289: Mike Maples on Finding World-Class Founders

Mike Maples, Jr is a Partner at Floodgate. He has been on the Forbes Midas List since 2010. He is one of the most successful early stage technology investors in the world with previous investments in Twitter, Twitch.tv, and Lyft. In this conversation, we discuss how to build a breakthrough company, why a founder's insight is more important than their original product, a new scientific method for identifying attractive markets, and what patterns Mike has recognized in the best founders over the years. ============================= This episode is brought to you by Koyfin. It is the only software tool that I use when trying to better understand the financial markets. They are a web-based platform that lets you analyze stocks, ETFs, mutual funds and other assets all in one place. I’ve been using it every day to track what's going on in the market and I think if you try it, you will too. Koyfin has a ton of high quality data, powerful functionality and a clean interface. The best part is that it is free. You can sign up at http://www.koyfin.com =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 45,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at www.pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Mike Maples Jr. is a partner at Floodgate. He has been on the Forbes Midas List since 2010. He is one of the most successful early-stage technology investors in the world with previous investments in Twitter, Twitch TV, and Lyft. In this conversation, we discuss how to build a breakthrough company, why founder's insight is more important than their original product, a new scientific method for identifying attractive markets, and what patterns Mike has recognized in the best founders over the years. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Koyfin. Koyfin is an awesome new product. It's

• 0:53Anthony Pompliano?

  the only software tool that I use when trying to better understand the financial markets. They're a web-based platform that lets you analyze stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and other assets all in one place. They've got charts and plenty of data. I've been using it every day to track what's going on in the market during these tumultuous times, and I think if you try it, you'll love it. Koyfin has a ton of high-quality data, powerful functionality, and a clean interface. It's basically a Bloomberg 2.0. The best part is that it is completely free. You can sign up at www.koyfin.com. That's K-O-Y-F-I-N dot com. Koyfin.com. You can also go into the description, and there's a link there to click. Don't forget, I also

• 1:35Anthony Pompliano?

  write a daily letter to over 45,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Pompletter.com. Again, the link's in the description. All right, let's get into this episode with Mike. I really hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 1:58Speaker 01

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

• 2:25Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Mike here. I'm super excited about this. Mike is one of the most thoughtful people, I think, in early-stage investing, and he's got all the war stories and scars to prove it as well. So, thanks for doing this.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  All right, Paul. Thanks for having me.

• 2:44Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. For those that don't know you, maybe let's just start with kind of your background before you got into investing with Floodgate.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if we go way far back, my first experience with business was a professional calligrapher in the sixth grade. And so I had a kind of a natural talent for it. And I learned that I could make money much faster and with less work by just hand labeling signs, you know, menus for restaurants, jewelry store signs and stuff like that. I'd follow my mom into town. So I was in the sixth grade, and you'd make a lot more money doing that than like weeding the flower beds and stuff. And so that's kind of how I got into it. And then when personal computers came out, there was this device called the Koala Pad. And my dad worked at IBM, and so we weren't ever going to get a Mac. And then, you know, Mac

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Paint came out. And so I thought, well, I want to create a version of Mac Paint that runs on a PC, but it's optimized for calligraphy. And so, you know, for folks who understand calligraphy, you have a wide brush that you tilt at a 45-degree angle to get that sort of the subtlety of the beauty of the letters. And so I got a Koala Pad, and I had it have different types of brushes, and I could do calligraphy on this Koala Pad. So that's how I got. And then after that, I started writing video games, and then went to Stanford. That was just kind of, you know, that was the beginning of it. Yeah.

• 4:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so after Stanford, did you know that you wanted to go into investing? Did you want to kind of build at the same time? How do you end up focusing exclusively on?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Not, yeah, not at all. It's funny, I would not have, if you had told me... Nine months before I started investing that I was going to be a VC someday, I wouldn't have believed it. So, I mean, we were lucky. We had good VCs in the companies I was involved with. Like when the company I helped start in the late 90s, Motive, had the top people from Austin Ventures invested, but also Jim Breyer from Excel at the time. And so, so I liked our VCs a lot, but you know, to be honest, I didn't really think about them that much, right? You're doing real company stuff. You're recruiting people. You're trying to avert disaster, make the quarter. And you know,

• 5:08Speaker 02

  you, obviously, they give you good advice and counsel, but my experience as an entrepreneur was not very connected to VC at all, other than they're good guys who are there to try to help us. So, so that one day, John Thornton from Austin Ventures said, have you ever thought about being a venture guy? And this was when I was thinking about what was next after Motive went public. And I said, no, you know, I don't think, I don't think I understand the job. I've never made an angel investment before. All my stock market is index funds. You know, I just don't think I know what I'm doing. And so he said, well, just humor me. You got some time. You could learn it. And so

• 5:50Speaker 02

  I have to admit, after about six months, I got pretty darn interested. And then I, I realized if I was going to do it, I needed to move from Austin to Silicon Valley, because at the time, you know, it was time to get the party started again with the internet. So, you know, you had what people call Web 2.0 and things like that. And so I just immigrated up to Silicon Valley, fly up every Sunday night and stay till Thursday. And, you know, my kids are still in school. So I just tried to make something happen in Silicon Valley, those four days a week for about a year or so. Yeah. And what was the biggest difference you noticed? Like when you got there, given the time period that this was, I think a lot of people who are especially younger

• 6:32Anthony Pompliano?

  In technology or Silicon Valley today, they weren't around then. So kind of what was like the big thing that you saw or big takeaways that was the difference between somewhere like in Austin and Silicon Valley?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it was interesting because what seemed to be happening was that the web was transitioning from a network of connected pages to now a broader programmable platform that was going to connect people and have stronger APIs. People had been taught about web services for a few years, but now you were seeing it writ large. And you know, you didn't really know what was going to go, but you kind of had this sense that important things were happening. And people were sick and tired of all the bad news, the dot com meltdown. And so this is probably late 2004, early 2005. And you go to things like the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference or the Emerging Tech Conference and Jeff Bezos would be there with his laptop.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  And, you know, Stuart Butterfield and F. Williams, all these people who ended up playing significant roles. You could have almost just written a check for everybody that was in that room and done well. So it was just an exciting time. And it was a lot like my early introduction to computers. I wasn't just so much interested in making money. It was just so intriguing. And the people who were involved were builders and they were interested in what's the right way to do this. And it was just a really interesting, magical time. So that was kind of how I got back. And there's just a lot more of it happening in San Francisco than anywhere else at the time. So I concluded if I was going to be an investor, I had to,

• 8:10Speaker 02

  there had to be an adequate selection of companies to work with to really make the model work.

• 8:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then at what point do you decide, hey, you know what, I think I've learned at least enough to go out and start Floodgate? And kind of what was the original idea there?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, part of it was necessity was the mother of invention. So no, no venture firms would hire me. You know, so you could imagine I'm this guy from Austin, Texas. I've never made an angel investment before, enterprise software. And I'm saying there's this revolution happening in the consumer internet. And everybody's like, yeah, that's great. And, you know, Motive had gone public and had done really well, but nobody at Silicon Valley cared, right? Because that's a company in Austin. And so it was, uh, the first 18 months were kind of tough. And it was not a very, um, not a very, uh, sort of helpful or auspicious introduction. But, um, while, but, uh, Foundation Capital, August Capital were nice enough to

• 9:09Speaker 02

  let me spend time there. And as I was there, I started to see more and more founders wanting to raise only a million dollars and they couldn't. And what, you know, not only was Web 2.0 happening, but the way companies were building, were getting built was changing. And so when I started Motive with four other people, you had to have, uh, an Oracle database on a Solaris server hosted at Exodus. Um, and, you know, it costs you a year and $5 million to start. And so I started to realize 500,000 is the new 5 million here. You have open source software, offshore labor, search engine, marketing, broadband penetration, and all

• 9:51Speaker 02

  the things that cost us tons of money and time to build from scratch was now off the shelf. I was like, you know, you're going to be able to, you're going to be able to get product market fit for an idea for like a 10th of the cost that you once could. And so, hey, why not, why not build a fund that's optimized, writing $500,000 checks instead of $5 million checks. That's, you know, there are a few other people with similar ideas. Josh Koppelman was just starting first round and in those days, we're kind of kindred spirits, the two of us and Steve Anderson, who ended up, uh, working on baseline and later a few other guys.

• 10:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then what, uh, the name Floodgate, uh, where did that come from? Or what was kind of the, um, the genesis of that?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were seeking a name that, uh, connoted the idea of an inflection. So like right at the, so that the idea was that come to Floodgate when you feel like you have an idea that's gonna, um, that's gonna create massive abundance in the world, but you want to find not just investor, but a co-conspirator. So, you know, I like to say, we want to back the top 0.1% of founders, but before the world believes. Um, and so, uh,

• 11:06Speaker 02

  So Floodgate was kind of like, we're going to partner with you right up to the point where it's time to just open the floodgates. And then it's like, we looked at people like Benchmark, Sequoia, Claire Perkins, Excel, Greylock as our customers upstream. And so we'd be the first people on Omaha Beach taking bullets with the founders and then, and then hopefully we could kind of get it to the next level where it's a little bit more ready for investment.

• 11:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then you've made so many great investments that I, I won't do it justice by rattling them off, off the top of my head. But one of the key themes is many of those businesses, when you invested, they didn't exactly end up doing what you had invested in, right? So whether it's Zimride and Lyft, or it's Okta, or Twitter, like you can just go kind of down the line, maybe just tell one or two of those stories. So people understand, you know, what I mean by starting out one way and pivoting, and then to kind of some of the lessons learned or patterns that you recognized over the years and seeing that.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, well, Twitch is kind of a fun example. So in 1997, or sorry, 2007, I'm in a coffee shop and I'm talking to the Weebly guys, so I just decided to invest in Weebly. And they said, hey, you know, we like you and we want to introduce you, a friend of ours, Justin Khan and his team at Justin TV. And as they're saying that, this guy walks in with a camera on his baseball cap with wires going into backpack. You know, it looked like he was like a terrorist or something with a camera on his head. And he said, he sits down, he says, I'm Justin Khan. And I'm like, great, Justin, it's nice to meet you. What like, what's up with this? Right? And he

• 12:55Speaker 02

  goes, well, I'm going to live cast my life at Justin TV. And I say, Justin, come on, that's stupid. Right? But, but like, what's in your backpack?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  And he describes how the internet is basically a hostile networking environment. And you think about it, YouTube had had a big exit, but it wasn't live. And that it was going to be difficult to create good live video experiences over the internet. And I looked at Justin and, you know, he's just barely out of college. And so same with Kyle Vogt and Michael Seibel and Emmett Shear. I was like, you know, these guys will be anti fragile. They'll, they'll never run out of money. They'll all live in the same apartment, spend next to nothing. And it kind of doesn't matter how stupid this idea is because the insight behind the idea is interesting. You know, that live video on the internet is going to be a thing someday. And I'm like, you know, if, if a team's going to do it, I could see these guys pulling it off.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  You know, Kyle had the technical chops. And so I think that's one of the first lessons I've learned is when I'm doing my job right. I realize that I'm investing in the power of the insight rather than what is the product for what it is right now.

• 14:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and, and it feels like in those situations, you almost have to ignore what they're telling you, right? In that example, they're basically telling you something that it sounds like you might not even believe they can actually pull off. It's more of, well, if you keep that insight and keep pursuing that insight, this will change. And you almost go into it, understanding that it'll change. Or does that just kind of happen and it's unexpected when there is some pivot or change in the future?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I guess the way I look at it is a startup is not a company. Like that's the first mistake people make is thinking that it is both in terms of investing and running them. And I think it's, I like to call it the startup breakthrough sequence. So there's three breakthroughs in a row. The, the first is the insight breakthrough. And the insight breakthrough comes from an insight from the future. And I like to believe that great startup teams have founders who are time travelers from the future. Who are bringing the future forward to the present and starting a movement to bring the present ahead with them. Too many startups today skip the insight phase completely.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  So they go straight to customer development. They, they try to go straight to the product breakthrough, which is, you know, what can I build? It's unique that people are desperate for. But it's just like, you know, Godzilla needs an atomic egg. It needs to be radioactive. And so. You can't skip the insight breakthrough. Then after the product breakthrough is the growth breakthrough. And so you kind of, you go from having an insight to the future to having a unique product that only you can build that people are desperate for, to now all of a sudden, we need to shift modes from MacGyver and James Bond. Now we've got to be more like Mark Watney on Mars. And we got to science the shit out of it because it's about predictable growth with a repeatable pattern. And everything we did in MacGyver

• 16:06Speaker 02

  mode isn't going to work anymore in the growth mode, Mark Watney mode. So it's like, you know, you kind of ask yourself, okay, when am I investing? Well, I'm investing at the beginning of the insight breakthrough. And so, all I can really evaluate is the power of the insight. And if I, if I try to evaluate much more than that and the founders, I just end up having false precision.

• 16:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I guess like, as you think about that insight breakthrough, part of it is not only how accurate it is, but also how important that insight is over others, right? So there can be kind of small insights or big insights. How have you seen kind of the most powerful ones? Is this something that the founder, they experience and they kind of learn from doing and then they have the aha? Are they sitting in a classroom and just thinking? Like, what have you seen there in terms of where those insights come from? And then how they actually evaluate which ones to pursue and which ones not?

• 17:08Speaker 02

  So I like to say there are three broad categories. I like to say there are plausible insights, possible insights, and preposterous insights. And so like, most people live in the present, and so they forecast. And because of that, they have projected futures. But projected futures flow from the present. And so you're not going to get much of an insight there. You're just going to get incremental improvements to what's already happened. And you're going to carry the baggage of what's wrong with the present ahead with you. So the plausible insights, an example of a founder I worked with is Todd McKinnon

• 17:47Speaker 02

  at Okta. So you meet him, he says, hey, I was VP Engineering at Salesforce. I know all the early adopter customers of cloud. The cloud is going to be a thing. There's going to be a lot of cloud apps. Customers are going to have problems managing it, making sense of multiple cloud apps. And so, once you hear that from him, you can't really unsee it. So it's like, not something that you would have understood going into the meeting, but once you hear it, you can't unsee it. And then you say, if anybody can do it, it's this guy, right? He knows all the customers. It's like, this is, this, it's not just why is he right, but what, like, why is this the team that will do it?

• 18:27Speaker 02

  A possible insight is like Marc Andreessen at University of Illinois, or Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC. So they, they get into this new field, and they may not even realize it yet, but they're in a time machine. So, University of Illinois was a supercomputer lab with superfast networks, and they were trying to help scientists collaborate. And so Marc builds the mosaic browser and web server to make the internet useful to him. And so he solved his own problem for what was missing in the future that he was living in. Bob Metcalfe, same thing. He does, you know, everybody at Xerox PARC had a hundred thousand dollar computer on their desk. But if you were at Xerox PARC, that was a personal computer.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  They all had whizzywig displays, and they, he connected them up on ethernet to a laser printer. And so Bob was like, when he started 3com, of course, this is how it'll be in the future. Of course, everybody will have a computer on every desk. Of course, everybody will want to share resources on a network. And so his, his ideas about how networks should be designed going forward, he just had a superior understanding of the future, because he was, he'd already been living there. So, you know, William Gibson, I don't know if you've ever read Neuromancer, but, you know, he says, the, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. And then the, the third type preposterous is Elon Musk. So the guy says, I'm gonna do a rocket company, and launch rockets into outer space and have

• 19:54Speaker 02

  them come back and land, and be reusable, when nobody's ever done that, except a government agency called NASA. I mean, other countries can't even do it, other than the Russians and maybe a few others. And Elon decides, I'm gonna start a company to do that. Or he starts an electric car company, when there hasn't been a successful car company in 50 years. And like, they've made a famous movie called Tucker, to celebrate the most recent abject complete failure of a new car company. So, now, people think that he's crazy, but actually Elon is the right kind of crazy. Because, you, when he's talking about first principles, what he's really talking about is...

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Inflections that are coming together and in all cases regardless of the insight, they're almost always in my experience powered by inflections that create exponentially improving outcomes that are the rock in the slingshot of the entrepreneur. So the entrepreneurs like David, he defeats Goliath by putting an insight into a slingshot, slinging it at them. So that's, you know, Elon understood that if you pull together battery technology, which is improving sensors, AI, big data, compute capacity, all of a sudden it became possible to pull all those pieces together into an electric car or a rocket.

• 21:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and so I guess part of this is having the insight is both the easy part and the magic, right? You've got to have the right insight. It's got to be a big enough idea, but it's also got to be on the right time horizon too, right? There's people who've been talking about, you know, we're going to put computers in each other's brains for, you know, decades at this point. And if you go back 20, 30 years, those people literally were considered crazy. Now people are like, that's probably going to happen, but you know, not next year. And really somebody's going to probably build a big company at some point around that idea.

• 21:58Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just understanding when and so how do you think about like why now or is now the right time?

• 22:05Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a great question. So, and this is where, why we think inflections are so important. So we like to say there are four types. One is technology, which is like Moore's law or, you know, sequencing a genome. The next is an adoption inflection. You know, X number of people use Bitcoin now, five years from now, 10x will, or 100x or 1000x will. The third is a regulatory inflection. You know, now telemedicine can be practiced across state lines. Will that be permanent? You know, new spectrum becoming available for communications. And then the fourth is a belief inflection.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  And a belief inflection might be, you know, now I kind of think I would like to do most of my doctor's appointments on telemedicine. Now that I've had to do it a few times, it's not so bad. And, you know, doctors and patients are starting to think that. So like a good why now example from a company we invested in Lyft. The technology inflection was the GPS locators in smartphones became 10 times more accurate with the iPhone 3GS. But if you'd, if you'd had the idea for Lyft or Uber, but you tried to launch it before that was true, it wouldn't have mattered that your idea was right. It would have been too early because the service wouldn't have worked, right? But then the other component of the why now was the adoption inflection.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  We could say, okay, it's 2010, 10% plus or minus have smartphones. Will more than 50% have smartphones in three to five years? We're like, you know, you could see that being possible. And so you say, okay, now let's, let's look out into a world where most people have smartphones that you can locate precisely. Maybe now you can create a transportation network. But whereas you couldn't have done it before, and if you'd waited another couple of years, you'd have been too late. Somebody would have gotten the jump on you and built a network effect before you could have.

• 24:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then I guess the last part of this kind of insight component is how big the insight is, right? And the reason why that's important is if you think about, there's a lot of investors who, they just say, look, the right markets, the team can be actually subpar. The market will win and kind of carry a subpar team. Maybe it's a little bit of an exaggeration and you need a, you know, above average team and a great market. So one would love to know your opinion on that. But also two, just how do you know that this market will be big enough if they can actually pull this off? Where it can drive the types of returns that make the power laws of a venture fund work?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the first thing I'd like to say about market is when it comes to startups, most people, in my view, misinterpret what a market even really is. So in a company, people tend to look at a market as something that you can map. It's like I'm Lewis and Clark, I'm gonna map all the tributaries of the Mississippi River, and I'm gonna say how high the mountains are, where the trees are, all this stuff. Where the Indians are, you know, where the arable land is. That's, that is a way to think of markets if you're living in the present, working at a big company. Startup markets are movements.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  And movements are started by time travelers living in the future, coming back to the present with a secret about the future. And they enlist other people initially, who believe their secret. And they start a movement. And the market is a consequence of the movement accelerating. And so as more and more people start to buy into the insight of the founder, of the visionary founders, this conventional wisdom and belief shifts to the point of view of the founders. And then there's this tipping point where the market tips. And now people in the present think that's a market, they start mapping it, they do all the traditional things.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  But, um, so the reason that I think that's important is that the mistake that I think some of my fellow investors make is they ask, what's the TAM, you know, the total available market? And I'm like, that's a myth when you invest in a startup. There is no market. The question is, is the insight powerful enough that a massive movement could start around it that will change the world? And so the insight is like the Archimedes lever of that founder who's gonna move the world. And they're gonna start out small. And by the way, most people are gonna disagree with them at first, right? Good insights, most people won't like it because most people live in the present.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  So you're trying to, you're trying to, the best startups I have ever been involved with are founders in on a secret that's right. Venture people who believe their secret, early customers who believe their secret, and they all go to war together to make this mission happen, which becomes this gathering movement. And the market itself is the accumulated enthusiasm and energy behind the movement.

• 27:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, one of the best ways I've heard this articulated is almost like this market expansion component, right? If you go back to Lyft or Uber with ride sharing, if you had just looked at it and said, oh, they can go after taxis. That's actually a pretty small market compared to what they ended up doing, right? They ended up actually, there's a lot of people who don't have cars now, they ended up going after black cars, they ended up going after taxis, right? There's so many different things that they were able to almost take a market and double or triple it, probably in size, if not more. And that's really hard to sit there with a spreadsheet early on and, you know, kind of find some numbers that tell you that story. You almost have to have a gut belief that that can happen, which I think is kind of your idea of this movement to some degree.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, like, too many people make the mistake, at least in startups, of thinking of markets as static, that it's the thing I need to discover, as if it's already there. But startup founders who are great understand that the future is designed by people with sort of a determined, deliberate view of what the future should be. And they realize that the future doesn't happen to us, it happens because of us and the decisions that we make. And so, you're not gonna, part of the vocabulary of product-market fit that I find problematic

• 28:41Speaker 02

  is, it's as if the market's there, I need to find it somehow with the product. But product-market fit is more of like a dance. And it's like you as the entrepreneur are the lead, and the market follows your lead by creating this movement that kind of goes back and forth in this dance. But that's, to me, that's the thing that, and we need more entrepreneurs like that, who are understanding that the future is what we make of it, that like, design is not just a word for making things look good, or even making products look good, the future is what we design. Design is a word writ large, in my, in my view.

• 29:21Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. I've heard you tell the story of, I think it was Ev Williams and Twitter and like running out to your car to get the check. Maybe explain that story a little bit and kind of how when you talked with them, it sounds like you made a pretty quick decision and knew relatively early like, hey, this is something I want to bet on, right? It wasn't let me run back to the office and spend six weeks and do a bunch of due diligence and all of that, at least from what I understand from the story.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so, well, there are two different ones. So Kevin Rose was the one where I went out to the car. So, so this was Dig and I was really interested in citizen journalism. And so I like to say, if I'm doing my job well, I've done all the diligence on the company for the most part before I ever met the founder. Because if I'm following inflections, I have a little bit of a sense of what, what, what types of valuable businesses might be built someday that haven't been built yet. So, you know, like with, with Kevin, I already knew who Dig was. I was super

• 30:27Speaker 02

  excited. And at the time, I had no reputation at all in the valley. And so I heard Ron Conway was this awesome angel investor. So I took him to lunch. And I said, just give me one chance to look at one project with you. That's all I want. Just one chance. All I need. And so he said, okay, whatever, you know, you get your chance. And so I said, you know, I imagine that you're going to be talking to this company Dig. I'm a huge fan. I know exactly what's up with it. I really want to see Dig with you. So we met Dig. Then I told Kevin and Jay that if, if they didn't let me invest, I'd go on a hunger strike in their apartment, which is probably a different tactic

• 31:09Speaker 02

  than most use. With, with Ev, it was I'd invested in Odeo. And a week after my check cleared,

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Apple decides to give podcasting away on iTunes for free. And at the time, they had monopoly in playback devices. So quickly, we understood Odeo wasn't going to be a business. And, and, you know, some investors were kind of disenchanted. And so I have to agree to give everybody their money back, which was just an amazing gesture. And, um, and I said, look, you don't owe me anything. It's, you know, you win some, you lose some. He said, well, actually, I'm kind of contractually, I need to give it back to you. And then he describes this thing they're working on. He's like, Jack is working on this thing with us called, uh, we're either going to call it voicemail 2.0 or TW TTR. And I asked him what it does. He says, you say what you're doing and what else 140 characters or less.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  This is before the iPhone. And, um, and I, I remember leaving, I said, well, okay, I want to invest in it. Whenever you turn it into something, he goes, it's not a company yet. I said, well, I want to write a check whenever I have a chance. And I went away from that meeting thinking, okay, maybe I've lost it for sure now. Um, but then it blows up at South by ironically in Austin, where, where I'd come from. And then, uh, and then I've called, it reaches out one day and says, were you serious?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Now's the time, if you want to do it. And by then Twitter was becoming a thing. It was, I was afraid of, he was going to have forgotten that I wanted it. So it was very gracious of him the whole way.

• 32:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And so like Twitter's a great example. First of all, it's an amazing story with the hunger strike. I, I, I think that, uh, that, that is definitely one way to win. And hopefully other investors don't take away that, uh, that they should start going on hunger.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not something I'd recommend. It only works, it's kind of like Maverick at Top Gun, you know? It's like a one time maneuver kind of thing.

• 33:05Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. But like with Twitter, for example, when it was still just TW TTR, what was the insight as to why you wanted to invest, right? So literally they said, hey, we're, we're going to go after this first thing. Odeo, it doesn't work. Here's your money back. And it sounds like really they kind of just described it over the phone almost. And, and you knew that you wanted to invest. Was it the team? Was it something that they had said in the pitch around like the insight? Just help me unpack that.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  It was, um, it was kind of a somewhat of a combination of a belief and an adoption inflection. And I, I, I didn't have the insight to understand the impact that the iPhone was going to have on it. But. Ev basically said to me, "Look, before I did audio for podcasting, I did blogger. You know, he wrote this blogger software and he got about a million people writing blogs." And he goes, "You know, podcasting is harder. It's, you know, as you know, it's, you just have to do more work. You have to know more things, particularly in 2005." And so he says, "You know, I figured maybe we should just go in the total opposite direction. And if people could write microblogs,

• 34:12Speaker 02

  it would be so easy that, just imagine if 10 million people did microblogs. And if 10 million people do it, then the burden of proof is on the people who are negative. Because then you've got something to build on." And I was like, "You know, I think he's right." And so, and at the time, I was like, I just felt a lot of confidence in them as people. And so I just thought, you know, that's right. It's a first principles exponential type of insight. But I'd love to say that I was smarter than that, but it was, you know, is pretty dang lucky.

• 34:49Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a little bit of luck in everything. Before we go on to some of the building stuff, you recently wrote a piece on backcasting. So maybe talk a little bit just like what that is and part of the argument that you made in that, in that piece.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, the idea was, is it, is it possible to apply theory to creating massive breakthroughs? And so a lot of people tend to say, "Well, yeah, it's easy in hindsight to say, 'Oh yeah, Bill Gates was awesome,' or, you know, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg." But that's, you know, survivorship bias. And there's some truth to that, right? If, if all you do is analyze the winners, you don't analyze the losers who didn't show up. But here's where I think the theory comes in. My theory is that basically inflections drive exponential opportunity.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  And that there's a cause and effect relationship. And you know, Moore's law, Metcalfe's law, all these different exponentially improving factors. Give them enough time and they'll breach the advantage of any incumbent. So the magic of the tech industry is it guarantees us a continuous supply of amazing, awesome, new, kick ass companies someday. That blow things up. And so like the, it's, it's almost like the gathering power of the entire ocean underneath you when you surf. Right. And, and so the, the backcasting, the theory goes. You want to take a set of inflections. Out into the future with you.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  And then map those inflections, imagine like the future is like a cone. And like the, the possible outcomes or the plausible outcomes are at the, at the center of the cone. And then the possible are like further out in the cone and then. Preposterously even farther. And so now you're, you're, it's like this future map of the future. And you're trying to locate insights. You bring armed with these inflections that you believe are going to be powerful. You try to talk to fellow time travelers. And tease out secrets about the future. And these secrets, these earned secrets are insights. And what I like to say is that there's no absolute best insight. There's sort of the, the best insight is very personal.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  It's about founder, market fit and every, every insight is a risk adjusted bet. About the future that the people in the present don't believe. And so Elon is willing to go way out there. And make preposterous looking bets to the present, but you know, he ends up being right. And so like, that's what I like to say is like, an insight is like a bet. It's a bet on a future that most people don't see. But it's also a bet on you. And like your confidence and your ability to be the person and the team to make that insight real. And I like to say on some level and insight, if you look at it through financial academia. It's an arbitrage.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  It's an arbitrage between your understanding, your better understanding of the future. And somebody living in the present who can only predict, project forward. And even though your likelihood of failure is high, your risk adjusted return is higher because of the upside is asymmetric.

• 38:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it almost feels like there's this balance between take Elon with the electric vehicle or the rocket. There's probably plenty of people who said, hey, rockets are expensive, right? And they don't quite get to, well, the idea of a reusable rocket. So then some people get to reusable rocket, but they say, well, there's no way to do that, right? How are you going to re-land a rocket? And you kind of, it's almost like a funnel where at the top of the funnel, there's a lot of people that understand maybe the problem. But as you get kind of towards the bottom of the funnel, people end up opting out and saying either it's not possible, they don't know the solution, or they can't build it. At the very, very bottom of that, it feels like there's somebody like Elon who says, not only do I have this

• 38:52Anthony Pompliano?

  insight, but also to your point, I can build it, right? And to me, like, that's the disconnect that I think you see is like, there's plenty of people who have the ideas, but the belief in being able to execute it, I think really sounds like that separates people from, you know, the best from everyone else.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  I think so. You know, the way I like to see it is, there's people living in the present, which is most people. And there's a small set of people who are out there living in the future. But the interesting thing is, when I talk to people living in the future, I very rarely ask them, well, what kind of a product do you think is going to happen? Because they don't want to think that way. Like, a futurist is like, well, no, you know, like, there's going to be a censor, you know, there's going to be a censor-free currency that's throughout the world and is, you know, independent of all governments. That's just, if you say, okay, well, great. What's the first step to that happening? What you realize through time is, it's not a good question to ask them. It's not a question they like

• 39:53Speaker 02

  to hear. It's not a question they have any expertise in. And so, you have this impedance mismatch. You have people living in the present who can't see the future. You have people living in the future who can't relate it to the present and don't desire to. So I like to say, the entrepreneur's job is to come from the future to the present and pull people in a structured way to the Future and and so backcasting is all about rather than projecting from the present to what the future will be. You go to the future, you work backwards and imagine the steps backwards through time. It's like you're at the top of a tree, you see the tops. And so you can look down and see all the branches I have to climb up the tree to get to the top.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  If you start at the bottom of the tree, you may climb what looks like obvious branches and you're out on a limb. And you can't get now, you can't get to the top of the tree. And so great entrepreneurs are able to to to sort of reconcile the impedance mismatch. They they go from the future to the present to the future to the present. And they can have the right conversations with all those people along the way. Because not just what you build, it's your your persuasive abilities, right? And getting people to want to change from their present state of comfort.

• 41:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I guess part of this too is like, I almost envision. There's a a visual of like, I know where I'm going in terms of maybe at the finish line, but but kind of the waypoint that I'm headed towards. And figuring out from where I am to there is part of the the company building or or the entrepreneur's job. How do you think about the best people, their ability to kind of constantly check if they're headed in the right direction? And specifically, one of the things that I've seen a lot is like, now that there's so much data available. It's really easy to use data to optimize for almost the wrong things rather than than kind of where you originally set out to go. So how have you seen some of the better entrepreneurs navigate that?

• 41:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Because you would think data is actually a benefit, but but sometimes it can be almost a distraction.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, it it's interesting, like what I find is that most most entrepreneurs see that that have been great are pretty firm about the future.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  But flexible and pragmatic about the present. And so they know that they have to convince people to go on a journey with them. And so, you know, I like to say, if you look at Star Wars as like a metaphor, the entrepreneur isn't Luke Skywalker, the entrepreneur is like Yoda. And you say, hey, look, I have this mystical set of powers and tools that's going to help you get from the world of today to a better world of tomorrow. But they have to be practical because they have to persuade those people. And people, people don't like to change, even when they're uncomfortable, even when

• 42:52Speaker 02

  people feel pain, often they're comfortable in their present state of pain because they're used to it. And they don't like to change because it gets them out of their comfort zone. And so the best founders I've worked with are somewhat rigid about their view of what the future is. And it's not even rigid, it's more just, it's inevitable. And I, and I get asked this sometimes, when I started Floodgate, or, you know, I'd been an entrepreneur in the past, people would say to me things like, well, there weren't really any seed funds at the time, what would you have done if you couldn't raise money? And it never occurred to me I wasn't going to raise the money. And, you know, it's funny because I couldn't even spell LP, but it was just completely

• 43:36Speaker 02

  obvious to me that, like, that wasn't the question that mattered at all. The question that mattered was, how soon are we going to back Thunder Lizards when they're lean startups? That was, that was what mattered. And so what I find is that a lot of the founders that I've talked to have been, who've been effective, they talk about the future like it's real today. And it's like, it's like they see it, and it's not a hallucination, it's just inevitable. And there's an inevitability about the founder where you're just like, wow, you know, this person, they're going to do it, they're going to make it happen.

• 44:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I guess part of this, you know, I've been fortunate to be around a couple of these entrepreneurs, you know, especially at Facebook, where just there was a top executive team where everyone was like that, right? You know, and they were kind of magnets to each other, if you will. But that, to me, when I would hear them talk, there was an element of, they were very humble, they're very realistic, but they were very confident in kind of a positive way that they were going to be able to accomplish whatever it's that they set their mind to. You balance that with, sometimes you hear founders pitch and the, that confidence is actually a level of arrogance to some degree.

• 44:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And how do you kind of filter between, you know, who is being pragmatic versus who's almost like saying the things that they think they're supposed to say? And trying to like decipher, you know, where to put the chips when you make those bets? And not almost get fooled by some confidence that ends up, you know, being pretty shallow.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, usually the people who are overly confident to the, and even arrogant, can't back up their insights. And when you, when you ask them, when you push them, they just wave their hands, you know, they, they just haven't been thoughtful. You know, they haven't gone down the IDMA's at all, they just sort of, and when you, when you ask them reasonable cause and effect questions, they, they kind of, their response is, well, you're just stupid. And whereas what I find is, the great founders, sometimes they are pretty arrogant,

• 45:49Speaker 02

  but they are tough minded about what are the critical insights that, that power their business? And what are the must do things that, that have to happen? They're almost like Pareto like in their approach to life. Andy Radcliffe of formerly Benchmark had this great anecdote that he told me when I first got into the business. When he was a VC, he would sometimes ask a bunch of questions to founding CEO. And if the founding CEO answered every question thoroughly, he didn't invest. And the reason is that the founding CEO was better at doing their to do list than prioritizing.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  And so what he wanted was a founder to say, look, if you want me to do another turn of this, I will. But like of the 10 questions that you asked, these are the two that really matter. So I went really deep on these two and I just did a barely good enough job on the others because I'd really rather talk about these two and why they matter. And what Andy tells me is that time and again, those are the founders that win because you just can't do it all. You can't check off everything on the list. And so you have to do that. You got to get an A plus at the small number of things, even if you get a D at everything else rather than a B plus at everything.

• 47:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's it's so funny to hear the best investors say the same, you know, five to 15 patterns. They just all articulated a different way, but those little things of just knowing what to focus on and being determined to see it through kind of stick out through all these conversations. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about COVID-19, obviously is raging on as we're recording this. What are you guys seeing kind of on the ground with these pre-seed and even some seed companies? That the virus is either changing, you know, things that they're doing. Or two, maybe markets that you mentioned telemedicine that maybe previously weren't there.

• 47:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Or you guys weren't excited about that now may may start to be ripe for someone to go ahead and and really build a big company.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so so there's there's a few areas that I think are interesting. Distributed healthcare, we can come back to that. I think that changes in regulation. And then just the overall problem of the cost ineffectiveness of our healthcare system. I think create an opening. I think that education, you know, now we're all finding out what it's like to homeschool our kids and on some level, we may not never want to do that again and never do remote education. But I think on another hand, we're starting to understand what works and what doesn't work. Related is remote work infrastructure. And so I think a lot of companies thought of remote work as,

• 48:48Speaker 02

  you know, distributed work is something that I might let people do some of the time. Um, but now I think people are going to be more willing to have it be a mainstream way. Relocalizing supply chains, I think, is interesting, particularly with 3D printing and advanced manufacturing.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  The, the, the other thing, though, that um, I've just been thinking about a lot is um, just

• 49:18Speaker 02

  kind of this, this idea that um, the government seems to be, you know, whether they want to or not, becoming an increasing fraction of our GDP. And that, that worries me a little bit, but I also have to be reality based about it. So I could, I could see a world where the government, in order to involve, in order to avoid deflation, uh, starts to fund back to work projects, sort of like at the, at the end of the New Deal. And if, if you believe that's going to happen, you could, you could maybe squint and see a possibility that some hard tech, you know, around transportation, climate change could get funded.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  That would have been more challenging for traditional VC to fund in the past. And so all of those areas I described, I think, have different belief inflections, technology inflections. But, but I think mostly it's accelerating a future we were already headed to, uh, just a little quicker.

• 50:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So you mentioned both remote work and um, I'll call it remote education or kind of homeschooling. Uh, those seem to have a lot of overlap because uh, the infrastructure may, you know, be positioned for different use cases. But for the most part, there's everything from communication to literally the ability to um, video conference and, and um, do all of that. How are you guys thinking about um, kind of what level of the stack to invest in almost, right? Is it something where you look at it as more of uh, platforms and marketplaces? Uh, is it something where you take up like an existing service, let's say like tutoring, and you just bring that online in, in a better way? You know, when you evaluate that, like, what does that framework look like to you?

• 51:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it's funny. For me, it always does start with inflections. And so, so for example, you know, I've been, I've been reading a lot lately about like the passion economy and people becoming solopreneurs and being able to be in business for themselves, which I love all that stuff, totally agree. But the way I would come at a question like that is to say, what are the inflections, technology, adoption, belief, or regulatory that startups will be able to use as a force multiplier to get a wedge into the market? Because you can believe that the passion economy is going to happen, but the beneficiaries or incumbents like YouTube

• 51:45Speaker 02

  and Instagram and, you know, Amazon and, you know, the people that make fancy camcorders and stuff like that. And so for me, it's, it's not enough to say that, that, you know, people coming back to work or want to do different things. I'm like, okay, I agree, or that there's a skill gap in the economy. I agree. You have to, you have to connect that to a change event that's bigger than any one startup, but that a startup uses as asymmetrically powerful weapon. And I found that that, that, that approach to things has felt durable for me in every market I've ever been part of. Yeah, like here's another

• 52:27Speaker 02

  example. People say, I want to sell, you know, elder care, you know, now's the opportunity for elder care startups. I'm like, I agree. What's the inflection that lets a startup win there rather than just traditional companies extend their product lines or sell more of their products? So to me, it always comes back to the inflection. That's the, that's the magic that animates startups.

• 52:53Anthony Pompliano?

  It almost feels like as you're evaluating the insight, you know, the three insights you just said are, I don't want to say generally accepted, but definitely they're not new ideas, right? Even to the point where you're saying, hey, I agree with you that that is a directional insight that makes sense. How important is it for the actual insight the founder has to be more nuanced than almost non-consensus versus it to be a consensus idea, but they just are, you know, they have a nuanced perspective on it, or they can just out execute people?

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and you know, your mileage may vary as an investor, right? So there are plenty of investors who would do a totally different set of things than I do, and they can be right, right? So it's kind of like, it's kind of like, what's your checklist and what's your access to the good opportunities? But I guess the way I, the way I look at it is, it's funny, I get pitched a lot by people and they'll, they'll tell me their idea and I'll say, well, you know, I think it should have some inflections and I can't see those yet. Can you describe them to me? And very often they can't. And, and, and so sometimes the response I get is, well, starting with inflections is obvious.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  You're not telling me anything I didn't know. And I'm like, okay, great. What are your inflections? And they don't have an answer, right? And so like, I guarantee you, if you, if you say, I don't know how many pitches you look at these days from founders, but I guarantee you, if you said, what are your fundamental insights? Most don't have a good answer. And so I'm like, just because it's obvious doesn't mean people do it. And, and so, so like, like for me, I'm just kind of simple. I'm like, if there's not an insight there, I get uncomfortable. But part of what I'm doing is I'm trying to provide a service to the founder because what I find is that when sometimes a founder has an insight and they just haven't put a voice to it.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  And when they can put a voice to their insight, then they understand in a Pareto optimal way, oh, this is where my real advantage is going to come from. This is the part that I need to stick the landing. Whereas this other stuff now that I think about, it's important, but it's not vital the way this is over here because that's where my weapon comes from. That's where my asymmetric upside comes from. And so I like to say you either have insights that you haven't figured out yet, or you just don't have any. And then you ought to ask, how do you feel about that? You're about to go to war for this startup idea. How do you feel about that?

• 55:31Anthony Pompliano?

  It almost feels like it's also a filter for persistence in some degree as well. Right to your point of like, if you don't have insights and you're running into the battle, at what point are you like, oh, wait a minute, this, you know, this is combat. This is not fun. I want to turn around and go home versus if you have that true insight and you really believe the world is going to look this way and that inevitability to it, it helps you weather some of those tough days and the downturns that a startup just, you know, is going to go through regardless of how great the founders are.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  So like, you know, love conquers all in a startup, right? And it's like, you know, all startups are impossible and you're going to get punched in the face over and over again. You're going to have people telling you your idea is stupid. You're going to have all these near death experiences. You're going to have bad luck come at the worst times. You're going to have founders arguing about which way to go. And so if you don't have authentic love for the insight and a determination to make it true in the future, you'll give up. You know, you'll quit when it gets that hard. Whereas, you know, love conquers all. And so, you know, I think that that's really important. And what I find is that, that people who, who have an insight about how the world should

• 56:48Speaker 02

  be, find it very hard to let go of that. You know, they find it very hard to unsee that or let go. They just have to see it come true.

• 56:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, I saw a tweet recently that you had where you were saying, no, that's a good one. You're saying basically like the fact that all of these younger people are being sent home essentially to their bedrooms, right? And they've got a lot of time to think, they're not distracted with their friends or kind of the traditional experience of school. It actually may lead to a lot more invention, right? They've got time to think and kind of do that. So maybe describe a little bit about why you think that's so important. I tend to agree with you, but just unpack it a little bit more in terms of what you meant by that.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so most, most great founders that I've met, I've also learned in their past, they built something for its own sake, not because they were going to get course credit, not because they were going to get an allowance, not, not for any extrinsic motivation, purely intrinsic. And they did it just because they got obsessed with a new field. And in fact, obsession is a word I like when it relates to founders. And you know, it rubs some people the wrong way. But to me, obsession is like you just, it's the last thing you think about before you go to bed. It's the first thing you think about when you get up.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  And when you're, when you're in a situation like a lot of these 14 year old kids are in now, they have time to kind of go off into their room and put the keep out sign on the door and pursue an obsession at a degree of, at a level of intensity that they might not ordinarily be able to do. And I think that's a good thing. So I think that we're going to find that a lot of inventions and breakthroughs from people who didn't know what the rules were supposed to be will, will come out of this period.

• 58:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's, um, we hope so at least for sure. One of the things you guys did at Floodgate recently that I thought was pretty cool is you created the anchor list and is very focused, I think, on operators and founders. Maybe talk a little bit about what that is and kind of the logic behind starting that?

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that, you know, what you find is behind a lot of these startups is some operators who, everybody who was involved with the success looks back on it and says, "I'm not sure it would have even happened without them." And they're usually kind of the unsung heroes or sort of like the offensive lineman in a football team, you know? And so, uh, these operators can be enormously helpful to startups. And so, we wanted to start to have a very highly curated list of who we thought the best startup operators are, which is important because a lot of big company operators provide precisely the opposite of good advice to startups. And so, Sean, who's

• 59:50Speaker 02

  our senior associate, is kind of heading this up and is very passionate about it. And so, we've gotten some really good judges and we're trying to identify the best operators who can help startups and just see where it goes from there. If nothing else, they get recognized, but if it goes beyond that, so much the better.

• 1:00:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And speaking of operating, I kind of want to end with a conversation around, the investing business itself is changing, right? And so, a lot of people want to ask investors about the cool companies they find and their process for finding those companies. But for those that do invest, they realize there's a whole nother part of the job that usually doesn't get talked about, which is building Floodgate, running Floodgate, and kind of thinking about your own business. What are those changes that you guys, you know, behind closed doors are talking about and kind of cognizant of as to how your business is changing as technology, you know, improves and the virus, you know, kind of goes and all that?

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that the thing we always try to come back to is, all great investing is about knowing something the market doesn't know.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  And so it's not enough just to say, hey, we were early. We've got a good brand. Let's jump into the scrum and try to win our share. And so we're always pushing each other to say, what is your idea that's not obvious? Because like right now, you know, it's funny, you'd think that seed pricing is going to go down, all this stuff. There's a good argument that it's going to go up. You know, the the series A firms and and the bigger firms are going to be less inclined to do series B and C rounds unless it's an overtly obvious compelling company like say Notion, and then they could just back up the truck and park a lot of money in it. But semi risky B and C rounds, I think are going to get done less. And I think that the big firms

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  are going to say, well, you know, writing a $2 million check doesn't feel that risky to me if I have a billion dollar fund. And so I think we might see more seed checks in the short term. And so if you think your business is just jump into that scrum and try to fight for your share of deals, I don't think that that you can ever be very good. I mean, I think you can do okay, but I don't think you could. You end up having a strategy that's based on fear of missing out. Whereas I think that what you you can still say, well, you can always have an idea that's not obvious. And you can always find startups that embody those non obvious ideas and be non

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  consensus and right as an investor, not just an entrepreneur. And I believe that you can always do that, that there's always a new frontier of getting good at that. There's always an opportunity that the market doesn't see. There's always group think in markets. It's always true. And so, you know, hopefully, we can hopefully, we can do that. But it's tempting, right? We start to say, gosh, we don't do as many events as this firm over here. Should we have a recruiting agency? Or should we, you know, have all these platform services and marketing programs and newsletters? And, you know, it's a every now and then, if you're not careful, you get caught up in the should we do that?

• 1:03:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, a very experienced angel investor once said to me, "This game's easy. You just have to see everything and then be able to get in the deals that you want." And I said, "That sounds really easy, but obviously incredibly difficult to be able to do." And it feels like there's a lot of, you know, the ground is moving a little bit in early-stage investing, some of it for the better, some of it not. But, you know, to your point, more and more people have newsletters, more and more people, you know, want to make sure they're top of mind. And it's almost a sense of what you described with founders, making sure they're focused on the right things, right? And kind of letting everything else just be. It sounds like you guys kind of go through that exercise yourselves.

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we try to be friends with, you know, anybody who's got new ideas of how to invest. You know, a lot of the operator angels, you know, folks like Jeff Morris, Brian Timmell, Bobby Goodlot, Ryan Delk, lots of these folks. We've decided, rather than think of it as a competitive threat or have a defensive posture, we should just say, "Hey, they're a fact, and let's help them and be friends and work on projects together, find a way to be good for the ecosystem together." And so, you know, I think that you can do that and still come out ahead. But, you know, it's a lot harder than it was in 2005.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  In 2005, it was hard to convince people that it was even worth doing. But now you got like 800 and some odd seed funds and climbing. You know, now it's, I like to say, when you invest, you got to decide, do you have fear of missing out? Or do you have joy of finding greatness? And so, I'm more of a J O F G sort. You know, I'm like, "It's okay if I don't see all the good ones, as long as the stuff I spend my time on is great. And as long as the people I'm in business with are really great, you know, I'll get my share and I'll just get comfortable with the fact that I can't see it all."

• 1:05:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you've got the podcast, Starting Greatness, and you've brought on, you know, great guests after great guests. And I joked with somebody recently, I said, Mike's cheating. He gets to talk to all the smartest people in the world already. Now he's just going to show it off to everyone on the podcast.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been fun. You know, if I was smart about it, I'd be a little more calculating. I'd be like figuring out the release schedule and how to game it so I get traffic and stuff. But I thought, okay, if I could, if I could have just the people who are the super performers and talk about when it was zero to one, that that would just be, that would be a good thing to put out there. And so I've just had tremendous fun with it. And so people that are coming down the pike are going to be pretty fun, too. I've got one coming out in a few days now with Steve Blank on COVID-19 that is going to be a little bit controversial because,

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  you know, we take some pretty extreme positions in it. But, but what the heck, you know, it's, the truth is we see it.

• 1:06:23Anthony Pompliano?

  It's, as you know, many of these cases, you can optimize the little things like release schedules. But at the end of the day, if the content's good, that's, you know, 80, 90% of the value, right? And kind of people will find the good stuff regardless of if you release it at midnight or some other time.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I hope so. And I mean, that's what we've, so far, it's just been less but better is how we're trying to think about it. And, you know, time will tell. And even if we never get a deal because of it, it's just been fun. And it's a fun, fun way to connect with founders throughout the world. And it's just, you know, 155 countries have downloaded it. It's just way, way more than I ever would have expected.

• 1:07:07Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. If people want to go find out more about you or Floodgate, where do you want to send them? Website, Twitter?

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably the best place would be Twitter, @M2JR. The podcast is Starting Greatness, so that's on Apple or Spotify, wherever. And then our website's floodgate.com. But yeah, I mean, and I like to engage with folks, particularly people who have these, there are these time travelers with these insights from the future. You know, those are my peeps.

• 1:07:45Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So before I let you go, I ask two questions and then you get to ask me one to finish. The first question is, what is the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  Gosh.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  One that has been poignant for me recently has been The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. And it's this woman named Bronnie Ware who was in Australia. And she would help people in hospice the last 90 days to six months of their lives. And she found out from these people, what are the things they wish that they'd done in life that they didn't get around to, or that they just, you know, I wish I'd been my authentic self. I wish I'd been not afraid to express my feelings. I wish that, you know, so there's this set of things, I wish I didn't work so hard. And so the book is really nicely done because it has an example of somebody dying who's pissed

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  because they missed this and they have no time left. And then there will be somebody who did it right. And they, you know,

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  they sort of end up having no regrets. And so that book was helpful for me because it was like, you know, you get so focused on winning the here and now that sometimes you got to come up for air and say, okay, if I'm in the last 15 seconds of my life, am I going to be like, oh shit? You know, I have one of these five regrets. So I like that a lot. I like books like that. I don't read business books as much. You know, I've always liked this book called The Alchemist.

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  You know, and I like a lot of Dumas books, like Count of Monte Cristo, who's such a good writer. But yeah, I don't, I don't read as, well, I read three books a week. So I, it's like depends on business and other stuff. But most of the stuff that sticks with me is longer term.

• 1:09:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think it's, uh, Bezos is the one who basically said, you know, most of the big decisions in his life, the way he decides what to do is he says, I fast forward, you know, till I'm 80 years old and then look back and say, which decision am I going to regret the most not making? And then he goes ahead and he does it. And so a very similar type of mindset there.

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  And every company I've ever started,

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  I was way more afraid of what it would feel like when somebody else does it. Then, uh, am I going to fail? Like it, it just, you know, in racing, the fast race car drivers say, you don't look at the pins, you look at the path through the pins. You visualize the path through the pins. And I think entrepreneurship's a lot like that. Like once, once you can't visualize not doing it, you're just like, well, I'll just find a way. I don't know the way yet, but I will find it. I'll find there, there's always a solution. There's always a path through the pins.

• 1:10:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Uh, the last question is, uh, aliens. Talk about, uh, the future. Uh, believer or non-believer in, uh, an aliens potentially existing?

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  Uh, I guess for the most part, I'm a believer. Because I think that really that's a question of how big do you think the universe is? And if you think the universe is really large, it becomes approaching a hundred percent probability that there's intelligent life somewhere. And it's weird. It's like, if you think that the universe is infinite, then by definition, you have to believe there's, in fact, you have to believe that

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  infinity kind of blows your mind when you really think about, because like the, the conversation we're having right now is happening in infinity number of times somewhere. Because that's infinity.

• 1:11:33Anthony Pompliano?

  You you you've hit on exactly why I asked that question, which is I actually don't care about the answer to the question. Is how people work through what their answer is, right? And you really can see the way that somebody thinks about. It's similar to my brother worked at an investment bank and he's, you know, he goes to the interview. And they're asking him how many golf balls go, you know, in a 747. Right, he's like, you know, basically, they don't care what your actual answer is, they want to see how do you mentally get there? Right, because the process is more important than the actual result to some degree.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 1:12:08Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, to finish up, what one question do you have for me?

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  Oh, boy, and I hope this isn't an unoriginal hackneyed question.

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  Do you think that? The dollar is a bubble that will collapse in our lifetime?

• 1:12:29Anthony Pompliano?

  This is the hundred trillion dollar question, so.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  Soon to be more.

• 1:12:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, so basically, here's my general thought. I'm going to give you two scenarios, and then I'll try to put a weight of confidence of them playing out. The first scenario is coexistence of a nation state.

• 1:12:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Backed global reserve currency like we have now. Coexisting with a very popular separation of state and money. Let's call it Bitcoin, right? And so to me, that is something that looks like the United States and many of its main trading partners end up. Continuing on the status quo, actually, it may get deeper entrenched, actually. But then there are some maybe smaller countries or countries who are. Not friends with the United States that end up saying, hey, look, let's get off this system and go our own way. This non sovereign thing is interesting to us. And so that coexistence is kind of path one.

• 1:13:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Path two is one that is much more adversarial and actually there is a.

• 1:13:43Anthony Pompliano?

  The nation state currencies fail, you know, whatever that ends up looking like. And then you get this non sovereign thing. On option one, I put a very high degree or a high probability. So I don't know exact numbers, but more than 50% likely that there's at least coexistence of fiat and a non sovereign currency that's used with some degree of popularity. When it comes to the adversarial nature, I actually think it's this weird thing where somebody once said to me, most things, most great things in life aren't something until they are, right? And, and, and that's a weird saying, but, but I think it really applies here in that it's $160 billion asset right now, right?

• 1:14:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think most people are looking at this like, what is this toy that these people on Twitter and Reddit are talking about, right? And, and even though we're 11 years in and it's had the performance it's had like, like it still doesn't matter to some degree. That will continue for, I actually think, you know, it could be five or 10 more years, maybe even longer. And then all of a sudden it really, really matters, right? And so ultimately this gets at the question that you're asking, which is, does the dollar fail, right? Can the US default? And I have a framework in my head, which I don't know is actually accurate, but I think it's at least interesting. So if you think of in history, every currency that's failed, each one of them basically

• 1:15:12Anthony Pompliano?

  were replaced as global reserve currency because another country invaded or used military might to establish superiority, right? And so, you know, Rome falls, okay, somebody else gets to put their currency as the global reserve currency. And really it's military might. And so that's what the United States has, and that's why the dollar has continued as it has. But that is all in the, the physical world, right? In the digital world, it's not so much actually who has the most offense. It's actually who has the best defense, right? And the example I use is, you know, if the United States hacks into China's electrical grid, we only can create damage until they kick us out, right? And then we gotta get back in again.

• 1:15:54Anthony Pompliano?

  But if they just never let us in, the defense actually makes you more powerful than the offense. And so in some weird way, Bitcoin having the strongest computing network in the world has the best defense in the digital world. Uh, and it has no offense, actually, right? So it's like 100% defense, 0% offense. And about a year ago, I wrote this thing and I said, you know, it would be, uh, to steal a line from Jeff Lewis over at Bedrock, it would be a narrative violation to think that a global reserve currency could reach that level of superiority without having an offense, right? Without having military might. Um, and so that's like a framework to me that, uh,

• 1:16:39Anthony Pompliano?

  is less about the dollar failing and more about like the game theory of people just slowly opting into, um, this thing that has, uh, the non-sovereign element to it. So on a probability of the US dollar failing, like, it's scary, right? Like, at the end of the day, it's just like, what does that world look like? I have an opinion, but, but like, that is a really scary development.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  And it's not obvious that Bitcoin is a hedge against it, right?

• 1:17:08Anthony Pompliano?

  A whole, a whole nother, you know, thing, right? Of like, you could actually be right that it happens, but be wrong on what the solution is, right?

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:17:17Anthony Pompliano?

  But when you get into this, um, I do think this is like the big question, right? And so today I actually wrote a thing that said, uh, you know, the treasury is gonna borrow $3 trillion from April to June of this year. And so I explained, you know, kind of how treasury bonds work. But I said, is it really debt if they're never gonna pay it back? And not so much not pay back the bondholders that they're gonna issue for, you know, this $3 trillion, but the federal debt, there's no path whatsoever, right? I don't care what your political belief is, I don't care. Both sides of the aisle, nobody has the intention nor the plan to actually pay back, you know, what'll end up being $28 trillion at the end of this year. And so it's like, you know, you get into this game of like, well, they can't really default because they could print whatever they want.

• 1:18:01Anthony Pompliano?

  But does that actually accelerate the failure of the currency and? You know, I don't know.

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  And then, so the concern I have about it all is if you think about bubbles, they're really usually a psychosocial phenomenon. And it's, it's something where nobody believes that it could ever happen. So that'll keep going. And I think that the average person I know just believes the dollar be here forever. But, but the problem is it failing is such a black swan event with such profound consequences. That, uh, first of all, it would be terrible. Uh, and, and second of all, um, it's like the, the fact that nobody believes it can happen

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  makes me more concerned that it could, you know, uh, so I, can I ask you one, another question?

• 1:18:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, before I let you do that, one other thing I want to say on this that, that, um, you made me think of is, uh, there's a lot of funds that, that obviously you know, uh, they basically lose a little bit of money every month betting on the black swan happening. And then when it happens, they make a killing, right? So there's an opportunity cost to doing it, but the risk reward exists. Um, the one thing about the dollar failing, so let's say Bitcoin would be the solution. There's almost no opportunity cost to making the hedge to do that, right? Because you, you can, you know, again, going back to that coexistence where you can actually, uh, be pseudo short the dollar by simply being long the other asset.

• 1:19:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, but it costs you nothing, um, in, in that. And so that's an interesting, uh, kind of caveat because normally you would have some opportunity cost there.

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, uh, and that, and that's to me, the best argument for buying Bitcoin is in the case of the extraordinarily rare event that the dollar is a bubble. It's the most logical thing to go up, or at least be worth what it's worth.

• 1:20:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I always tell people too, like, the part that scares me is like the, a lot of people in the crypto world will call it like the financialization of Bitcoin. I'm not worried about like the, the infrastructure or the people who come in, it's the narrative. And what scares me is like Bitcoin is such a binary thing. It's either gonna be worth tons and tons in US dollar, you know, terms, or it's gonna be worth zero. And when you start to financialize it, it then comes into, uh, you know, hey, it went up 10%. Like, the 10% doesn't matter, right? Cause that, cause if you hold this for a long period of time, it's either going, you know, way higher, or it's going to zero. And that risk profile, I think is really hard for people to, uh, to wrap their heads around as well.

• 1:20:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, so I don't know. What, you said there's one other question?

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, as someone who follows crypto pretty closely, um, what do you think are the technology inflections? That might cause a massive acceleration of adoption in crypto? Cause like, mo- most people, they'll say, well, people are gonna believe X, Y, and Z. I'm like, okay, great, I get that, but like, just humor me, is there a technology inflection? What do you think?

• 1:21:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So.

• 1:21:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I have kind of a, a two-part answer. So one is, we already had it, right? It, it with, uh, with the actual invention of Bitcoin, um, and so, and solving, uh, the double spend problem. And that was, uh, such a leap forward that really empowered all of this, right? If we don't get that, we don't see, you know, any of this really happen. So I think that was kind of sticking point one. The second one is, um.

• 1:21:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I haven't thought enough about it to exactly articulate it, but it, but it's the layer two, layer three, you know, and above, right? So I always go to, um, gold and the dollar, where you had gold bars. One of the big, you know, quote-unquote, technology inflection points was the creation of paper claims on the gold, right? And. And as people started to adopt that, you know, technology, it made all of the transactions easier. It made everything around pricing easier, like everything changed because now you were able to use the currency better. Ultimately, we don't think of it as a technology inflection point, but it was, right?

• 1:22:29Anthony Pompliano?

  We went from carrying physical precious metals to now you had a piece of paper that was a IOU or a claim on that. I think that there's something like that. There are some people who are trying, right? So obviously Lightning Network, Liquid with Blockstream. Like they're, I think, directionally correct. Are they the correct implementation of the technology? That's remains to be seen. But I do feel like there are elements that get built on layer two that completely change this. And it empowers the transactions. It empowers the ability to price things in BTC.

• 1:23:12Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, and really what it does is it sucks a lot of people in because that technology inflection point

• 1:23:19Anthony Pompliano?

  in some weird way, almost like expands the market of people who are willing to use it. You go from like the really hardcore early adopters to now you get something that looks more usable to a much wider audience, right?

• 1:23:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, because like what I've wondered about is, so for better or worse, I'm an amateur cinematographer, right? And like 4K video will just bring any computer to its knees. And so I've got this Mac that has this card in it called an Afterburner card. And it's this FPGA that's purpose-built to like just tear through ProRes video. And I mean, it just, it's not just faster. It's like super fast, like crazy fast. And I wonder if someday.

• 1:24:05Speaker 02

  In smartphones or some type of ubiquitous device, there might be a chip someday that's low cost enough that now you can calculate, make consensus protocol calculations way more efficiently or way more distributed or just way better somehow. Like, that's the kind of stuff I'm looking for. It's like, what's the, what's this thing where it's like, oh, man, now that, now that we have that, you know, the equivalent of an afterburner in everybody's phone but for Bitcoin or for Ethereum or, you know, whatever the case would be.

• 1:24:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So the one thing I would say to this, and I apologize, I'm thinking a little bit out loud here. So one of the things that, I call it like the arc of discovery of Bitcoin. So people come in, they hear about Bitcoin, right? Usually that it's about price. So they come in, they see that. Then there's like enterprise blockchain. Then there's like the ICO stuff. And you kind of go throughout the entire industry and some majority portion of people come back and say, okay, this Bitcoin thing is real. But you have to go explore the other things intellectually to kind of see that value. So if you then go, okay, well, what is it about Bitcoin that is that kind of zero to one or that inflection point? There's for sure the technology of solving the double spend problem. But actually, there's plenty

• 1:25:19Anthony Pompliano?

  of other technology platforms that are using either blockchain or distributed letters technology that are faster, they can, you know, process more transactions, all this kind of stuff. But the reason why Bitcoin continues to win is not a technology problem, right? And there's people who will say like, money's not a technology problem, it's a monetary policy problem. Right? And so the one thing that I do wonder, and I don't have an answer, I wish that I did, is like, money, the one asset slash opportunity where the technological advantage is actually mute if you don't have the monetary policy kind

• 1:26:02Anthony Pompliano?

  of superiority, right? Or advantage there. And so it's interesting to think to, because I don't know.

• 1:26:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, to me Bitcoin is just one of the most amazing, you know, I mean, I don't have to tell you this, right? You just go down infinite rabbit holes. But like, what I, what I find particularly inspiring about it is a lot of the early network effects companies that I invested in. After the fact, have problems with abuse or have problems with, you know, unintentional consequences in the platform. And what to me was brilliant about Bitcoin is that governance, effective governance was an emergent property of the protocol. And so the networks that I'm excited about in the future are those that have governance embedded. It's just like the US has a constitution.

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  You know, I think that network capitalist enterprises are not the same as vertically integrated corporations. And network capitalist enterprises, because they have co-creation and production with their customers, it's a lot like, it starts to look more like citizens in a country. And you kind of say, look, you know, for us to all get the most out of this, we have to agree on a set of rules upfront and what the boundaries and guardrails are. And they're not intended to restrict people, but they're intended to make it not in the interest of bad actors to act badly. And like, to me, like, some type of a governance strategy is really important for AI and some of these things that are coming on the horizon where getting it wrong is going to be way more costly than Twitter spam.

• 1:27:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the thing that, you know, relating back to our earlier conversation is like, the insight that a technology solution to governance across a whole bunch of applications feels like a no-brainer. There are people out there who have thought, you know, 100 times more and longer and deeper about what are those specific applications? How do you actually productize them than I have? And the one thing that I do go back to is on that governance, it's not only like the actual consensus mechanism, right? But there's also this weird element of how the votes are cast. Right? So there's one way of like, like, you know, how do you count the votes and ensure

• 1:28:23Anthony Pompliano?

  there's not fraud and all that kind of stuff? But in this, you know, you can almost imagine a world where like, we're going to have big problems in the future if the quote-unquote governance of something is, hey, 10 of us are going to get on Skype or Zoom and I happen to have really good deep fakes, right? And I can cast votes and all this kind of stuff. The beauty of Bitcoin is the proof of work is really, really hard to manipulate or fake. I don't know if that's the answer for every single application of governance in the future, right? There's plenty of people who are detractors of it, whatever. For money, it feels like the right one. But as you get into something like more akin to a network governance or corporate governance,

• 1:29:08Anthony Pompliano?

  are there some of these other solutions that will work? Probably. I just know that like, hey, I'm not smart enough to figure that out. And so I'd much rather go find somebody who is the expert and feels like they've got the solution and then let them kind of do their magic.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  So can I be greedy and ask one more question?

• 1:29:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, I could talk to you all day.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  So like the other thing I've been thinking about lately is, you know, you have these computing waves. So when my dad was at IBM, there were mainframes. And then the PC came out. And processing power went from super expensive. Like when my dad came back from Vietnam, was working for IBM, they used to call it the IBM room and they had guys in lab coats. And everything was about keep the mainframe running and don't screw it up, right? And then, and then all of a sudden, microprocessors come out. Computing becomes free. Value migrates to proprietary software, Microsoft, Oracle, companies like that. Then the internet happens and communications bandwidth starts to become progressively free.

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  And value migrates from proprietary software. Software becomes open source and it becomes who's the single source supplier of certain types of data, right? So you get Google, Facebook, Amazon, all having this massive advantage in data. And so if you, if you, if you subscribe to the theory of evolution of computing technology, you would say people in software and technology are so smart. And there are so many of them and they just keep coming. That someday, data is going to go from being proprietary to commoditized.

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  And so part of what also got me excited initially about blockchain or even blockchain-inspired ideas was this idea that data would be commoditized and rather than owned by single companies, it would be pushed out to the edge and owned by we, the people. And then it seems that in that world, governance becomes now the valuable scarce resource. Right? So it's another little bit of a twist on it. And that's if you believe in crypto through the lens of not just money crypto, but also software crypto and tech crypto, which sometimes I get offend people when I say I might believe.

• 1:31:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It's a weird thing where like, so like if you said to me, what is one view of the world or of the future that I think is a, it's a foregone conclusion at this point. What I don't know is how somebody will build that actual solution. It's this idea of us owning data. But to me, what you're actually doing is less about like you owning the data and it's more about removing the middleman. Right? Which is right now, you actually create a bunch of data. Right? So it's whether Apple's got all the steps you took, your heart rate, Facebook has where you went and checked in or what photos you uploaded and just go down the, you know,

• 1:32:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Twitter's got your thoughts, whatever it is. They've done a great job of collecting all of that, anonymizing, aggregating, and they don't really sell the data necessarily. What they really do is they sell targeting with the data. Right? And they've all done a great job of monetizing. Well, in a world where you hold that data, really all you're doing is you're shifting the revenue from somebody else to you. The question becomes, how lucrative is that? How do you change behavior? How do you automate it to some degree? Right? Like, I don't think Mike's gonna sit there and say, oh, okay, somebody sent me an email and wants to pay me $3.20 to get my steps today. Approve. So I think it's, you know, you kind of get into the details of how do you actually execute

• 1:32:50Anthony Pompliano?

  on it? And I don't know what that looks like. But to me, there's governance there and there's this idea of just sovereignty. Right? And the internet really democratized stuff. And then I think you'll get some sovereignty on the back end of this that'll end up being incredibly valuable as well.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Okay. Cool. Well, anything else we should talk about? We'd probably go all day if we're not careful.

• 1:33:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, you've been incredibly gracious with your time. I always enjoy talking. So thanks for doing this. We will, we'll send people to the podcast and go check you out on Twitter because you're tweeting up a storm, which I enjoy seeing.

• 1:33:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been playing with tweet storms lately, but um, yeah, Anthony, I really appreciate you having me on the show. It was fun. It's always fun to talk to you. You're one of the first guys who's willing to spend any time with me when I was starting to look into crypto and always be grateful for that.

• 1:33:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna embarrass you for two seconds because you're the only person who came to me. This is pretty early on. You were one of the first, what I consider more traditional venture capitalists who reached out to me. And I walked away from our meeting and I said, he's the only person who brought a pen and actually took notes. So I know he was listening.

• 1:34:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone else wanted to like, you know, kind of bullshit or shoot the shit and they walked away and I was just like, I have no clue if they even got anything out of the conversation. And I remember when you walked out and you had notes, I said, you know what? I don't know if he'll, he'll agree with it or not agree with it, but I can guarantee you that he actually understood what was, what was going on.

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I've still got him. Yeah, I've got him from this podcast today. Yeah.

• 1:34:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Well, I appreciate it, Mike, and I hope everyone really enjoys this. All right. Thanks, Anthony. Appreciate the time.