#588 Delian on Space and Bitcoin

Delian Asparouhov is an investor with Founders Fund and a co-founder and chairman of Varda, a space manufacturing startup. In this conversation, we discuss Founders Fund, Varda, Bitcoin, DeFi, Original thinking, Miami, Red pills, and Courage to say what you think. ======================= Public Rec is on a mission to make comfort look good. Their fan-favorite Flex Short is the ultimate crossover short you’ll need all summer long. From the beach to the gym, this quick-drying short has you covered. Comfort starts with a better fit. Free shipping. Free returns. Visit www.publicrec.com/pomp and use POMP at checkout for 10% off! ======================= Whether you're an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With the new Kraken app, you can easily buy and sell over 60 of the most popular cryptocurrencies in just a few minutes. Featuring a sleek new design and an easy-to-use interface, you can now take your crypto portfolio with you on the go, 24/7. Visit kraken.com/pomp to learn more or search "kraken" in the app store. ======================= Unstoppable Domains makes crypto easier by replacing your address with [AnyName].crypto. They allow you to send and receive over 70 cryptocurrencies, including BTC, ETH, and LINK with a single blockchain domain. Go to unstoppabledomains.com and get [YourName].crypto to make your crypto life easier. =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Delian Asparov is an investor with Founders Fund and a co-founder and chairman of Varda, a space manufacturing startup. In this conversation, we discuss Founders Fund, Varda, Bitcoin, DeFi, original thinking, Miami, red pills, and having the courage to say what you think. I really enjoyed this conversation with Delian, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Public Rec. They simply make the most comfortable clothes in the world. No, seriously, the most comfortable clothes in the world. Public Rec is on a

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Learn more or search Kraken in the App Store. Go check it out and let me know what you think. Last but not least are my friends over at Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains has teamed up with OKX to make crypto simpler by supporting .crypto domains on their exchange. Unstoppable Domains allows you to receive over 70 cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Chainlink with a single blockchain domain name. This makes it so much easier for millions of users to send and receive crypto by using their name, like pomp.crypto, rather than that long letters and numbers Bitcoin wallet address. It's the stress-free experience needed for mainstream crypto adoption. Plus, .crypto domains are NFTs that are stored in your wallet, so you permanently own them and can transfer to your other wallets as needed.

• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Go to unstoppabledomains.com/r/pomp. Again, unstoppabledomains.com/r/pomp. And get your name .crypto to make your crypto life easier. Unstoppabledomains.com/r/pomp. All right, let's get into this episode with Delian. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:43Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have the mayor of Miami. Oh, just kidding. I have Delian here. What's up, man?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Prince of Miami.

• 3:48Anthony Pompliano?

  The prince of Miami. Exactly. Let's get started talking about space. Varda is a company that you co-founded while working at Founders Fund. What is going on in space? Like, why do you want to do this?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  I've been thinking about space since like, I don't know, I was a kid, maybe like 2007, 8, like, you know, freshman year of high school. And was just like fascinated with this world of like the commercialization of space. Like, at the end of the day, the Apollo era was like super cool, but it was government dollars and government dollars are limited. They can't grow exponentially. But it was like super cool to see. I'd been tracking SpaceX since like The very first launch, I was like, oh my God, like if they figure out how to pull off a commercial rocket, that makes it to the commercial satellites and all these other things are like so much more viable. And so I've been tracking it for like sort of years and years. And then finally, maybe like 2016, I started being like, okay, I need to start considering like not just having this as like a hobby where I'm like reading books and like watching the launches. Like, I gotta start to do this like actually professionally. And so that was part of why I actually joined venture was because like I found it to be the best way to sort of do it

• 4:45Speaker 02

  earlier on in my career. Because like, I basically thought that there were a couple of different paths. One, I had a bunch of friends from MIT that actually like went to like work at SpaceX, right? Some of whom, you know, still work there. But I'm like, I'm a pretty good engineer. I don't know if I want to be like an engineer like 90% of the day. Like, what I like is like, I can do the engineering, plus business, plus a little marketing storytelling. Like, I kind of like a diverse set of like, you know, skill sets that like I work on. So I didn't want to do that. The other path that I thought was the only possible option was like you do the like Chamath, Jervison, Elon approach. I like make it big and like regular tech, and then you get to do space stuff. But I was like, man, that path two like is gonna take too long. And so that was where like sort of path three sort of showed itself to me, where I was like, oh, the world of venture allows me to like actually kind of learn about space. Because like venture is one of the only jobs in the valley.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Where like I feel you actually get paid to like learn whatever you kind of want to learn. And so six months into like this role at Coastal Ventures, which was originally supposed to be like a one year stand, I was just supposed to like, you know, figure out how to like co-found a company and like kind of was like half EIR, half chief of staff type thing. I actually sourced a space company, and I was like, oh shit, I can do the space stuff today. And so it's kind of this like whole like, I don't know, like left turn of my life where I was like, okay, screw the being the founder thing. I'm gonna do the venture thing, really lean into this, and I'm gonna make sure that one of my focus areas is just like, I'm gonna keep doing space. And so invested in that first space company, started spending a ton of time going to like, space conferences, meeting everybody. And like, when you see it from afar, it feels like a, you know, I'm sure, you know, crypto and other industries are the same way where it's like, it feels like there's a ton going on, blah, blah. But once you get into it, it's like, actually, there's like, you know, probably 20

• 6:13Speaker 02

  companies that have raised north of $15 million that represent basically the entire commercial space industry. And I literally just met basically every CEO except, you know, Elon, and got to know all of them. And like, you start to understand, okay, like, how do satellites get sent? What are rockets made out of? What are the components? What's the supply chain? How do you do all this? And you actually start to realize, okay, here are like, the possible sort of angles of attack and like, potential other ideas and, you know, things you could work on. And that's kind of eventually how Varda came about. But the thing that I kept tracking was like, You know, a lot of the like, let's say like, you know, mobile industry and a lot of like, you know, SaaS was enabled by AWS, you know, getting really, really cheap in, you know, 2006, 2007. And I always describe that like Elon with SpaceX is basically the equivalent

• 6:54Speaker 02

  of AWS, where this asset that used to be extremely expensive, only accessible to governments, like was a pain in the ass, I rocket launches, is now like, dude, you can book on SpaceX's website, a 200 kilogram satellite, you can send it up for a million bucks. Literally just like, there's like an e-commerce flow. Like they literally like, you click through, for sure, you gotta like, talk to a sales dude to like, you know, submit the wire, but like, you do like a little prepayment and like entirely digitally, right?

• 7:17Anthony Pompliano?

  That's wild. That's wild.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  One day, it'll be like, full online. Like, we're not that far away from like, literally, like, you literally don't have to talk to anybody. There's still a lot of like, hard engineering that has to go into like, right now, when you like, book a SpaceX launch, you still, like, it's not like you just talk to the sales guys, like, the engineers over there have to like, integrate your satellite into it. But like, there's a lot of companies working on, okay, how do we standardize this, make it so that like, you know, you can literally just do this purely, purely digitally. And so that's what I started to track and got me really excited about Varda, where I was like, okay, this AWS-like cost, I launch costs are now cheap enough, where it's not just satellites that are now economical, space manufacturing is economical.

• 7:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so what is space manufacturing? That's the whole point of Varda, is to do space manufacturing. So what is that?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I described it as like, we're doing space manufacturing for Earth. There's a lot of people that think about space manufacturing in space, so it's like, building stuff in space, or doing like lunar ice mining and stuff like that, like, that's, that's cool, but that stuff's like sci-fi. Like, a venture capitalist can't really back that. Like, there's cool government projects going on, but that stuff is, again, very small dollars. Versus, what we're doing is, we're building materials in space for use back here on Earth, which means there's Earth-sized markets, very large commercial markets. And so there's already been a ton of research done on the ISS over the past, literally, like, 15 years, that has showed everything from, you know, cancer drugs, like Amgen and Eli Lilly have showed that they have better yields of their cancer drugs, when they manufacture them in microgravity. There's been human organs that have been printed in space. Basically, the way you can think about it is, if you try to print a human organ on Earth, it like,

• 8:41Speaker 02

  flops over because of gravity, versus if you're in zero G, you can kind of keep printing it, and you can see you can print a really complex organ. There are semiconductors that have been shown, fiber optic cables, basically a ton of material. That have been shown up there. And so in early 2020, actually, before starting Varda, I went and talked to all of these researchers that had done this type of microgravity stuff. And I was like, great, super cool. You guys have done this on the ISS, but the ISS is never going to be like a commercial factory. NASA is not going to allow a bunch of fucking like, you know, line workers up there. We got to do this independently of the ISS. And they're all like, yes, we need to do it independently. I'm like, great. Can I give you money to do that? And they're like, no. And I was like, well, why the fuck not? They're like, well, we don't know how to go independent of the ISS. Like, we're researchers that rely on NASA for getting up there, running our like research, and then coming back down.

• 9:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So right now, basically, you can, kind of the workflow would be, I want to run a test in space in microgravity for, let's say, fiber optic cable development. And so what I do is I get all my materials, I book it on SpaceX Rocket, they launch, uh, my shit gets to the ISS. Then somebody who's on the ISS is given instructions, essentially, do my test, send it back. And when a rocket comes back, then, uh, I get my results. And like, just do that over and over and over again. Obviously, there's limitations around how much can go on the rocket, how many people are on the ISS, what's the complexity, what's their knowledge, etc.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, like, from start to finish, that whole process you talked about takes on average four years. The largest thing that you can set up is roughly the size of like a glove box. So really limited, like, total volume. And then there's extreme limitations on like, for example, in a lot of fiber optics, there's a toxic chemical that you want to coat the fiber optic with that protects it at the end of the process. No fucking way is NASA going to let you put that toxic chemical on the ISS. If that thing gets out, like, you're potentially killing astronauts. So there's like severe limitations on the processes, the size, how long it takes. If you want to iterate on that process, you're like sending it up, and then four years later, you're going to iterate on the process once again. And so it just takes way, way too long. And so our whole idea was like, okay, how would we do this independent of the ISS? Great, we can still get up there via SpaceX, Rocket Lab, you know,

• 10:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Because they can just send the rockets and you can, you don't have to go to the ISS. You can go to any destination in space.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. You can go wherever you want to. So that part still stays the same, but now, okay, we got to go independent of the ISS. That means now we got to power ourselves, communicate with ourselves. That part actually also pretty easy, because look at Starlink, look at, you know, Planet Labs. They, they power satellites up there, they communicate with them, they have batteries up there. Okay, so that part's pretty easy. Actual glove box. It's like, okay, well now we're gonna take that same glove box, that fiber optic unit that, you know, whatever, or, you know, human organs that people are making. Take that same thing. Now we can go a lot bigger. Now we can put that toxic chemical in there. Now we can go a lot hotter. Now we can bring more materials up there. So that part, if anything, is like easier in some ways than it was on the ISS. The only like wrinkle is the ISS is pressurized in atmosphere versus to keep it really low cost, we're putting everything in vacuum.

• 11:27Anthony Pompliano?

  What would explain the engineering difference?

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. So in atmosphere, the biggest thing is actually the like thermal environment. So, you know, right now I'm in this room, right? My body is generating heat and it's getting moved away from me from the like cold air that's basically around me. And that's how most things get cooled down in manufacturing processes. So you have like a, you know, a really hot semiconductor, the way that it cools off on a typical like, you know, Intel manufacturing line is the air around it basically just cools it down. In vacuum, there's no air. And so if something gets hot, it just stays hot. And so what you have to do is you have to use these what are called like radiative cooling tubes. And then the way that they basically work is like the little like, you know, semiconductor glows a little bit red when it gets too hot. The 3D cooling tube absorbs that and then it actually sends it out to these like little wires that are on the outside of the satellite

• 12:15Speaker 02

  that are basically made to glow extra red when they get hot. And that glowing of that red light is the only way you actually quote unquote cool down. And so that's the really hard part is basically cooling down is really hard when there's no atmosphere.

• 12:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So basically what you're doing is you're taking the same principle of bring something here to cool this down. The difference is that you're doing it in a much more kind of thoughtful, intentional way versus just allowing the air around it.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. So that's the maybe tricky part, but other than that, everything in some ways is much easier when you leave the ISS because you can go bigger, more materials, more chemicals. The ISS, you know, doesn't have those same, or you don't have the limitations from the ISS. But then the part that all these researchers were really scared of is, okay, we finished those materials. Gotta bring them back down to earth.

• 12:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  That's what everybody's really scared of because the counterintuitive thing is right now it's actually quite easy to get up to space. What we do is we take a rocket, we get it out of the atmosphere and then we go really, really fast, right? And that's how we actually orbit. And the hard part for a rocket isn't the getting out of the atmosphere. Like that's only like, you know, the first like whatever 120 20 seconds of the flight. The hard part is like then they're going really, really fast so that you stay in orbit rather than just coming back down. So when you think about it is when you're coming back, you're going really fast and like, yeah, you could like send a whole rocket up there, slow yourself down and then hit the atmosphere, but that's really inefficient. The much better way to do it is just come into the atmosphere really fucking fast and use the atmosphere to slow you down. That process of reentry has never really been done by commercial organizations other than SpaceX with their Dragon program, right?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  So whenever you see the astronauts coming back, the like trickiest part of that whole journey is when they come back going really, really fast to the atmosphere. Same thing with the Apollo era days. That's like the most dangerous part for the astronauts when they're coming back.

• 13:51Anthony Pompliano?

  How fast are they going when they're reentering?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  You're going like, uh, man, I hope any space engineer reading this doesn't like correct me on this, but I think 14,000 kilometers per second. So you're talking like real, real fast.

• 14:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Multiple G forces in terms.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  To give you a sense of like, uh, so, you know, we take these materials. Yes, you go through roughly eight Gs at the peak. So, um, in our type of reentry, because we're not taking back humans. So the reason that like sort of our vehicle in some ways is much simpler is like, we are just taking back some like raw materials. We don't have to take back a bunch of humans. And so I sometimes describe like our thing that we're using to bring down the materials is like a, you know, delivery van versus like the SpaceX Dragon vehicle is like a gold plated limousine with like great AC and soft seats for the astronauts. You know what I mean? That thing costs a hundred million. We're making something for like a hundred K to bring back our materials.

• 14:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So I send up materials.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:38Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a satellite or a vehicle there, uh, and then I have to get back. What is the process to get the materials off of the thing that goes up into the actual like testing or manufacturing, uh, facility? And then how do I get it back? Is that all robotic?

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the first time we're actually just sending everything up already preconnected. In the future, for sure, we'll be doing docking and moving around. But the first time we actually send the like satellite looking thing, the factory looking thing, and what we call the reentry capsule. We actually just send that all connected already. So that basically it's like already ready to go. In the future, for sure, for a variety of reasons, that actually gets much more economical to not send it up all together. But to do sort of that demonstration mission, we're sending it all up together. And basically, literally the raw materials pass from the factory into that like reentry module. The reentry module comes. Back in, but like to give you a sense. So like, you know, we actually, you know, have to, we have are regulated by the FAA because like we're re-entering over airspace.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  If we like miss, you know, the atmosphere, even literally by like three or four seconds, you're talking about like, rather than like landing in the United States, you're like accidentally like landing in like Europe. And so you're going so, so fast that like you have to be extremely precise about like where you re-enter. And so a lot of the problem is like convincing the FAA, hey, we're going to make sure to do a very sort of like controlled re-entry in a very sort of tight area, such that we don't accidentally like, you know, land in somebody's house and like kill them.

• 15:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Is this the whole, I think it was a Chinese rocket or something that was like coming back and people were like, oh, it could land in Asia or the United States. They were like, wait, that's a pretty big area.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. So that gives you a sense of like how fast you're going. Like think about like, you think about like a 747. Yeah, that's fast. That's 500 miles per hour. When you're up there, you're going 14,000 kilometers per second. So it's just like, the speeds in orbit, I think sometimes are like hard to comprehend because like you can't actually go that fast on earth. Like if you were going that fast on earth, you'd melt basically instantaneously. The only reason you can go that fast up there is because you're in vacuum.

• 16:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  And so if you miss even by a little bit, and it's like kind of hard with like that rocket, people are just using radar to try to figure out where the hell it was. Cause like, there's a little bit of atmosphere up there. And so the drag and how you hit it like can just like buff it around that rocket. And so that's why it was really hard. Part of what we're doing is we're coming in hot and fast on purpose. So that little atmosphere that's up high doesn't sort of affect our path. And we can actually much more precisely say, hey FAA, we're going to come down like right here and we're going to make sure that there's no humans around and like not going to hit anybody.

• 16:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you want to land on land or in the ocean?

• 16:57Speaker 02

  It is much simpler engineering problem to land on land. And so when we, when we fly, we will be the first commercial re-entry vehicle to ever land on land. So Dragon, Apollo, all of those have landed like on water. We would be the first ones to do it on land.

• 17:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do they all want to land in the ocean or SpaceX basically lands on like a drone ship?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  SpaceX's original plan was actually to land on land. So the Dragon was originally going to have retropropulsive boosters that actually just landed it on a landing pad on land. But the qualification process for getting NASA comfortable with that was basically going to take way too long. And so About maybe, I think it was like two years into the Dragon program. They pivoted to just being like, screw it, we're just doing the Apollo style. Basically, just like, it's a lot easier to just like, you throw a parachute up and then you just hit the water. Rather than like, you know, if you hit ground going those speeds, that actually can be like, you know, harmful to the astronauts. And so mostly, it's like, the reason we land on water is just like, it's an easier engineering problem.

• 17:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Splashdown is a lot easier than hard ground.

• 17:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and it's funny because their reusable rocket lands, like, oh, the land thing, there's like regulations and stuff. Why don't we just create a drone ship and then we'll just use that to land on? Like, that's wild.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that was part of the reason they did the drone ship too, was just like, you know, it makes it a lot easier for testing. You don't have to clear everything, like, it's in the middle of the ocean, like, you know, there's no risk of like, yeah, the rocket blows up, whatever, there's nobody around. But over time, SpaceX does want to get more consistent, and they do it occasionally, right? When they have enough fuel, they've gotten the FAA comfortable now with like, landing the rockets on land. But for sure, I'm sure in the long term, they're thinking about, okay, how do we eventually make it so that like, when we're flying humans, they also land on land, because like, the seaports are kind of a pain in the ass.

• 18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Is the idea that SpaceX, you guys, whoever else, these rockets are going to take off like, every 10 minutes?

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, with Varda, the initial product that we're going after, if we were to eventually satisfy the entire market that we're going after, we would have multiple of our reentry capsules coming down per day, and we would be buying a SpaceX rocket every other day. And that's just us. And so there's a world where, you know, SpaceX between, you know, Varda and all the other companies that are coming up, are literally launching a rocket multiple times a day. And like, we're not talking about that being like, you know, a decade away, we're talking about that being like, you know, this year, they launched so far already 28 rockets. So it means they're on track for, you know, doing on the order of like 50 or 60. And so we're already talking about like, we're already at one a week. And like, three years ago, we were at like, one a month. And so, you know, you extrapolate that out, and another three years, it wouldn't be surprising if there's like, a SpaceX rocket launch

• 19:19Speaker 02

  basically every other day, and another three years after that, multiple a day.

• 19:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, when you think about the cost, so you take your device, you want to get it up to space, and then get it back. Is that, you said, I think, the device itself is like 100K, and then the whole round trip is like 2-3 million dollars? Or how was the economics?

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the way you can kind of think about it, launch costs basically $5,000 a kilogram today for like SpaceX. And so when we think about it, we think about, okay, how much of our entire, so I mentioned that whole thing, the satellite, the factory, the reentry. How much of that is actually the useful raw materials, right? Because like that's what we're really getting paid for. In our early missions, it'll probably more look like 5% of the entire thing is going to be the useful raw materials. Part of why eventually we want to leave the factory up there and dock with the raw materials is it makes it to the, rather than being 5%, it's actually like 50%. Because then we're just bringing up a bunch of raw materials, documenting the factory and then taking them back down. And so the way that I think about it is sort of like the net cost of launch for the raw materials.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  The first time is if it's 5%, it's basically, well, okay, you're basically paying 20x the launch cost rather than 5,000. It's like a thousand dollars per kilogram to get up there. But once it's 50% of the actual payload, then it's only $10,000 per kilogram of the actual raw materials to get it up there. And so that's kind of the economics. But then when you think about it of like, okay, well, how many very useful materials are there that you could sell for more than $100,000 a kilogram? Turns out, if you look at semiconductors and fiber optics and human organs and things like that. Most of those things, if you wear it on a per kilo basis, they actually sell for a lot more than that. And so that was basically what I was tracking in the back of my head. I'd been thinking about space manufacturing for like a decade. It just didn't work if it was $100,000 a kilogram. Because again, that net cost of taking things to launch was like millions of dollars a kilogram.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  There's not many materials that sell for millions of dollars a kilogram, but there's a lot of things that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 21:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So really, the equation it seems like is what's the cost of the raw goods? What's the cost of getting there, manufacturing, getting back? And then if you add up those two costs, if you can sell it for two, three times that, whatever you bring back, then you've got a business.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  That's literally what we get kept up at night, all night, every single day. We're in the midst of digging into this right now.

• 21:23Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And then really this idea of like a reusable factory is really what you're building, right? And so it's, right now, you've got to send it up all connected. But the ideal thing is like literally there's a factory there and you're just bringing the input of materials. There's some process that happens and then there's the output, you bring it back.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. And that makes the economics a lot better because like right now, each time we're paying for the factory with each mission that we send up. But the factory, once the reentry module leaves, that thing just unfortunately burns up in the atmosphere because it doesn't have a heat shield and all the things you need to bring it back down. But over time, we'll just have factories up there and we'll start off with one and then we'll start off with two and then 10. And then like the thing that gets me really excited about Fart is again, we scale based off of commercial markets, the size on earth, rather than just pure government dollars. And so if you track that exponential equation of like, once you need one factory and then 10 factories, 100 factories, you're talking about, you know, I think it wouldn't be totally unrealistic to say that by the end of the decade, we have something that is bigger than 10 times the size of the entire International Space Station, that is just our factories that are all connected together.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  And then that also makes it much more economical. For a long time, they'll be purely robotic. But once you have something that large, it's actually not that expensive to them be like, okay, well, why don't we add a human compatible, you know, module to it? And then it gets a lot easier to think about, okay, actually having permanent humans stationed up there on the factory. Because, you know, it turns out, it's actually a lot easier to get to space than it is to build a robotic arm that's as dexterous as a human is.

• 22:44Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about this, you're going really, really fast after a massive market. One of the things that I noticed you do, I've seen Keith Raboy on the open door, or I'm sorry, open store deck he recently had, is the number of days since you started. And I don't know where this came from, but I've now noticed on multiple people doing it. Why do you guys do that? Why do you track how many days it's been? And then I also noticed that you have a countdown clock to, I guess, the first launch. So walk me through kind of the timeline thought process and why so obsessive about those timelines?

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it actually started with one of our portfolio companies, Ramp. And I think part of like their, you know, culture and why they've done so well is because they're so obsessive on days. It was actually at that first board meeting, I think it was like day 59 of like, you know, Ramp's life, like Keith and I went to that first board meeting and it was literally the first thing that you see in the deck. And Keith and I just both turned to each other, we're like, this is just fucking brilliant. Like this is the best way to institute an ethos. Because at the end of the day, the thing that is always difficult about startups is early on, it's easy to move super fast. When you're like six people in a room, you all can communicate really easy, et cetera. Once you become 600, all of a sudden just decisions start to slow down, things start to slow down. And so in some ways, you can almost always predict how successful a startup is going to be, just off of how fast they move. And this is just like a really simple cultural way of enforcing very fast movement.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Because when you're measuring things on the order of days, then it's a great, like, you know, I sometimes joke, like, you know, we have like a big deadline at Varda, for example, like, that's like, you know, this Monday, and I think today is like, whatever, Thursday. Thursday to Monday, pre-Varda, felt like a, you know, a snap in time versus now with like the Varda mentality, it's like, oh yeah, Thursday to Monday, that's basically like a month. Like, I have plenty of time to like, you know, all the things that we need to do, like, we'll have like six meetings between now and then to discuss all the progress, like, Saturday and Sunday, everybody's gonna be like totally online. And so, I think it just like, you know, forces this just mentality, which is like extreme speed. And then also, it's even more relevant in the world of like space stuff, because there are these just like, such clear delineations of like, you know, in a software company, you like, you do have like, launch days, but like, in a space company, you have like, launch days.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Like, you know, those are a clear delineation and like marker in the company's life. And so, yeah, it started there, and then it's, I feel like it is kind of spreading amongst other founders that I know that are also now starting to be obsessive about it. But yeah, every single all hands, you know, at Varda, every single Monday morning, we start off with like, you know, it is day XYZ, this number of days till launch, you know, we're, you know, whatever, 15% of the way, you know, to our first launch.

• 25:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is the all hands on Monday? Most companies in Silicon Valley have done them Friday, people can ask questions, it's kind of a kumbaya, whatever. Calling it an all hands and doing it on Monday seems more like a kickoff meeting for the week, or what is that?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny, um, you know, I'm not the CEO of Varda, and the CEO comes from SpaceX, and a lot of the early engineers come from SpaceX. So through them, I've got to learn a lot about sort of like, you know, I'd say, you know, let's say 60 to 70% of our culture is kind of like SpaceX-esque culture. And so, there's just less of this like, there's so many things that I really love about it. One, like, I walked into the factory one day, and there was like a 70-foot American flag hanging in the factory, and I was like, this is amazing. Like, in the San Francisco Bay area, being patriotic is actually like somehow a polarizing topic, versus something about your, when you're working in the world of aerospace, it's by default patriotic. And everyone was asking, it was like, I love that I didn't like, ask for this at all. And I was like, who did this? And like, a couple of engineers were like, yeah, well, you got drunk last night, got a big ladder, ordered this off Amazon, and like, you know, immediately installed it. I was like, this is, I love

• 26:02Speaker 02

  that part of the culture. And then the second is, there's just less of like a culture around like, I don't know, there's not this like, yeah, all hands, need to like, ask questions, feel like my feelings get petted, etc. It's just like- Mondays, we start like, this is what we gotta do. Like, you know, everybody like checks in like, yes, this is what we're doing. It's like definitely like a kickoff meeting. And then Fridays is like, no, there's no questions. Like, if you have a question, email the CEO. He doesn't have time to like, sit around and have everybody like, you know, have a kumbaya moment. Like, there's no time for fucking kumbaya. Like, email, did you get the thing done that you said you were gonna get done on Monday? And then we rinse and repeat the next week. And so, yeah, I like that style.

• 26:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Are there free snacks?

• 26:35Speaker 02

  We're limited. Yeah, it's definitely closer to like, you know, apple culture of, you know, no free lunches. We do actually do free lunches, but.

• 26:44Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. You work at Founders Fund and spend majority of your time investing. So Varda is a big piece of what you're focused on now, but you do spend a lot of time investing. I feel like everyone at Founders Fund is red pilled. Like, like just everyone has unique views. They say what they want and what they mean. Is it self-selection? Or is there something going on? Or is there something in the water at Founders Fund that gets everyone kind of? A lot of times, not even necessarily agreeing with each other, but just having the confidence, courage and conviction to say what they actually believe.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'll front run this by saying also, I think you'd be surprised that probably, I mean, I don't wanna put an exact number on it, but I'd probably guess like 60 to 70% of the investment team in the last election, like, almost certainly voted Biden. And so, there's for sure some amount of like red pilling. But I don't think that also necessarily correlates with like people's exact underlying politics, because there is actually a wide array of politics, for sure. Maybe certain people on the team are a little bit like, you know, louder than others. And so, you might think that we're like all biased in one direction, but actually the entire team, I'd say, is quite, you know, diverse in terms of politics. And, you know, yeah, very willing to be, you know, sort of very upfront about that. And it's absolutely sort of like self-selection, both in terms of like, when we interview people, there is sort of just like that, does the person fit the like Founders Fund ethos? Which is just like, are they very comfortable being themselves, being actually like quite divisive?

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Like, I in some ways like, love our team in that, very willing to like disagree with each other, both publicly online, right? You've seen Keith and I even like get into arguments online. But then, just imagine that like, if we're like shielding a little bit externally, internally, it's like, you know, people will, yeah, it is full-time war at all times, right? But I really like that, because it forces, like I said, of like intellectual honesty, where it's like, it doesn't feel like there's any politics. At Founders Fund, like, everything is just, like, very intellectually open and honest and, like, can be very disagreeable, and there can be people that have, like, you know, really significant arguments for extended periods of time. But at least it's sort of like out in the open. And I think it is self-selecting, both in terms of people that want to choose to work in that environment. But then also, I feel like during the interview process, we're like, man, is this person gonna, like, you know, survive the, like, intellectual battlefield of Founders Fund?

• 28:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and so when somebody comes in new or somebody who's been there for a while, let's use Founders Fund as an example, but I think there's other firms that have some of these dynamics as well. You've got very well-known people, right, that are participating in the investment process. You've got kind of legacy investments, legacy LPs, legacy kind of reputation, all this stuff. And then you've got this, like, zero fucks, like, everyone say what you want, and let's kind of have that attrition of ideas, etc. How does that work in terms of making investment decisions? Is it just like, hey, Delian, here's a pot of money, like, go invest it and, like, come back and tell us what you did? Or is there, like, no, we all have to vote and everyone has to agree? Or, like, how do you think through that and what do you like and not like about the process?

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'd say, in the grand scheme of Silicon Valley, there's, like, sort of a bell curve of types of firms. I call them, like, consensus-based investing and, like, conviction-based investing. And both Coastal Ventures, where I worked prior to Founders Fund, and Founders Fund, I would describe as, like, on the extreme end of conviction-based investing. I.e., if one person really, really loves and is, like, pounding on the table, like, the thing sort of, like, gets done. For sure, there's, like, an amount of rope that is given to you, right? Like, if Peter is pounding on the table, that is, like, a larger check than, like, if Delian is pounding on the table, obviously.

• 29:52Anthony Pompliano?

  I thought it was the opposite. That's funny. Okay, I learn everything, something new every day.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  But, like, at least there's that opportunity to sort of, like, pound on the table. And then what I like about Founders Fund is, uh, Cyan Banister actually did an interview on this, maybe, like, you know, a year and a half or, like, two years ago. And so we actually, like, relatively publicly share this. But we actually have just, like, a very strict and regimented, you know, process around how investments get made. But we're actually not very strict and regimented on how to go through that process, if that makes sense, like, as an investor. So, like, basically from, like, zero to 1.5 million, any two people on the team, basically thumbs up. 1.5 to 5, it basically becomes, like, three people. 5 to 10 becomes four people. 10 to 30, five people. 30 and above, six people. So basically, as the checks get larger and larger, you need basically a thumbs up.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  But the thumbs up is closer to like, you kind of need like, let's say for the six people, you know, are the super large checks. It's more like you need like three people to be really enthusiastic and three people that are more like, it's not a no. I like, I don't think this is a bad idea, not like I'm also as equally like pounding on the table as you are. And so for sure, there are times where like, I've seen Keith like basically say like, I wouldn't do this investment, but I'm giving you my thumbs up to be clear, because like, I don't think it's like a bad investment. I just wouldn't necessarily do it.

• 31:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and I'm assuming some of that is like, uh, let's say you really understand space. And let's say that Keith, I don't, I actually don't know what, how into space he is, but let's just say he, he didn't understand anything about space. If you could make the argument and say, hey, I want to do the space investment. He's like, oh, I don't really know that much about space, but like, yeah, that makes sense to me. Okay. I'll give you the thumbs up, but like, I'm not going to go pound the table because I don't, I'm not an expert in space.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  For sure. And that's partially why, like, you'll see it even in my portfolio. I kind of say that like, I feel like there's like two or three different parts of my portfolio. There's like a third that's like the pure space stuff. There's a third that I kind of describe like, kind of space ish stuff, but it's on earth, like whether it's like robotics or industrial automation, or it's like still kind of like hard tech. And there's like a third of the stuff that I do that it's like, I literally just say like shit that I learned from Keith. And partially because it's like, it's easier for me to like work through the investment process when like I'm investing into a financial services thing. Like, you know, Ramp, for example, because I know that Keith will also understand it really well and we can work on it together. And when the two of us are like, hey, here's a financial services thing, both Keith and Delian are excited. We really want to do this. It's like actually, you know, quite easy to get the deal done. Versus let's say, you know, in the world of space, there's like less people on the team that understand the space stuff. It's really like Scott Nolan and I are the only ones.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  And so at some point, like it's kind of hard for other people on the team to really give a super strong feedback. And that also makes it so that it's like a little bit less likely that we'll take a super, super big swing, um, you know, in the world of space. Like our, you know, interest or willingness to take a $50 million check into a space thing, probably less likely. Like, you know, we did recently invest a lot of money into SpaceX, but at a relatively late stage, lots of revenue. Starlink was going online and so it's like easier to understand now there's also like revenue flowing and like numbers. And so more of the team got that. Um, but yeah, so there's definitely like domain areas of expertise. And then what I really like about Founder's Fund, especially in comparison to most firms, um, most firms are not super willing to give a lot of rope to junior investors. Like they're Are pretty restrictive. You really can only, you know, report to one particular person or they really limit your sectors.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Founder's Fund, and we sometimes describe as like, almost like the blockchain of like, you know, investing where it's just like, we don't have partner meetings. We don't meet up on any like regular basis. Everybody kind of goes off and like does their own thing. And like the way that Keith runs his investment process versus I run it versus like, you know, Brian or Peter are like wildly different. At the end of the day, you get to get that same outcome of like the votes. But like, for example, if I'm working on like a space thing, I might like go first, go to Scott, and then maybe rope in one other person and then one other person. Versus maybe if it's like something that I know a lot of the team understands, I'll have it meet four people at once. Right? It's just kind of up to you how you want to take a founder through that process, as long as you do eventually get to that very specific like set of votes.

• 33:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's no Monday meeting? There's not none of that?

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no like, we never have a like, you know, basically everywhere the firm in Silicon Valley has like a Monday meeting. Where like they have companies come in and present to like the entire partnership. We almost never actually, the only time that we ever have full sort of partner presentations is actually only for incubations, interestingly enough. Partly because it's just like, hey, this is our company. Let's all meet and like, see how things are going. But we never do that for external companies.

• 33:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Hereticon is, I think, the best manifestation of everything you just described is kind of internal. Then you guys are willing to put like a stamp on and say like, no, this is actually what we believe. Like, we believe we should go talk to people who everyone else thinks, you know, aren't worth talking to or whatever. Like, there's this conference. And I don't actually know how much of this is like Founder's Fund backed versus like people at Founder's Fund are helping to organize it. But like, talk a little bit just about the public component, because there's almost this element of like, there's lots of trolls. There's lots of like, kind of the woke crowd and like all this stuff that I think most people now are just kind of saying like, look, there's things that legitimately our society needs to improve. And then there's like all the virtue signaling stuff that's just like a waste of time. It almost feels like you guys are trolling the trolls, right?

• 34:29Anthony Pompliano?

  To some degree and like saying like, look, like you guys are being ridiculous. So like, okay, cool. What is ratcheting it up? And we'll be more ridiculous on the other side. And that's not something that most venture funds do. So like, explain kind of your viewpoint in that.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's been interesting to see, you know, obviously I've only been a part of Founder's Fund for the past, you know, whatever, two and a half years now. But the firms like, let's say, both public viewpoints and the way that it's presented have shifted. Sort of like the media landscape has shifted as well, right? So if you think about like, you know, 2010, publishing the manifesto, you know, we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. The brand was much more the firm, but that was sort of the ethos at the time, right? This was pre Twitter, this was pre sort of individual creators being as much of a thing. Institutions were the brands, but now over the past decade, right? Things have shifted, like, you know, people are much more interested in talking to the CEO of Tesla. They don't want to hear from the Tesla brand account on Twitter, right? And so I feel like we've just sort of embodied that same thing, which is like, you know, it probably flipped in, you know, honestly, maybe when Keith and I joined,

• 35:24Speaker 02

  we're all of a sudden, okay, the like core Founders Fund Twitter account was not as much of like the voice anymore. It was now all the individuals that are at Founders Fund that represent like the like online voice. And what I like is like, we're just much more willing to, you know,

• 35:38Speaker 02

  unlike most of the firms, there's almost, and you'd have to really push the bounds. There's almost nothing that you could like say on Twitter that would get you like fired at Founders Fund. And so people are willing to sort of be much more intellectually honest with their like core values. But then what I like about it is like, we follow up with it, right? When, you know, people complain about, oh, they're coming to Miami and they're like XYZ not, you know, appreciating the locals, whatever. And then it's like, and then we're actually like funding the largest series A in Miami, right? We just back it up, you know, with our actions. And so I like that when we like discuss these ideas, it's not just like, just for sake of trolling the trolls. It's also because there's like, I feel like real substance behind it. And I feel like that's why people seem to, you know, enjoy, enjoy the votes. It's like, I feel like most of the voices that I feel like on Twitter are either packaged corporate. Like you can tell like this went through compliance committee to like get out, not super interesting.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  You have like the just true virtue signaling, like, you know, talking about like, you know, social justice. Then you have like the like troll accounts that are just like the memes and like humor, but there's no like substance behind it versus I feel like we do for sure do some amount of trolling, but I feel like there is like substantive, like when you read like, you know, Mike Solano's Pirate Wires, he's talking about like, you know, fundamental like society issues, right? In those, and then we follow up with that with like fundamental societal investments, right? I think like Andorol being like the perfect example of this of like, we believe that like in order to maintain Western society and democracy and allow individuals to have freedom. You need to invest in capabilities like the future of warfare. And most VCs are like not even willing to touch the idea of that. Like anything that is like, oh, military contractor, government, something like that.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Complete unwillingness to you versus like, we've had phenomenal returns between Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril. We've anything like forged a new type of company that can do technologies that both benefit the government a lot, but then also end up benefiting like the end consumer a lot.

• 37:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Solana is probably the best example. Mike Solana is who we're talking about is probably one of the best examples because he can very expertly navigate like complete shitposting and trolling on Twitter. So then you read pirate wires and you're like, wait a minute. Like that was actually very intelligent and like well thought out and well articulated. And I think that's part of what makes founders fun, founders fun, right? It's basically what you're saying is like the ability, no, we can go shitpost and troll everyone and yell and scream and be idiots on the internet, just like everybody else. But then, oh, by the way, like, we're actually very thoughtful and we also can put money to work and do the things that we need.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's like team discussions that we have and obviously like, you know, Peter being like the epitome of this or just like extremely intellectual, broad raging discussions, right? Even when we're like debating a particular investment, there's a lot of times where it's like in the framing of like this like extremely large, like, I wouldn't say that we're like super thesis driven, but we think about like the macro environment and why this is an important investment to get done. And then sometimes we even debate like, oh, are we investing in this just because we have this macro bias towards X, Y, or Z, and we want this to exist in the world and we're investing this, even though maybe it's not a top tier founder, but it just like, you know, matches our ethos, right? There's a lot of these, I think, like very, you know, interesting discussions that we have, and I think that is definitely something that the team optimizes for is like both somebody that's capable of doing that, but then also like, you know, grabbing a drink at the bar and like having fun, like the founders fun, like off sides, let me tell you, are like, they're a fun time.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Like I enjoy those quite a bit, you know, both the intellectual discussions at dinner, but then we're getting trashed after dinner.

• 38:38Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Three people that I want you to tell me what you've learned from them and then we'll move on. One from Peter, one thing from Keith, and then one pick somebody else on the team that you're like, I really learned a lot from this person here, so it is.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the Peter like single nugget that I always think about, and this actually like kind of comes from, you know, Trey Stevens, who sort of says that this is the same nugget that he shares from him, which is both prioritize having very unique thoughts, but also how difficult it is to do so. Like, most of the time, even like most of the ideas that I reiterate, whether it's like, you know, crazy out there space manufacturing, or, you know, talking about, you know, why SpaceX is like the AWS, most of those aren't my ideas. You know what I mean? Like, they're almost certainly something that I've read somewhere, pulled together, and it's like very rare that I'm like coming up with like an actual truly unique individual formulation. And doing that actually requires extremely deep thought while also having very broad ranging intellectual curiosity, both in terms of the people that you meet, that

• 39:36Speaker 02

  you talk to, that you read. And so that's definitely, I feel like, the thing that I both admire the most from Peter and aspire to. And I think that is something that he does. Obviously, he's like, you know, world class at. But probably prioritizing that is something that I feel like I've learned the most. And sorry, who's the? Keith. Keith is probably like that there is actually a science to operating companies. Like, I feel like, you know, so I was his chief of staff for, you know, basically almost two years, a year and eight months. And, you know, watching him across all the variety of companies that he's involved in, right? Whether it's, you know, open door like PropTec, you know, Affirm, FinTech, Consumer Social, all the types of companies that he's done. At the end of the day, building a company is actually the same across all those verticals. It all comes down to the people that you're hiring, the operating cadence that you maintain, the way that you

• 40:21Speaker 02

  set your goals, the way that you communicate in the company, how you run interviews, like, all of these things actually, like, there's a just best way to do them. And for sure, you like, kind of need to adapt them, right? Any rule, obviously, needs to be broken to, like, you know, fit into your company. But like, actually, that they're all the same thing. And I feel like it took me like, you know, I sometimes joke, like, the way that I sort of learned from Keith is like, he has this like gigantic tree of knowledge. And in some ways, he probably couldn't even describe that whole tree himself. But each time we meet one particular founder in one particular situation, I get to watch him traverse that particular branch. And then I see that branch, and then I see another branch the next day, and the next day. And I feel like my job and part of why I wrote this like, series of, I think it was like, six or seven essays at the end of that sort of like,

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Two-year stint where I just tried to distill like there were some things that Keith has done like a really good job of like distilling over the course of various like podcasts and interviews. And for those, I mostly just like stole his previous frameworks, but there's one that I was like kind of proud of, which like, you know, how to be an effective, how to interview executives effectively. That one was actually like Keith had never really talked about or written down his framework for interviewing executives. But having watched him like interview like 15 CFOs and 15 VPs of marketing and 15 like VPs of sales, I was like, oh, there's actually a pattern to how you're doing all of these. And this pattern is actually like quite useful like framework to think through. But like, this isn't something that he had even like thought about. And I remember like showing him the essay. I was like, is this framework correct? And he's like reading, he's like, huh, that is correct. Like, yes, like I hadn't thought about framing it this way, but like, yes, this is basically like

• 41:42Speaker 02

  the decision-making framework that I go through. And so, yeah, I guess like the science of operating is I feel like what I learned from him.

• 41:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating that once you understand the science, then you just replicate it over and over and over.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  That's why he's had such success is like, the reason that Keith is a successful investor. Obviously, there's some amount of like reflexivity to it of like when you've had such success, the best founders want to have you on their board. But then part of it is like, I think, and people have different philosophies on this. Some people are like VCs are useless, blah, blah, blah. But the reason that really, really good founders want to have Keith on their board is like those very, very difficult situations where even like the top-tier founders can't quite figure it out on their own. Keith has seen the situation, knows how to deal with it and like actually gives you like meaningful advice. And like, you can talk to everybody from like, you know, Tony Hsu at DoorDash to Max Rhodes at Fair to like literally any company that he's involved in. I will guarantee you that they will say there is at least 20 instances of really critical moments in the path of the company where Keith changed their mind on a particular topic or candidate or like something that was actually quite core

• 42:34Speaker 02

  that actually ended up helping the company become much, much more successful. And is he perfect? No, but he's right like 90% of the time. And so if you're disagreeing with Keith, you better have like a really good reason you're disagreeing with Keith.

• 42:45Anthony Pompliano?

  He, one time I was getting coffee with him and I said something and I was like, yeah, you're a pretty good investor. He goes, actually, I've averaged one unicorn every year since I've been investing.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And I was like, okay, you're really, really good, right? Like, it was just, uh, you, when you start to actually put data around it, it's unbelievable.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  I mean, I think 20 years, 20 unicorns or something. Yeah, he had, I think, eight IPOs over the course of six months last year from whatever June 2020 to December 2020. It was literally just, you know, Back to back to back every single one and it's not even like, oh, he was like a small angel check. It's like, no Airbnb, he was the first investor. He put in a decent amount of money into that seed round and then like brought it to Sequoia for them to do the seed. DoorDash, seed round of DoorDash, right? Like, you know, there's like all these companies that have been extremely great IPOs. It's like when you get to the like eighth one down the list, you don't even think about it. But it's like, oh yeah, I wish also one of the early angel investors in which, right? But that's not even like something that either even like talks about or most people like even realize.

• 43:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, they only list the top four, right? So like the rest just get forgotten. All right, I feel like we talked a little bit about being red pilled. I feel like you got orange pilled or whatever you want to call it with Bitcoin and crypto for a little bit. It seems like you had conversations with a few folks, you can say who they are if you want. And you started to go down and then you kind of have like slowed your roll a little bit on crypto. So maybe just talk about like what your thoughts on crypto were before, how you started to get a little bit interested in and then what you think now?

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, I'd say my first foray into crypto was probably like 2013 or 14, like definitely got convinced. I was like, cool, Bitcoin is a store of value and I definitely debated and like invested some amount then. And I was like, maybe I should just hold this for the long term. Then I was like, eh, I'm like 22, I'd prefer to spend my money on like beer and like startups and like, just like kind of enjoying life rather than like really investing at the time. And so I kind of put it on the shelf for a while and maybe held on to like one Bitcoin or something like that for a while.

• 44:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Whole coiner.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Whole coiner, one coiner, exactly. And so, yeah, I kind of put it on the shelf for a while, then I'd watch it and I'd like, you know, occasionally catch up with friends. And I have this friend, Arjun Balaji, you know, we've known each other, I think since, yeah, fall 2011, literally, basically since like, you know, freshman year of college. And so he's obviously gotten, you know, very much into crypto. I don't know exactly when he started, but most recently he's now, you know, one of the investment partners at Paradigm. And so I've been watching crypto for far occasionally catching up to, you know, generally still felt I was like, you know, store of value still really feels like the only like, I don't know, like what I call like business use case, like where I felt like there really was something that like made a sense for a business to use. And then, you know, we were grabbing, you know, lunch, maybe like three or four weeks ago. And I'd been kind of poking into DeFi a little bit, but it was that lunch with him that really convinced me that like,

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Algorithmic liquidity pools were like this aha moment for me where I was like, whoa, there is actually like a second, you know, true business use case because there is a long tail of assets. The example that I always like to give, you know, I won't say who it is, but like I have a friend that is like now working on this extremely interesting startup, basically trying to like securitize musicians and artists, basically like future earnings and create a way for that artist to basically sell some of that, you know, future cash flow upfront. But then ideally also have a market where people, you know, can trade them along the way and do that not only for all their future cash flows, but even down to like particular albums. The problem is for creating liquidity market for that, you can't afford to have like a trading desk behind it, right? Jane Street's not going to invest in some random Joe Smo, you know, R and B musician from Chicago's,

• 45:50Speaker 02

  you know, trading desk for his like album. But DeFi and liquidity pools felt like a way I was like, oh, okay, here's a way where you could actually create, you know, an algorithmic, you know, liquidity pool.

• 46:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And real quick, just so for people who are listening who don't understand what this is, basically there's an entire idea of let's say there's a couple of different assets, liquidity providers put the assets into these pools. And then there's literally a decentralized protocol in an automated fashion that says, Delian wants X asset, and he's willing to give Y asset, and literally it takes Y, gives him X. And the different pools provide various returns to liquidity providers as a way to incentivize more or less assets in the pool.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  And the way that it was sort of like pitched to me, which is slightly different than how you pitched it, which is part of why I got maybe slightly unenthused with it, was that, let's say that this was actually, let's say, you know, Kanye drops a new album, and there's a share price. The way that like typically share prices are generated is like you actually have a little like market maker, somebody who's finding buyers and finding sellers and finding the basically like middle price. And then that's how the price gets determined. And instead, the way that I was pitched the liquidity pool was, instead, there's just like, as you buy a share, and actually rather than getting given to somebody else, it actually gets put into this like pool of money. The larger the pool of money goes, logarithmically, the price of the stock goes up so that each time you want to buy an individual sort of new share, it gets more and more expensive until it basically gets infinitely expensive at the final share. And then the reverse happens is as people

• 47:08Speaker 02

  are selling, they just take their money out of the pool, and then the price logarithmically goes down, and the price actually never reaches zero because it just keeps shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. So the liquidity pool also never really reaches zero. In practice, I basically started to play around with this and there were some parts that were disappointing where I was like, oh, well, I do kind of understand, yeah, there needs to be a sort of counter token, let's say. And I found that some of the liquidity pools that I was playing around with, it was more that they were like playing around with the fact that there was actually volatility on both sides of the markets. If you had like a, you know, an Ether Uniswap liquidity pool, well, the problem was like, it didn't really feel like I was trading into one or the other. It was mostly like dealing with the volatility of the two assets. Now, you can obviously fix that if instead you had like a, you know, what I understand to be like a stablecoin and then, you know, Kanye's album on one

• 47:49Speaker 02

  side, great, the stablecoin should stay stable and therefore the like, you know, volatility only comes from Kanye's album price basically like moving up and down. But after playing around with it for a weekend, I purposely like, you know, I'm a relatively decent software engineer, you know, started playing around with it and then kind of started from scratch. Honestly, if I hadn't done the KYC from Coinbase, it would have taken even longer. I did that obviously six years ago. But like, it literally took me like, I think almost like 36 hours from start to finish from like buying Ether, buying Uniswap to eventually actually getting those into a liquidity pool. And it was like, obviously not continuous 36 hours, but like waiting for one thing, waiting for, you know, whatever, you know, gas prices that day were super high and things were taking forever, blah, blah. And even then, just like understanding like what is my LP position in this pool and the fees that I'm generating from like

• 48:31Speaker 02

  liquidity. Anyways, I came away from it being like, this is still probably a little closer to DARPA net days than it is like ready for like Google to get co-founded. And so I feel like my like net conclusion was like, I'm not short crypto. I'm just more like, I'm gonna probably put it on a shelf for another two or three years, wait for like the true crypto believers to make it a little bit more mass market. And then I'm like, great, I'm ready to like fund a company maybe in another two or three years.

• 48:52Anthony Pompliano?

  It almost feels like, and I'm cheating because we talked a little bit about this already off air, but you see the light at the end of the tunnel to some degree, right? It's like, okay, cool. Like if this continues progressing, like there is going to be a lot of value created here and there's Bitcoin, there's other stuff, whatever. Right now, though, it's hard to use it. The user experiences, the interfaces are different. Like, it's just gonna be really, really hard to go build a multi-billion dollar, multi, you know, tens of billions of dollar company based on that idea. With that said, uh, do you think at all about like, that's company, right? Like a centralized entity versus these protocols that get created and like, let's hold constant for a second, like, uh, there's just some, you know, manipulation that goes on or like, you know,

• 49:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Dogecoin ends up being, you know, $60 billion and everyone's like, ah, maybe, right? But the protocol have value, like, have you thought yet about, uh, kind of protocols or market caps versus like company valuations? And like how you, how they are similar or different?

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, somebody had a funny tweet on this and I might not be able to like, remember the like exact wording, but it was basically like, if you're thinking about how you're going to make a lot of money off your protocol, it's probably a company and it's not a protocol.

• 50:01Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great way to look at it.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Because if you look at S M T P, nobody made a lot of money off of S M T P or S M S or all these other protocols that like, you know, people talk about, uh, and so I guess that's where, you know, I agree, there's maybe something of like, yes, you want to incentivize early adopters of a protocol via token, et cetera. But, um, I'm maybe more skeptical of the like world of, yeah, decentralized companies. I think at the end of the day, like, really great things only happen when a small group of people come together, having a line vision and like build it together, um, and protocols don't necessarily totally, you know, satisfy that.

• 50:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that makes Bitcoin an outlier in terms of like, this thing got built with like millions of volunteers on the internet? Or however you want to describe it, like, is that because it's, uh, vying to be money versus like a productive decentralized like entity?

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's like store of value feels like something that's like, yes, that does feel decentralized in some ways. Like you want it to be like, that's part of why gold is such a great store of value is like, nobody like owns gold. Gold is just like a material that is fully independent versus with like decentralized liquidity. Well, you know, if I'm Kanye and I'm listing my album somewhere, I'm probably only going to do that if I've got like a support number to call. You know what I mean? Like they want, they, they, they still want a corporate entity as like a part of that. I, I think we're a ways away from people being willing to like trade such large assets. Again, why does Airbnb go IPO in the NASDAQ and not in like some, you know, crypto equivalent? It's like, there's somebody to call at the end of the day to like, you know, deal with these large assets. And sometimes I think about when people talk about like, and this is the thing that I always like, you know, I was actually pushing Arjun, you know, from Paradigm really hard on this. I was like, How does a crypto transaction eventually happen where I buy a physical asset?

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Like I buy a home. At the end of the day, like it still feels like mostly what happens today is it gets converted into fiat. And then fiat is used to go like, you know, buy the home. Because it turns out like, you know, people, there's both regulations around buying homes. There's titles and things like that. And the world of like all of that shifting fully to crypto in some ways requires the government buy in. And so you need the government to somehow start to issue these tokens. But at the end of the day, there is a backing entity behind this. It's not like there's like some decentralized protocol for real estate. Partially because it's like, well, okay, so if somebody like, you know, steals my whatever, you know, secret key. And then literally do they get to like steal my house? And is there literally like no retribution for that? Like with Bitcoin, I get it. Somebody steals your Bitcoin, there's no retribution. That's fine. Same thing kind of, you know, honestly, in the real world, there is at least some retribution for gold. Like the US government will try to like investigate on your behalf.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  But man, if people can like steal my house, if they just get into my secret key and the government's not going to help me like that's the world of like a decentralized protocol. That seems kind of tough. And so I still think there's going to be some amount of centralization.

• 52:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of houses, last thing I want to talk about is Miami. You have a house here. You are one of many people who came to visit. I think kind of as like a, let me go check this out. Let's see. And then you're like, no, I'm actually going to move. And I remember you DM'd me and I was like, wait, is he kidding? Like, no way. He just got here like three days ago. And then you're like, no, no, no, like seriously, like I'm doing it. So walk me back to you tweet while in San Francisco, you get retweeted by the mayor and he's like, how can I help? It's this whole thing now. What's your perspective on the whole Miami thing and like your role in this?

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we originally started debating like, where would we open a second office in like July 2020? Cause Keith was really looking to like leave the Bay area. And finally, maybe like September, October, we like settled in Miami. He like bought the house, decided to move. And the entire time I was just like, dude, like, how is he going to be as like top tier investor? How is he going to win really competitive series As? Like this in-person stuff really does matter. That's going to come rebounding back. Like it feels totally impossible. And then in December was just like sitting there and this was like in deep in the grind of Varda. You know what I mean? Like I've been working on like basically pulling the company from scratch, dealing with all the, you know, convincing the co-founders that we should work on this equities, place, business plan, fundraising, et cetera. And it was like, it was rough doing that while also trying to do my founders fund job at the same time. Like I felt like I was working crazy hours. The one thing that was keeping me sane. Was I could go have outdoor dining at the fucking Wild Seed Restaurant next to my house. It was like a nice way to like cap the night.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  And I remember just seeing the like, you know, announcement of like, we're shutting down outdoor dining. And I was like, sitting on the can, I was like, are you fucking kidding me? There's no scientific evidence that there's any outdoor spread. Why are they doing this? If anything, it's gonna make things worse. Cause I guarantee you, people have now started to become accustomed to being social outdoors. Now they're gonna all go all indoors. It's gonna be even worse than if you just kept the outdoor dining. And so I sent what I thought was like very obviously a pithy tweet to my followers. Cause I've been tweeting about like anti Miami things for the past like, you know, month and like arguing with Keith about it like publicly. And I was like, oh, fuck it. Like, what if we just like picked up Silicon Valley and like moved to Miami? So we don't have to deal with this like outdoor dining stuff. And then, you know, lo and behold, like the mayor quote tweeted it and he was like, you gotta come visit. Like this went viral, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, dude, like I just started this company and like, we have 14 people that are starting like in our LA office on like, whatever, Jan 19th. I don't have time to fucking like think about a Miami trip.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  But anyways, Varda sort of got off the ground. We got everybody on boarded. We had this first, you know, whatever board meeting early March. And like Keith's birthday was like, you know, second or third week of March. And I was like, you know, maybe I could afford to go like visit Miami for a week, go check it out. I remember talking to my girlfriend like that Sunday before we arrived, we're like, there's no fucking way we're moving. Like Varda's in LA, like all my friends are in San Francisco. Keith's totally wrong about this thing, like there's no way. And then over the course of the week, a couple like, you know, cracks started to appear in my argument. Like, you know, on Wednesday, I remember like going out to dinner with Keith and just like looking around the restaurant, being like, Jesus, like this is like, uh, the deck, uh, which is like this, you know, restaurant that's actually like pretty close here. And I was like, this is a more vibrant and happy and like laughing, like lifestyle and vibe in this restaurant.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  Then like even like the best restaurant and like choose your favorite evenings in San Francisco, whatever you want, New Year's, anything. It is like less fun and less happy than like how happy I feel right now. And I care a lot about being happy because I think it does make you like work harder and I've found that in Miami that I work a lot harder. And then the following night I went to this like tech party that you were also at, like whatever in March, where I just walked in the room and I remember just being like, oh my God, there are more top tier VCs, builders, like, you know, engineers, founders. In this room than what I've seen in San Francisco for years. San Francisco used to have these like very fun ostentatious parties. Like I remember like 2014, 15, going to these like crazy pool parties in Woodside. You'd see like everybody, all these types of builders. And like, it sounds kind of silly, but I actually do think those parties are important.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Cause like those spontaneous interactions sometimes lead, you know, somebody who maybe works in space to talk with a D to C ecommerce thing. And it turns out there's actually some sort of collaboration. And like when those sort of parties started to get canceled over the course of like, you know, cancel culture in San Francisco, you just lost out on that. And so people didn't have these like spontaneous interactions nearly as often. And I do think that's quite important. Like I remember from that party in March, I knew that like six or seven investments happened, like multiple deals got signed. Like a lot of things happened from that party. And I walked in and I sort of like, I said it originally as a joke to a friend, but then the moment the words left my mouth, I was literally like, I don't know how the fuck I'm getting on that return flight to San Francisco. And the moment that hit and I said it, and like I had not been thinking about it until that moment. And then I said it and I looked at my friend, I was like, oh my God, I'm moving to fucking Miami, aren't I? I was like, I think I am.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  And then Nadia, by the way, my girlfriend was having a completely like parallel experience where she had actually left Miami for two days to go to Disney World with all of her friends. And I kind of describe her as like, you know, she's much more like the public intellectual writer researcher, like much more, you know, creative than I am. Smarter. Much smarter than I am. You know, she was having this parallel experience where one, all of her like friends had already moved to Miami. And she just felt like her like creative energy was so much more unlocked by being in this place that was much more intellectually diverse, physically diverse, so many more colors and beauty than she was seeing in San Francisco. And so she had actually been having this whole discussion with her friends as she was driving back down from Disney World for like this dinner that we were gonna have Friday night together. Where she was like, oh my God, I need to have this like very serious conversation with Delian. We're like, I want to spend more time in Miami because I'm really happier here and I'm enjoying it here.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  And I know he really loves San Francisco, but like I really, I can't go back to San Francisco. I need to be like spending more time here. And she's like arrives at dinner and it's like, Delian, I think we should spend more time in Miami. And I just like replied to her, I was like, I think we should just move to Miami. And she was like, what? I was like, I think we should just move. And I was literally like, we basically like didn't talk about it after that. We were like, great, we're moving to Miami. That was like it, that was the extent of the discussion. Then Sunday morning, we woke up, took a Vespa around the city, went to a couple of open houses and basically like bought the like, you know, second house that we visited. And we're like, great, put in the offer the next morning and you know, started planning the move. And that was the extent of it, 48 hours from, you know, deciding to, uh, moving.

• 57:53Anthony Pompliano?

  What was Keith's reaction when you told him?

• 57:56Speaker 02

  He was at first, I think, like, almost like in disbelief that it like it happened. But there was actually a sort of nice text that I got where the actual moment that I texted him that we got the offer accepted, he actually happened to be on a Zoom call with a like mutual friend of ours. The mutual friend said that like that was like the happiest he'd ever seen Keith in a long time. So it was nice to, you know, it was nice to get that text.

• 58:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I, I feel like he really, really stuck his neck out there, like put his reputation on the line and said, hey, like this is real. And your story is very common where even myself, I came and I came because I just wanted to get out of New York for a weekend. Right?

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 58:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And then I was like, wait, this is like weird. Like I think it was Mateo and Alex from Eight Sleep, Stephen from Cameo, Keith. Like, like there was an, and I was like, wait a minute, like there's way more people here than I thought there were. And then we came back the next weekend for a whole week. And I was like, are we gonna do like, you, you almost are like, am I getting tricked? Like, like, like, what's the catch?

• 58:53Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 58:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And then the, it's funny you say happiness, because that's how I describe people. I say, I'm happier in Miami. And that encompasses a whole bunch of different things. I don't know if it's the sun, if it's the people, if it's just the environment, if it's the diversity of, you know, kind of this is like the capital of South America. Some people describe it, whatever it is, I do feel like people are happier and there's higher energy. And some people will look at that from a work perspective and say, I work harder. Some people just look at it like it's a higher quality of life.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, for me, I'm like, all I care about is, you know, my number one goal in life is I want to be one of the best investors of all time. And I want to build a lot of very big space companies over the course of my career. And when I'm happier, I just work harder. And so I just like, can't imagine like ever deprioritizing that and like moving somewhere elsewhere than Miami. Cause it's just like, there's no fucking way. I like work harder here than I did in San Francisco. Moving back would involve like compromising my productivity and I have like zero willingness to do so. And then, yeah, also it turns out like the weekends are a lot more fun. And then like part of the reason I'm also much more productive is like, I'll work a 12 hour day. And then like, you know, in San Francisco, if it was 9pm, it's like, you're going home, all the restaurants are closed, you're Uber eating like some shitty burrito. And like, you're watching Netflix with like your girlfriend versus here at 9pm, it's like, I can go to Mila, I can have a quick like one hour meal. And by the way, there's like fire dancers, a DJ, I'm having a great fucking time.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  And like, what I've realized is like, this took me a while to figure out how to articulate like why it was so refreshing. It's because when you're in that like burrito Netflix watching mode in San Francisco, it's kind of still like the same delian that was like the work delian. Like it's not like changed versus. 15 minutes or so into Mila, like for sure, the first 15 minutes, I'm still kind of in like in work mode. And then at some point, you just like have so many people laughing around you and the lounge music and the fire dancers. That about like 20 or 30 minutes in, you just kind of transform into like what I call like vacation Dalian. And it's like, you're happier and you're excited and all the stress and like the shit that you had to deal with all day like totally melt away. And just being able to sort of have that like literally like daily reset of like having everything just totally melt away. Allows me to like then approach the next day, I feel like a much fresher, clearer mind and like work super hard again.

• 1:00:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone in San Francisco knows the tech industry is there and everyone's in tech. And therefore, like you go to the bar, everyone's just talking about work stuff, right? Uh, especially if you're public on Twitter, like if somebody sees you at the bar, like, hey, let's talk about this, oh, space, founder's fund, whatever. I got a startup, let me pitch you, like all, like all the craziness. Here, nobody gives a shit.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:01:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Like literally, there's not a person in Mila who gives a shit about the tech industry. They're literally here from every industry, all different cities. Uh, some people from the United States, not from the United States, whatever, like they're there to have a good time. And I think that's what you're kind of getting at is like, you don't feel like everywhere you go, from the coffee shop where you see all the VCs. Uh, and founders to then work to then you go to a restaurant and then you go home and you do it all over again. Like it's just, you just are seeing the same people that are in the same industry over and over and over again in San Francisco. And Miami is completely different.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  There's such a melting pot here in so many different ways, right? Like, I love the fact that you have people that are like Barry Stern, like one of the best real estate investors, operators of like all time. You have Thomas Bravo, one of the best PE firms of all time. You have like Antonio Gracia, one of the best deep tech investors of all time. And you have Keith Roy, one of the best like fintech, healthcare tech, like, you know, more consumer venture investors of all time. Those never were ever like, it was impossible to get all four of those types of people in one room anywhere in the world. Cause like the likelihood of them actually coordinating travel or going to the same conference is quite low. Whereas in Miami, that happens all the time. So you both have this like intellectual melting pot, but then obviously also you have the like cultural, like diverse melting pot. Like what I love about Miami is like, nobody's talking about race because there's just so many different people from so many different types. Like why, like nobody, it's not even, it'd be like ridiculous to even like talk about it.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  Whereas I went back to like San Francisco this past weekend for like a friend's birthday. And I remember it was like shocking to me, like I walked on Chestnut Street literally for like five minutes. And like the thing that just kept going through my head, I was like, there are. So many fucking white people here and I never appreciated it until like now, living in Miami. We're like now it just feels like so jarring where I'm like, oh my God. I just like my olive skin does not fucking fit in here. And now I get why I feel so much more relaxed in a city of immigrants that is much closer weather to Bulgarian weather. Where like, nobody asks me who I am, where I'm from, etc. Cause like, doesn't fucking matter. Everybody's got a weird name and has a weird accent and like, has, you know, weird colored skin. And so it doesn't fucking matter. Nobody's gonna ask you about it. Nobody's gonna judge you based off it. Versus in San Francisco, they're all fucking looking the same and they're the ones that are constantly talking about like racial politics, critical race theory.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  And it's like, the only reason you guys are talking about that is you all fucking look the same.

• 1:03:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I wish I had a microphone you could drop.

• 1:03:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, I got three questions before I let you go and you could ask me one. Most important book you've ever read?

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  Oh man.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  Probably. God, I just love, I mean, I don't know if it's like important in that it changed me, but I just love Seven Eves by Daniel Stevenson. It's about this, uh, basically this like, they call it like a critical event where basically, um, uh, what is probably like a small amount of antimatter passes through the moon. Causes the moon to start breaking up and then basically causes like an Armageddon type situation. Where eventually a bunch of meteorites from that basically collision, two years later are gonna rain down onto the moon. And it's just like this amazing story of just like the whole like, you know, world, um, having to coalesce around, oh my God, the earth is ending. We have two years to figure out a ton of different interesting space technologies and figure out how to make ourselves a spacefaring, uh, you know, civilization. But I like it cause it's like written in a very like hard science, very realistic way.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Based off of like today's technologies, like it's not written with some like crazy, we have nuclear, whatever, you know, starships, like it's like. If we like literally today had to figure this shit out and figure out how to like, you know, make it so the entire human race could survive off earth. Like what would we do basically for the next two years? And I always think about that cause I'm like, that's almost like the pace that I want Varda operating at is like, if we don't fucking make Varda work and like make ourselves a multi-planetary organization, like civilization, like. You know, we could actually end up in the scenario where, you know, an asteroid comes and kills us all.

• 1:04:27Anthony Pompliano?

  That's very deep. All right, Eight Sleep, uh, I sleep on the thermo-regulated bed, I'm assuming you do as well. What's your sleep schedule?

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm pretty diligent about it. I'd say it's probably like, you know, in bed at like 10:30, 10:45, asleep by basically like 11, uh, 11:15. Uh, I have, I think at this point, I was counting it up. I think it's like six, eight sleeps, uh, in my life. So I have one that sits in the Varda office in LA. So every time I fly there, I go directly to the office, pick it up, and then I go install it at the hotel room that I'm at. There's not enough hotel rooms right now with eight sleeps near the office. I have two in my parents' house in Utah, um, and then two, uh, you know, here in Miami.

• 1:05:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're a, you're a believer?

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm 100% a believer. I actually slept on the very first Eight Sleep outside of the founders. It was like a jumble of wires, some sketchy looking pump. It woke me up a couple of times because it was like, you know, way too cold, but uh...

• 1:05:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you think you like peed in the bed or something?

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. There were a lot of, uh, there were some rough moments the first couple of years of prototyping.

• 1:05:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but it's great. I love it. Uh, aliens, believer or non-believer?

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  That's a good question. I don't know if I believe that the UFO stuff that we're seeing is caused by aliens, but I for sure think that there are sentient aliens that are probably much closer to us, almost certainly for sure in the Milky Way, and also much closer to us than probably we expect.

• 1:05:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, so I agree, difference between UFOs and aliens. The odds that the UFOs are just things that we haven't identified or figured out yet, but not aliens, probably pretty high. Uh, if they're in the Milky Way or closer than we think, do you think in our lifetimes we'll be able to communicate even from afar or like recognize? Or do you think it's something where they're probably out there, but it's just the technology barrier's too big and we won't be able to actually find them?

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  I don't think in our lifetime, but I mean, yeah, when you're doing these far up projections, it's kind of hard, but next 300 years, absolutely. If you like, you know, just track the pace of our exponential progress in space in terms of just like sphere of influence and how quickly humanity can grow, and just say, okay, imagine that bubble just continues to expand for sure over the next 300 years. Almost certainly at some point that bubble will get large enough where we will eventually interact with a, uh, with another, you know, alien species.

• 1:06:28Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, you could ask me one question to finish up. What you got for me?

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  Okay, uh, what is your favorite part about dating somebody that's Bulgarian? Or sorry, married, married to somebody that's Bulgarian? It may be least favorite as well.

• 1:06:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  But it has to be Bulgarian specific. Can't you be like Polina specific?

• 1:06:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Due to the fact that she's Bulgarian.

• 1:06:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that, well, there's the Bulgarian experience is what I'll call it. So there's this element of like toughness, which I actually can't separate. Is it just like the immigrant element of it versus like the Bulgarian specific element of it? But there's many situations where you just kind of are like, you didn't complain, you didn't whatever, like just the way that you handle that situation is very, very different than almost any other person I know in that situation. And like that toughness to me has to be from the experience, whether it's immigrant or Bulgaria together. And one of the funniest things I think of in terms of, I've been to Bulgaria now, I think three or four times.

• 1:07:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I know enough words to be dangerous to like tell her mother, like her grandmother, I love her and she's beautiful and like, you know, whatever. Right. But Polina's father lived through the hyperinflation in Bulgaria. Literally at one point his salary ended up being the equivalent of like 30 cents a month. And so he just like stopped going to work.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And talking to him, I get reminded all the time of the American ideals and like the ethos and the freedom and like democracy and capitalism. Like all the things that sound so stupid, like, oh, why do you care about that stuff? Like, no, go talk to somebody who lived through communism. Like they literally will be like, that sucked. This is way better.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:08:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And so like Polina has an element to it too, where she's not as vocal about it, but like there's, you know, a lot of stuff that happened over the last year. So she's just like, man, it's a lot of complaining going on, but like, uh, I came from a country like that wasn't so cool compared to this country. This country is pretty cool. Uh, and so I think like you just get that constant reminder of like, hey, there's a lot of things that can be improved. But we got it pretty good right now.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think that's partially why I love Miami so much. It's like, it's a bunch of people that all hate communism. Like I remember. I was at this like political event, like this like old Cuban guy comes up to me, he's probably like 55 or 60 and he's like, he's like, you know, why are you here at this event? Like, why do you like it so much? And he was like, well, I grew up in Bulgaria. And then he cut me off. He's like, that's all you gotta say. And I was like, okay. Yep, that's it.

• 1:08:48Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy because I do think that there's this element of like, America was the upstart. America was the challenger and we did such a great job and we ascended to this position of power and frankly, privilege, right? In the world of just like, I was born in the United States and I never had to worry about hyperinflation, never had to worry about communism, never had to worry about any of this stuff. And also we were indoctrinated into like, well, democracy is good. Like, yeah, no shit, right? Like, okay, capitalism, whatever. But there's a different appreciation for it when you come from a place that doesn't have it and now you have it, right? Like you almost, you get to understand what the other side looks like versus like reading it in a book. And so just like, there is this element of many immigrants that have experienced that they just, they understand.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  That's why we're so fearful of like, you know, when you start to see things that like diverge away from what we believe to be like democratic capitalism. I think there's much more of like an adverse reaction to that as an immigrant versus I feel like some of my friends that are born and raised here have become somewhat complacent with the idea of like, oh, well, maybe we can do like universal XYZ, you know, benefit and just pay everybody to not work XYZ. And we're like, all the people that have come from there, you're like, no, no, no, no, no. We know how this starts and where this game ends. Like, no fucking way are we going down that path.

• 1:09:55Anthony Pompliano?

  We're not gonna go there. Where can we send people to find more about Varda, Founders Fund, or you on the internet?

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  So for Varda, it's just varda.com. So pretty easy. We put up, you know, a bunch of interesting stuff. We'll have a new website coming pretty soon. For myself, probably my Twitter handle, @zebulgar, Z E B U L G A R. And then Founders Fund, probably foundersfund.com and the Founders Fund handle, @foundersfund.

• 1:10:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Thank you. We'll do this again.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Thanks, Pomp.