How the Top US Angel Investor Operates | Ed Lando, Founder of Pareto Holdings

I think the model works at scale I think the part that breaks actually sooner than the economic model like even if you're imagining billions of dollars I think the model works and you can you can be really well but I think that what

what breaks is the the brand and the attention to detail if we get to the point where we have thousands of precedes where we are actually the First

Investors the hardest part for us and I think we will get there but I think the hardest part will be how do we continue to be a brand that people love and want to work with is like they're the best like when they

decide on you they're the best and actually someone who's done a really good job at that isoa whenever they invest in something everyone wants to invest in that company but if you go to CR base seoa has thousands of Investments you know they're louder

about the bigger ones uh but like you know a seed round type of thing from SEO like there's been a good amount I think I forget the latest but I remember it was like 1500 or 2,000 Investments or something like that it's like that's still a good amount of companies and

they have a really good success rate but they've managed to not really dilute their brand in doing so which is fascinating welcome to the peel I'm your host Sher Novak founder of banana

Capital today's guest is Ed Lando co-founder of paredo where he's been an early investor in over 25 unicorns started and incubated a dozen companies and was recently named the most active angel investor in the world according to

Crunch based data we are not passive we know we're not waiting for people to Ping us we're sort of actively hunting our conversation gets new as Angel strategy lessons from starting and investing in over a thousand companies

trusting your intuition navigating hype in substance and why Ed didn't raise outside capital I I think this model that we're doing actually scales to managing billions of dollars because he also breaks down his playbook for

incubating companies but most people get wrong advice for hiring your first true employees and why he doesn't think incubating companies is actually a good strategy I have gotten so much criticism

from investors for for this model that we've done for a long time plus he shares the biggest differences he sees between the US and Europe several of the people we work with in Paris work harder than a lot of the Americans that I know

a quick thank you to Ben Cambier Rohit badang and Stan cin for their help brainstorming topics fored a reminder I publish you episodes of the Peele every week exploring the world's greatest

startup stories just like this one tune in next week for conversation with Matt molway co-founder of Wordpress now let's talk to Ed Ed how's it going welcome to the show

good to see you yeah excited to do this so so I think this kind of came up you uh were featured in one of my friends he did this report on the most active Angel Investors in the world Lenny ritky he put it out we'll link it in the

description for people and you were number one so I think that's probably where for a lot of people that's the first time they kind of came across you what's kind of the the story with all the Angel Investing yeah thanks for

having me so the story is um you know I've been building startups since I was 18 uh you know I sort of I got into college I grew up in France France I got

into college I went to pen and um I taught myself how to build websites and and apps because um I wanted to to to build my own things and because you know Engineers would not respect me and my

friends if we didn't know how to build our own things and you know build some things uh got into YC when I was a senior um in in college and went through that as a lot of fun built built a a

couple companies even before that when I was an undergrad but but had a few smart people already kind of like around me that I wanted to uh to bed on and so you know quite early on um you know just um

just just starting taking small beds on them and then it compelled you know usually hopefully you know it's sort of like having customers where if people if people enjoy working with you uh they um

they refer other folks and I found that like you know impressive people tend to know other impressive people and and I found that's a great way to it's been a great way to meet uh at least some of the best investments I've made yeah

that's fair I think when you think about most most VCS people probably think that they're super loud and active you you know you kind of think of like the a16z approach like a media company you've

kind of done the opposite and it sounds maybe you just explained why but can you kind of talk through why historically you just haven't done much PR and how you think about it yeah I I've had this discussion many times with um you know a

few good friends uh and and I think there's been this debate about like whether or not to to be loud or to be quiet you know there's some people obviously if you go on on on Twitter ask you know I'm guilty there some people

and I'm sure and sure it it it yields a lot of great things you know and even you know when Lenny sort of did that feature you know I didn't expect it came out of nowhere and definitely I I got a bunch of great opportunities out of it so that's why doing a few more of these

um but yeah over the years I I've never really focused on on on doing PR or or having news and I don't know how newsworthy it is to to invest in companies yeah exactly you know but but I've also found

that like the the the best folks that I've met have been you know someone from someone who I know who sometimes said is like gosh like this person is like the

most impressive Relentless person that I know I would bet on them no matter what and you know it does work I guess when you get more marketing or PR it sort of helps uh but but often you know the sort

of compounding uh has has worked in itself where you know we backed I backed a lot of companies now with bredo and so we just get an interesting sort of Base there yeah it makes sense it for me I

kind of accidentally became an influencer like I was just kind of trying to get a job in VC eight years ago and it's kind of turned into what it is today it's the vi yeah and I think

the the the thing that is kind of interesting about it is it's not like somebody says oh uh just because Ed had a good tweet like I'm gonna reach out to him or

I'm gonna like let him invest in my company but if you were to say to somebody else like oh hey you should meet my friend Turner he's really good at this stuff like check out his Twitter listen to his podcast then the founder might be like oh yeah this guy seems

pretty legit like it just kind of makes you easier to introduce to people but you still got to do the work of like actually contributing or maybe at a minimum like not messing up the the company when you when you invest so

totally no and this debate is still ongoing you know there's many examples of people who are very successful who are quiet uh and obviously several of them even you or I might not have heard of them uh but there's some people who

have no internet presence and who've been part of incredible companies and there's some people who you know have have are very very loud and and and and and the sometimes obviously get get access to great opportunities because

they are top of mind so I I am sort of uh tending towards the the being a little bit louder might be worth it these days yeah I think it just depends what are you good at like if you're a really good writer you know you should

probably put your writing out there right like if you're writing something internally to your team or like there's like some new model like Claud on it you know 3.8 comes out or whatever they're going to name the next one and you have

a good interesting breakdown or take about it or like you tried it out and like no one's really r about it yeah and you throw it out there on the internet a lot of people will see it and like you did that anyways like to like your team or in the group chat or with friends

it's like just throw it up online and it might be helpful for people and it you know kind of builds your brand your reputation however you want to think about it totally and it's it's funny you say that you know one of the selfish

reasons why I want to do a few more of these is that I love to write and I'd love for more people to read what I have to say so uh you know we'll see what um what are you gonna be writing on like

substack or I you know I have a sub stack and also I I'm I'm slowly becoming a LinkedIn influencer which is my my major Acclaim to fame uh but but you know I think it doesn't matter like I repost the same thing everywhere um I've

never been that good at optimizing it uh but as far as like what I like to write about you know it's sort of a mix of thoughts and music and startups but then also frankly musings on on life when I

was an undergrad apart from uh from some working on on apps and and websites I actually thought that I wanted to be a novelist uh and I I just love to write I love reading I love philosophy I love

thinking about the world so uh you know trying to share those things all right we'll throw a links for people to find you in the in the description they can they can read along um what so this is

probably a question that would come up if somebody is more attuned to like the oh you need to be allowed to get deal flow like what have you found works best in terms of having inbound deal flow come in or maybe it's outbound deal flow

when you're more quiet I think you kind you kind of got into a little bit but can you just kind of talk through how that would work yeah would I would think about it as far as like the beginning of a process right where where let's say you're just starting off investing uh

you know just simply asking yourself who are some of the most impressive people I know from where I studied where I worked uh who do I believe in let me try to find a way to work with them or back them if if they're building something

and then usually if you do a couple of those um again at some point those people will meet other people who they find interesting or they will hire other people who work there for a little bit and then those people will leave and do

their own thing and so I very much believe in it's we can talk talk about hiring later because we spend a lot of time building companies these days but I very much believe it's a similar approach to sort of like you go to the people you know well versus you know let

me go go ping folks you know of course there's a lot of investors who do the strategy of pinging people on LinkedIn or pinging people on X and sort of sniping people who are interesting and reaching out to them with interesting

message that can work for sure uh you know one one of my first good Investments by the way was I read about this French team that was building a consumer mobile app I know where you're going with this yeah I was oh yeah I

have a story there but they you know there was um I was writing for The Huffington Post whatever that meant but I was proud of it it was this was in college and I reached to them I was like Hey I want to cover you guys in The Huffington Post and I used that as an

excuse to meet up with them and I ended up investing in them so I do believe in a little bit of the hunting too what do you find yourself investing in today I think I saw that you tweeted or you it was a LinkedIn post can't remember which

one but you said you're doing like a couple of week at this point so what are you kind of looking for on the investing side and like well what's interesting to you right now yeah what is interesting to me in the

investing side is very um industry agnostic it it's sort of I um I just want to back impressive people who are dropping out of school or who are quitting their jobs and ideally I want

to be the first investor in those people uh and and that's what we want to do with bro so we're we're chatting you know we're going a lot of campuses we're chatting lot of people who are graduating or dropping out of school or

sort of like you know fairly uh young folks with their first startups um and then also so folks are like leaving their jobs and I think partly is because I I definitely also take part in in rounds that are a little bit more established than with people who' have

already proven themselves out um and and that's the sort of more consensus bucket of what we do uh but but I find that compared to other investors out there this is a more unique thing for for me and for the Paro team to

do yeah I feel like it's more gratifying to like back someone you're like the very first investor and they like crush it and you're like it it's just kind of fun like it's just way it's way more fun to me it's fun and you feel more useful

you know like one example that comes to mind is like you know have developed a really great relationship with this guy Keon who runs nucleus uh you know nucleus genomics it's like a cool

company it's on 23 and me you know we met him through a mutual friend and and we sort of like Le co-led the seed with him at the precede and Keon at the time was an undergrad at pen and you know he

is great family but you know his parents I think as immigrant you know immigrant parents uh you know didn't want him to sort of leave school and and do this and you know we offered him funding

while he was still in school and that allowed him to drop out and uh and our friend who sort of um co-led this with us you know shared like I think there was a story like the even footage of Keon's reaction when he heard the news like on his security camera or something

at home just like oh no way screaming and joy yeah and so I think when you can actually be the first person who bets on people you're definitely much more memorable than you know hey this top

fund is leading around a seed uh do you want to put in uh 50k you know like I I think that that that's great and you can still make money that way uh but but you're you're less useful in that way yeah so then how did you make the

transition from this kind of your you know I don't know Angel Investing quote unquote if you want to describe it that way you still kind of are an angel I guess but you have kind of like a fully fledged fund and strategy just how did

that whole transition happen over the past 10 years and maybe a way to frame it is like you know yeah for you or like advice for somebody else trying to do it yeah yeah so we're very kind of like we

have a strange approach where we don't really have a fund um so you know a couple years ago I was at like 450 Investments or so this was really just

me as an angel and it started becoming too much for for one person to sort of take care of even help helping people with intro signing docs yeah just just doing the k1s like the taxes anything

yes it just it was becoming overwhelming it was not enjoyable I was having panic attacks we could talk about that but it it was not pleasant um and I became friends with uh with with with with someone in New York you know who sort of

like started you know investing in some companies with me and then we were like hey why don't we put you know some Capital together in in a structure that we named you know Paro um the name essentially from the idea that that I'm

obsessed with which is U that of power law in a sense we're like you know we can go into that later but but but like you can back a thousand companies and it's really sort of one hopefully you know you hit sort of one Google and and

one will return like a thousand times over you could do well with like let's say a 100 uh but you will do sort of incredible ly well with one we decided to to to pull together some Capital into

one vehicle and which allowed us to hire like one or two people to start and to simply just have a little bit more leverage and so Paro you know I worked with that partner for a couple years now it's back to being just me uh sort of

funding poo uh so so poo is like a sort of Super Angel vehicle if you will that I fill up once in a while and we have a couple people working with us um two

great folks Ben and Jules um and together we we cover ground you know we we are in almost a thousand companies to date we are not passive we know we're not waiting for people to Ping us we're

sort of actively hunting we're essentially the First Investors we've preceded almost 200 companies um and um we actively help them raise more money like in nucleuses case you know we put

in a six figure check to start and then we helped them raise you know a couple million dollar seed round I think they rais a couple million from Founders fund and then they raised a series a from 776 they've raised like more than 20 million

we were the first investors you know kian's an amazing guy I think we were definitely you know important to his trajectory and like we're trying to find more people like that where we're the first to back them yeah I remember that's um talk about anti- portfolio I

know we were talking about that a little bit earlier that's that that one in my anti- portfolio well it's doing great but you know the it's never over till till it's over but yeah we have we have a ton I mean we've missed a ton of

things too so no no worries there by definition you know the the world economy is pretty big so so so it sounds like you so you kind of like structured the thing you like set up this like okay

this is like a dedicated strategy but you didn't go and raise a more traditional fond like everyone else like what was your thinking about keeping this like a little more under the radar Your Own Thing versus the more traditional model that people will do

it's a luxury too right it's because like partly you know I've also helped start some other things and have been able to sort of sell some shares along the way and so like recycle some some some Capital there and have some Capital to invest into companies so so it is

luxury obviously if you can invest your Capital uh it's it's there's a lot of benefits to that versus uh other I think you know the downside by the way even if you have some Capital to invest and and

so on and is that you um we've often felt more Capital limited than than other funds you know every day these days you're reading about a new $600 million fund that closed or a new

billion dollar fun the close you know we're not there yet uh maybe we will be one day but but like you know there many cases where like you know with Ben and jwes we're like we wish that we could put more money into this company you know even in cases where we put 100K

we're like we wish that we could have done 500K or or or whatever it is or a million dollars but you know we have an active strategy right now of like when some of our investments get a little bit further along we we sometimes sell a

part of our stake even if we believe a lot in the company because it allows us to have money to invest into other companies but so it's not even like a deliberate strategy thing it's more about I have

um I'm a very impatient person uh and okay and I um you know over the years some really nice people have been like Edward you should meet you know this LP or or that LP and I've met with some of

them and I've I've actually liked some of them but I found um their process to be too annoying uh to to to sort of go and try to raise a fund and and sort of man for now at least U and I've also

found that there a lot of them not all of them a lot of their sort of questions uh are not that interesting you know essentially like if you if you go to a lot of LPS for early stage you know invest in early stage funds if you say

Hey you know we're only investing in like agriculture tech companies that use robotics with like an AI thesis in you know uh the United Kingdom they'll be

like cool that's a very specific thesis you know like let's run that by our investment committee we can sort of sound not not not dumb if you know by sort of like pitching that or you know these days like all these AI funds or crypto funds but if you tell them you

should back me because I have good taste in people and because I will sort of work harder and and help them more they can't sound smart to their you know to their investors uh and so yeah frankly

the the requirements to sort of raise the F early on were frustrating uh and so I decided to take this route and now it's getting to the point where we have enough compounding internally that um

it's unclear whether you know we will ever need external Capital but we'll see yeah so then what was your decision making then on you took like your entire

net worth and just put it all into this extremely risky and illiquid asset class that I mean I'm sure like 99.9 maybe most listeners would be like oh yeah this makes sense but like most people in

the world would be like that's that's crazy what was just the thinking process of doing that yeah and by the way I don't even know if this disclaimer is uh is useful or necessary but like obviously is not investment advice okay

yeah true true is not investment advice but but look like in my in my case um I've always been a little bit uh crazy like risk-seeking uh for better for

worse and so you know I have um often over the last few years had a uh let's say liquid to liquid ratio personally of one to several

hundreds Fair yeah that is essentially what you know what what would my internal sort of finances look like with our stuff I I think you know sure it is risky obviously you know we invest in a

lot of companies and so um it's sort of across a lot of different people um and it's just like this is this is what I do you know I don't really do other types of investing I don't really do public markets investing I don't really do real

estate investing I don't think I understand that or I've never really looked into it or you know I went to you know I I took some of those classes I'm sure I'd be like okay at it if I if I tried to do it but I don't think I

have an edge there I like you know making early bets on people and sort of having an INT intuitive sense for people and uh you know I think I'm good at it uh and and you know we'll see it's been it's been about 10 years but you know it

seems to be working and and hopefully it will keep working and frankly I think that people like like Ben and Jules are also really good and have become a lot better so I've had the luck of attracting some great folks and um I'm

not that worried about it but yeah I would say um you know 90 plus percent of my of my 95% or more what I have is invested into what we're investing in and also in what

we're building which we can talk about later uh and I sleep very well at night thinking about that there there are other things that keep me up but not that yeah that's fair I mean for the record I'm in a similar boat like pretty

much the vast majority of my netw worth is literally in all my banana funds and I mean my my wife is always like are we okay like is that a good idea and I'm

like it sounds like give a great wife yeah yeah she I mean she's awesome but and and she's like she's on board with it like she trusts me with it and everything but a rational thing would be like you know be a little bit more

Diversified like in the past I've like owned real estate but when I made the jump into Venture I literally sold I had two houses I had one I lived in and a rental sold it cashed out and went all in which I mean I feel like you kind of

have to do that if you're going to be in this business like this realm is like you kind of got to be risk-seeking and you got to believe in yourself and you know I don't know that's that's all you

can really do yeah well no I think you know in the traditional wisdom it's there's been so many books uh and and written about money and making money and there's been a lot of podcasts and and and everyone has an opinion and uh you

know obviously there's some people who are really great at it like you know Berkshire haway and and others and you can kind of learn from those um it seems like diversification doesn't actually uh

uh work that well you know and it seems like and the people who actually do very well tend to initially make it from like kind of uh one or or two big things and then you know over time again with this

sort of like preed type model you don't have to precede that many Ubers or Googles to return everything a THX over hence the the power law idea um but um but yeah it seems like it's actually

worth it to to concentrate your bets and what we're doing a little bit more of occasionally is U writing slightly larger checks so we've done a couple seven bigger checks into things uh when we we really know people well and when

we sort of have a very strong point of view so we'll see if it pans out I have no idea uh but uh you know it's worth to try yeah I mean I think there is a like a thread of Truth to that because I've

seen studies where these are this is like public market stuff where you know relatively liquid assets and mature businesses or whatever they say if you

have like a public stock portfolio of like 20 companies that is pretty you get pretty much like 95% of the benefits of diversification and you keep getting

more and more Diversified it doesn't really give you that much but then you limit kind of your upside because you miss out on the big winner sort of it's it's it's the same thing you see in

Venture but I do think because the way that we we're investing in companies that basically burn a ton of capital and like the whole the whole point is they're they're super risky and

they'll likely not work you kind of gota say okay maybe 20 is like not enough maybe you should you know expand the scope a little bit is 30 a good number and like that's that's the bar or like

30 per year or like per vintage or however you want to think about it so I mean I do think that and then to your point you're right like you just you get one thing like if you have 5% of your portfolio in something and that one

position is 100x that will 5x the whole portfolio yes yes yes no the math is really interesting and I think about this a lot and and again not investment advice but but like let's say if you

compare like public markets to private markets and let's say you have um hypothetically so 20 public stocks right 20 public positions and let's say you

have $2 million to invest in total and so you put you know 100K into into each one of them and you know unless in some cases right you've had crazy streaks over the last few years with like Nvidia

you know and and other companies kind of behaving like crazy you know uh private Market companies but usually I mean there's been exceptions but usually in public markets you don't really get 100x

thousand X type of things you have gotten many anomalies recently because the Market's been crazy but usually you don't get those things so if you if you do like kind of hit a winner in public markets and let's say you get like a 5x

which could be great you know you 5x 100K which is awesome uh and then and then you know on the rest you know maybe you get plus or minus like five or 10% for each one of them or or or whatever

it is the net effect on your two million invested is not going to be that much right versus let's say you put 100K times 20 like into 20 different companies and you know you buy sort of a significant stake early on because

you're you're sort of preting the company yeah they're starting the business and you own like 5% of it right so let's say you know like a couple you know several of them fail because that happens some of them do well we find

that you know several of them like will do like a 5x or or 10x or something like that so you'll actually like make more money already than you've invested and it it just takes a lot of time that's the problem and then and then let's say

you know you get very lucky because one in 20 chances I mean it's to find an outlier is is uh it's pretty amazing odds but let's say you get very lucky and you hit like a mega outlier and you

kind of like you know 100x right um you're you sort of end up with like A10 million do position there just with that one thing right with dilution and other things like that so so these sort of

power law effects and venture or for this early stage thing are very powerful where um you can I guess in in in a sense you can both diversify and have very sort of uh large concentrated

positions yeah the one way I think about it to and explaining to people you know they like oh just you know how awesome would it been to just invest in when he was starting the company like just go go

meet him earlier like it's obviously very much easier said than done but like yeah that's I mean that's basically what you're doing right you're just going meeting people when they're starting generational businesses and you benefit

from it hopefully and then the crazy part about Nvidia or about other companies like that as you know and even Amazon is that some of those companies went public pretty early and so if you had actually just bought those companies

when they went public you would have captured most of the upside and then you of course have stories of like amazing investors like you know mosa at soft Bank who I think is is is incredible and has has a lot of ups and downs I believe

you know there's an interview where like you know he sort of jokes with u with Jensen hang about having sold a lot of his position in Nvidia at the wrong moment and so you have you know the life

of a great company is decades and so for better for worse you're gonna have moments where you're going to buy and sell probably along the way and I think it's impossible to time it perfectly so so in my case already it has been the

case that I have looked like an idiot uh for for sell some things I back someone early and then I sold some some something and and and I sort of made some money but then there was another sort of 10x or 100x afterwards so that

that will inevitably happen more oh you had 100x once after you sold yeah you know like there's a company that I backed super early where sort of I mean have a couple of those but where sort of you know I bought like I think 10% quite

early and you know I I sold some and sort of I think locked in essentially like a 25x or 30X already which is pretty great and reinvested some of that into other companies so who knows if you compare the compounding there but that

company then went on to appreciate you know another another 10x and then maybe now another like you know five to 10x so we'll see we'll see it happens you know and and and and you know you you never

know if you were right or wrong until the true sort of end value of the company because uh we'll see yeah I mean at least it's your own money you're you're staying in the game like you're keep going I mean I feel like you you think differently is when it's your own

Capital versus someone else and whether that's you're riskier sometimes you're a bit more risk of verse because you're like well no and look I was chatting with an accountant friend of mine recently uh who uh who sort of you know

was telling me that you know there's there's a lot of sort of VCS at top funds who no matter what every year make uh if they have interest of their their carry and the fund for the good years

they'll make a couple tens of millions of dollars uh just based on sort of like the the management fee and the carry and everything regardless of their performance and so you don't have that luxury you got to like actually make

money right so in their case you know like I don't know if they care about cashing the thing and making the Thousand X or whatever it is I think they they don't mind you know overpaying for the series a or series B and only

getting you know a couple X because they'll get into the brand name and then they'll keep attracting more LP money and then they'll keep fees off of that so it is it is in many cases a different game yeah I feel like the game that that

maybe the the game that you're playing is backing good Founders and maybe the game other people maybe fall into is attracting uh Capital like attracting LP Capital exactly no I think the game I'm exactly is backing good Founders

actually being a good partner to them and making money by actually making good Investments uh which is a an interesting an interesting comparison to some of these other models yeah I think at this point you've I forget if you mentioned

this if I read it somewhere but you backed like 25 unicorns at this point is that is that the number something like that yes but but I think you know that number all a lot of numbers are misleading in in general like for

example I could have bought my way into 25 unicorns at you know a $500 million valuation for each one of them and then say that I backed you know but a lot of those I actually did back very early sort of the seed stage and then the

second thing is that's not only that's not the only thing that matters like in certain cases you know me and and then Paro we've gotten into companies where very early and and you know we're now

sort of marked up I don't know 100x or or 200x and the company's not even well 100x the company's not even like a unicorn yet and so in some cases our best multiples are are actually not in

companies that are unicorns because we got early and interesting yeah I think that can be the beauty of investing in like out of favor categories like cpg for example I know you have this one uh

company is called is it called Catalina crunch is that how you pronounce it is this is this an example of that it's an example yeah very good friend of mine you know sort of I I I I was friends with him back in the day uh you know we

we sort of overlapped a little bit in school and I've always found him to be brilliant you know several of other people who who knew him were like most impressive person of our year you know as a Quant Quant researcher at aqr like

really good at math used to be like a national chess champion and he initially wanted to start an auto insurance company uh and back in the day I was even like we were hacking in some websites together I thought I was maybe

gonna like start a company with him um but he tried he was doing the auto insurance thing he tried to raise you needed to raise a couple million for it you know as a first-time founder which was a lot of money uh you know I don't

know eight years ago uh and uh you know compared to some of these AI raises but it was a lot of money eight years ago and he's brilliant but he wasn't the most sort of V acious fundraiser he doesn't sort of like overselling and so

was not able to pull this Capital together and then he just had a total 180 and you know decided to work on something that he cared even more about which is he happens to be diabetic and

he could not find cereal or or cookies or snacks that uh that he could really enjoy and so he decided to start his own brand of of Keto cereal and he started baking his own cereal in his tiny little

kitchen in the Lower East Side of New York okay and then he needed a little bit of money for it and a lot of the people he'd been talking to are like okay look we could have invested in you know a Quant from aqr to to do an auto

insurance company I guess that narrative would make sense to our LPS you know it make sense whatever the the story but like you making serial like what's the connection there and you know again not to not to to two on horn too much but I was just like this is the same person

you know I'm investing in the same person so had the luck of teaming up with him early got to invest in a very low valuation um and you know it's it's it's the company's you know doing north

of 100 million in Revenue today profitable um he's built it into this thing you can find in every corner store uh and I think it's just the beginning uh but he's a beast and that's an

example of uh you know a lot of the say that that people say have some truth to them even though they sound Bal but like it's an example you're just backing a person and uh and I you know I I know several people who are very intelligent

people and who who are VES and they're very sort of clear thesis and markets but they' still passed in some great seed Investments because the companies looked very different from one month to

another and it changes shape and then they missed the opportunity so that's but yes that's one example where being being an angel in something uh you know early on um can actually sort of yield

incredible returns even if it's not like an Uber siiz company yeah well even in cpg like the if you if you listen to a way that most early stage investors will

talk about cpg and why it's so hard it's the math like it is the numbers like the numbers are really hard to to get right like whether it's the CAC or like your Logistics cost whatever and he's a math

genius right like he's good at understanding numbers and he's going to go and Tackle this category like obviously there's you almost need like some taste and like some design and maybe some other skills there but that's

the part A lot of people get tripped up on is like the math on those businesses you're right and and actually maybe the fact that he is a math genius to use your terms like probably has help has helped them think about it as an actual

like you know as an actual business in sort of they they did a great job expanding with retail instead of like spending too much money acquiring customers online and he's always been super rational and looking at all this

stuff and for a while you know some of the early folks who invested uh you know were a little bit impatient with him being like come on you should move faster there's other players who are spending more online growing faster and

uh didn't matter his strategy worked so uh that's another topic we could talk about but I have seen some really smart people build companies in different ways and uh not all of which I initially

agree with and so I've learned that uh there many ways to skin a cat yeah I mean that's a good topic to dig into like how would you I guess I'm not really sure what you're referring to like any other examples that you're thinking of that you've seen yes I think

that like I tend to buy us like I try to be perhaps less and less opinionated as I go but I I tend to bias towards like a certain way of building a company like I

I spend 95% of my time these days helping build stuff uh not investing so we can talk about that at some point but but I like the sort of spe and and getting traction quickly and kind of you

know a couple of the things I've been part of uh have grown really fast almost from day one and have gotten traction immediately and then you know there's like there's another company that I've

been involved with for five five plus years now five and a half years and like a B2B software company which is slowly compounding and starting to sort of you know add add a lot of new users every

day and I think there's a shot that it could be the next figma uh but but you know I have pulled I have pulled my hair out a lot over the next over the last few years uh because I've been like why

can't we grow faster and uh it's it's been a difficult product to build and it's been it's not a trivial way to acquire customers so um as opposed to you know I was a kind of early investor in

in misfitz market like a Grocery Company online grocery company I sort of helped get it off the ground with my friend Obby and who runs it and um you know that one grew really vast uh and uh you

said it was you know 18 months to get to 100 million Revenue run r or something something like that yeah so like that that was an example of like if you if you think that every company needs to look like that you might be right in

some cases but but there are other models out there that that would not sort of U you know align with that including some of these sort of complicated software companies and

including some deep tech companies you know which I believe open AI took a very long time until it sort of got that that crazy traction right when they release strategy PD so they they don't all look

Sim similar I think there's some there's some principles that are Universal across them though yeah I mean I think even even Facebook if you go back to kind of the early days of Facebook it wasn't the fastest growing social

network and they I mean they did a lot of things that you might say I mean it's probably why they succeeded but at the time it's like why are you only letting college kids join and only kids at Harvard and then like I think they just

limited like you need to be in high school like a high school too like they they like limited the growth but you know today it's like you know we'd be bragging if you said you invested in Facebook back then but it didn't look

obvious at the time but they were making really intentional product and Company building and like growth and all those different decisions that ended up playing out into like I don't know is it a trillion dollar company now something

like that it is yeah it's one of them but you're right like there's always there's for for every company I found that I've seen there's there's kind of non- obvious things that you do along the way uh that are that are kind of

surprising how have you have you found any maybe like um ways to sus that out or like how have you decided like when you're we talk a little about investing we're going to talk talk more about like

building companies and incubating stuff have you found anything that you've been able to like pick up on or like when do you decide like oh this this might seem like a bad decision from the outside but

like internally I think we're going to do this because of a specific thing like we might be growing slower or I mean that's usually the thing it's like oh it's it's slower growth but it's maybe the better decision long term uh it's a

good question I mean I have much more of an opinion on this on the things that we're building uh you know when we invest or when I invest I'm a lot Dumber less sophisticated and I'm like I like

this person I like this team I have a good feeling about them sure let let me be the first investor and that's that's usually how we sort of operate uh sort of uh and and you know so I think being

being naive and and a little dumb uh has has worked and in fact if we ever talk about you know the companies we passed on uh we probably should have been dumber and said yes to more uh so okay that's a yeah maybe that's a good maybe

that's a good segue we we're talking a little bit about anti- portfolio but but just to fin you know the building thing like it just depends like we're actually kind of building something fun and like social right now and um you know one of

the the main product people that we have on on on this new company is very opinionated because this product was very much kind of his brainchild and um there's certain things that we could do

to try to grow faster like you know have you invite your whole actress book and force you to invite people in order to use it and stuff like that and a very reason why we're doing for which we're doing this product is against that and

so we're trying to do things that are not uh an experience that we wouldn't want as because we're sort of building this product as as a counter to a lot of the other social things out there that that we don't like so you would you

think about this as like a growth first retention so maybe going back to the Catalina crunch like he was growing slower but he was like building a good product that people are going to keep using and like building customer Affinity or something like that or like

defensibility like better margins I think you would be better at answering that question than me and again I'm just sort of useless investor in the company uh you know he's actually built the

company but uh but you know he um you know my understanding was that like you can you can spend a lot of money sometimes to to acquire people online it's it's sometimes it works it's

gotten more competitive it's depends on the channels it's unclear the quality of those cohorts and and the retention uh and then also you know it just it got

more competitive right I think that the in e-commerce you could um you could acquire people for a lot cheaper in like the early 2010s you know when some of these companies were were scaling some

of these sort of golden days of eCommerce especially in New York uh and you could you know the mattress companies you know whatever if they were selling a mattress for ,000 Dollar online they could acquire a customer for

a couple hundred dollars and so if you literally immediately pay back your CAC and then you can reinvest it you know while you're also you know unless there's like a lot of returns you're you're getting paid back on day one uh

and you're more than paid back in day one and then you can just reinvest it into more more Facebook that sounds like a VC's wet dream right there like that sounds incredible and it was right but but then of course other people whether

it's in that category or others other people figured out that you can find another product and and just sell it online we tried to do that with um with my friend we had you know we were selling candles online and sheets and

stuff like that but it just becomes more commoditized to Source these products you can you know hire a cool Brooklyn agency and make a slap a Cool brand onto it run Facebook ads and then then becomes more commoditized and then you know it's sort of the definition of

perfect competition so you have to find other channels through which to grow including uh retail do you have any common patterns or mistakes that you found yourself making like reasons that

you maybe you could talk about specific examples in the portfolio in the anti- portfolio yes yes there's a couple that come to mind uh you know I don't I don't obsess over them that much I think

thankfully I have not passed on the the next Google yet or maybe I haven't I just don't know uh but but um I um well now I just say yes to everything so we're not passing anything

anymore just joking but I you know uh we um there's a couple like I you know I passed early on on like open seat uh you know and I remember meeting one or two of the founders at a coffee shop in

person in New York and I didn't understand what the hell they were talking about and what an nft was I don't think you're alone there I think a lot of people may still don't get nfds and you I think they were raising at

like somewhere like I don't know 10 or eight or 12 or $4 million valuation or something and you know like at its peak so far I think it was worth the company

was worth like 10 billion right at least in in private markets um and so what is that a THX um and you know I think if you look at the background of the team

they're super impressive people and so if I had just adhered to what I say which is you just sort of back on people back people even if you don't fully understand what they're doing especially if you're riding a small check I probably would have been investor in

that company or or you know there's another company I met with early on um Headway in in the mental health space uh I've heard of it yeah and they I think they they mostly kind of focus on like

B2B mental health now they've done really well like software for therapists and stuff I'm not frankly I'm not even sure anymore but I think that I'll look it up after but um that you know I met

with a Founder in person again I think these iners ones are are tough because I was like it's you get more information from a phone call and so if you think that you're good at reading people you uh this disproves for that thing but um

met with him in person I remember we walked around I think like Union Square or something and uh smart founder from Stanford you know he he wasn't the most kind of like loud aggressive person

which is maybe what I was filtering for like sort of force of nature obvious aggressive person he was a little bit more subtle um and uh for some reason I did not invest uh and you know that

company I think is a couple billion dollar company so so and there's there's other there's other examples there I mean I think that um kind of a non-obvious pass uh sort of

like not quite a company but you know it's whole like back when when crypto was like taking off and and I was living in San Francisco you know there were some friends of mine who were kind of

like early investors in like ethereum or or Bitcoin and um I did not pay like that much attention to those things because I was in the mindset of I'm I'm

looking for people I need to invest in people I wasn't looking for I need to buy this coin uh and uh and and that that coin is actually the company uh and

so that is certainly a couple hundred XS at least that um that I did not participate in uh and perhaps you know one last one last example is I think uh I I did a good job in San Francisco even

back in the day of making my way uh in the same room as people and meeting people and you know I met with uh Olaf from poly chain early on um and I believe if I remember correctly that I

had the opportunity to invest in the GP of that fund which again in my mind I'm like I'm not in the business of investing in the GP of a fund I'm in the business of sort of uh investing in companies early on and I think that that

GP position would probably be a couple hundred X at least if not more uh so I think just you know what I learned from it I don't know if you if you were GNA ask that is um keeping an open mind

about what exactly the kind of interesting opportunities are because not everything looks the same and to a h everything looks like a nail uh and then also paying attention to like the

strange things that are happening in the world and where kind of like the the very nerdy intelligent people are are are spending time if that makes sense uh I think I've learned to do that a little

bit more yeah I mean that does make sense and I mean I definitely would have asked that so I think you answered it pretty well what one interesting thing you said is you said the the phone call or the zoom call versus iners and you

said that can throw you off I feel like most people will say oh meeting in person is better but it sounds like maybe no no I think it's better I was more criticizing myself there where I

met them in person so you know I I could have forgive you know if I had been done a 10-minute call with with one of these companies maybe it be easier to forgive like you know I didn't get the full

thing but in both of these cases I met with them in person and uh and so clearly my in-person radar was was off and uh that is the thing you usually

that I trust the most um you know my friend my friends my close friends and the people I work with know that I I rely on intuition for for a lot of my decisions investing building life

decisions um and and I find usually my intuition is correct but but in those cases something was wrong and so um interesting to to calibrate the model yeah okay that's that's fair then might

be too much information but I think you can always learn a lot from your parents uh you know essentially like my my dad is is a journalist um uh and so he's a

very very cerebral person sort of uh very nerdy and in a Charming way but like you can spend hours writing without interruption just entirely focused and can spend hours painting very sort of

talented in in many disciplines and my mom is is very um very different and and very sort of impressive in her own way she she's extremely intuitive and a very

sort of good social creature so she if she's in a room she can kind of like the energy in the room everyone charm everyone and she immediately likes

dislikes trusts doesn't trust people and I think inherited uh so I've certainly inherited that from her and I've inherited I think the love of writing and and kind of intellectual curiosity

from my dad but um but yeah I you know I think even even my even my parents sometimes have been wrong in some of their analyses and I think you know perhaps less wrong than me but but I

think um I have noticed that in myself that uh even your strength once in a while can be can be off by a little bit yeah that makes sense actually Ben on your team was telling me that you have like a pretty unique relationship with

your parents where I think you I think you teach a class or you'll go to speak at in a class or panels conferences and your parents actually come and watch like that's that's that's

pretty incredible like is that is that true yeah we're very close uh you know I'm very lucky in that way uh you know we uh we grew up I mean they they had me a little bit older my mom had me when

she was 42 and my dad was 52 when he had me uh so they had me they had me later in their lives and um for my mom she she never knew if she was going to have a child

like that was her first and only child and so so I think she valued that a lot and quickly you know she actually was an entrepreneur as well but but he retired pretty quickly and um decided to uh to

to focus and spending time with me which was amazing for me uh and and my dad as well you know had a lot of flexibility in what he was doing was already kind of retired and so you know when I was six for example they took me for a year out

of school around the world and uh We've traveled to 70 countries together uh and it was I was sort of you know I have half siblings on my dad's side who I'm

close to but but I was um I was uh essentially brought up as like an only child in a sense and uh and and sort of you know uh yeah they taught me you know

school during that year and it was certainly great but yeah I'm very close to them um they they sort of like startups and Entrepreneurship a lot and and they will sometimes come to some of

these uh talks that we give on campuses and then sometimes as well we're building a couple new companies right now uh my my dad in particular loves to come hang out at the office we have an office in Paris and just hang out with

the team see what they're doing when they're tinkering with AI he's obsessed with AI he keeps recommending new books uh to me oh that's cool yeah yeah so we have a great relationship man that's awesome so he's

probably you said he had you when you were 50 when he was 52 I'm assuming you're you got to be at at least 30 so I'm assuming your dad is in his 80s right just hanging out at the

startup office I'm 32 um yeah yeah my father is like incredibly intellectually voracious uh I think he reads like

almost the book a day uh and he is uh yeah he's he's much much better read than me uh and he's often the one saying Edward you have to read like the other day he was like I just finished the the

book from the founder of uh Deep Mind on AI he's like you have to read this book and I'm like okay that I I will I need to answer these 300 emails but I will getet of me because like the next day

yeah he's got a new one I L just listen to this two-hour podcast you know by this person on like Tech on robotics who should read about it like okay I haven't gotten into your book but sounds good

he's just like an ABS he devours content uh and so yeah very impressive well if he's listening right now i' just like to say hi thanks for listening I hope he is I hope he is hi Dad and I will read the

books that you recommend maybe you could you could uh you could chat gptm you could use AI to summarize the stuff that could be the the thing yes yes although I refuse I I admire you know I think AI is actually

very cool and useful but I refuse to use AI to write because I love to write and uh I don't think that it will write uh better than me but maybe I'll be wrong yeah I'm kind of in a similar position

with it where I don't know I I I don't really know how to explain my relationship with AI like we've had I think the two two guests before this we've had a guy named

Mike mergerson at Ada he's kind of it's like this AI powered customer service product kind of the idea is you it's like an AI agent that just kind of lives in your slack and your email and all

your customer support channels and it's like a team member B like it's a true AI agent that's on your customer support team and you get work with it yep we invested in one of those which which hopefully is better and which you should

you should use instead but uh but yes that's like okay yeah well and so we had a really interesting conversation just about like all these different ways just see like AI is changing software and I

it's it's all super interesting and I do kind of get it but I'm also like with writing like I'm definitely the person who like I enjoy writing and it kind of feels like it's hard to give it up to someone else to do it and you feel like

it's you're still better than it if that makes sense um I feel like there's some areas where where like coding I feel like you know it's it's like an objective thing like I feel like if there's a specific thing like you must

follow a rule and you must there's like the structure and you just like know when the AI does it and it just like matches your bar but for kind of these qualitative things like maybe writing

we're working on a robotics company right now um which I'm very excited about and you know people have a like kind of a lot of the general public L have a oblique dystopian view on automation like the robots are coming

GNA take our jobs and all that and like I have a lot of of of respect for for for people who do difficult jobs in general um and I think that like there there's some you know some people the

way they do their jobs is better than any Automation and some people and a lot of people for some tough jobs like don't really like them that much and so for example like one example is uh you know

I find I don't know if it's if you've ever had a case where you're in a car and you know you're an anuba or something and your driver is uh not very good like they're not paying attention

they're texting trading stocks in some cases they're trading stocks or they're like watching a movie on an iPad and like you know I can understand that that's like a very tough job and and and in a couple cases I just politely asked

them hey do you mind like you know I don't feel safe you know can you please like focus on on driving uh but like that happens and and I get kind of like you know I'm like they shouldn't do that job because they don't seem to be enjoying it I shouldn't be in that car

it's dangerous and like I would rather be driven by a whmo um but there are other cases where the driver is so good at what they do that they like really

care they they they sort of give you incredible customer service they Drive really well I kind of like it when they drive a little aggressively like you know what I mean like I think like w legally obviously but like you know like

just good good European driving you know I grew up I grew up sort of driving in Paris so like you know like sort of aggressive like not like you know just decisive aggressive like you know I think you probably had a driver like

that um I think those are better than you know sort of like machines driving which will sometimes like I was just in San Francisco sorry to go on a rant on this but like my my friend picked me up

in a wayo we were going to to dinner and the wh like took another five minutes because it did a a sort of right right right around something that made no sense when it should have done something else and so I don't want to live in a

dystopian world where like the machine is sort of governing me in every way um but the point is I think automation can replace a lot of jobs that people don't like having and that are dangerous and unpleasant and and that you know there

will be companies that will help people retrain and find other jobs that are better but I think in some cases when people really love their Craft um I'm pretty bullish that that machines will not replace them or or will only augment

what they do yeah I think yeah augmenting what they do is like you humans will always need to do something and it will be I mean if you just think about uh the way

that AI is changing the world is usually just like it makes our existing software better so like if you go back to you know the 1940s when someone when you talked earlier about like an accountant

like the accountant would like by hand like do your books and like do your tax it's like you probably want your accountant using software like using a computer and using the internet to deliver it and submit it and not by hand

and it's like the same thing it's like okay well if just like the the the next wave of software is just like smart software that just does helps your accountant do better and more work it's like they should be using it funny you

say that it sounds like you're you're almost plugging this but we're actually building an accounting AI company with the with the French team oh interesting okay so maybe that's a good transition you've you've indicated this you've been

like dropping the hints all throughout the whole episode I feel like we're we're like an hour in here and we're like all right we're going to finally start talking about this you have you've built a bunch of companies and now at this point sounds like you're you're

building a ton kind of all at the same time incubating them um so what's the um what's the accounting or the the accounting AI company in France I wouldn't say a ton I I have played

around over the years with um starting new things uh and and I've sort of tried to figure out what is the correct number uh to start where we can do a really good job and and build things that are

successful you know I think we started I've already helped start you know more more than a dozen companies over the last um 10 years um and you know unfortunately they've not all been

successful um but uh but so have you know have learned about I think the the the the right number and and perhaps improving the the the areas that we go into and how we assemble the teams and

all that stuff but like the general overview even with the county is like um we have um you know we have part of our team in Paris you know as mentioned like I I'm partly French um Ben who who

introduced us or put us on a thread who invests with me is in Paris so is jwes and Ben also loves building and we um we've had success helping start a couple software companies over the last couple

over the last few years um we helped start a sales tax company called zamp uh which is a much better version of Avala uh because we were using Avala at some of other companies and we couldn not

believe that they were worth eight and a half billion dollars um when the product didn't really work and it wasn't like a good experience we decided to build better version the initial product was

built by this engineering team that we have in Paris that is amazing and uh and so and they're great at engineering at product and all that stuff so we we have a couple of other areas that we're we're

building stuff in right now kind of like you know boring and yet exciting B2B software stuff that is that is fairly early on um just in in cool areas like certain certain industries that we think

you know um deserve a little bit more automation we're doing sort of like a software to like improve the workflow of accountants and you know not not that much to say about it at this point but we're

building a couple new new things there and then as alluded to earlier we're also building a couple of deep tech companies uh which I find very exciting you know we've been working in a robotics company for the last year and a

half with the founder of um I teamed up with the founder of bar robotics which is um pretty much a unicorn at this point we became friends about two years ago and uh we're building essentially uh

in our opinion a smarter version of of the humanoid robot which which applies to certain verticals like you know Warehouse automation um backend automation for qsr restaurants and and

and things like that how do you balance just having so many things it sounds like maybe there's four things five things just how do you think about just balancing it all well

number one uh I'm not yet married and I don't yet have children so I think that helps uh there go can essentially uh I wake up I work out I work uh and I do it

again uh sometimes I'll have a nice glass of wine because I like wine do do you sleep you didn't mention sleeping yes I do sleep okay that's good uh but we we do we do have some pretty crazy

hours bro uh but no I I think that we we essentially the answer is we have a very people say this but but in our case I think it's true we have a very very good team um and they work super hard and

it's almost like a we're all I think quite quite close um and uh you know Ben for example helps leads helps lead several of these new kind of like software ones and in the robotics case

like you know Bren is is sort of the brilliant roboticist Who U knows how to build them and so and and we have you know other great people in our team like Annie and and and folks in the US so

it's uh the right folks on our team and then and then sort of assembling great uh Downing teams for these companies that we build and the other answer is like you know when I when I speak to

people I feel very lucky you know with what we do but when I speak to people who are maybe in some cases in more traditional jobs and and kind of bored of them corporate jobs um it doesn't feel like

work you know um and a lot of these interactions I have with people on on iMessage and you know I don't really use slack that much and you know we just sort of enjoy what we're working on uh and so it obviously some things are

stressful as usual when building a business but it just feels like you know a continuation of uh it's just a continuation of the day it doesn't feel like work and so it doesn't really stop yeah that I mean that's definitely the

advice I always give people is like you should be trying to do things that don't feel like work like gu as cliche as that is but it just makes it more fun and makes your life more interesting like

I've had jobs where it's like you have the meetings like you have five recurring meetings every week for an hour at these specific times and you don't do anything in them and they're

just not your job is like to you're in charge of a spreadsheet like that is your whole job is like updating that spreadsheet it's performance we actually we actually have another company that for for spreadsheet

automation so amazing but no you're right like and you know one of my biggest fears like I loved I loved where I went to school I I thought I'm very grateful for for pen and I went you know Warden undergrad and

it's an amazing school but one of my fears there was like you know when I was 18 I just got into campus and one of the first things that like my my friends down the hall told me he's like oh

there's like an oncampus recruiting session for in for banking if you want to come to get internship for next summer and I was like okay you know what do I have to do and they're like you got to put you got to put on a suit so I was

like hey I put on a suit and I went there and there was some Banker from I forget one of the big Banks was like so do you want to do investment banking or do you want to do private wealth management or whatever and I was like I have no idea what any of this stuff is

like I'm 18 I just landed here from Paris I don't know what you're talking about um but you know in some of these classes I found them very interesting like finance and stuff like that but in

others I was just like I don't want to update spreadsheets as as my job I I don't want and I as an investor also I don't want my only point of view on

companies to be the result of a um of a of a sort of DCF model you know I'm sure some people can do like great discounted uh sort of evaluations of companies and

and do an amazing job I don't see what the edge is of one person versus another in that I think that like I I I wanted to do something where you can actually it's it's a it's a luxury like feel very you know grateful and not everyone is

this luxury but I wanted to do something where being a unique individual uh you could express your sort of unique self I think that that is the ultimate goal of of having a job it's to not be

replaceable H yeah that's interesting and to your point about DCFS like I think you need to know like what the DCF looks like or will compute but like you're it's not going to be any

different than anyone else's right like you need to generally know like oh this is what it's roughly going to look like and to to our job is probably like oh we just met the guy that's gonna he's going to build or the girl who's going to build a company that's going to produc

this DCF in 10 years we met them and believe in them before anyone else and like the DCF will be built in 10 years when there's actually something there that can that the DCF can be built on exactly it'll be built eventually when there's actually a business and and a

lot of people know how to you know cut and shop and analyze a business but not many people can sort of just um just make it happen you know there's one thing side note I'll say is you know I don't know if you saw I watched parts of

the um Magnus Carlson podcast on on on Joe Rogan which I thought was really cool and I like chess and uh you know like you could say like you know chess is a

lot about memor memorization and you learn openings and it's not that original and it's similar to like you know doing a discounted cash flow uh model sort of a company or writing software you know like what's that

unique about about the thing but in some cases understanding the rules a little bit uh is the sort of prerequirement for being able to innovate on those things

so you know Magnus Carlson understands all the rules and he's able to then innovate with these sort of novelty type things that only he can do because he's sort of a grandmas of those things so anyways that's a sort Counterpoint for

going through some of the more boring stuff initially yeah I like that way of thinking about it because like if you know all the rules you can know when to bend the rules and know when other

people will or won't know how to adjust to the rules or how they'll react to the rules it tells them to or what it tells them to do so it's like a remix you need you need in order to do the remix you

need to take the original song oh nice I like that well um I'll listen to that that sounds like I I don't listen to a ton of podcasts honestly like as somebody who who who has one um but yeah

and that's actually why I started it just like I thought it would be kind of interesting like you just get to meet people like we maybe you maybe you would have agreed to like talk to me for two hours and like record a or like but you

just record the conversation you just like ask people stuff that you're interested about you can learn things and it's not like oh I have to I guess because it's a podcast like I do put out an episode every week and I try to be

disciplined about and like plan stuff out but it's it's kind of like you just kind of do whatever you want like and just like have whoever I want on but I'm sure it's a lot of work actually my my dad encouraged me he says you should launch a podcast and I was like it's a lot of work and I actually think you're

doing a great job at it I don't think I would I would be as good or have the time to do it so it's it's everything to be done well everything requires a lot of work yeah I think and it's kind of interesting you got to find ways to to

the point about bending the rules like the the rules or like the current meme or thing in in VC or Tech would be you know everyone has a podcast and they none of them are very good right so it's

like okay well what if you just try to make a really good podcast right and then you you kind of break through the noise so that that was kind of my thinking um I guess TBD I mean I I've been working on it so to your point I

think everything looks from the outside you there's a lot of people in the world and and you know there's like not I mean there's a lot but there's not that many categories of opportunities and like startups inventure Capital One but like

everything can look like a red ocean if you just look at it from far away but but but then very few people actually do what they do well you know and so uh yeah I think again whoever you know when

you invest in a company and you actually like the person you're investing in and you actually sort of you know believe in what they're doing and it's not about the who else is investing and the social proof and the Dynamics of the round and

they're going to raise their G you know two days later because of that but you just like yes like you're actually just you like the person you're betting them and they're going to build a business so

so I think there's a lot of U secret uh places to be uncovered underneath the sort of uh veneer of red ocean perfect competition one framing that I use for

investing I don't know if this is true for you and but I I think about like would I work for this person like if I was just looking for a job like would I take a job at this person's startup like if if would I be their first employee or

would I be a co-founder or something like that because you know that that hits the lens of like okay they got to hire do I think they'll be able to convince talented smart ambitious people to work with them but also like I'm

betting my entire net worth and like my salary on getting paid and compensated by by this person um so then it can it kind of guide like do I think it will work do I think they're a good founder

what I enjoy or would people enjoy working with them do I think it's G to be a good investment that's kind of a rough framing that I use to kind of you know it's not perfect and you think of other stuff too but no it's it's you're you're essentially by investing in it

you're sort of in some way you know allocating part of your resources you're in some way kind of working for them or with them and then they'll they'll ask you to do things to help so I think that is a good it's a good magnet it's a good filter yeah what have you what have you

found uh you mentioned before you guys move really fast and move quick on things I think that's something that Everyone likes to think that they do or or wants to do better um and maybe some

people move too fast they do it wrong I'm not sure but how do you think through doing that correctly like how do you move fast and and be good at it I think first of all you know my my first

answer is is um it's not as high stakes for the check sizes that we're writing where you know if we're pting you know we're investing in a couple companies per week some of the Investments are 25

to 50,000 some of them are you know low six figures um so it's still like you know it's not trivial but it's not like we're not writing a $50 million check or100 million check into a company um

and so you know we definitely make mistakes but like the cost of being wrong is uh is lesser in a sense and and again sort of the the cost of um I guess

mission is greater also than the cost of commission uh and so um you know we can't say yes to everything and we actually people are surprised given our

volume that we sort of say no to 90 98% 99% of the things we see we see a lot of things um but uh yeah like I think it's it's a it's just a gut feeling type of thing

where you know I've had tens of thousands of conversations at this point and uh and I think Jules uh while Ben has had thousands or or at this point and so is Jules um and

um we don't think that much I think it's more kind of a visceral thing that's our pitch We Ever Raised from lpce it's like we don't think that much it's like yeah we gotta do it you know

and like for example the other day the other day uh Ben and Jules were pinging me you know they're like Edward you have to jump on a call with this person like they they they met this person I think

Jules did a great job hunting him like literally like pinging him over and over and over until he answered and then Jules talked to him it's like talk to us and yeah he's great at that and then he's like Edward you got to talk to him

and they didn't really tell me that much about it and uh you know sometimes he does send me sort of a write up and so on but I just got on a call video call with him and I was like I get it like I was just like I get it he's got sort of

like killer energy that we're kind of looking for and um again it sounds very naive but um that was the that was the

diligence and so you know in him yeah it just we just felt it I do think what I love about it is it is a very intuitive thing you know I think some people are probably more intuitive for people than others and some people are more you know

have a greater innate sort of ability let's say with numbers or stuff like that U you know I think TBD whether you know we're great at what we do again we're patting ourselves on the shoulder

a lot but this is kind of like our our approach we definitely feel things um and um yeah I think it's kind of it's an

interesting way to uh to to look at the world and and at at companies it sounds like trusting your intuition on like that's a good way to move faster is just you you don't question

yourself a little bit a little bit but um but uh we we trust our intuition a get them out you know another example I obviously will not name will not name

you know but U recently Ben uh you know pinged me about another company or founder and was like I you know I think this person's like very impressive they

say they have a lot of traction but like you know unclear he's like can you talk to him because I have an impression I don't want to tell you too much I don't want to bias you and I said okay and so I got on the phone with him and uh 10

minutes in or five minutes in I messaged Ben and I was like this person is a charlatan and I was like I think this person is Charlton and Ben was like I know what you mean and I also had the

same kind of impression but I'm not 100% sure and so there are there a few cases like that you know because like you talk to companies early on they're like you know we have a team we're a team of one or two or three we've got this cool

product maybe in some cases we've got traction or contracts with this or that and you're like we're not sure you know uh and um and so then the question is like what do we do but um I just refer

back to uh just trust your intuition so then how would you do it on the the building side like obviously you've got to make you've got to make fast decisions if you're working on so many things like do you have a framework or

just like a process you kind of go through or just like a thinking of like okay the way you act fast move with with haste and speed on the execution side yeah well thankfully on the on the

building side I found that you know and again we'll see if if we end up being as successful as we hope we will be but like so we've helped start you know missfitz is already kind of a couple billion dollar company at this point and it's done great and and that's in great

part due to Obby who's running it uh who's done the hard work but you know thankfully uh you know I I've gotten to be a part of that and it's been amazing um and and then there's a couple other companies that you know I've been sort

of involved with early on or it help start like you know zamp is doing really well uh you know it looks like it's an awesome trajectory the robotics company K is doing really well we have others that are doing well and and so and we've

helped start you know payments company I helped start a company called goodie in the gifting space that I actually ran for a year and a half which is doing really well um you know we're we're building a new Healthcare company right

now so so all these are like kind of different areas but the same I find that it's the same thing it's just always kind of the same thing which is like you try to have like a pretty

clear like thought opinion on on an opportunity and then you have an initial set of people you know sort of someone usually leading like product or engineering and people helping with

operations and making sure that sort of the ship runs smoothly and then you know at some point not always immediately but at some point a great force driving the thing forward as the CEO um and then you

have to attract other people beyond that that have good chemistry with this initial set of let's say three to five people and and that work well and hard and that are self motivated and then you got to get some resources and then you

got to make some progress towards whatever your metrics are or whatever your sort of goals are and then you probably have to get more resources um and it's essentially kind of like it's the same thing uh and it it is a funny

thing where you there there's sort of a couple different types of Founders or or or CEOs right I think and there's a few good books on this but there's the like operator CEO you know who's almost like

a COO in a sense and that person is like in every detail and often CEO should be in every detail but that person's in every detail understands every line item you know how much am I paying for this what's the exact sort of like

contribution margin for that and so on and there's kind of like the capital allocator CEO the capital allocator CEO is kind of like the investor minded CEO who might be a little bit more uh out of

the weeds a little bit more kind of in the cloud but sort of understands like okay we need a team for this person for that we need resources for that we need to sort of um you know allocate some of

our resources here um anyways the point is I think it's a lot about just attracting uh some really good people early uh that have good chemistry working together and and working with

urgency towards something yeah it sounds like coming like having a good uh plan of attack or like you need to you need to know the steps or the goals or Milestones you need to go to like just the couple most important things it

sounds like maybe you're kind of that's something you're hitting at too but yeah I mean I think I think um if if look if we talk in a couple years and and we've started uh you know three or five

billion dollar companies maybe I can come on another episode and I can um uh you know lecture people and and sort of like break it all down yeah I can act like I know everything I think right now you know we have a couple things that

are doing pretty well uh and that have some good momentum and and again my my what I'm surmising is that it's a lot of the same thing like it's just like you find you want to build a company insurance base sometimes we know a lot

about the opportunity sometimes we don't sometimes we know about it like we were using the sales tax software it sucked so we started zamp sometimes we're like we love automation we think there's something incredible to do automation let's team up with someone who really

knows you know robots like like Bren at KI and then bren's an amazing engineer he's great at attracting talent I I've help build a couple couple of companies and there's always the same motions of building a company cool this robotic

company is going to need customers we need someone to help lead sales we need to close some warehouses we need to get some sort of pilot signs signed um we need to sort of like have people help

implement this robotic solution at the warehouses we need to hire more Engineers we need to work on the product we need to know what product we want to build by you know next week or in three weeks uh we need to um you know go raise

some more money so it's a lot of the same motions no matter what company you're working on and obviously investing in a lot of companies uh influences how we look at building companies and building companies

influences how we look at investing companies yeah good good feedback loop do do you U are there any things that you see people get wrong often maybe it's like lessons you've learned personally or like through investing

stuff just like maybe specifically on like the building or the incubating side like if somebody were to ask you like you know what what advice do you have for me like incubating companies is there like common pitfalls you see

people run into or maybe that you've you've ran into a couple times um I think well by the a lot of people want to incubate companies it's it's really hard like like everything that people want to do well you know it's really

hard and you know unclear we'll see if we're successful at it so yeah maybe that's an interesting way to like start the question or the answer too is like why should you or shouldn't you do it uh I I think I don't think it's that good

of a strategy to to to incubate companies you because I think it's already really hard to build one company well and um I have gotten so much

criticism from investors uh for for this model that we've done for a long time of like we don't believe you can attract the best talent uh we don't believe that you know you can do this or how do you

allocate your time or whatever it is I think the results will speak for themselves like if we build uh our goal is to build a couple of largest companies in the world uh if we do that

then uh we'll have been rights um but uh you know like clearly like some people right who are amazing and and who everyone knows whether it be mosar or others like have helped build several of the largest companies out there often

they've started with um one big success right and then that big success has given them knowhow resources ability to attract Talent ability to attract more resources from investors so still think

the dominant strategy for someone starting off is pick something pick an idea that you have a pretty strong opinion about where you have some sort of specific understanding that most

people don't have and um where ideally you can get traction pretty fast go get traction execute succeed sell your company or IPO either you or run it

forever if you buil if you happen to have stumbled into Facebook or something uh and uh and then either kind of you know hang out and become an angel investor because you've already made money and it's painful to build a

company or then go do the incubating thing but I I think almost no one can can incubate things because it's um it's really hard so you should probably only do it if you've if you really know what

you're doing it sounds like or if you've you've kind of gone through the motions quite a bit I know a lot of VCS that manage billions of dollars um that say you know hey you know you want to incubate stuff or maybe we can team up

on one of them and they're like we could start off this company with like $5 million and or 10 and I'm like Jesus that that's more than like what we started any of our companies well that sounds amazing yeah that's like what we

deploy in a year or two year period yeah but but a couple of times you know I've sort of uh I've sort of you know exploded with them and they're so dogmatic with their way of like looking

at like which type of talent would be the right caliber for the founding team and they're like oh you know you want to build in this space we have to get someone who used to work at you know xvp

of something at this of course that has to be the right CEO for that it just Dogma it's like the the right X VP of this is now the perfect CEO for this new company instead of like frankly a lot of

the best people that I've worked with have come out of nowhere like they were not the best you know they were not the xvp of whatever they were just like very hungry self-taught folks who probably had a couple years of work experience

somewhere very intense and brutal where they sort of learned like like how to work 100 hour weeks were very smart and who figure it out you know like Road at samp like came from insight and came from like private

and was a warden undergrad and like dual degree engineering and like he wasn't the ex you know like VP of something something at Avala we ended up hiring several of those people there and and then people from from other kind of

competitive companies um but um it's just the to to to end on my rant it's whether you're investing or building most people think that greatness has to

come from like a pedigree place you know of like of course you have to hire your founding team from this thing and those are the rounds that become over subscribed very fast and a lot of the greatest companies are like anomalies and they come from like

you know who knows yeah well so it sounds like the importance of like the people and the team is it's kind of like Shan through the whole conversation what what would

you recommend like if I'm a Founder I'm maybe a couple Founders where three people two people whatever solo founder whatever I'm trying to hire my first five to 10 employees can you just maybe

talk through how you would approach that yourself and just like what what I what you would think through and how you would do it also yeah I've done this like you know 15 times now uh and actually it gets harder after a while

because so the the way you start if it's like your first company I think it's it's easier because you have hopefully a bunch of friends from school from back home hopefully you if you went to a good school or from your previous job if you

work somewhere with smart people and you're like and often I ask people this I'm like who would you want to hire who you know who's like a good friend of yours yeah I feel like everyone has this Sarah from this thing and mic from this

thing are like beasts like of course I would want them they would be my first phone call I'm like cool then go bring them on and like usually it's like your roommates or your like best friends from this or the person you work with with

that company and those are your like first five people on your team or first three to five and then you know you make some progress maybe you raise a little bit of money and then so you become a little bit more real you have a website

maybe you have a couple customers um you raise a little bit of money and then you go ping fancy industry person so whe you know if you're building software for uh I don't know if give me an example you

you're building software for something accountants or you'd be like well okay maybe someone from QuickBooks would be good you know uh or into it right great so how about the VP of product from

there you know and like if it's just you first-time entrepreneur it'd be hard to hire the vpf product at QuickBooks and unclear whether you want them uh but start off by hiring your roommate or teaming up with your roommate teaming up

with Bob from your previous job or or Jane or whatever it is and then get a little bit of money get a little bit of traction and you know have have maybe you know the vpf product that the fancy

company give you advice and then check in with them once in a while and then like two months later they're like wow you made a lot of progress and what you're doing sounds exciting and youve closed some investor Capital you know and I'm tired of working at a huge

company fine I'll join you as you know a head of product at your startup and then you get the head of product of the fancy company that joins you and then that person usually has worked with a bunch of other great people and then you

essentially get them to maybe recommend some folks um because it's great to hire teams versus only individuals uh and then you kind of compound from there but usually you don't start with a fancy

person you start with um people that you know and trust and and who you've known for a long time who are willing to grind with you so you do recommend the fancy

person eventually once you get there I recommend the sort of um industry person uh as as higher number like somewhere between you know higher as five through

10 uh but but but for the first couple people I recommend to sort of your your your good friends who you like to grind with and who you want to be in the trenches with okay how would you sus out somebody who is coming from a bigger

company and figuring out would they be good you know employee number five at this grind it out startup I think the most important thing is to make sure that they don't want to be only a

manager and that they're okay still being an individual contributor I think if someone thinks I have 15 years of experience you know or 18 years of experience uh I'm too fancy to do the work myself but

I want to lead a team uh and I want to hire people and tell them what to do uh I don't think they're good for a startup I think that the best people for a startup are they might have a really good resume like that person but they

will also they'll get their hands dirty and then they will build out a team so an example is we just hired an amazing uh head of BD at the robotics company and that person previously was at

another company for seven years where he led helped lead them from a couple million of AR to a couple hundred million of AR and when he joins you know our startup which is now 18 people um

but when he joined you know he was like you know I wanted to find out I was like you know so how how quickly would you want to build out a team you know to sort of give you leverage and so on and he was like oh no we don't need that right now he's like I can do a lot of

he's like I I can build a pipeline I can do a lot of these conversations myself close some deals and then you know we'll close some more money we'll close some deals and then we'll build out a team under them so it's really the sort of if you've seen one of my favorite movies

like toy you know like you want like Achilles to like take the beach with his soldiers you know you want Achilles to be like sitting at the back of the boat being like you you guys storm the beach

I I'll sit here you want that sort of initial uh senior hire to like do the fighting uh themselves alongside the soldiers and then um and then they can

scale but but that's how you sort of earn the respect and also that's how you hire someone who's not essentially useless uh because hiring someone who's just the manager initially is is not useful and frankly it might never be

useful yeah and and such like a suck of capital like let's say you've raised three million bucks and you got to pay him 300 Grand a year all in just like the cost of like salary benefits sales

tax like their computer rent for the building or whatever like that's like 10% of your Capital like you put 10% of your balance sheet on a bad hire that's that could kill you it totally can kill you and then of course they'll attract other people who are not that good but

you know I would I would sort of challenge you to say like take any successful company very successful company and you know give me an example where the you know hires number 100 to

200 are better than highers number 0er to 100 right or or or even zero to like 20 or or let's say hire and in some great cases there's some great companies where hires like the team was still

amazing at hire number like 800 uh you know but then like almost every company becomes kind of like diluted in a lame way when they get to thousand bues because they just bring on people who

are more kind of bureaucratic and U so it is something to be allergic to I think otherwise up looking like a like a sort of large government agency or

something okay that's fair uh you tweeted uh the other day you tweeted I love AI well what's what's the story with that oh that was just a little nod or

wink to uh to one of my uh best friends uh Riley Riley Aela who's um one of the sort of best American tennis players he um he's he's become a very good friend

uh you know he's he's invested several of our of the companies that we're building and uh you know he actually kind of looks a little bit like erck Bachman from Silicon Valley he he's definitely a

handser okay I mean he's got the big beard he's like a handsomer taller version but he loves you know he he when he was injured he literally did a trip to San Francisco and went and met with some robotics companies and this is a

guy he's a seven foot tall tennis player you know used to be like number 17 in the world and uh he he go into these startup offices to meet with them and talk about Ai and Robotics and you know he would sort of like aine

in their product strategy and so on and the whole time he was uh you know making fun of himself you know knowing that he doesn't really have uh much of a background to be able to comment on this uh but but interestingly his his thoughts and opinions are actually

always very sharp and valid uh but he he loves making fun of himself and uh know often he'll um he'll call me and talk about startups and uh of course neither of us find uh you know anything as

exciting as ai ai of course is the most exciting thing in the world as we know from all the investment activity uh going on there yeah I I feel like maybe there's like a little bit of

uh a little bit of like humor in that response or oh yeah yeah of course I I think that you know I actually think AI is cool but but but at any point in time

you know I think that um you know the crowd uh gets excited about something and and just the number of rational deals that are getting done uh around the effusive excitement around this and

then there was the last thing before that and and the last thing before that is uh it just it's very funny so uh yes so so so how do you navigate that like do you spe are do

you like have an immediate allergic reaction to whatever the current thing is or like how do you approach that and just like thinking about as a Founder I mean maybe it's good to build something it's hot but as an investor maybe you

want to invest before it's hot how do you how do you manage that well as a Founder you know we try to build like two types of things we try to build some some things that I would say fall into a little bit the consensus bucket where we're like you know what there's a bunch

of players out there it's a hot category but we think we can out execute everyone because we work harder um and we're more intense and and we're better at raising money so let's just go and out execute people and kind of some of these obvious

ideas like the accounting AI thing that we're going to do and and and some of these other things you know it's not like a huge secret but like the devil will be in the details and we think they're large categories and we can out

execute people but then there's other you know I also love the non-consensus things and I think the non-consensus things or like uh skating to where the puck is going to be is is you can essentially become legendary right I

think to open ai's Credit you know when they started working on open AI um people were not talking about it as much right and and and right now I don't know when that was like 2015 or something uh

but like you know right now there's the equivalent in other Industries and um so you know for those it's like things that we find interesting and that we care about like for example I've always cared

a lot about you know the uh quote unquote longevity space uh however you you might call that and ever since I was um in college I um I've known that I wanted to do stuff in that in that space

and I've over the years read a lot of books met a lot of people and I followed you know over the last two years there's been a lot more attention around Brian

Johnson and some Netflix shows around various longevity things and everyone these days is uh doing sauna and coal plunge and fasting and being careful about what they eat and and uh you know

all that stuff but but I I've been sort of interested in that area for a while and you know we've invested in some pretty intense like deep tech companies that are trying to help us live longer

uh through maybe replacing different parts of your body that are falling apart and stuff like that and like I think they're not really getting much attention right now because they're very

nent and uh and and a lot of people don't like to think about it or have not started thinking about it but um the people who are leading those companies are some of the most impressive folks

that I've met and it is possible that in a couple years you know they will already be able to show something and people might be like oh I can get like a brand new organ or you know other part

of my body or something as it's failing um sure sounds good I would like that you know and and at that there might be a whole craze around like deep Tech bio

companies um and um but the correct moment to do the non-consensus thing was uh earlier on so I think whe whether you're building or investing uh you know we definitely participate in some of the

hype things because sometimes we think the hype is correct um it's almost like that quadrant right of you know the quadrant of like consensus non-consensus

right and wrong um obviously ideally you're never wrong uh but then you can either be uh consensus right or or non-consensus right and so several good companies I've invested in uh were kind

of hype early on and I got to participa it was great and and we did well but several of the best investments I've made in most legendary things i' I've been a part of uh were initially not

consens yeah I think you go back I did a presentation to my college I presented to a finance class and like what is venture capital and I just looking at some old data and like Amazon raised a million bucks at I think it was five

million post money or something in 1995 like in videoos million bucks at 10 million posts or something um Facebook

was you know 500k or something it 500 for 10% so five uh five five posts y yeah but but and then but then you go back it's like it's not like Facebook

was like a shitty company or shitty asset like if you looked at like they had a couple million users at that point I'm pretty sure maybe it was like desktop only but there were there was like a lot of noise around social

networks and it wasn't the fastest or like the most attractive or best looking social product or social network at the time but it ended up being right but it was non consensus at the time and look

like without taking too much particular shots at people like hear about let's say several of the founding employees of uh of open of open AI who leave and Who

start new companies um and those companies get backed immediately at a couple billion or a couple tens of billion valuation um you know I don't know I'm sure I can imagine what the

discussion was you know which is like this is an infinite Tam you know there will be there will be that's what was said in the room it's an infinite yes that's the most dangerous word infinite

Tam there will be multi-trillion dollar industry here with with these sort of infrastructure AI companies you know even if we're doing it at you know 20 billion or 30 billion with no product or no traction uh you know we still have at

least 100x and like this is the company it's the last company you know whatever so we 100x our investment that's probably the discussion that one in the room I personally prefer investing in a

company at a two cap and doing a THX on that with my own Capital but that's that's my way of investing so we'll see you know I but that's that's what happens when you don't manage billions of dollars of

other people money yeah different incentives you play different games I mean I will say even one day if and when we manage billions of dollars I I don't think we will invest in in in a particularly fry way like this I feel

like your strategy does have to change though like if you look at uh like Burk Shiner like Warren Buffett like he I think he's classically said like if you just gave him if you put him back and you only had a million dollars like he

could put up 50% returns a year because at this point like he in order to move the needle he has to invest in like one of the 100 largest Assets in the world kind of a thing so it definitely it

changes what your opportunity sell looks like as your Capital base goes up so it does it does yes because if you have let's say a billion dollars um and if you have a billion dollars and let's say you put in you know 100K into a company

and you were right and you back them early and it becomes $10 million which is amazing um it doesn't really move the needle that much which is which is kind of a problem yeah you'd have to do that

100 times to return the fund you have to you have to put more Capital to work essentially and if if you're investing if you're investing 100K at a time you have to do that like I don't know 10

times a day to like invest the whole billion and like but the the part the part that I disagree with with large funds is that there's always this this trim of putting more Capital to work um

because of what we said however let's say you buy seven or 10 perent of the next trillion dollar company today even if you only quote unquote put to work 200

um who cares you still if you if you let's say find you have you have Capital so you actually maintain your your ownership throughout a refunding round and you end up with seven or 10% of a multi hundred billion or a trillion dollar company you know are your

investors not going to be happy that you only deployed you know think you might have to deploy more Capital to prove that you're that you have to deploy more Capital but but I don't I the answer to the thing is I I think this model that

we're doing actually scales to managing billions of dollars because um because is the power law because of like you essentially get THX or 10,000x or more uh so it can actually still work even if

you keep investing small amount of money in lot of different companies uh but but to give one example to support the sort of disruption of of the model you know like one of the other people that I

really admire is Bernard o no in France uh and I admire of course that he he managed to succeed uh in an environment that's that's very difficult for businesses like it's not at all as friendly as the us but like the way that

he started right is like he um found that asset right a distressed asset with Dior and Dior was part of like essentially like a was bundled with a couple of other assets and and he took

Dior brought it back to life got rid of the other assets it started spinning up it started creating cash flow and then he got another one and then he realized that if you had another luxury brand there were economies of scale because

you could share back in operations share marketing share other things and then there was more cash flow and you got another one another one today that group is worth a couple hundred billion it's one of the most valuable or the most

valuable private or I think it's Public public sorry public companies in Europe um but he still owns like a big piece of it um and he um you know today I I

forget exactly the price uh of your originally I think it was like somewhere between 50 and 100 million like today a target of that size would be too small to be interesting to them and so that is

sort of disruption at work where if you wanted to create the new lbmh um you could probably find a great asset in that price range for 50 to 100 million uh that they they could not be interested in because it wouldn't make

sense for them so thankfully uh there's still always a way to disrupt incumbents yeah you're almost doing like Bottoms Up disruption to venture capital like you're going at the very bottom of the market like the first check in the

smallest valuation like cheapest lowest end of the market per se but uh and and then you can move up but I think the another interesting thing is I've heard Sam maltman's actually said going back

to the YC days like he wishes he could back 10,000 companies a year at YC because it just it like opens up the opportunity of Entrepreneurship and you know if you're investing at a super low

entry point you have just a ton of companies like that you just increase the basket size you have a higher hit rate like you get more things that hit in the portfolio and if you have

reasonable entry points they like it works and like even like a single check at two three four million Post in somebody that no one else believes in

can return the whole fund or more or and you're doing it so many times that you will have a couple of those and it will continue to return the entire pool exactly I think the model works at scale

I think the part that breaks actually sooner than the economic model like even if you're imagining billions of dollars I think the model works and you can you can do really well I or even even

probably tens of billions um but I think that what what breaks is the um the brand and the attention to detail and I'm not commenting on anyone in particular but I'm saying if we get to

the point where we have uh thousands of preds uh where we are actually the First Investors the hardest part for us and I think we will get there but I think the

hardest part will be um how do we continue to be a brand that people love and want to work with is like they're the best like when they decide on you they're the best and actually someone

who's done a really good job at that is seoa because like whenever SEO invests whenever they invest in something people freak out and everyone wants to invest in that company but if you go to CR BAS

seoa has thousands of Investments they have thousands of Investments uh and you know but they just like you know they're louder about the bigger ones uh but like you know a seed round type of thing from

SEO like there's been a good amount I think I forget the latest but I remember it was like 1500 or 2,000 Investments or something like that like that's still a good amount of companies and they have a really good success rate but they've

managed to not really dilute their brand in doing so which is uh fascinating yeah that's that's actually pretty interesting because yeah because someone could just say like oh like I know Ed and fro like they invest in

anything that moves like that doesn't mean anything to me like as a to somebody else but you got to like uphold that that keep that high bar like quality of the brand I like oh that actually means a lot the truth is I said

earlier is like we pass on almost everything but we are very active and we hunt a lot of things and we we get introduced a lot of people uh so our our Quality Bar is very high and I would say higher than all these accelerators and

free seed funds and all that out there but we just happen to see a lot of things so you you can probably make volume and quality work uh in the long term at scale interesting yeah I think

it'll be it'll be cool to just see how it evolves for you guys because it's like one probably one of the more interesting approaches anyone has so I'm excited for it well we maybe we'll do maybe we'll do another one uh in a year or two and and we'll we'll see how it's

going one thing you mentioned that I thought was kind of interesting you've kind of hinted at like us versus Europe what have you kind of found uh differences sounds like you've built companies in both of them um whether

it's on like the operating Environ M opportunity set um just how how do you think about us vers Europe yeah yeah well so you know I'm I'm a little bit of both you know I'm I'm partly French I'm

also partly Canadian I'm now also American which I'm very proud of uh so I'm third a third a third um and you know we we have part of our team is in the US part of our team is in Europe uh and some of the cliches are are in fact

are not true and in fact they're kind of reversed where a lot of the yeah like several of the people we work with in Paris in in building companies um and in investing work harder than a lot of the

Americans that I know obviously everyone works really hard on the PO team but like some of the French people on our team are some of the hardest working people that we know and they don't even do any of the stuff that people in the US do like they don't work out you know

they don't they don't spend any time you know doing all that stuff they just they're just at the office smoking cigarettes and you know taking zins or something and just working just working yeah any of the wellness sauna working

out stuff they're just like just grinding and so it's very interesting um but as far as the market we we definitely invest in some European companies and we're finding some really

cool people there so and and same thing can find them at at low prices um and so that's exciting and we're going to double in on that I would say on the building side we're building American companies it just so happens that a lot

of our product and Engineering teams are in Europe and so same thing like there's some very very talented people there uh they're less expensive in comparison and and they tend to also be very very

hardworking very loyal so that's my general insight and I and I definitely think that uh the markets are not exactly the same in the way that consumers behave um uh you know for

example like French people spend a lot less money on e-commerce you know like oh do they really yeah like well they also they have less money on average you know but like they you know Americans

will be like cool like new you know uh coat for my dog you know subscription every month every month new code for the dog like a different code every month it's

like $150 per month like sure I'll try it you know I'll sign up and you like you could probably build like a a $50 million Revenue business on that pretty fast in the US yeah I could see like an

influencer launching that like a dog you know some like cute girl like hot girl with a dog yeah exactly uh but in uh in in France in Europe people spend way

less money online they just they have less money they spend less money there's there's several you know like they'll yeah people will be way more careful about that so e-commerce is just trickier for that stuff but we tend to

build businesses you know it's funny because like I I focus on France because I grew up there France I think last I check is like around 70 million people something like that I forget exactly I

should know um but like you know Sweden Sweden is is uh is smaller uh and uh in Sweden it's like a trickier thing because everyone in Sweden like speaks

Swedish which is like not very common at all right and like French is still like a pretty common language in the world so like if if you're like a French entrepreneur you're still kind of like tempted to build for France because like

France is still like a pretty big economy and a lot of them launched there and then they're like let's build for Europe but of course building for Europe is not exactly the same thing because there's like different regulations for

each country and it's like hard so it's a pretty fragmented like high highly regulated type of one market after the other versus in the US yeah it's just like we just my point about Sweden was

they've had to build abroad immediately because the domest domes Market is not that interesting versus in France a lot of people still build for France because the domestic Market is like pretty big

but but we don't do that like we we we only build us companies I I can definitely see I've definitely like heard that analogy before is like you know the people in like Denmark or

whatever or in you know insert random small like it's Unique language or something like you're kind of forced to go Global quickly definitely see that maybe you know if if obviously people

want to find me you know like they can find me on on x you know Edward Lando um they can uh and also I try to I'm trying to write more and more I love to write uh and maybe one day I'll publish a

novel so if you want to subscribe to my substack it's also Edward Lando um and it's and it's linked in my my LinkedIn um and I usually also I post what I write on LinkedIn so maybe LinkedIn is the best thing but um but yeah thanks

thanks for having me and and and again I would say among the people listening if um I my favorite time to meet people is not necessar it's not when people say

you know I have a term sheet for around and you know we're looking for Angels like I don't find that very interesting like we still do that but I don't find it interesting it's when they're like I'm just getting started and I haven't

really raised any money or I'm looking for a co-founder or I'm even looking for an idea uh that is the time where we Thrive because we can help people find ideas we sometimes build companies with

them we sometimes they're First Investors that's when we're more useful and more differentiated than a lot of the people out there yeah we'll we'll throw all the all the things you mentioned we'll throw them in the in the

description and people can reach out if it sounds interesting cool yeah this was awesome I really enjoyed the conversation yeah this is a lot of fun thanks for doing it and thank you for listening if you like this episode

please share it with a friend if you missed it make sure to check out last week's episode with Tommy Nicholas co-founder and CEO of alloy one of the fastest growing fintech companies in New York tune in next week for Matt m l

co-founder WordPress and automatic which Powers over 43% of all websites on the internet if you don't want to miss it subscribe to my newsletter the split Linked In the description to get each episode plus a transcript emailed

directly to your inbox every week thanks again for listening see you in the next episode [Music]