I've been in like, you know, Facebook, Snap and Twitter, which a lot of people think of as like being similar in some way. And so I have this interesting trajectory where I've often seen the same decisions happen and see how they are discussed or talked about in three different companies.

• 17:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And you may not say this, but I'll say this. You also have had the opportunity to work pretty closely in most cases with Satya at Microsoft, Zuck at Facebook, Evan Spiegel at Snapchat, and then Jack at Twitter. So it's not just, oh, I worked at this company. It's these decisions are being debated at the highest levels of each one of those businesses. And you've been there to kind of see how those.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if you want to jump into that, I think, you know, one thing I found is, you know, when I was at Satya, I was like Wade Junior, you know, in the stack. I was, but with these three, one thing you realize is each of them are incredibly smart. You know, in the top, if you talk to them, you just, you quickly realize why they are in the position they are.

• 18:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  But they're also incredibly different. And if you look at these three companies, one thing I've realized is, one, there are many, many ways to build a fantastic, great company. And each company is a reflection of the founder and some of the core values that the founder holds dear. So let's look at Facebook. I think as, if you look at lessons from Facebook, I think there are many, but I think off the top of my head, and I think this, I'd love to get your take on it, is one is optimizing for impact. You know, Facebook or many, probably over everything else will pick impact. So what does that mean? It means that in any decision you make, in any product decision or hiring decision or anything you do, you ask yourself like, what is the most impactful way to go about

• 18:51Speaker 02

  this? For example, back in 2007, 2008, when Facebook was thinking of growing, there were many paths for them to grow. They had grown in the US, you know, they could have picked the next country and grown after and gone after them. But at the time, you know, the growth team looked at it and said, well, the most impactful thing for us to do would be to go after everyone who doesn't speak English. And that led to the creation. Of you know, the translation project existed then. So it's just definitely a mindset of always asking yourself, what is the most impactful thing that you can do?

• 19:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  That is one.

• 19:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And that story was always interesting to me when we were there because they didn't start out with like what most companies would do. What would most companies do? They'd go hire a bunch of people who speak, you know, Russian, Chinese, whatever languages. Instead, they just said, hey, we've got tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people using this site. Anybody who speaks Russian who would like to help translate our site from English to Russian, here's some tools to do that, right? And to go back to the impact, it was like, if you go and you hire, you know, Russian translators and it's very kind of centralized and methodical, it's gonna take a long time to get to the impact in terms of just kind of open sourcing to some degree, tools that then allow people to help quickly translate the website. Now you get a bunch of different languages all at the same time and much quicker.

• 20:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's not only just like, where is the most impact? It's also like, what's the straightest line to that input?

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Which I think is the second part of what makes it so effective is a focus on speed and iteration. You know, somebody at Facebook who's very senior once told me that he's never sure if Facebook will get it right at first, but they're gonna, it probably gonna be the fastest at iterating and getting to the right answer the quickest. And I think you see this all the time where Facebook builds both technological and cultural missionary to focus on speed. So, you know, when they launched this translation product, they, it probably wasn't perfect, but they knew they could make it better very, very quickly. Like we saw this when we did ads, when we launched, you know, the original version of the Facebook ad products, it didn't have a lot of features that Google had or the competition had, but Facebook got so much better so quickly.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  And I think one of the lessons I learned there is I think it's very easy often to psych yourself out of launching something or to say, I'm gonna wait until I get everything right. I, I understand every single like I and T. But Facebook was like, let's just go get something out the door. Build the muscle to go execute and iterate very quickly and you will wind up beating the competition. So I think it's a very particular mindset. Now it has its downsides, which you know, I think we now sort of famously know. But I think that was like such a key cultural attribute for them.

• 21:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Tell the story of the mobile ad network because what you guys, when you guys built and launched that it went from zero to a billion dollars in revenue in 18 months, I think.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. So, so the backstory then is, you know, Facebook at the time was trying to figure out, they had an interesting problem. They had, they were, in the ad tech world, these phrases that we use called being supply constrained and being demand constrained. And what this means when you're supply constrained is, you know, you have a lot of people giving you money, but you don't have enough space to show them. And if you're demand constrained, you have a lot of place to show these ads, but you don't have enough people giving you money. And Facebook went through this very interesting transition in around 2011, 2012, you know, they had a lot of, you know, space to show ads in, but they didn't have enough people giving them money. They were demand constrained. So that's why they launched the bitter Facebook exchange. This is probably only interesting to these, you know, the ad tech population.

• 22:19Anthony Pompliano?

  They just, they launched a lot of products to try to drive more demand, right? Hey, we have all this space, but no one wants to advertise yet. Let's do things to get a lot of people who want to advertise.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Exactly. But things change very quickly.

• 22:30Anthony Pompliano?

  They were very good at getting demand.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Yes. We are like, oh my gosh, we, we have a lot of demand and we don't know where to put the ads. And I remember, and this like, you know, probably seven, eight years later, so I'm starting to get in trouble. At one time we looked at some numbers and we were like, wow, we're spending less than 10% of the money that advertisers want to spend on us. Like people are basically like, I want to spend a hundred dollars with you. Facebook could only spend like eight or nine dollars of their hundred dollars. And so there was this question of, well, how do you actually go show these ads? And you have to be smart about it because you know, the easiest answer would be to say, why don't you just show more ads to everyone? But you know, as we all know, like, you know, the more ads you show, the more you risk annoying people, the more you risk, you know, losing your best, you know, most valuable customers off the platform.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  And so you have to figure out, well, and if you want to show an ad, let us say for Nike, and I'm a big sneaker person. So you want to show me an ad for Nike, you have to know that I'm really interested. And sneakers that it is a fantastic ad and make that match the exact right time and space. So circa twenty thirteen, we had run out of space, you know, we had shown all the ads we could in feed at the time and we're trying to figure out what to do.

• 23:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I remember literally being in those meetings and Rob would say, winter is coming.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? I remember that was the big mantra, which was essentially saying all of the ads were going into news feed. But there was only, you know, every feed loaded, basically every time you refresh it was like six or seven ads. And they were sold out every time and there was still more demand. It was like, it's like having a business with a line around the corner and you're like, we gotta have more supply. Cause we gotta feed all these people who want the food, right?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Yes. And, and so there was this kind of this hunt to go figure out like, why do we show these ads? And, you know, one obvious answer was like, well, why don't we show these ads outside Facebook? And this was not a novel idea, like Google had, you know, ad networks have been around for a very long period of time. Google obviously had at the time, the dominant market leader with Google AdSense. But we said, well, we should take a stab at it. And in the past, Facebook could not take a stab at it because they didn't have a line on the door, but now they did. So, you know, and me and a few others, we kind of put this effort together. It's called the Facebook Audience Network where we said, look, where is Facebook really strong? Like we're strong on mobile, we are strong inside apps. And we're also really good at showing ads which look and feel like they should fit within the app.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  You know, because ads, the time where these big banners which would kind of like, you know, slide up or they would slide in. And they were annoying, they were not fun. And Facebook had really discovered like how to show ads in feed natively, which felt a part of the experience. And we said, what if we can do that for everyone? So we built a steam and, you know, it was again like right time, right place. You know, we were able to scale it up very quickly because it turned out that there were a lot of people on mobile. You know, publishers, like for example, media companies who had switched over to mobile, but they were not making a lot of money. Or there were gaming companies who had some paying customers, but that wasn't enough to, for the large amount of people who never pay. And we came in and we said, look, we have, you know, authentic people because we know who these people actually are.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  And we have a great set of advertisers and these are ads which are not annoying to the people who use you every day. And so it's kind of this perfect, which worked really well. And, you know, again, it is one of the things where after six to eight months, it really took off. And I think, you know, at the time, and it still is like really a market leader. So.

• 25:46Anthony Pompliano?

  But but on day one, when you guys launched, it wasn't like, hey, this is called a billion dollars.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  It was terrible. It's like for months, I think we didn't make any money at all. And at the time, we were wondering, is this ever going to be a thing? So that's, I think, one of the lessons from Facebook where these things never work on day one. You know, you get the big press launch, you, you know, you get the big announcement.

• 26:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You're literally Facebook. You call up anybody and they write about it.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you can get any partner, but they never work, you know, because you've never seen it in action. You don't know how the machine learning is going to work or all the zillion bugs you hit. And you've got to make it matter. And I think that's another lesson I learned from Facebook, which is you have to grind it out. You, you know, and it's the little things. One story I always keep thinking about is in every earnings call that Facebook would have, they would always ask like, what really, you know, drove revenue? And these analysts would always be looking for an answer of, well, we launched project X or product X and that made all this money. But the answer is never really that. The real answer is more like, well, we had like 2,500 different machine learning model changes, which each added like point one percent and they all compounded.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  But that's really hard to go explain. And I think that's kind of where I learned, like, the hard work is never really in these flashy launches. It's like looking at the data, launching something and building the cultural machinery where it's okay to fail, okay to kind of experiment it and doing it again and again and again. I think that's one of the best things I learned from Facebook in that era.

• 27:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, Alex Schultz, when I first got there, I could tell the story now because he would probably laugh.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  I'm telling all the stories now. I'm hoping like.

• 27:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I hope they all listen and they.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  I'm hoping you're in love with me for this podcast.

• 27:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So Alex sent me an email. I joined, I was taking over as product manager of the growth team for Facebook pages. And Alex is kind of one of three people who kind of really runs the growth team at Facebook. And so to most people in the growth organization, he was, you know, this guy up on this thing, but I was.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Gone.

• 27:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and you said it, not me. And I didn't know who he was, right? And so I guess he had sent an email and I just missed the email. And so my boss at the time walks over and he goes, hey, did Alex Schultz email you? And I was like, who's Alex Schultz? And he was like, can you check your email? Serge, like, yeah, email. He goes, you should probably respond to that one. So I responded and he was so gracious and he said, well, why don't you come in and meet me? And I think we met for like 30 minutes or something. And one of the things that he said to me in that very first meeting, which we were talking about kind of grinding it out, he goes, look, most people don't realize, but growth is just a continuation of compounding wins, right? And it was this idea of like, don't go try to find a 10% you know, increase in click throughs or any of this stuff. He's like every, you

• 28:24Anthony Pompliano?

  know, 50 basis points, every hundred basis points, like it counts, right? And it adds up. And I remember one time on the Facebook mobile. So it was like the mobile interfaces on like really bad phone connections. They people who are using kind of like the T9, right? So they would kind of click through. We drastically increased the page creation. So kind of the top of the funnel for advertisers by simply moving paid create page further up in the stack. So people had to click less times on the button to get to it. Like not a groundbreaking idea, right? Some engineer who's like, hey, what if we just move it up faster or whatever? Well, nobody knew how much demand was there for people who wanted to create pages in, you know, Indonesia and these other countries. And all of a sudden

• 29:09Anthony Pompliano?

  there was this big jump in revenue that kind of trickled down. And I remember Alex being so excited about it. And to me, it was like, man, I would have never thought, you know, if you said, hey, what's the two things that we're going to do this quarter or whatever to, you know, get growth, I would have never like, well, we should go to the people who are using, you know, like the T9 mobile devices and move the, no way. It's just testing.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think growth, you know, has a bad reputation now as a word, and sometimes maybe deservedly so. But I think good growth at the heart of it is looking at the data and experimenting and then letting the data tell you where to go. So I think really well run growth themes are fantastic at trying to feel like what is stopping a customer from doing something? For example, Facebook, and I think this was before or era, had this famous quote of 10 friends in seven days, or seven friends in like seven days. And the idea was unless you have the certain number of friends in the first week or so, you are probably going to be lonely. You are probably not going to have a fantastic experience with the end of a Facebook social network. So they tried really hard in the first week to make.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Make sure that you had friends, that somebody was leaving a comment, that you know, that they would, somebody would see your photo or they would tag you. And I think that's where good growth thinking comes from, which is really looking at the numbers, trying to deeply understand what these people want. And then experimenting very quickly and learning from the data.

• 30:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And they didn't make that up, right? It wasn't, it wasn't like somebody was just sitting there like, ah, I think that you should have ten friends in seven days or whatever it was.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:35Anthony Pompliano?

  No, they looked at the data and the data is highly suggested that there was a massive increase in retention if you had this number of users in this many days.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:42Anthony Pompliano?

  On the service. So let's optimize for making people hit that metric so that then they will stay.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  It is. And I think, so the interesting question, you know, and kind of tying these three companies together is, uh, you know, if you compare, say, Facebook and say Snap. One thing I think is very interesting, and I have a pet theory, is I think Snap is a counter culture reaction to Facebook in many ways. I have this sort of phrase I use, which is, you know, I'm a big comic book nerd. And the DC Universe, there is a Bizarro Universe, where everything is the exact opposite of what it, you know, what, what is the real in ours. So for example, in DC Universe, in Bizarro Universe, Lex Luthor is a good guy, Bizarro Superman is a ba- is a bad guy. You know, the artist, like, I think, a cube, everything the exact opposite.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  And I think of Snap and Facebook at many levels as the exact opposites of one another. So for example, and I'm going to tie this back into what we're talking about in culture. So if you think about Snap, you know, Facebook was always about, let's look at the data. And let's look at where, where the data is going to lead us to answers. And they were really good at that. But I think one of the challenges with that approach, and I have to think they have done a fantastic job in DC handling this, is you can sometimes get locked into a local maxima of optimization.

• 32:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What are you optimizing for?

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah. So for example, it's very easy to find yourself like optimizing the hundred different shade of green. Where there might be a much better way of helping people create content somewhere else. And I think of Snap as the exact mirror image where Snap really focused on creativity and helping people express themselves. Sales as their higher order bit as the thing that they really wanted people to do. Where Facebook is often led with data and impact. So one, I think these are kind of mirror images of each other. The other way I think they're kind of different was at the time, you know, Facebook was believed in. If you remember back in two thousand nine or two thousand eight, when Facebook did the first F eight. You had Curtis Cox, you know, chief product officer show up on stage and talk about how Facebook should be the story of your life.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  You know, everything from birth all the way to your time in school, to your marriage, your first baby is going to be on the Facebook timeline. Snap said the exact opposite. It said the only thing which matters is this moment right now and who you're with right now. So nothing matters. So it was the exact opposite of what Facebook was going for. Facebook has always had a very neutral voice. If you remember, they famously ran a ad where they compare themselves to a bunch of chairs. Because they were like, we are a platform, you know, we are here to help people make the world more open and connected. Where Snap has always believed in having in an irreverent goofy voice. So I think in many ways, they were the exact opposites of one another.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Which I think sometimes led Snap to find product answers, which are, which a lot of other people would have struggled with. I'll give you an example. So, you know, now face filters and filters are, you know, everyone has it, every single platform has it. But when Snap first built lenses, it was pretty unique, you know, I think they had bought a company, but this is really the first company to kind of build at scale. There's look luxury, I think it was. Yes, you know, I think they were based off the Ukraine, if I remember. Yeah. And the question, you know, so I left Facebook in, I believe, like in twenty fifteen or early twenty sixteen to go work at Snap. Where I headed up a bunch of revenue and add products. And one of the reasons I wanted to go there was I wanted to understand like, why does this company know?

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Why does this company operate differently? Because when you open the app, it was very happened, they were doing something different. They operated differently than every other tech company in the Bay Area. And so one way to kind of think about this is let's look at why do lenses work? And the easy pitty answer to say, well, they just help you express yourself, you know, and you know, it's fun, it's weird, it's goofy. But if you unpack that, there are many reasons why lenses work. Number one, and this, I think a lot of people would assume this, uh, it it's only to your close friends and family and it disappears after uh twenty four hours. So the downside of me posting something embarrassing and it's staying forever. A future job prospect or a future spouse finding it are negligible, right? Or when I run for president, you know, getting embarrassed by that are low.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  So one, you're more open to just sharing yourself. That's one. Second, uh, you know, like you're doing this, you know, interview right now. You follow me on Twitter. If I go on Twitter right now and post a selfie, I'm like, that's fine, I'm posting selfie. If I post twenty selfies on Twitter in the next few minutes, you're gonna be like, that's weird, like, what's up? Are you good, man? Because it breaks the etiquette that we have on the internet. And um but but not a lot of people really want to post selfies. And what's Snap did lenses is, have you ever been to a wedding where they have photo booth? And you have these big gloves and the goofy glasses? A lens is the digital version of that, so they give you a a a social license to post a selfie. Because now you're like, this is just part of the product and you have these raw materials to be creative and to be fun.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  So once, you know, you're just not posting a selfie, you're like doing, creating a character, you're telling a story. Which brings you to uh number three, which is before lenses and stories, you could not tell a story linearly. So I'm I I write screenplays and novels on the side, I'm terrible at it. And uh and so there's this team called the Joseph Campbell's Heroes Journey. Where every story kind of goes a particular way, you know, hero wakes up, he's happy, he gets a challenge, he sets off on a journey. You know, he he accomplishes his mission. And so it's kind of like, you know, think of a lot of things, every story follows this arc. Uh with stories for the in Snap, for the very first time, you could tell your own story. You could say, I woke up in the morning, I did this thing, oh my gosh, and then I went to bed. You could not do this on feed, because in feed, everything is reverse logical.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  And finally, and most importantly, I think, stories didn't have numbers on the screen. So you had nothing which I think let people judge you or for you to judge yourself. So for example, even me, when I tweet and there's zero reactions, you know, I'm, you know, I'm a big boy, I shouldn't need that affirmation, but I kind of feel bad.

• 36:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Did I say something wrong?

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Did I say something wrong? Do you not find me entertaining anymore? Right? Like, I, I, and, but with stories, nobody knows whether you have zero fans or billions of them, which lets you to be more open. Now, Snap was able to combine, I think, all of these, and this is my own deconstruction of why these work, all of these together and build a fantastic product. Now, there is no way you can optimize your way to this. You know, it requires some.

• 37:11Anthony Pompliano?

  It's thinking outside the box or kind of original thought.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think you can't optimize way to this. So I think Snap was very, very good at those things where they were able to like intuitively form, perform these products which really work for a set of people, often like young people, in a way which I think was hard for the Silicon Valley to compete in. And of course, like now, I think with Instagram and with TikTok, a lot of other folks have found their own ways of doing this. By the time it was like very different.

• 37:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you want to know an interesting fact that I found out earlier this week? The entrepreneur, I, I believe this is correct, this is what I read online, which now we have to question whether it's real or not because I read it online, but.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Everything is true online.

• 37:48Anthony Pompliano?

  The entrepreneur who sold Luxury to Snap created a second company, has something to do with like more like AI, but still around content creation, and just sold that to Snap as well for like 150 million bucks.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 38:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So two for two, same entrepreneur, somewhere in Europe, I think, and both kind of creative products, but out of the box.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Kind of creation tools.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  So one thing that was very impressed me about that team is, you know, I really had no exposure to Ukraine before that, is how amazing a lot of like, you know, engineers there are. I saw this at Facebook too, when I was at Facebook, you remember this, we bought this company called Live Real.

• 38:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Killed it.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Killed it.

• 38:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Was it a video ad management, basically?

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they had some fantastic talent and I know, and they were based out of Kluge,

• 38:36Speaker 02

  if you remember, which honestly was not a city I really knew a lot about before. But I was just amazed at the talent they had. And I think only now are you seeing like with the focus on remote work, distributed teams, the rise in costs in like San Francisco and New York, you're seeing much more tech companies leverage that. But one of the things I think Facebook. Can snap it. I had the curve around then it's finding these pockets of talent in parts of the world which other people weren't looking for like nobody was going out and trying to find a company like Kludge, right?

• 39:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Uh, and they were really good at spotting the talent.

• 39:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think Live Rail, uh, again, people will correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Live Rail was the first profitable company that Facebook ever bought. And, and if I remember correctly, like there was a hiccup in the acquisition because they were like, well, how do we value this thing? Cause they were so used to buying products that had either no revenue or, or they were burning, you know, venture money. And Live Rail came along and was like, no, like we actually make money, like, like we can go forever.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  That is true. I, I think Facebook at the time, I think the big acquisition they had done was, I think they'd done Instagram. They were about to do WhatsApp.

• 39:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  They're about to do.

• 39:37Anthony Pompliano?

  In fourteen, my second day at Facebook, they announced WhatsApp for eighteen billion dollars. I remember being like, whoa.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Like this is big.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Well, that's another example of something I think I learned from Facebook where Facebook is very good at not letting ego or not invented here syndrome get in the way. So a lot of other companies would have looked at something like WhatsApp and said, look, we have our own team. We have really smart people here. We should just go compete with them. In fact, you'd been competing for many, many years. Uh, but Mark looked at that and was like, look, either if we want to make the world more open and connected, that's the mission. Uh, WhatsApp at the time had, you know, close to, it was on the path to getting to a billion users, you know, it was clear they want to get that. I don't remember the number, but it is good. I want to get there for sure.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  And if we believe in having impact, this is the most impactful thing to do. And if that's worth, say, like 10% or so of my market cap, it seems like a fair trade off. So there's so much in there, which I think a lot of other CEOs would not do. Uh, you know, having, being able to set aside your ego and saying, I know we competed hard with these guys, but you know, you know, I think, you know, I should look past it and bring them in, you know, focusing on impact. I think Mark has done that time and time again. He did it WhatsApp. He was doing that with the original Instagram acquisition and also later, for example, building stories into Instagram, um, which is very controversial. I think Mark has been very good at reasoning from first principles and focusing on impact. In a way, I think a lot of other people find hard.

• 41:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, my, uh, my favorite part of the WhatsApp acquisition is, uh, Jan, uh, had applied for a job at Facebook. Obviously he'd gotten turned down, as people know, but, uh, a lot of people don't remember the part of the story where he took the acquisition papers. And he actually signed them by going to

• 41:20Speaker 02

  The place where he got his foot?

• 41:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it was the, where he used to pick up the welfare checks with his family, uh, in Silicon Valley. I forget which, uh, town. And, uh, he literally, there's a photo of him, uh, he's got the papers pressed up against the door and he's signing it right on the front door of the building. And it's just, it's cool to see, um, how meaningful stuff like that is to people. Uh, but I think also it's a testament to Mark and the executive team that, like, that's somebody who's pretty missionary driven, right? They're, they're not just building a company to build a company to make money or anything like that. Uh, to get them to kind of see a vision, uh, with Facebook, et cetera, uh, and to pull off an acquisition like that's very rare.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  So two things there. One is Jan's story is super interesting. So there is a cliche about who a Silicon Valley founder is, you know, you're below thirty, you're wearing a hoodie, you went to start Stanford, uh, you know, you look a certain type. Jan doesn't fit any of that. Uh, Jan's an immigrant, uh, came from a very humble background and, uh, his family was on foot stamps, uh, growing up. Uh, was, had a stint at Yahoo before, was I think close to forty or already over forty when he started WhatsApp. Which in the Silicon Valley scheme of things is like

• 42:26Anthony Pompliano?

  You're old.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Pretty old.

• 42:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Uh, uh, and, and also he didn't have, he wasn't at Stanford or any of the Ivy League schools. He had gone to like a community college. So in pretty much every respect, you know, he was the opposite of what a Silicon Valley founder, uh, should be. And in the way he built his company, WhatsApp famously hadn't raised money for many, many years until Sequoia came along. This funded themselves using, I think the dollar a year subscription fee they had for many, many years. Uh, kept the team really small, um, really focused on performance. So I like to point at WhatsApp whenever, you know, people say, you know, kind of stereotype certain Silicon Valley behaviors. I had to point to WhatsApp in Jan as being the exact opposite of, you know, behaviors. But second to your point on Mark, you know, it takes a certain executive team to set aside like their ego and be like, well, if you're believing the mission, this is the most impactful thing we can do.

• 43:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think they negotiated that like, I don't Friday night at his house.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, it wasn't like lawyers were involved. I, I, I think the story that came out was just like, hey, they had dinner together and they said, you know, we're gonna do this.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  I, I think so. I think if I remember, uh, Mark had built a relationship with Jan over time. And, uh, and he had said something like, look, if you ever, you know, if you're ever thinking of doing something, you know, should, give me a call and we should think about this. And, uh, one holiday season, you know, they were like, well, we should go build a trigger. And how was this thing gonna work? And, uh, I think, you know, history shows it's gonna work out really well for like all parties involved.

• 43:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, absolutely. What about, uh, Twitter? You, uh,

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So Twitter's the one that people probably, uh, today, uh, people listening to this podcast are probably most using, right? So, uh, some of them might use Facebook, some of them might use Snap, but Twitter for sure. But nobody really knows what's going on inside the company.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Well, first as a stockholder, I'm really happy your audience is using Twitter. Please use more of it. I couldn't say these things when I was employed by the company. You know, but I have no fiduciary duty.

• 44:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, you're free. You can say, tell us all the secrets.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you everything, Bob. Um, so I left Snap and, you know, I was very fortunate to be at Facebook and Snap. And I was trying to figure out what I want to do next. I started, started to do some investing, which I'm doing a lot more now, but I just started doing some investing. And honestly, I was just goofing around. Like, this was the summer, by the way, when, you know, Bitcoin, which never sleeps, as you remind me so often on Twitter. You know, had exploded. I think it got to like, you know, it did the curve for above $15,000. And I was out, like, I was writing a solidity app. I was just kind of goofing around. And I knew Jack for a long time because I had been very active on Twitter. I have a little bit of a following. And Jack knew me and Jack had just come back to Twitter, I think, the year before.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  And at the time, Twitter was not in a great spot, uh, because they had multiple rounds of layoffs. Jack had just come back, but it had not been a long time since he had come back. Uh, there were all these rumors because I think, you know, Benioff and Salesforce had wanted to buy the company, but the deal had fallen apart, which we now know because, uh, Benioff's board had disagreed and vetoed it at the last moment. I think somebody reported that recently. And what I think also almost happened was Disney almost bought Twitter. And the deal fell apart, which we now know, thanks to Bob Iger's excellent autobiography, that he basically had a change of heart at the very last moment. So there were all these swirls and the company had these, you know, big, hard questions to deal with.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  So Jack and I had dinner a couple of times and Jack said, look, you know, like you, you know, you seem to have an understanding of the product, you use it a lot, and you know, we have these really hard challenges. But more than that, you know, we have like a really important mission. So one thing I think connects all these founders and definitely, you know, Jack and Mark is they're extremely mission driven.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  I I want to know Jack some about well over the last few years. I will tell you that anything that Jack says in public is pretty much the exact same thing he says in private. In fact, he has very few secrets and Twitter as a whole has very few secrets. And I always tell people, you just have to read between the lines of what he's saying. So Jack, you know, in this dinners, he would convince that he had how much he believes in the public conversation, you know, and what he means by the public conversation, what he believes in it and why it's important for Twitter to serve the public conversation. And he really convinced me, like, you know, he was like, look, you know, the elections had just happened. So the country was going through this really interesting polarizing time, obviously. And, you know, the and Twitter was just playing a big part in world culture. Like, you know, I think I think Black Lives Matter had just happened the year before.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  And he's like, this is good, this company is going to be really important. We are going through such a rough time, you can come and help us, you know, help us, basically. And I was convinced, you know, and for a while I was a little bit queasy because I had done two of these social media companies before. Like, I tell people, like, am I like a Thanos, a nerdy Thanos, collecting the infinitely gonflet of social media companies? Right? But ultimately it came down to Jack and he really won me over with his sincerity, his focus on the mission. And I was like, I said, okay, I'm it. So I said, yes, I think, you know, like, almost like three years ago now. And in the text, I was like, what do I do?

• 47:25Speaker 02

  So I had spent enough time doing tours of duty on advertising and Twitter had a fantastic team who, as all the working ads, and they didn't need any help there. And the question was, well, we need help with consumer product. So, uh, you know, and uh, Jack said, look, we need help, you know, helping people stay informed using Twitter. So everything from user growth to onboarding, to the home timeline, or how it ranks, how it looks, all of it. Search, explore moments, uh, uh, trends. We need somebody to kind of come in, you know, take over the teams and help shape the products. And I said, well, this thing, this is obviously such an interesting opportunity because it was so meaningful. I was like, I meant, so that was Twitter.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  And it's been a fantastic, uh, few years there, uh, because we've, one is, I like to joke that Twitter is the most public of public companies. Because one, you're obviously a public company in the, you know, in the Wall Street sense of the word, you have an earnings report, you have investors and, you know, you're, you're on that cycle. But you're also a public company and since you're serving this public conversation and you have some of the most interesting influential communities and people using Twitter every single day. Like crypto Twitter is a perfect example because I think, you know, without Twitter, you know, the crypto community would not be what it is.

• 48:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  And, you know, everything from uh, Vitalik to Naval, to so many interesting people, you obviously on Twitter every single day. So you're such a public company and it's so public in a sense, like it's the only company where the most important people in the world tells you how much you suck using your own product too.

• 48:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  So you definitely get that too. It was an intense few years.

• 48:59Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, I always laugh when I see some, some big account tweet at Jack, right? Always at him and they say, uh, I wish there was a damn edit button, right? And it's always like, you know, iced tea or, you know, like, like some random account who they, they don't think it was like a technology product that they use every day and then they make some mistake and, and.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I always want Jack to go be like, well, you know, thought of it before. Thank you. You know, it's interesting. So Jack actually covered this in a recent interview. So I think the history behind this is that Twitter was designed to be text messaging. You know, and when you send somebody an IMES text, you don't think of editing it. And that's how they, they wanted to be the short, uh, easy to send messaging. It's kind of the heart and soul of Twitter. It still is the heart and soul of Twitter in many ways. So edit was. Not a functionality that was needed. So one was there was this historical component. Second, there was this concern about, for example, let's say I say something and you retweeted, you pointed something I said was wrong or you correct me. Then I change what I said, you know, it could change the meaning of the conversation that you've been having.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  So it's kind of these meaningful questions about, you know, how do we sort of preserve these conversations and maybe stop bad actors? I think that the second one, the third one, and you know, was how important it is in terms of how many people really need it. Whereas they can just fix a typo later. So I always laugh because I think whenever Jack tweets, I see like a million people be like, yes, Jack, but like ship edit. Uh, and I'll just laugh, you know, but Jack's very patient.

• 50:26Anthony Pompliano?

  What is, um, what is it like having a CEO? Uh, because Mark and Evan both were a hundred percent focused on the businesses. Meaning that they were there every single day, all day long, et cetera. Jack is fascinating to me because he's got Twitter and Square, both that are, uh, successful businesses that, um, you could look at it and any entrepreneur would hang their hat on just one of them, right? And say, look what I built. He seems to now with Cash App and Bitcoin and a lot of stuff like, he has this appetite for more, right? And so kind of what was it like working with somebody who, um, was spending a lot of time and was obviously paying attention to Twitter and, and really cared about that public conversation.

• 51:07Anthony Pompliano?

  But also you knew didn't have just one single focus, right? He had these other interests as well and was spending time there.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  So the, so Jack, Evan and Zach are so different, you know, we spoke like, you know, Mark being focused on impact, uh, and speed. Evan being focused on creativity. Jack is, uh, very different. I think he is obsessed with thinking from first principles and simplicity. Uh, I like to joke with people that Twitter has no secrets. You just have to listen to Jack on any of his podcasts, you know? You listen to him on Rogan, you listen to any of his things. He's basically laying out, you know, you know, what he thinks for what Twitter should do, what Square should do. It's all there. Um, and one thing that really comes to appreciate about Jack is his rigorous focus on being focused on principles. Having very simple.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Principles and then building your life, your company, every single decision from those principles. That's one. Second is obsession with simplicity. So he's obsessed with keeping things as simple as possible. Is it, you know, one hundred and forty or twenty characters to a tweet to how Square works? So if I had to take away like the top two things I've learned from Jack, I think those would be right at the top. Um, outside of that, I think one of Jack's, you know, you know, I always tell people, you know, um, and Jack's, you know, is so different. You know, he looks different, you know, uh, uh, I, I like.

• 52:26Anthony Pompliano?

  He walks to work. He doesn't own a laptop, I think, right?

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. He's focused on his iPad, you know, I like to, you know, make fun of him for, uh, his, you know, his fashion choices. You know, and, you know, and one of the things I think we, then you look at it and you're like, well, here's a person who has founded not one, but two twenty plus billion dollar publicated companies. And also in two completely different domains. So if you know nothing about, say, Jack or how he looks or what he says, you're like, how does somebody do that? The, the, the, I'm guessing the number of people who fit that pattern are probably really small. Uh, I think Elon is up there, a few others, but not a lot of people do that. I think one of the things that Jack does really well is he finds great people, you know, and he really empowers them. So for example, at Square, you know, he had Sarah for many years. He had Goku Rajaram for many years.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  At Twitter, one of the things I think he's been very good at is building what he thinks was an enduring team. So, you know, and that he is not needed in every single decision. So you have fantastic people. You have K one running product. You have, you know, Ned Segal, you know, who's, you know, probably my favorite CFO of among any CFOs. And Jack was like, look, I'm going to build this fantastic team. I'm going to really trust them so that I am not a bottleneck in any single decision. Now, of course, when something needs to see it away and Jack's going to weigh in, but he really trusts his team.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  And for me, you know, that was so liberating because you, you know, you know, in the first place, I was like, whoa, I'm kind of running this, you know, meaningful part of Twitter in this very, you know, which something which, by the way, everyone in tech has an opinion on. Uh, and definitely everyone crypto has an opinion on, but also, yeah, after. It's kind of cool because you know, Jack will say, you know, you're you're in charge, you know, you should feel free to go do what you think is right. And that's very liberating, I think, for a lot of people. You don't get a lot of that freedom. And I think that's kind of the key to how he's able to run all these companies, um, both Square and Twitter. But also be also be looking further out, right? He's looking further out at, you know, Bitcoin and both for Square and for Twitter.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  You know, uh, uh, you know, uh, and also like different countries. So I've, I think if I think the lesson from Jack is principles, simplicity and get great people and you go trust them.

• 54:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, uh, you mentioned one hundred and forty characters to two eighty. Um, I was in the, uh, anti, uh, character, uh, camp. And and not for anything other than like, hey, I like Twitter and like, don't screw it up, right? Just like, for no other reason than just like, it works pretty good and like, why change it if not? Uh, I gotta say though, in hindsight, probably one of the best moves that could have happened.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  And it was so.

• 55:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Exponentially better experience.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  There's a fantastic story there. So I remember, so I can take no credit for that because that team was already working on it way before I showed up. And they are fantastic, smart set of people. When I was having dinners with Jack about joining Twitter, he said, look, I'm gonna share something with you. We're gonna gonna double the character limit. I was like, whoa, you know, because hundred and forty characters is the heart and soul of Twitter. Uh, uh, uh, and I think it's a big deal. And I remember telling him, Jack, well, regardless of what happens, right? I think it's a fantastic move. Number one, if it doesn't work, you can always revert it back, right? Uh, but number two, uh, and I'm gonna tell you why they did it. But number two, I think it was a big symbolic move that nothing is sacred. Uh, that you and Jack, you know, as a new kind of coming back as CEO was like, nothing is sacred.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  We should look at any sacred cow, examine everything first from first principles. So.

• 55:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think that's why I was against it was because in my mind, it was sacred, right? Like which which is a great kind of contrast to even better for them to look at it and change it.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  So the so the question was like, why change it, right? And so what Twitter was finding was it is okay, it all started with Japan. So what was something which exactly, uh, not a lot of people know is Twitter is huge in Japan. Uh, um, uh, in fact. For reasons which I think kind of exactly the opposite of why Facebook has, you know, not been really huge. Because, you know, in Japan, Twitter has all these amazing communities where, you know, be it manga or be it following pop culture. Twitter has kind of found this great product market fit for Japan for many, many years. And the Japanese language, and I'm not an expert, I could be getting the details wrong, is much more dense from an information content than than the English language.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  So with hundred and forty characters in Japanese, you are able to communicate a lot more than you're able to do with hundred and forty characters in English. Just because the density of the the characters involved. And there was this, I think this engineer or data scientist who saw that and he was like, huh, this is interesting. So what if we brought that exact same behavior onto English Twitter? So they did the math. They were like, what is the length of, you know, the Japanese actual length? Because not hundred and forty characters, you're able to transfer more information. What is the actual length of this in English? It came to two hundred and seventy nine, which is, I understand very well. They were like, you know, two hundred and seventy nine characters in English kind of matches hundred and forty characters in Japanese.

• 57:24Speaker 02

  And we were like, huh. And so that was one data point. The other data point was they, Twitter graphed the amount of tweets with characters. And you saw this curve where, you know, you saw a very pretty normal distribution, but there's this huge spike at hundred and thirty nine and hundred and forty. Basically, people are right at the limit and they were cut off. Where in Japan, you saw a much smoother curve, right? And they were like, huh, maybe people want to say more, but they are stuck. No, there's this question of like, but that's that's the magic of Twitter. You don't want people to kind of drone on and on, you have like a blog. Yeah, it's not medium, right? Yeah, so it's not medium, you know, if you want to announce your job change, go do it on Medium. But in Twitter, it's more meant for conciseness. But what if you could have both, right?

• 58:06Speaker 02

  And and we almost had Japan as an evidence point of you could have short, succinct, the creativity, the magic, you know, the sort of the the creative charges you have to make to be funny or funny or engage on Twitter, but also get people to say more. And so two hundred and seventy nine characters seems like a bizarre. Our number to go pick and you know, the team decided, let's make it to eighty. They launched that and this was, I would say, a very scary launch because of most tech companies, when they launch something, you can, you know, you can A B test it in a small audience, you can test it out. But this is, you can't test how a large community is going to react to such a change. So Twitter was like, okay, we're going to really go in for this. And this is, I think, a lot, lot, lot, lot of credit goes to Jack.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  Because Jack had just come back as CEO, he had been there for a year and he was like, you know what, I believe in this, I'm going to go for it. And we're going to question the most sacred of sacred cows. Uh, and I would, if you remember this, like, that was not a popular opinion, right?

• 59:01Anthony Pompliano?

  It was not.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  You know, uh, it's interesting, but when you work at Twitter, you have to very quickly grow a thick skin because everyone or using a product is going to tell you how wrong you are.

• 59:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  And, uh, and so, but we launched it and the funny part is, uh, and I think there's a great post, uh, about they did a year after launch. The graph matched exactly what Twitter predicted was going to be. It turns out that, you know, one was it didn't change the magic, you know? People are using Twitter more, engaging more, but it that sort of spike where people are stopping at hundred and forty characters.

• 59:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Smoothed out.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Smoothed out and people are able to communicate more. So it was kind of this, you know, I, I, I really liked that because one is such a bold addition for Jack to make, but also very data driven one, you had this power. So I love this story, uh, but I would tell you like for a, for a couple of weeks, it was not fun.

• 59:47Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, uh, the million dollar question for Twitter before we move on.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh.

• 59:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone wants to know how to get verified and for, uh, for quite a while, you were the, uh, you were the victim of whenever that question was asked of as an executive, you were, uh, you were the guy doing verifications. What, uh, what's going on there?

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  So first off, that, that part is not true. I never worked on verifications. There, Adam Bain, who used to be COO of Twitter, uh, when he left, played this joke where in his bio, he pointed people to me and he said, see, I'm the chief verification officer and they should come to me. And I swear, like every single day I got, uh, and by the way, I'm sure even just mentioning this is going to get me more emails now. I would get like dozens of emails from all sort of like nice people, well intentioned people to some really, you know. Bizarre ones. I got all sorts of emails and tweets. I did not work on verification. Uh, uh, and so I will, you know what? I'm gonna, for the first time, I'm gonna copy and answer Jack gave.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Jack was asked this last week and he said, uh, K1, uh, Bevpur is the, uh, current head of product at Twitter. He said, just go at tweet him. He's at K A Y B Z. He's got you, you know, you, you know, it just tweet at him and he's gonna get you verified. So he's not, he's not, he's gonna hate me for this.

• 1:01:04Anthony Pompliano?

  At K A Y Z.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  V Z.

• 1:01:06Anthony Pompliano?

  V Z. Okay.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Get that right. And you know, you want, you want to make sure that he sees you.

• 1:01:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, cause if he doesn't see you, then he can't verify you.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's gonna verify every single, every single person who sees and tweets at him, he's gonna verify. And if he do, if he doesn't see you at first, just tweet him a few more times, just to make it, make sure.

• 1:01:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Make sure.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Maybe I can give your audience's phone number too.

• 1:01:23Anthony Pompliano?

  This, this is my favorite, uh, joke in all of Silicon Valley. Of all the inside jokes I'm aware of, this is my favorite one because everyone wants to know how they get verified on Twitter.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Okay. So there are two funny stories. One is I used to get, uh, I, I got a lot of interesting people reach out to me. Uh, uh.

• 1:01:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, like serious people as well as like crazy people.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  For example, once I get a cold email and I'm just gonna sound name dropy, but like I got like Post Malone, like send me a cold email about verification. I was like, I, I was not sure it was him. You know, but then he followed me on Twitter too. So that was very interesting, but I also got something really weirdos.

• 1:01:54Anthony Pompliano?

  How, how does Post Malone start an email? Is he like, yo dog? Or is it more of like a hello, hello, I would like a verification?

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  He had a friend, I think, who needed verifying.

• 1:02:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So not him.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  Not him. He was verified. He has like a huge following. He basically like, you know, I have a friend who needs help. It's post and.

• 1:02:10Anthony Pompliano?

  It's post.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I was like, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's fake. Until I saw his account had just followed me.

• 1:02:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  And I then asked somebody else who knew them and they were like, it's actually legit. I was like, okay. Then I was able to kind of.

• 1:02:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Get him in the right.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Point him to some people. Uh, the other.

• 1:02:24Anthony Pompliano?

  That means that Shriram knows who does the verification.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  The other part of it, I think sometimes you get some scary people like, you know, I once got what I'll just kind of roughly say as somebody high in the armed forces of a country which is not friendly to the United States, send me an email saying their boss, who was a very senior figure, had just created a Twitter account and they wanted to get verified. And when I didn't reply, they kind of sent me more and more aggressive emails. And I had to send it to Twitter security because I was like, I don't know, like, this is like,

• 1:02:56Anthony Pompliano?

  This is real.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  This person has some real resources. I don't want to piss them off. So, and yeah, they were capable of some really bad things. You get these really fun, interesting things. The challenge with verification, by the way, I think this is why like Blue Sky and all these efforts are really interesting, is verification is many things in once. So, one is, I think it is, and this is not, I'm not talking about Twitter here, I think it's true for any platform, like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. When you verify someone, you give them a blue check or the green check, it means, one, you are who you say you are. So, you are actually authentic.

• 1:03:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Authenticity, yep.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Authenticity. Second, it's also some form of social capital. So, where it means that you're somehow meaningful.

• 1:03:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you're quote unquote important.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  You're quote unquote important. And these things get conflated. And by the way, I think I have this theory, which like social capital and social currency is one of the best ways to both understand social media and to kind of how to compete with them. But in this example, so you can often have somebody who we think of as a really bad person, you know, who's committed a crime or has done some organization, it's like any reason people think this is terrible, but they have a lot of people impersonating them on, say, Instagram or TikTok or Twitter, and then you verify them because they are actually who they say they are. And these things get very conflated. You also have all these interesting questions, like, for example, let's say somebody's running for office, you know, and, you know, they get verified because you want to make sure you know who the actual candidates are. But then after a while, you know, they maybe lose and they go back to being a normal citizen.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  Do you unverify them or do you keep them in? So, there are all these interesting questions. So, I have a lot of sympathy for, there are some really smart folks working on all of these platforms. It's a very, very hard problem, which is why, by the way, so I really like Blue Sky because I think they're often an alternative approach.

• 1:04:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  So for for context, Blue Sky is this new effort from Jack and Twitter to basically build a decentralized version of Twitter. And my, you know, the mental picture like to paint people is think of Gmail today. You open up Gmail, you open up your browser, you see a list of emails. Some algorithm has sorted the spam away, stuck it in a trash spam folder. Some algorithm has tried to figure out like what is social, what is promotion, sort of in their inboxes. There is a fantastic UI experience. And at the bottom of it, there is some SMTP happening and some IMAP happening, maybe when these mail servers talk to each other, the MX protocol. But you don't really know it because you're so abstract away.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  And one, my mental model for this is, it's a Jack basically announced on Twitter a few weeks ago that he and Twitter are going to sponsor something called Blue Sky, which is an effort to build an open source decentralized social network protocol from the ground up, which Twitter is then going to support. It's very early stages, you know, I think right now they're basically looking for somebody to come in and run it. I think it's, you know, it's very likely it's going to have strong ties to crypto

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  for all the obvious reasons. And my analogy was in this Gmail example, think, you know, you now have Gmail, but you never had SMTP. You never had alternative clients, right? And that's what social media is today. When you have Facebook, you have a stack. You have the UI of like, how does these things look? How do I post things? You have this incredibly complicated ranking algorithm, which you are familiar with, like one of the most sophisticated pieces of software ever built by mankind. You have all sorts of policies. You have policies on moderation, what kind of content is allowed to stay up or not allowed to stay up. Your policies on verification. And so you basically get this in a box. There's no way you can tell Facebook, hey, I want all of this, but I want to plug in my own ranking algorithm. You can do this on email.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  Like you can write a client right now and do your own email hosting and be like, I'm going to pick my own spam email. You don't need Gmail. You can't do it on Facebook. You can't do it on Twitter. And one of the things that's really exciting for me is, is what if we could now, using my analogy, split out SMTP and email and then A lot of people can innovate on top of it. For example, like, you know, you want, you, you don't like how Twitter is verifying people, but you want verification policy. Uh, the, the crypto community could say, we're only going to verify people with, you know, some proof of stake or proof of work, or we could have pomp Twitter where only people who pomp likes will get verified and no one else. So, uh, you've got to come kiss the ring. So you could imagine sort of this, you know, and you can imagine for algorithms.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  So if you don't like how any social media platform is prioritizing who gets amped, reach, who, what gets prioritized, you want to pick something else. Like, for example, you say, I don't want algorithms which only prioritize things which get liked or retweeted. I want the algorithm which prioritizes things that has the most information, things that are the most helpful content. And you're a way to figure this out. You could build that algorithm, you can plug that in. So you, I think can really open up a wave of innovation and just people building on top of social media in a way which hasn't happened before. Now, there's a long way to go, right? There are all these unexplored questions around how does, you know, how will this work? Um, you know, how will other platforms support it? Uh, how will like cryptocurrency plugin? It's super early days, but I'm really excited for this.

• 1:07:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and to me, uh, we've seen this in crypto where people have to, uh, they want to get to a decentralized end state. And so you can just start out trying to be decentralized or you can start out centralized and decentralized over time. I don't know if there's a, like an agreement yet on every single way to do this. What's the best one? Um, we know with Bitcoin, obviously just decentralized from day one, but eh, one person was the first, right? And then it kind of decentralized very quickly. Um, and I think Twitter exploring this, uh, the thing that I appreciate about Jack, he, uh, he just announced with the Square, they released the Lightning Network Development Kit, like, uh, with Blue Sky. It, it's tools, right? It's, look, I don't want to be the guy in the position of making all the decisions. I actually think that there's many different answers for many different people.

• 1:08:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, here's a bunch of tools, do what you want to do, right? Uh, which I think is pretty powerful.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  And I think you can sort of construct this from Jack's first principles in some way. So Jack believes a couple of things, right? He believes that, uh, on the internet, everything's going to live forever in a blockchain. And two, that relevance algorithms.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Or what really matters. And sometimes I don't think people often pay deep attention to what he says when he says, but I think you can sort of construct everything he has done from just those two sentences. So, for example, if everything is going to live far on the internet, it doesn't really matter as much what gets taken down or what stays up. What really matters is what gets reached and what gets amplification. So, for example, like, you know, if we do this podcast and no one listens to it, does it really matter if YouTube puts it up, takes it down, or Spotify puts it up, takes it down? It doesn't matter, but what really matters is like if Spotify features it or Apple is going to feature it somehow, or they're ranking a product, that really matters more.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  So Jack really believes in this and I think, you know, one of the things he's talked about is like he, someday he wants Twitter to just be a set of relevance algorithms working on this corpus of content. So then, you know, for example, if you disagree with, you know, some moderation policy or who's getting verified, it's all there. You can build your own implementation and Twitter could maybe have an alternative implementation of that, but you're free to go do your own thing. So that's one of the things I really like about Jack, where every one of his decisions or which I think the company is in, you can sort of build on top of his principles and really kind of layer them on and they're all intellectually consistent, which I think is really liberating because when you're a company, you know, you, it gives you a framework of what is important, how are you supposed to work, how do you make prior decisions, which is often really hard.

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  So that's kind of one of my key lessons from Jack.

• 1:10:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you write a lot.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  Sadly.

• 1:10:31Anthony Pompliano?

  No, but it's very good. Where can people read the writing first?

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  Well, thank you. So I think there are two places where I'm very active. One is on Twitter itself. I'm at Sriram K S R I R A S R I R A M K at Twitter. And the other is on my own site where I have a blog and a newsletter at sriramk.com where I try and like kind of collect some of the things I've been writing every once in a while.

• 1:10:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So you've written on a variety of things, everything from how.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  I have an opinion on everything.

• 1:11:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, no, but it's great because everything from like super operational things like.

• 1:11:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, how do you, how are you successful as an executive when you join a company in the first thirty days, right? Like, that's really actionable to this idea that I want to explore a little bit of like organizations being systems, right? And kind of Apollo and all this stuff. So maybe talk a little bit about like how you think about

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Anthony Pompliano?

  The organizations as systems and like, where does that really come from?

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  So, so by the way, my motivation for writing is very simple. It's very selfish. I think, I really think writing online is a superpower. I highly encourage everyone to do it because it's the best way to put up a portfolio of who you are and how you think to the world. And, and you know, it has opened so many doors for me. I've met so many great people, both for work and not work. I highly, highly recommend everyone doing it. For example, you had a previous guest, David Perle on here. I, I met him through his writing. I, I loved what he was writing and I met him and you know, he's one of the smartest people I've met purely from his, just from his writing alone. So I think it's a real superpower. And I had, I would say two ulterior motives for writing.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  You know, one was I love meeting interesting people. When you write something, you, when you write something and it's hopefully good, interesting people seek you out. Because you find they're often trying to find great things also. So I, you know, it's a good way to be like, here's a bat signal. When you write on a topic, you often get the best people in the world reaching out to you. So I, I talked to an example, when I started writing on like companies and, you know, collecting some of the emails from these companies. I got so many interesting people just email me and talk to me about it. So it's a great, you know, it's kind of like having a homing beacon where you get really smart people to come to you instead of you having to go to them.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  So that's one. And the second thing, honestly, it's for myself because, you know, a lot of these things I'm writing on something where I had no idea what I was doing. And kind of through painful trial and error, I learned something over a period of time. And, and kind of helped me work through my thoughts. And then after some time, I can kind of go back and refer to it. So for example, I have this post, just referred to on the first thirty days in executive. So, you know, when I, when I kind of took on sort of these more and more meaningful roles, I really Struggle with like, how do I do this job? You know, and and a lot of people, I think, struggle with imposter syndrome, and I was one of them. I was like, I'm too young, I haven't done this before, why should I be running? You know, why should be telling like, you know, a few hundred people what to do? And I built a playbook over time, you know, asking a lot of people.

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  So, for example, you know, I think a lot of people hit this thing where they get a new job. You know, either you join a new company in a senior role, or you get a promotion where you're now an executive running a really large organization. Or maybe you're just taking on a different role and you are, say, a general counsel and you're now like a COO or a CFO moving to CEO. I think all of these are new jobs and you, it's really hard to figure out what you should do. Because the people don't know you, they don't trust you. It's a new job, so you don't know what you're doing. You don't have all the answers at your fingertips yet, but people already look to you for the answers. And by the way, the clock is running because unless you show impact and results, they're going to be like, yeah, somebody is just being paid a lot of money. But like, why is he or she even here? So, and I struggled a lot myself.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  So I built this playbook where, and by the way, Andrew Bosworth, you know, Boss at Facebook is, you know, one of the folks who has really helped me with this was first was, in the first stages, you follow this. Number one is you go meet everyone, right? You literally meet any, every single, you do nothing else but just meeting people all day. You do, you do no active decisions. You, uh, you, you take part of like really no active work. You just meet everybody, every peer, every, you know, mid-level manager, every skip level report, everyone you can think of. In every meeting, you do the same thing. You know, one, you figure out what they're working on, but you ask them two questions right at the very end. You ask them, what are sort of the few things that you want to see improved in this art? And who are the two smart people I should go talk to? And very quickly, we just within two, three weeks, you're going to build a map.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  You're going to build a map of, these are repeating themes that show up. Two is you're going to figure out like, who are all the smart people that who act as information sources and you should keep an eye on. So you could, it's going to kind of act as this, this like huge accelerated education path in a very short period of time. So that's step A. I think step B is to just communicate all the time. So when you're new, I have this place called like you, you have to be elected, elected, not selected. When you get a new job, I think, and often I think execs. You know, who fail, think that they now have power. Um. But you don't, right? You have hundreds of people, thousands of people, you know, who now have to believe that they are in the best job possible for them, that you're someone worth listening to.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  And you might be, but you haven't proven it to them yet. They don't know you. They you you may have just seen a press release on you. Or you they might have seen you as a different organization, but not running this. So what do you do? So? And I think you have to communicate. You have to talk about who you are, what you're doing all the time. So they hear from you. They get to know you. And this can be as simple as like an email a week with like, here are my top priorities in terms of who am I meeting? Right? So they get to know who you are as a person a little bit more, because as an executive, you often like have so many people and they don't get face time. And they're going to make snap judgments of you based on seeing in a hallway or some offhand comment. So the more you can talk to them and hear from you directly, I think it's super powerful when they're getting to you. That's second. Third, I think is you have a very limited time window to make changes.

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  So I would say you have about a month, and I think any team, when you come in, you're going to find out that there are certain things that are not working, you know, either organizational structures or often just people. And it's not their fault, you know, it could be that they went the wrong role or, uh, you know, or it's some reason it's not working out. Now, the team is going to look to you to make those changes very quickly, because I I've seen this every organization. You know, there's always some like well-known thing which is going wrong, and the team's going to almost judge you. It's a test. It's a test of like, can you actually fix it for us quickly? Because the the other person, the predecessor, you know, he or she could not. So you have a limited window to do the obvious thing. Um, and I think, you know, and I think so. And finally, and I think this is super important.

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  They have to see you, uh, roll up your sleeves and be in action. So, uh, Rahm Emanuel, he used to be mayor of Chicago, and then, you know, worked with the Obama administration, had a great quote, which is never waste a good crisis. And I believe that in the first two months, if there is some way for you to dig into the details and not something super abstract, like, you know, here's a strategy for the next five years. Not that that's not important, but that's often more abstract and take more time. Something as simple as, hey, you know what, uh, you know, this, you know, customer, you know, if you're going to lose this customer, right? Or this product launch is not going well. And for you to figure out how to add value, right? Um, and roll a PC. And this is very important because adding value is very different. Like sometimes you swooping in can be the worst thing because you don't know anything, they don't know you.

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  But for you to be useful and for them to see you in action and for them to go, this person's actually not so bad. You know, they're up rolling their sleeves and they're doing something. So I was very lucky at Twitter, like, you know, my first, uh, you know, a couple of months, we had this big product launch that we had to go through. You know, mostly my already built it, but it kind of the big end stages of it. So I got a chance to be like, okay, this is great because now I get to meet everyone. They get to see me in action, I get to learn a lot and they get kind of an accelerated version of knowing what it is to work with me. And I think that goes a long way in helping you build credibility. So now I kind of built this playbook over a period of time, most of the trial and error, you know, um, and I wrote this just as a reference to myself. And you'd be amazed how often like people like come to me, they're like, oh, I just go, I love this and this is what I've learned and now I learned something from them. So that's one.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  Now in organization systems, one of the things, you know, I, being in Facebook, Snap and Twitter is utilized that are many ways to do the same thing. Build the same product. In fact, I joke that I've been in the exact same decision in three different companies. Uh, and you get to really see how different teams and organizations structure things very differently. So just for honestly, for my own education, I started really diving into this, what makes a good organization? And you have so much literature on this, right? Like, you know, I'm sure there are like a zillion Harvard Business School case studies you can go to, a billion business books. But for me, I think I looked at a couple of places, right? I looked at what are some of the most quickest, most impactful projects that have ever been done?

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  You know, and it turns out like, you know, sending someone to the moon, thanks, you know, right to the top. Uh, you know, and, uh, and, and also where can I really understand and not just where? Reading books, how the insides of great organizations work, right? And that's when I really started collecting my memos because I thought like that's actually a great way. Is when you kind of look at how they communicate on the inside, you understand how they work. And then you can build a sort of a system or a playbook. So for example, you know, when you look at like Mueller and what they did with Apollo, you learn there are some very basic things it got very right. For example, things which sound very obvious, but small teams, uh, everyone knows what the goal is. Everyone knows what the steps to the goal are. There is super open communication, which was not a given.

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  Um, super crisp sort of like intermediate steps and metrics they need to go hit. Because you can just send something to the moon, you need to launch something to space and have it come back quickly. And you had all these other things you need to go verify. And this sounds very brain dead, but it actually turns out to be really hard and most people don't even get it right. And I just started collecting these examples because for me, you know, one thing I was trying to figure out at Twitter is how do I make, you know, my, you know, part of Twitter better functioning, well run, delivering fantastic product experiences. And I was like, how do I go learn this? So I was just looking, well, let's look at all the classics. Let's look at some of the best products that ever been, ever been built. So that's kind of what start started my curiosity.

• 1:20:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Where did that curiosity converge with uh memos, right? So we were talking before that, uh, I think you and I both like these memos, which are usually a little bit longer. Uh, kind of writings from well-known figures. Uh, I've taken more of a liking to what I call financial memos. So these are Wall Street investors who um write quarterly or annually. Um, the, you know, Warren Buffett annual letter is probably the most famous of of that type. You have spent more time reading and really liking uh what I call like the operator memos, right? So this is uh Mark Zuckerberg, this is Katzenberg, you know, all these folks who are writing. Where did that fascination or curiosity come from?

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Honestly, out of purely selfish motivation, where, you know, when I, for example, joined Twitter, I was like, I don't know how to do this job. You know, I'd never done an organization of this size before, this complexity before in such a public way. And uh I and how do you even communicate, right? Like, how do you write a? Fantastic strategy doc, but word memo is all right, but just an email or you know, just a doc. You know, how do you create a great strategy doc? How do you send a, an email to the team which motivates them when times are hard? And I just started collecting examples. One of the things you quickly realize, and I think even inside of these companies, is the inside of these large tech companies are chaotic, very personality driven.

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  And whenever some press pieces like, oh, this company has this conspiracy theory. I'm like, are you kidding? We can't even get like five people to meet together in the same room at the same time. And, um, and often I think it's really hard to form a, a accurate impression of what is happening on the inside from just reading press releases. Or even reading books after the fact, you just don't get the insight. But there is one way to figure out what is actually happening inside, to go read the actual words these people have written. The executives, you know, the CEOs, the founders, you know, the presidents. And these are often really hard to find, you know, one, because they're on the inside, they're often protected. They're not often made public. So over the years, you know, whenever one of these would pop up. Uh, I just kind of stuck them in a little Dropbox folder.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  So what, for example, and they were often popping a few ways, right? You know, one, some of these are historical. I have a lot of historical ones. I have one from like an ex White House chief of staff. I have one from like, you know, uh, DuPont about like that time. I have some of these historical ones that now made their way into the public domain. A lot of them are through leaks. So for example, when the Sony leak happened, uh, I think the press really looked at the salacious details. You know, I looked at like, how does Sony run as a company? You know, what are all the great smart executives writing and how do they motivate their team? How are they writing an all hands memo? How are they writing, delivering bad news? I kind of looked at that, just to learn from. Uh, that's two. Third, it comes from press leaks. For example, you know, uh, you know, Facebook recently had a bunch of emails, uh, which by the, I'm actually, one of my emails is in there.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  Uh, well, uh, released by the UK government. And, um, and again, the press, I think is going to focus on, you know, like certain like.

• 1:23:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Shri Ram said what?

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I actually turned so that I actually came out looking pretty good. So I was, I, I did have a moment of nervous, I was like, you know. Did I say something really embarrassing? So I actually, I came out looking pretty good. But you know, but I looked at like, okay, what are all these folks who I really respected? What did they doing? So and then I over the years, I just kind of collected them. And about four or five months ago, I put it up on my site. It's at sridamk.com slash memos. And it was amazing. So one is, I think the memo is kind of, it's a great teaching tool to help you understand how different leaders handle situations. So a couple of my favorite ones, one is, let's use one from Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most strategic thinkers you will ever meet.

• 1:24:28Anthony Pompliano?

  But hands, hands down.

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  Hands down, you know, and you, whenever you're in a meeting with them, you're like, you're just blown away by the sheer force of its intellect. And I think you and I have been these things. So you, you know how real that sentence is.

• 1:24:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And to me, the intellect isn't like, oh, he's a big thinker. I remember there was a meeting once, and I won't go into all the details, but basically there was a new product that was being presented to him that hadn't yet been rolled out. And he was having to think very strategically about the resources that were being used. Where does this fit inside of our kind of our plans, the impact it could have, you know, a whole bunch of like really big things. And literally in the middle of the presentation, he drilled, then it was like that, that what's wrong with that? And it was like pixel level attention to detail. And it was just like, holy shit, like 10,000 foot view down to, you know, feet on the ground, back to 10,000 view, all in seconds. And it was just incredible.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  And it's kind of humbling because you're looking at it being, I have the same data that he has. I'm looking at the same thing. In fact, you're sometimes closer to it, but he's able to see a pattern or he's able to kind of play out a set of like chess moves into the future of how something would play out and look further ahead. And it is amazing. And it's really hard to talk about this in public because you're like, well, you're just saying that because like Mark Zuckerberg, you work for Mark or something. But it is really true. And also it's never exposed to the public because all of it is internal to Facebook, which is why every Facebook employee often talks about this. But you know, you don't really see in the press, except a bunch of his emails over time have kind of shown up in the public domain because of, you know, leaks or because of, you know,

• 1:25:55Anthony Pompliano?

  FOIA requests or whatever.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, because of like these various of legal processes. So I found, you know, a couple of these memos, which I was like, great, you know, now I have an example. Which, you know, I can showcase to the world, which won't get me like sued by, you know, Facebook legal of like how Mark writes. So one of my favorite ones is on the site, which is Mark about a couple of years ago. He makes a case for why Facebook should buy Unity, right? And it is like a seven to, it's like almost like a seven to eight page memo. Now, you should think about, you can think about like a lot of companies where this conversation will play out. Of course, the deal never happened, but a lot of conversation this have been like about the math, the numbers, the valuations. And other teams would have been doing it for Mark as, you know, CEO of like a four hundred business or company.

• 1:26:39Speaker 02

  But Mark writes a memo himself and he lays out the strategic rationale about how he sees Facebook changing. How he sees the face world changing and adopting gaming more. And he says, look, we are a communication platform. We're all about, you know, making the world open and connected. But essentially, we always run on someone else's platform. We run on Apple, we run on Google, but for long term, for us to be, you know, not at sort of, you know, you know, at the whim and fancy of someone else, we need to own our own platform. And you kind of makes this case where VR and AR and Unity as a part of it. And then he says, well, if we do Unity, what's it going to mean? How do we get like, you know, different companies to work with us? Will they stop working with us? And this is like, there are so many things going on in here.

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  One is at a ten thousand foot level, he's thinking about how the world is going to change and how technology is going to change. Second, he's thinking about Facebook's strategic position in that world and how, you know, what it needs to do to compete to stay ahead of things. Third, he's thinking about if this happens, what game theorying out various situations? And he's really, I remember him to say, exactly, by the way, he doesn't need to. He can just basically say the word and they can do it. But he's, and it's just a fantastic bit of writing. And I look at it whenever I need to like, like write something really strategic of how to break down an argument and be really thoughtful. So that's one example. To look at a very different kind of example, like Jeffrey Katzenberg, you know, writes this famous memo, you know, and Katzenberg, of course, you know, now works on Quebee.

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  But, you know, he's obviously a Hollywood legend for his time at like, you know, Disney and DreamWorks. And he writes this great memo in the early nineties about how the current. Hollywood studio model is broken. And it's such an interesting look at sort of an insider opining on movie studios, which you'd never see because you're talking to a peer. So you want you understand the space, you understand the vocabulary space and you such fantastic strategic thinking and action. But my favorite memo, and I think this is one which not a lot of people notice because it's not like a well known name is uh Dave Goldberg, right? And so Dave Goldberg, uh you know, um uh who I think we all knew very well, uh with you know, with Shell's husband. He sadly, sadly uh passed away a few years ago.

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  He was CEO of Survey Monkey and in his, there's an email between him to Michael Linton, uh who was running Sony here in the U S at the time. Where you know, I think Michael had asked him, you know, help me understand the music business. And this is an email sent from one person to another person. Nobody else is going to see this ever. And I'm pretty sure if I hadn't put up on the site, like it never, never gotten shown, but it's.

• 1:29:10Anthony Pompliano?

  By the way, it's the CEO of Sony asking Dave Goldberg about the music industry, like pretty crazy.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  It's pretty crazy and you know, and he basically breaks down, you know, how does this industry work? You know, how, who makes money, you know, how should Sony position itself strategically? It's one of the best written emails I've seen and it blew my mind because what I, as to my knowledge before the Sony emails got hacked. Only one other human being had ever, ever seen that email. So I think, you know, what this helps me with all these emails is in the finance world. When you're an investor writing a letter, you have a bunch of objectives. You are here to, you know, talk your portfolio.

• 1:29:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you're talking publicly for sure.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're talking, and you're basically saying, look, I'm a great person to be a custodian of your money in some shape or form. But when you're an operator, you have multiple agendas, right? You are trying to make a case to management. You're trying to make a case often to people who work for you, but you still need to make a case to them. You're trying to rally the troops, you're trying to bring morale up. You are trying to help simplify a really complicated topic with multiple different incentives. There are so many different things going on. And for me, the memos kind of act as like kind of this educational aid where I'm like, okay, this is how the greats have really done it. And you know, if, you know, if you have like a White House Chief of Staff writing a memo to. Successor like whatever problem you're solving is like much less important than what they were dealing with.

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  So and how did they deal with that? So it's a fantastic education. And so I put this up a few months ago on the side. What has blown me away since then and this writing by writing online is just so power. It's every day an email about it and you get some of the most thoughtful, beautiful emails and I get people sending me new memos. I get new memos all the time and sometimes I'll be like, whoa, you can't send me that because your company is like legal department is going to either sue me or sue you. But sometimes you get these fantastic people who just send me their own memos or memos they know of and it is beautiful. So I've gotten to add so many fantastic memos and just kind of it's all this machine which keeps going. So I it's one of the been one of my favorite things to do.

• 1:31:10Anthony Pompliano?

  When you put the the light up, right? And people are attracted to it. It's like it really is a magnet.

• 1:31:16Speaker 02

  It is. And you know, my one of my goals is to someday, maybe like interview the people in the memos. And think about like, okay, what is going on when you're writing the memo, right? Like, and some of them are still alive, some of them are very active. For example, I have like, you know, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, you know, doing a memo on how to be a good product manager. Right? He wrote his PMs at Coinbase, but you know, now a lot of PMC I'm like, what were you thinking? Or even some go back to Zuck or go back to, you know, somebody at Google or somebody historically. I would maybe somebody do a book on these.

• 1:31:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  But for now, I just love it. It's a treat and I use it all the time.

• 1:31:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So another thing that I know you love is LeBron James.

• 1:31:53Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:31:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's let's talk about it. Where does the fascination with LeBron come from and is he the GOAT?

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  The fascination with LeBron is he's absolutely the good. The fact that LeBron comes from the fact that I like to annoy people. I'm a troll at heart. I'm a troll, you know, I like to annoy people. And so a few years ago, like I live in San Francisco, right? And San Francisco hates LeBron because the Golden State Warriors, you know, were at the peak of their power for many years. And LeBron was, you know, Darth Vader, Voldemort rolled into one. He was the only one.

• 1:32:27Anthony Pompliano?

  San Francisco has been spoiled. They did what? They had the.

• 1:32:31Speaker 02

  They had the.

• 1:32:32Anthony Pompliano?

  The Giants, right? The baseball, then they went to the Warriors. Now they got the forty Niners who seem to be. Doing pretty good.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  They had the forty niners with the Colin Kaepernick era with the Bealival and you know, there was an age where they had like, you know, the Steph Curry Splash Brothers, Kaepernick, the Giants doing well. It was an amazing time for San Francisco. But you know, I'm always a bit of, you know, to use his overused phrase, a bit of a contrarian. And I know this was during the twenty sixteen finals. If you remember, the Warriors were up three one. And I made a funny post on Facebook. I thought it was funny. I'm like, you know what? I'm pretty sure like LeBron and Cleveland are gonna come back and win the series. And I bet you at this time, I was a fan of LeBron and I'm a fan of him for reasons I'll get into, but I just kind of said that. I didn't really mean it. But then, you know, they won in a game five.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  And then they famously won game six where Steph got ejected. Then you went to game seven and I was like, oh my gosh, this could be getting real. And then game seven happens, LeBron chases down, you know, Iggy Dalla, you know, and Kyrie hits a jumper. And I was like, oh my gosh, and my feed exploded. People are so mad at me. And I was like, wait, I now have this thing which is now reliably going to annoy people and I loved it. So since then, it's kind of become the self fulfilling prophecy where you know, where I just love to trot out LeBron. Because it annoys the heck out of, you know, all of my, you know, friends and peers in San Francisco. I actually usually I'm a huge fan of LeBron for a bunch of reasons. My biggest reason is, um, I think in any professional career,

• 1:34:01Speaker 02

  it is really easy to coast on what made you successful at first, right? Whatever your first thing was, I've seen a lot of people who max out because they were like, I've become as good as he can be. Uh, I'm really good at this thing. I'm just gonna continue doing this thing. But I think it takes a certain other kind of person to continuously reinvent themselves. And to always look at what the game is and stay out of the game. Like for example, I think of, you know, uh, my wife always mentions Madonna in this context of always reinventing herself. And if you look at LeBron, LeBron's always reinvented himself. Like when he came in, you know, he had no jump shot. You know, he was kind of just like, you know, he relied on his speed and athleticism.

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  Went on this personal journey where he went to Miami, was hated because of the decision, um, you know, learned from that. And then he kind of became. This one sort of in the public realm, this lovable figure, you know, working with kids in Akron, you know, kind of becoming a spokesperson for like so many important social causes. On the court, became a leader, changed his game and he's gotten older. He's kind of like figured out how to play with it. He's always been reinventing himself and staying ahead of the game. Like he's like, you know, he's like thirty five now, right? And he's still one of the most athletic people in the league. That was not a thing um back like, you know, like ten years ago. And that can only happen with not natural, you know, gifts. It can only happen. You constantly invent that. So that really inspires me.

• 1:35:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So uh I actually am a huge fan of LeBron, but for a different reason.

• 1:35:30Anthony Pompliano?

  His dominance on the court is undeniable, right? I'm not gonna uh change anyone's mind. I always talk about like the goat argument of like LeBron, Jordan, Kobe. Whoever you believe going into the conversation, I'm not gonna change your mind. That's who you believe. Knock yourself out. But the thing that is so crazy to me about LeBron, LeBron is probably uh probably the last athlete that uh started out in an era where social media wasn't really a thing yet, like it was just starting. And now continues to play at the highest levels in like this explosion of, you know, basically can't walk down the street without somebody taking a video of you, right? And so uh at sixteen years old, I think it was, he's on the front cover of Sports Illustrated, Chosen One, all this stuff.

• 1:36:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Sixteen years old, how many other kids, you know, Sebastian Telfer, I mean, I can go through them all, right? They were all there, they were on the covers uh and they all fizzled out. So one, he made it, right? In terms of he actually fulfilled the athletic promise. But two is you've never heard drugs, infidelity, uh doing something wrong, you know, partying like.

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  Fantastic role model. I mean, look at him, you know, I mean, people now criticize him for talking about his kids way too much, right? But he's obviously a great dad. Uh uh he's a great family, but he's just a fantastic role model. Where it's really hard to be at the peak of your sport and to have, you know, all the adulation, be one of the most recognizable names in like the world, really. It's very, very remarkable.

• 1:36:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And and my whole thing is just like that level of scrutiny for now, you know, what is it? Uh yeah, twenty years, right? Surprise sixteen to thirty five, thirty six years old. To do that and be the one of the best players, if not the best player, you know, in the history of basketball, it's crazy. It's just, it's really, really hard to do that. I think that like the average person doesn't understand those types of pressures. I don't understand that type of pressure, right? And I don't think there's very many people listening who understand that. But we've seen it over and over and over again. Everyone cracks, right? Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant. I mean, you can just go down the line, right? Conor McGregor recently, like all these guys, they all end up doing something stupid. And some of it is fame goes to their head. Some of it's just they make a dumb decision. You know, some of it's they're undisciplined, whatever. LeBron for 20 years has been kind of untouchable.

• 1:37:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And your biggest critique is, hey, he made a decision on live television and donated a million dollars to like the Boys and Girls Club. Okay, there could be worse things, right? Or he talks about his kids too much, whatever. So I think it's just pretty cool to see somebody kind of thrive in that environment. And it's kind of hard to hate them.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  It is. And I think there's a big lesson for that, like anybody in like any normal job, which is to just reinvent yourself, right? Like, and the game always changes, you know, for some metaphorical definition of the game. How do you stay ahead of the curve? I think it's true. For example, I talked a lot of venture capitalists. I was talking to, you know, if you look at some of the great venture capitalists, they've been able to have great hits across many generations. And whatever their original job was, like John Doerr was, you know, a sales VP at Intel. You know, him, you know, help getting Google or picking Google. I don't think being a sales VP at Intel is going to set you up for that. So you obviously kind of have to reinvent yourself, stay ahead of the curve. And to do that over a long period of time, I think LeBron's been a great one. And that's, that's why he's really inspiring.

• 1:38:37Speaker 02

  And he really annoys every one of my friends.

• 1:38:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What are, what are you doing now? You're doing a lot more investing in startups?

• 1:38:43Speaker 02

  I'm tweeting.

• 1:38:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, tweeting, that's good.

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  Podcasting, there's a lot of that. So I've been doing a lot of investing. So when, when you have an active day job, you know, you don't get a lot of time, you know, and you know, now I have some free time. I've loved helping young founder, founders and entrepreneurs. So I've been able to do a lot of that. You know, so been, one is doing a lot of investing on the early stage and kind of really helping shape mostly consumer companies, but lots of different companies, which is how to think about product and operations. And second is just to help like other, even like later stage companies with, you know, I call it like my war stories. I'm like, well, I don't know what you guys should do, but like these are mistakes I've made. So at least please don't repeat the same mistake. So, but it's mostly been investing.

• 1:39:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I gotta say that. Out of everyone that I know or have worked with, you probably, if you cut your experience by the types of companies, the variety at which you worked at the highest levels, and also what you did within those companies, so products, right, ads, etc. There's not very many people who have kind of done that much, right? There's usually like, okay, I do sales, or I do product, I'm product manager, I work on growth, whatever, and maybe I go to two, three companies and do that same thing. But my father told me this one time, he said, there's some people who get, they worked on something for 10 years, and they get two years of experience, five times.

• 1:40:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:40:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? But it's the same thing, five different times. And so, yeah, it was 10 years, basically get two years of experience.

• 1:40:15Speaker 02

  First of all, thank you, that's very kind of you. But second, I mean, you, you know, I'm not like blowing hot air behind you. You are the living epitome of doing that. Like, you know, I knew Palm back in ads at Facebook, and he always stood out because he was one of the smartest, most like, you know, logical thinkers in the room, and also one of the loudest voices, like literally, but he's one of the smartest, most logical thinkers. And I've kind of seen you reinvent yourself where, well, you know, to Bitcoin never sleeps, guys. I never stopped making fun of you for that. So I think you are the living epitome, like, and across industries. So, yeah, I mean, thank you, but I think you're way ahead of me there.

• 1:40:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, I think that you follow something similar that I do of just like, it's where does your interest take you, right? And it all leads back to kind of this authenticity thing of, I think a lot of people, the joke of that, like, you get, have 10 years, but usually two years of experience, five times, is those people tend to just do what they think they're supposed to do, right? So it's like, I'm supposed to go to do this, and then I wait two years, then I go do this, and then after that, I do, join a venture capital firm as a principal, and then I do this. And it's like, their whole life, they already have like scripted out. And I've always just been like, well, like, what if I don't want to do that? Right? Like, what if this other thing is more interesting, or that, you know? Whatever. And it's like the whole, I have a master plan.

• 1:41:27Speaker 02

  So let me turn the tables. If you are a young person, right? And you are, you know, for example, I think the path is you get a job, maybe you have a B school degree. You get, if you, you get a B school degree, then you come in, you rise up the corporate ranks or Silicon Valley way, which is, you know, you become a founder and you start something. But you don't want to, how do you know what your path should be?

• 1:41:46Anthony Pompliano?

  So

• 1:41:47Speaker 02

  Let's say you, somebody listening to you is in the middle of a company.

• 1:41:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So I actually think the best thing that somebody can do, um, and, uh, there's a couple of kids, I don't want to use their names because I don't know if they'd be comfortable with me. But, uh, there's a couple of kids that I know that range in age between, I'll say they're, uh, probably 20 to 25, right? So they're either should be in college and they didn't go for whatever reason, or they're just out of school. And they're all executing this very, very well. But basically what I tell them when I see them doing this is like, look, go find people that need help. Whether they realize it or not, and be overly helpful, but don't go find the person that's at, you know, the entry level employee at some company. Go and talk directly to the CEOs of startups and go talk to the partners at these investment firms.

• 1:42:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And they always say the same thing, like, oh, like that, that person doesn't want to talk. Why do they want to talk to me? I'm 23 years old, right? And I say, well, they're going to want to talk to you for one, it's your reasons. Either they think that you've got really unique insights or two, that you can do something to help them.

• 1:42:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:42:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And what I think that the people who I've seen do this really well is they realize Twitter is a great tool. You can reach out to anyone, right? The LinkedIn writing online, like there's all these little hacks that you can do, but very quickly, like David Perle is a great example. He wrote online a bunch. Everyone started, you know, one person read it. It was like, that's interesting. Another person read it and they shared it. And then, and next thing everyone knows, everyone looks at it goes, oh yeah, that dude's smart. Like he gets a certain part of the world that most of us don't think about all day long. Like, that's great. Um, I'll, I'll, uh, mention another person. This is not a young person. Um, I don't think, and so don't get mad. Uh, I've never met any person, uh, but Matthew Ball. I don't know if you know who this is.

• 1:43:21Speaker 02

  I love Matthew.

• 1:43:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Unbelievable. So he just left, uh, Amazon Studios, I believe. Uh,

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  His newsletter, uh, if you folks haven't subscribed, they should. He's a friend. I've known him for years. He's

• 1:43:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, have you? Okay. So I only like in the last like two to three months started, uh, like started seeing his stuff. I don't think I've read something that he's written that I wasn't like, holy shit, this dude is smart, right? And he's just analyzing everything from Disney plus to media models, like all this stuff. And you're just sitting there. You're just like, I cannot believe that this content is on the internet for free. Like you can learn anything. And so I even think that there's people who are really good at like, let me go find information. Let me consume it and like, put it in my brain and then turn around and like regurgitate it back to somebody else. Right? And like, if you're good at doing that and synthesizing those, you know, Matthews 20 page write up and then turning around and helping a media CEO like, put it into practice, like that person is probably going to think that you're smart.

• 1:44:14Speaker 02

  I have so many thoughts on this. I think first is, I think a lot of people actually make fun of me for writing. Because in the inside of a large company, you know, or you're pushing a power. It's not obvious why you want to tweet or why you want to write. You're like, why are you wasting this time? But you know, it's such a real superpower when you write, because it pays off in these nonlinear ways that you never really understand. When you're able to help people finding great people in so many ways. So for example, a lot of people come ask me, you know, I want to get into product management. And I don't have either, you know, the right background. I'm in like a different role and how do I get in? Do I just apply, you know, coal to this company? And chances are, if you apply coal, you probably not, nobody's going to look at you, you know?

• 1:44:57Speaker 02

  Because some resume, you're going to get screened and not because they're terrible people. They only have finite amount of time. And if someone has not been doing product management, you just don't have enough time to go through every single person. Now, I always say the exact same thing, which is there's one sure way to get every head of product or CEO's attention, which is you write a doc or a set of tweets. You talk to them about the biggest things that company or the product should be focusing on, they're not doing. Write a strategy memo or bright marks, do whatever it is that you're good at and just send it to them or tweet it even better, tweet it. And I guarantee you the CEO, the founder, the head of product, they will reach out to you and they will grab coffee.

• 1:45:35Anthony Pompliano?

  They'll be super impressed if somebody's critically thinking about their business.

• 1:45:38Speaker 02

  Right. And honestly, they read it and they share it every single time. And I know I was talking to somebody who wanted to break into company and this person, he had like no background in tech, no computer science background. And it is really challenging to break into product management and you don't have that. But he wrote this memo, this, you know, really hot startup founder saw that memo and got him in it and he knows what's like a product role. You know, I that's I think and I'm not saying you need to do it just because you got a job, though it's actually a really way to go get a job and have a portfolio. I think it really pays off in these nonlinear ways, which are unintuitive. Which is why like I recommend everyone write online, beat a tweet, a newsletter, a blog. It's a living portfolio of your work and it's going to pay off for you.

• 1:46:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, uh, it's why Twitter, I think, is so powerful. Is because you it's it's kind of like reading somebody's conscious stream of thoughts. Right? It's like, what is that person thinking about today? Paulina usually gives me a hard time. She says there's times where like we'll have a conversation and 20 minutes later she sees me tweet something and she's like, are you subtweeting me?

• 1:46:41Speaker 02

  Yes, I I the same, Artie, Artie, she's like, yeah, I get the same thing.

• 1:46:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's not always about like your relationship or her. It just might be a conversation that we had and she's like, hey, like tag me next time, right?

• 1:46:54Speaker 02

  First of all, both of us need to start doing that. But you know, I I think, you know, there is a certain, I think, one of the hardest thing, one of the things people find really hard about Twitter is I think the best tweeters are on this efficient frontier of being vulnerable. But also not doing something will blow up their career. Like Jared Diamond, you know, in Road to Gunship, he has this fantastic analogy of like a civilization, which is too chaotic, falls over a cliff. But if you're not changing enough, you know, you get stale and you die. And I think the best tweets are something like that. Where, you know, if you're not vulnerable, you know, if you're not open to people criticizing you or giving you tough feedback, you will never post anything interesting.

• 1:47:37Speaker 02

  Which is why, you know, like so many people, you know, who just post press releases or, you know, or are so scripted are not interesting people to follow. But on the other hand, you know, so easy to blow up your whole career using Twitter and you need to find what I call that edge. The edge is magical, like Naval, for example, one of the best people I've found who's found that edge. And there's something in you, it takes some courage because it's such an unnatural thing to be somewhat vulnerable and you're going to get a lot of flack for it. Your friends are going to tell you why you're doing this, it's an obviously stupid idea, a lot of Random strangers on the internet definitely going to tell you it's a bad idea. But there's something magical about putting out your ideas, knowing they're going to be wrong, but getting feedback and getting the smartest people to talk to them. Because when you do that, when you share these ideas, it kind of pays off.

• 1:48:22Speaker 02

  You find a smart people who come back to you and you gravitate towards you and you build these communities over time. And that's something magical. So.

• 1:48:30Anthony Pompliano?

  You you attract like minded people.

• 1:48:32Speaker 02

  Yes, and and you form these connections which you never can. And Twitter, by the way, is amazing for that. Twitter is the best place to meet like minded people around pretty much any community. Like, for example, I recently started tweeting, I got interested in spy satellites. You don't know that there is an active sub community of people who are on the world amateur astronomers. Or I don't know what the term is, but they track spy satellites.

• 1:48:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So they're tracking the spy satellites to try to understand where they're positioned in the world.

• 1:49:02Speaker 02

  In fact, they already know where all the positions are because they can track all the launches. So, for example, there's this guy and I actually posted a link in my recent newsletter. When you remember when President Trump posted this photo of this Iranian reactor blown up? This guy, who's this Dutch professor, he doesn't have a day job connected to satellites. Just using that photo and the angle of the sun computed which satellite it was. And it was a previously unknown satellite. And second, that it had an imaging sensor that the US had never admitted to. And he just does it using just the photo. And there's this amazing blog post in where he breaks the math of like trying to analyze the sun's angle and the trajectory of the earth. It's amazing. And so you have these weird, kind of eccentric set of people around the world who do this.

• 1:49:46Speaker 02

  And they put up these little cameras on their porches at night, which track satellites as they pass by. And they're like, well, do I know this thing? Do I know this thing? And they share, and this is email list, which I joined for a period of time, then it got very nerdy, where they shared, you know, this information. And it's this really, let's be clear, it's a very nerdy niche activity. It's all the fascinating, don't you know that from your backyard, you can track pretty much any spy satellite from any government, which I didn't even know about. And I found all these people on Twitter. I know, I know, follow all of them. I know have a list of people who are all into tracking spy satellites. And you're like, where would you find that? Like, where would you find that group of people if not on Twitter? And it only happened because I put out this tweet about, you know, this Trump photo. And then somebody else had replied, added someone else, and then it kind of became a thing.

• 1:50:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of satellites, believer or non believer in aliens?

• 1:50:37Speaker 02

  Um, can I, I'll answer this in a different way.

• 1:50:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:50:41Speaker 02

  There are people ask me a question, which is what are things that have changed my mind on?

• 1:50:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:50:47Speaker 02

  Okay. And my top answer is always when I was a kid and until five years ago, I believe that meeting aliens was a good thing. I know meeting aliens is a terrible thing.

• 1:50:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, why?

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  And it's, and very early in life, you have like one book or one moment where you know that changed your mind. But I have this, which is, uh, I'm going to butcher his name, uh, Chick Chin Liu, who is one of the most famous, one of the most awesome sci fi writers of her time. I wrote this Chinese sci fi novel called The Three Body Problem. It's now a trilogy.

• 1:51:16Anthony Pompliano?

  The Three Body Problem.

• 1:51:18Speaker 02

  Yes, it's now this very famous trilogy. It's probably one of the most famous literary works to come out of China uh, in the last 10 years. It's definitely the most well known work of sci fi in the last like five, 10 years. And I don't want to spoil it, but the, this trilogy roughly deals with humanity running into an alien race. Uh, I, I, can we nerd out about this for a little?

• 1:51:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course. So, so just so you have context, on the podcast, uh, this all started because I used to ask if there's uh, such thing as alien pets. So we always talk, think about alien like a race, right? But we never think about, well, like, are there multi-species? So like, are there pets and stuff? So that kicked off the whole aliens thing. Uh, I've had 200 plus people answer the question, all kinds of crazy shit. Uh, and one of, I think you are now only the second or third guest ever to, uh, basically, uh, pontificate about, wait a minute.

• 1:52:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Every single person in the human race that has been invaded, has it turned out well? Like, like pretty much across the board, the invader usually has a significant advantage.

• 1:52:20Speaker 02

  So this book, by the way.

• 1:52:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So it sounds like that's kind of what you're talking about.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  A little bit. So the, the trilogy basically says, it's called, there's a theory and, uh, it's called the dark forest theory.

• 1:52:29Anthony Pompliano?

  The dark forest theory.

• 1:52:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I don't want to spoil it. I don't want to give you just, but the rough contours of it is space is so vast and communication is takes so long and you have so little context when you're communicating that you can't assume good intentions. So for example, I, by the, I'm sure I'm butchering this and I'm sure, you know, your listeners. I'm going to point this out, but my interpretation of it is, you know, we often sometimes think look, alien races are going to be so evolved that, uh, you know, that, you know, they don't want to harm us. They're going to be beyond like warfare, et cetera. I think what the book makes a very convincing argument for is alien races can't trust each other because of the very nature of space. So the safest thing to do is to never being spotted by another alien race. And the more you spot them is to try and destroy them.

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  And they, yeah, and the, the book is fantastic. Uh, there's a reason why it's one of the most famous sci fi books of recent time. It really put reasons this out of why it's from a game theory perspective, it's the smartest thing to do. And so that kind of changed my mind where, you know, when I was a kid, I loved sci fi, you know, I, one of my favorite works of all time is Carl Sagan's Contact. You know, the SETI program I used to obsess over that, uh, I love sci fi, but now, you know, I'm like, uh, you know, sending, you know, these probes into space, which have like basically a homing beacon on humanity. It's like maybe one of the most reckless things we have ever done. And I'm sure a bunch of you listeners are like, oh my God, there's somebody nerdy geeking out. Uh, I just go read the book.

• 1:53:52Speaker 02

  There is a very well thought out game theory perspective on why it's a bad thing. It's called the dark forest problem. The book is called the three body problem.

• 1:53:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Three body problem has the dark forest.

• 1:54:01Speaker 02

  Theory, the dark forest.

• 1:54:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Theory. Okay. Uh, before I let you go, you could ask me one question, but first, uh, what's your thoughts on Bitcoin? We're supposed to talk about Bitcoin, but, uh, we're, we're going to spend the last five minutes talking about that.

• 1:54:11Speaker 02

  Uh, I heard it sleeps and naps a lot. Is that true?

• 1:54:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I, to be honest, uh, so the first time I ever tweeted this, uh, was like, I don't know, some bank was down or, or what, something happened or Instagram went down or something. And I was like, you know, Bitcoin never goes down.

• 1:54:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It was probably one of the, uh, least thoughtful things I've ever tweeted in the sense of like, it was a thought that popped in my head. It was kind of like half funny, but true and whatever. Fired it off. I put my phone down. I remember I like came back and was like, oh my God, people like that one really worked. So I did it a second time. I think like by the third or fourth time I did it, then it like became a thing or it's like this kind of like repetition becomes a thing. And, uh, I forget what sir, it might've been Twitter, either, no, it could've been Twitter. Maybe it was Instagram again. It's like something went down. Uh, this is maybe like four or five months later. And I didn't tweet and I had all of these people like tweeting constantly Bob, something's down. And I was like, all right, this is getting out of hand now.

• 1:55:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it just like became this thing, which is like, it kind of is like the meme is the message. Right. But

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  Very Marshall McLuhan.

• 1:55:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course. Well, exactly.

• 1:55:18Speaker 02

  Which any Facebook employee gets to learn about on day one.

• 1:55:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I, I think people are surprised at the books that, that they're given. I remember, was it Sam Lessin? I think he gives out Snow Crash.

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  Snow Crash is a big deal. Cox was very much into McLuhan.

• 1:55:32Anthony Pompliano?

  McLuhan.

• 1:55:32Speaker 02

  And the media is the message.

• 1:55:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:55:34Speaker 02

  The medium is the message, rather.

• 1:55:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And there was one other one, but those are the two that I remember.

• 1:55:38Speaker 02

  I think Ready Player One is very big on the VR AR side for sure. Okay, okay. One question for you.

• 1:55:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait, no, no, hold on. What do you think about Bitcoin?

• 1:55:46Speaker 02

  What do you think about Bitcoin? Well, I am, you know,

• 1:55:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Can't avoid that question.

• 1:55:50Speaker 02

  Oh gosh, I, you promised me no crypto questions.

• 1:55:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe's smirking in the corner. So you definitely can't, can't avoid it.

• 1:55:56Speaker 02

  Well, my, I have, you know, a not insignificant person of a net worth in, yeah, Bitcoin. I'm hodling, you know.

• 1:56:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Nicely. Okay.

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  So I

• 1:56:07Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a start.

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  It's a start. I, when I had free time in past years, I dabbled. You know, I wrote my own solidity apps. I wrote kind of the first generation of dApps. I even traded on many shady, you know, Asian trading sites, which I now can't seem to get login back into. Well, what do I think? So let me kind of lend a personal twist to this. So I have a mom in, back in India. She lives in Chennai and every, every few months.

• 1:56:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Sorry, I'm laughing because you said, I have a mom. We all do. Okay, go ahead.

• 1:56:41Speaker 02

  Well, and you know, she's, you know, she's a little bit older now and you know, like, and your Indian viewers would really appreciate this, you know, as like a, any good Indian child, I try and like send money back every once in a while.

• 1:56:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:56:54Speaker 02

  And it is a painful, painful process. Like I go through this arcane, you know, very well-known companies with these arcane set of UI with like a crazy grid. And it often fails for some weird reasons. And, you know, I just think there's something very Powerful about like changing and reinventing and decentralizing all that. So you know, and look, I am not, you know, a crypto libertarian. I I definitely very interested in my technology angle. I I love, for example, when Vitalik Vitalik wrote the state of crypto a few weeks ago, I went under like every single paper, you know, he was referring to in there. But I think I come back to, you know, why, why should Facebook's Libra exist? Or what is the promise of Bitcoin? I come back like, why is

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  it so hard to send money to my mom, right? Because like, India and US are both very civilized countries with uh with sort of this financial infrastructure. But for me to even send like a small amount of money is hard. It has so much friction. And then she, you know, and you know, she's almost eighty now. She kind of has to figure out, well, how do I then convert into actual money, which she can then go spend on, which sometimes she she can't figure it out. So anything which, you know, and those barriers shouldn't exist. And anything which can help with that, I think so probably for my mom.

• 1:58:06Anthony Pompliano?

  You you are hitting on something that I think the whole crypto community has done a really bad job of actually. Uh, and if you think about like a great startup pitch, what do they start with?

• 1:58:17Speaker 02

  The story.

• 1:58:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's, here's the state of the world, right? And this thing is gonna happen. And here's how it's gonna look in the future. Uh, I think that crypto, for the most part, not not, this isn't true in every sense, but in most part, uh, people like to go to, there's this thing in, we're here, we're gonna change the world. But like, explaining what you just did about, here's a pro, like a real life problem that people have, we can fix this problem with this product, right? And here's how that'll change. Uh, I think that that's been missing a little bit. I actually think that companies that have been started in the last like three or four years are doing a much better job of doing it. Um, some of that's because you get people who have more experience in kind of the tech world and and building companies, etc. Uh, but they're being teamed up with uh,

• 1:59:02Anthony Pompliano?

  people who are like very much crypto libertarian, uh,

• 1:59:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:59:05Anthony Pompliano?

  and that type of

• 1:59:06Speaker 02

  I'll give you an example. You had, I listened to your podcast with Brad Gollinghouse of

• 1:59:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  By the way, his memo, fantastic, also on my site. I heard

• 1:59:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Does he have a good one?

• 1:59:14Speaker 02

  He mentioned it on the podcast, the peanut butter memo

• 1:59:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

  Legendary memo. But there's something else he said. On your podcast, it was super interesting where he said he often sit in these conferences and you hear and look, I am a computer science engineer by background. You know, like I used to write Paxos algorithms. So, you know, anything which is about consensus, I love all this stuff, right? But he's talking about when he sits in this conference and he's like, but what is the actual problem you're trying to solve? Which often to an outsider seems like some business or management speak, but I like to think about like back in human terms like. I want to send, let's say Bitcoin to my mom, you know, how do I do that? How would she understand it? How would she actually spend it at the local store, you know, around the corner she has? How does all of this work? But that's the deal problem because I know it's how hard it is for me to do that right now with the current French infrastructure. I would love a Bitcoin to make that better.

• 2:00:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, look, I think it's gonna happen at some point, right? I think it already, let me rephrase. I think it already is in some aspects. So like. On Saturday, it won't settle. Bitcoin will do it, right? So kind of the it's always up, right? There's lower fees, right? Okay, that's great. But again, is the UI perfect? No. Can there be improvements? Of course, right? Is there an education kind of obstacle for people just to understand what is this? How do I transact it?

• 2:00:32Speaker 02

  Of course, India, for example, is a very weird place with crypto right now. So.

• 2:00:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it legal? Right? It's super simple question.

• 2:00:39Speaker 02

  I'm gonna get out of here and talk about this next time I go into India. So I think you have all these like. These incumbents, you know, who are trying to feel like what should do with this. Some countries, obviously, you know, you have the Chinese government who are like leaned in. Others are like, well, we want to take a wait and see approach. So that's like a huge factor.

• 2:00:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What one question you have for me? It's a lot of fun, man.

• 2:01:00Speaker 02

  Oh, my. Thank you. I want to think of a good one. I'm struggling. Okay.

• 2:01:07Speaker 02

  Okay. At this point in 2020, do you think?

• 2:01:12Anthony Pompliano?

  We're 16 days in or 20 days in.

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  Two questions. Who do you want Nakamoto to be? And do you think the world should ever find out his or their?

• 2:01:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:23Speaker 02

  Identity.

• 2:01:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't even know if this is controversial anymore. I don't want to know. And I think that it, one of the strongest parts of Bitcoin is that we don't know and we'll likely never know. And the reason.

• 2:01:35Speaker 02

  It's because it's you, right?

• 2:01:37Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I'm not even, I don't even have 1% of the intelligence of 1% of the intelligence required to create something like that.

• 2:01:47Speaker 02

  He winked at me. You can't see it on, you can't hear it on the podcast, but he winked at me.

• 2:01:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I can't even figure out how to make my cellphone work in the office because we don't have good cell service. Definitely not figuring that out. No, but it's this idea, I think it was Marty Bent was the first one that I heard say like the immaculate conception, right? And so if you think of like, if you really boil down what is money, money's a religion, right? And that religion is the belief that when I hand you whatever the currency is, whether it's a digital currency or physical currency, whether it's fiat, bitcoin, whatever, you accept it because you and I both believe it has value, right? Now, when you look at why does it have value, except there's a whole bunch of explanations, whatever. But when you think about that, there's not very many successful religions, meaning that there's people who subscribe to it in the world where there's a single

• 2:02:33Anthony Pompliano?

  person that is alive that everyone looks at and says, that's the leader, right? Now, there's the kind of extremist type, you know, the people who end up like all drinking stuff and like mass suicide, like all that kind of crazy stuff, right? But like a quote unquote legitimate, and I don't even know if that's the proper way to describe it, but like a mainstream religion where the person is still alive who's considered the leader. If you look at fiat currencies, there's no single leader, right? Now, there's in many cases like a central bank, that central bank, the leadership switches out every so often, etc. But no one thinks about like, who's the creator of the US dollar, right? It's more of this like facade of an organization that you can't really touch or feel. Bitcoin

• 2:03:16Anthony Pompliano?

  has the same thing. And I think that if it lost that, right? Because it became very apparent and verifiable, like this is the individual who is Satoshi Nakamoto, or the group, especially if they're still alive, a lot of kind of that magic goes away. And so you, I don't think that it's necessarily like a fatal flaw, but it definitely causes some problems and challenges. What I don't know is like, there's a lot of people who think Hal Finney is Satoshi Nakamoto, how Finney's passed away. So like, okay, maybe that still has some of the magic because he's passed away, right? But, but I don't really know. And so generally, like, I don't-

• 2:03:59Speaker 02

  Do you think it matters at this point?

• 2:04:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, if the person's alive, I think it does, right? Not in the sense of like all of a sudden Bitcoin's worthless, but like Vitalik has it with Ethereum.

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

  What are the persons like out there, you know?

• 2:04:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Vitalik has it with Ethereum, right? Like Vitalik spends a lot of time answering questions about Ethereum's progress, even though Vitalik is he's incredibly important. He's obviously the creator, if not, you know, a creator. But it's not only up to Vitalik in terms of like, he's not writing all the code, right? There's much other people.

• 2:04:31Speaker 02

  Vitalik is interesting because he's such a good spokesperson and symbol. Just one of the smartest people that you can ever encounter.

• 2:04:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 2:04:37Speaker 02

  What if, you know, he was somebody who was getting into scandals all the time? Going back to a LeBron example.

• 2:04:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Huge problem.

• 2:04:42Speaker 02

  What he was on like TMZ, you know, after Bender every single night, like it would probably impact Ethereum.

• 2:04:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 2:04:49Speaker 02

  But I'm just laughing because you just imagined Vitalik.

• 2:04:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and he's like, kind of like, um, I mean, he's a little weird, right? To describe it this way, but he's not a mythical type figure, but, but he's, people realize that he's different.

• 2:05:02Speaker 02

  Right?

• 2:05:03Anthony Pompliano?

  He's obviously incredibly intelligent. The intellectual horsepower that he has is, you know, bar none compared to most people. He wears like the unicorn shirts and like, just like his whole mannerisms. Like you can just tell like, hey, that guy's different, right? And so if you take that to Bitcoin, like I think that it's just, you're 11 years in now, right? So you kind of take it away. The part that I do think would be fatal is if it came out that it was a government organization. So if that was, um, again.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  It's very unlikely though, given, I mean, for them to be on the some of the cypherpunk email list back then, that's.

• 2:05:42Anthony Pompliano?

  This crazy shit that's happened, right? The world, the world is crazy, but I, I think that it's, um, again, verifiable. So not the conspiracy theories, not the like, hey, I stitched together all these photos and like made a YouTube video and edited it somehow to make it look like something happened.

• 2:05:56Speaker 02

  It was on YouTube, it's true.

• 2:05:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Very true in today's day and age, but like it was verifiable that, uh, it was an organization, you know, associated with a government, etc. I think that would be a, a big issue and potentially fatal. But the other piece of this actually, that's really interesting to me is, uh, at what level of penetration in the ownership can be known without it being an issue? So like, forget the creator, take the.

• 2:06:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Top 10 holders of Bitcoin. I don't know how many are known, but let's say five or six probably. Well, do we care that we don't know the other four? What about out of the top 20, the top 30, the top 50, right? Like the if you're in the top 20 holders of Bitcoin, like you're probably holding more than 100,000 Bitcoin. Like, pretty big number, right? And so like, the whole ethos of Bitcoin would be that we don't ever find out who those people are. But like, if that becomes, you know, publicized, there's some people, organizations, like, we'd be like, oh shit, like, that's bad. Right? Not bad because the asset's bad, but just like, I see now that there's going to be people who are upset that that person owns a lot of this. Right?

• 2:07:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:07:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I think that there's kind of like various levels of

• 2:07:05Speaker 02

  Fascinating.

• 2:07:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Of thought process here.

• 2:07:09Anthony Pompliano?

  But again, like I always fall back then on like, I have this theory in startups of like, it's a, what is it? I think it's the law of energy. I don't know. I'm embarrassed myself right now. But basically things that are in motion stay in motion, things that aren't in motion, you know, don't. And startups are very similar. Like if you find a startup and they have traction and data points and like progress and like, it's very clear. This isn't just like, hey, we had a bunch of ad spend, but it's working.

• 2:07:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:07:36Anthony Pompliano?

  It's likely that it's going to continue working, right? For the most part, if something is like stagnant and they can't seem to like get that inflection point. Every day that goes by gets harder and harder to like, all of a sudden that now it starts working. And so I think that Bitcoin probably more than anything has benefited from this because it's like 11 years of being attacked in the media and technology and all these different things, like it's still going. It's likely that it's going to keep going regardless of what we throw at it, including, you know, who the holders are or whatever. But I don't know.

• 2:08:07Speaker 02

  It's like reflexive in the George sort of sense, right? It creates momentum.

• 2:08:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think all of these intricacies and kind of complex questions are like, why people are so fascinated with it. Right? Like, like if you, if you like to think about kind of these multi-dimensional problems, Bitcoin's like the perfect thing. Right? You're like, oh, wow, there's the economic part, there's the technology part, there's like the government and geopolitical components. There's, you know, all sorts of game theory involved and economics. It's like, Jesus Christ, like how, you can't possibly think through everything. You can't understand it fully. And so there's always something new to learn, which I think is fun.

• 2:08:41Speaker 02

  Well, that's why they should subscribe to you.

• 2:08:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I I do enough shilling of people to subscribe to me and follow me on Twitter. I I have one last question for you. I usually don't ask people this. But you you have a one year old. What is the one thing that you've learned as a new father?

• 2:09:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, what's your one takeaway from a year of having a a little human to take care of?

• 2:09:06Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh. OK, that's a really hard question.

• 2:09:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Out of all the questions, this is the hard one?

• 2:09:13Speaker 02

  That's a really hard question. OK, I think one is. It's hard because I think. It turns out that all the classical, sometimes pithy answers are true. I think it's so dependent on your unique experience and it's also so profound that it's hard to sum up in just like a few words because such a profound experience in so many ways. What can I say? So I think, OK, let me, I don't know whether it sums it up. But I think one of the things which I always strikes me about being a dad is it's not often, and I'm going to sound, you know, somewhat sentimental and romantic here. And I'm sure you can feel free to roll the dice.

• 2:09:59Speaker 02

  It's not often in life that you suddenly have someone that you are like, oh, my gosh, I love this person without like expecting anything, without any transactional return. Now, if for a lot of us and and your parents, you kind of did that, you had that relationship as a kid. But often, you know, when you find a partner and you're lucky enough, it's like it happens over time, like nobody, you know. You know, and maybe you're very lucky, but like on day one, you're like, oh, I'm going to marry this person. And that's it. You don't have that. But when you have a child, like one is like immediately your heart and your your sense of who you are expands. Like, I never thought of myself as a dad or, you know, somebody who loved someone that way. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I know this person. You always had a new. So well, and. I'm sure other fathers listening or parents listening to this will definitely relate to that.

• 2:10:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:44Speaker 02

  It's really hard to explain it. It's one of these annoying things where people would tell me this before. And I was like, yes, yes, I don't get it. But once you kind of get it on the other side, that's one. Second, I think, which is kind of interesting to me is it puts you in touch with your own childhood. So every single day, I now remember something I never did. Either it's something my own parents did with me or something like I remember like when I was a kid, when I was a baby about two, I used to love playing with chairs. It was a silly thing. Every kid has their own thing. I love pretend that a chair is a train, a bus, airplane. I love playing with chairs. And I when I see, you know, uh, my daughter who just turned one do this, I'm like, I did something takes me back. And I something I never remembered now because you don't have really crystal memories. I don't remember this.

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  So it kind of makes you relive your own life and maybe a part of your life you've forgotten, which is sub four years, sub five years, you know, and you don't remember this. And you know, under kind of understand your own parents better. That's kind of this occasionally you become your own parents over time. You don't understand your parents a lot better. So that's kind of unexpected for me because I definitely expected in some ways that, you know, it's going to open up this new set of experiences and, you know, you're how you deal with tiny human being and that, you know, how to kind of protect them in this crazy world we live in. But the thing is, I didn't expect was it helps you understand yourself.

• 2:11:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:59Speaker 02

  And your own story and all these experiences you might have just forgotten. So that's been very unexpected for me. I don't know whether to answer your question.

• 2:12:06Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great answer. That's a great answer. All right. Listen, this might be the most fun I've had in a while.

• 2:12:10Speaker 02

  This is so much fun.

• 2:12:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I appreciate it. Thank you for coming to it.

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. This was so much fun.

• 2:12:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Shri Ram K dot com and Shri Ram K at Shri Ram K on Twitter.

• 2:12:21Speaker 02

  That is right.

• 2:12:21Anthony Pompliano?

  But not the other Shri Ram.

• 2:12:23Speaker 02

  Oh, not the other one. That that person's evil. We should not talk of them.

• 2:12:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, man. We're gonna do this again. I appreciate it.

• 2:12:29Speaker 02

  Thank you. This is so much fun. Thanks for having me.

• 2:12:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like 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.