2021 Recap: Acquired x Not Boring x The Generalist
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So we thought we'd do a little, it's been a big year for all of us. Thought it'd be fun to get together, do a little celebration, a little recap. We've, how many collabs have we done? This is, if we count this as an idea dinner, six or seven of those?

We've done a bunch of episodes. Let's see. Idea dinner. Have we done three idea dinners plus this? I think that's right. I think this is a fourth. Yeah. Okay. And then we did the Ethereum piece with Paki, the not boring story with Paki, the SPF interview with Mario. Was Slack 2020 or 2021? I think it was 2020. Oh, good point. Roblox.

DPO preview with Mario. So that's eight just with Acquired. And then Paki and Mario, you guys have done three together? Two. Yeah. All right. That's so cool, guys. That's an even ten. It was an honor. It was really fun.

And we're also fun. Ben texted all of us before and asked if we wanted to have a drink on this, and all of us said no in our own way. In our own way. David blamed the baby and sleep. Yeah, I know, right? No, it's pathetic. It's just who I am. Drinking a latte. And one of these... Have you guys ever bought one of these Mountain Valley gigantic things of bubbly water? Yes. I...

I've been buying them. It's like a funny guilty pleasure. The first time I went to Benchmark's San Francisco office, they were like, do you want a water? And I was like, sure. And they brought out this gigantic glass. I mean, this thing is a quart. It's 33.8 fluid ounces in this beautiful green bottle. And so now whenever I'm by one of the Whole Foods and I'm feeling fancy, I pick it up. That's why I built Girlie. That's a hell of a humble brag, by the way. Oh, that I once had a meeting at Benchmark? Yeah.

Well, the last time I was there, though. Yeah. This is fun. We're getting comments in from YouTube, LinkedIn, all of that on the side here. I can't believe there's actually people on LinkedIn listening to this. That's true. Also, the person on LinkedIn being, yo, was good, boys, was very much not what I expected. From LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where everything's moving these days.

By the way, I was browsing. Do you know Amazon has kind of a social network?

You can view people's profile pages on Amazon and you can see all their reviews. And it even has a profile picture and a banner picture. And no one has set them. And David, you have one. I was looking because you're the number one review on Seven Powers. Your picture is like 10, 12 years old. You have short hair. You're missing a banner picture. It's very incomplete. But they clearly didn't.

They didn't intend for you to find people other than through reviews. So we all have a profile page, but no real social graph. Wait, David, you're the number one reviewer on 7 Powers? That's my number one claim to fame. I should change my Twitter by that. Can we get the photo of David with short hair sometime, by the way? Yeah, I'll throw a link in the chat. Oh, yeah. Pre-flow. Pre-flow. When did you get the flow, David?

I got the flow in 2012. Oh, wow. When I started at business school. I kind of always wanted long hair, but I was like, oh, I need to be buttoned up for the workplace. And I was like, well, I'm going back to school. Like, why not? Just let it go. I think it's a better look. Well, people can see the photo in the chat and then they can decide if I'm better. It's a pretty low-res photo. It's like, we'll have to see how this goes. The flow is iconic now.

So let's recap 2021. We thought we could go through Acquired, Not Boring, and The Generalist. Talk about this big year for all of us.

I'm already self-conscious because you guys have just had like the most bananas years of all time. I'm going to be like, oh, I grew like this much. You'll be like, oh yeah, I grew that much in February. That was fun. So I'm already worried. This is not... First of all, not about that. Second of all...

Let us remind you that we had three years of like linear growth with a slow slope, maybe four years of that. So we added five listeners per year. Something, something compounding something, something. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I'm pumped. Should we start with acquired? What's the, what's the best kind of way to recap? What was the most popular acquired episode of the year? Ooh, I have this pulled up.

First of all, let me warm you all up with a quick comment first, which is I pulled up our total downloads ever and sort of just episodes by most downloaded. And eight of the 10 were released this year. So they've had the shortest amount of time and have the most. So the only two that weren't from this year in the top 10 are SpaceX and Airbnb. Wow.

And Airbnb was December 2020. So, you know, basically this year. Yeah. What's number one? Berkshire Hathaway part one. Which I actually wouldn't have guessed. I thought it would be TSMC. That's what I was going to guess. Because TSMC has gotten like a lot of Twitter love. We managed to like hit this intersection of like,

silicon twitter plus tech twitter plus like fin twit that was this like perfect uh semiconductor twitter is legit yeah i have a for anyone who follows me on twitter i have like a list called silicon that i use just to follow people who are like analysts of of uh that as i was preparing for the tsmc episode and there's it's a whole different universe when you dive into there who's the number one must follow on silicon

Uh, that's a good question. Honestly, I think it's the NZS guys. Yeah, I think we got a John Bathgate in NZS. Yeah. Oh, right, right, right. Because they're curators too. They find a lot of the best, like, other stuff to reshare. Are you? So when you, I always struggle with this a little bit too. When you're, you know, after the TSMC episode, are you continuing to just stay up on Silicon and, or are you like onto the next one?

It's a great question. It's hard. I certainly can't stay as current as we are for the episodes. I think I hit the peak knowledge of all I will ever know about a company in the final few minutes of an episode, and then I start forgetting it. There's some half-life to my knowledge after that, and it gets little re-ups every time I'll read an article or something, but never that knowledgeable again. It's like finals, right? Yeah.

Totally. It's just like writing a term paper. Yeah. You're like, man, what do I remember about the American Republic two years later? I forget. But for a moment there, you really feel like you're on top of it. I will say, though, there probably on average, maybe two or three times a year, we'll do an acquired topic. And then I'll be like, OK, I'm going to need to

you know become a shareholder in this company or buy tokens or something and um yeah tsmc made that cut for me this year hasn't performed you know that great it's i think it's basically flat since i last did but i was just like there is other than the you know political geopolitical threat of uh what happens with taiwan in the coming years um which i think the company can probably survive uh

I just don't see any future where they're not an incredibly important piece of the entire world's ecosystem. Did you buy ASML also? I did not. I probably should. I did, but I think it's like the Tesla of Europe from a multiples perspective. I think it might be the most valuable European tech company. And certainly by any reasonable metric, they're not. Paki, I'm curious. $332 billion.

do you feel the same way? Like, how do you stay up after you write a piece? I don't. I mean, it's really, really tough. So I think this year, certainly compared to 2020, when I was writing kind of more just like one company at a time, that was really hard. Now it feels like, you know, occasionally I'll do one company, but more it's a part of a big kind of, you know, arcing narrative. And so it's a little bit easier just to kind of stay up. But

Even writing about this stuff every week, it's impossible to stay up on everything. Obviously, I have people DM all the time or cocktail parties ask me about very specific things, and I have no idea what they're talking about. So I don't know. I mean, for me, it's just picking a few things that I'm really interested in, making sure that I'm at least kind of knowledgeable enough, continuing to follow people on Twitter and read and all of that. I've given up all hope on being fully knowledgeable at this point.

Well, it's impossible in Web3 also. I'm sure there's approximately 1,000 people that are trying to do something like Constitution DAO, but for a different object. And yeah, you couldn't possibly stay up on all that. Although my favorite right now, my friend Brett started something called FriesDAO. Like fries electronics? No, like fries, like French fries. And they're trying to buy...

Fast food chains. And the fun part about this, and I think I might write a little bit about this on Monday, is that each one of these things seems so stupid. Why not just put together an LLC and go out and buy, I think even Fry's now will have LLCs involved in the whole thing.

to go buy franchises. But each one, I think, has a little innovation that they're adding to the mix. So this will be like... I think the interesting thing on this one will be one, I guess, kind of around decentralized management of single entities. But the other is around what you do with profits when these are governance tokens and not securities. And so they have some kind of interesting ideas there on what to do with the actual profits from the franchises. And so all of those are just, I think, adding one little piece that...

I think this year, frankly, like we're going to start seeing DAOs come together and do some really, really cool shit and like solve some really hard problems. So I think each one of these dumb things are like dumb looking from the outside things is adding one little piece that ultimately those big DAOs will need to go do some cool stuff.

I like that framing. It feels like just rapid imitation and evolution that'll just help us sort of naturally select for a really incredibly interesting structure. Totally. I just read Complexity finally after I think it came out 30 years ago. Yeah. But it does feel like these are just...

Exactly. It does feel like these are just kind of models almost, you know, like just these digital models that allow for really rapid kind of iteration and experimentation, but with real people. And then you might be able to apply those models to, you know, to other things that are maybe less digitally constrained. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, this is like,

This is the theory of startups, right? Like this is why startups exist. Like many of them look stupid and are stupid, but some of them are not. And now in Web3, it's just happening at like such a crazy fast pace and anybody can do it and you don't need any permission despite what Jack says. Can someone explain to me, I know we're away. So like to think about the levels of like function calls that we're in. We started with how's everyone's year been? We went to acquired and

But can I take a sidetrack here? What is the Bitcoin maximalist argument? I understand. I'm very amenable to this Web3 argument. It's decentralized AWS that everybody owns and you pay with the... That's my favorite analogy for non-Web3 people. It's the globally decentralized computer. It's a new application platform. You can easily see how there's intrinsic value created by that.

What is the like, I'm long Bitcoin, but short Web3 perspective? I think it's, I think there's a few things. One, it's kind of purely decentralized and the OG and Satoshi isn't even a real person and there's no central control. And what you really want out of this is just

a financial asset that nobody can control and so that anybody in the world can own and access equally and all of that. And anything that happens in Web3 or like Ethereum, Solana, any one of the L1s, even the existence of many other L1s, smart contract L1s,

proves that they're all shit coins because it's easy for anybody to start a different one and kind of take attention away. It's not, I mean, I'm not making the argument probably particularly well because it's not obviously one that I subscribe to. But I think from Jack's perspective in particular, it's really like if he's just bought in fully on this Bitcoin thing and anything else is a distraction from that. I don't know why he went

went so hard after after VCs in particular and why it wasn't just like purely pro Bitcoin versus anti Web three and anti VCs. We we need a break, guys. I mean, don't be out here. But I think that is his perspective, is that he really does believe in the power of having this kind of like decentralized world currency and anything else is a distraction.

I mean, this is more of a meta point, but the... And this is also an argument that I think will get very little sympathy, but I honestly think VCs get a tough rap. Like...

Oh, here we go. We've moved into the feel sympathy for VCs part of the hour. And also, I'm the only one here who's not a VC, so I feel like I can say it. But for real, Jack built two big companies with VC money that served a really valuable purpose. For all of these Web3 products that are getting VC money, yeah, they're using it to get off the ground and to bring it to the masses. Yeah, VCs do a bunch of corny stuff, but...

It's such an easy target that I don't think is particularly articulately attacked beyond just like vests. It seems to me a flaw in Jack's argument is that

In traditional equity startups, yeah, it was so stacked for the VCs. Nobody on this call could have invested in Square when it was a private company or Twitter when it was a private company. And those VCs made billions and billions of dollars because of that. And it was just closed access. But everything that...

Andreessen's interesting in Web3 and like anybody listening here, any of us can just go buy tokens in that at the same time. Like I bought a bunch of tokens after we had Ronil on the show. And I was like, this is awesome. And I was going to ask him, I think I did ask him after the call, I was like,

what's the best way to invest? And he's like, go to Uniswap, hook up your MetaMask. I think he actually explicitly told you I can't tell you how to invest. I think that is true, yeah. I think he said it was traded on major exchanges, but I can't, like, decentralized or centralized exchanges.

And the interesting thing there is, I mean, I do think that probably over time, you know, the amount that a Web3 VC is able to purchase in a protocol comes down. Like I think probably it looks like a minimally extractive protocol almost over time. But I do think particularly in Web3 when people can invest earlier and when there are

millions of projects that come out, most of which are scams. I do think that VCs do play kind of an important filtering role. And so, you know, a VC can invest token launch and somebody can invest right away versus waiting seven years. So I think it's a good kind of signaling and filtering mechanism. But over time, probably the amount that they own comes down and that's a really good thing.

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, there's sort of like information creators in any market. Like you sort of have price setters and price takers. And it's kind of, even though they're conflicted, it's kind of nice for the whole ecosystem to have price setters that are doing diligence or that are making informed decisions rather than like, you know, however memes sort of come to be that people sort of glom on. And when you look all the way back at the original thing, it was actually super low signal, but then got higher.

got the gain turned all the way up and then a whole bunch of people ran into something that didn't come from originally a strong signal. So even though certainly the people pouring millions of dollars into a project early on become wildly conflicted in it, they're doing actual research to found the original investment decision.

And I mean, the other good thing is that in many cases they're locked in for a very long time. And so, you know, instead of somebody just kind of coming in and buying and selling and moving on to the next thing, VCs are typically locked in for at least two years, maybe more in a lot of these projects. It's also, I think, very easy now after this year to say like, oh my God, look at how crazy it is that the VCs own this. Where like, you know, Solana's early investors, that was an incredibly non-consensus bet to me. Totally.

Flow, I think over time, looked like a crazy bet. Adapter Labs looked like a crazy bet and ran into trouble before it blew up with NBA. So VCs look, I guess, kind of extractive when they're right in hindsight. But a lot of this could have just been a house of cards that fell apart and they own a bunch of shit coins.

Well, I'm glad we've now alienated the audience enough. So VCs are cool and all, but back to us. Let's talk about us, guys.

Yeah.

Yep, Vanta is the perfect example of the quote that we talk about all the time here on Acquired. Jeff Bezos, his idea that a company should only focus on what actually makes your beer taste better, i.e. spend your time and resources only on what's actually going to move the needle for your product and your customers and outsource everything else that doesn't. Every company needs compliance and trust with their vendors and customers.

It plays a major role in enabling revenue because customers and partners demand it, but yet it adds zero flavor to your actual product. Vanta takes care of all of it for you. No more spreadsheets, no fragmented tools, no manual reviews to cobble together your security and compliance requirements. It is one single software pane of glass that connects to all of your services via APIs and eliminates countless hours of work.

for your organization. There are now AI capabilities to make this even more powerful, and they even integrate with over 300 external tools. Plus, they let customers build private integrations with their internal systems. And perhaps most importantly, your security reviews are now real-time instead of static, so you can monitor and share with your customers and partners to give them added confidence. So whether you're a startup or a large enterprise, and your company is ready to automate compliance and streamline security reviews like

like Vanta's 7,000 customers around the globe and go back to making your beer taste better, head on over to vanta.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. And thanks to friend of the show, Christina, Vanta's CEO, all acquired listeners get $1,000 of free credit. Vanta.com slash acquired. All right, so just to wrap on acquired, I also pulled some data that surprised me.

We did our usual 16 season episodes this year. Bitcoin, New York Times, Meituan, Rec Room, three on Berkshire, Ethereum with Paki, two on A16Z, TSMC, two on Standard Oil, Not Boring, FTX with Mario, and then CAA with Michael Ovitz, which was, that was a highlighted year for me, was interviewing Michael. That was so fun. And he was so great and so gracious. He sent us a super nice note when we released the episode.

episode that was awesome so that was we did our usual 16 season episodes our usual 10 specials we had like ho nam kevin rose michael malvison ncs all awesome how many lp episodes do you think we had then i feel like uh let's see so that's 26 18 wow 19 which is like i in my mind i was like oh like

In my mind, I was thinking like, oh, we probably, you know, we did 16 season, 10 specials. We probably did about 10 LP episodes. No, it was our biggest content creation was LP episodes this year. I mean, that's not surprising. Those are like, just to like...

they're so much easier to do i mean it's it's like we hop on we don't quite wing it we do research we do an outline but it's mostly like find super interesting people that can talk a lot on their own and dive in with them it's not like the lp show when it first started which was like you and i are going to create a six-part class on how to become a venture capitalist and methodically single-handedly walk through that it's it's very much a like um

Yeah, they're deep cuts. But yeah, not surprising to me that was our biggest category. And talk to us about the decision to make those free for everybody. Yeah, well, my hope was that...

Well, I guess let me take it back to a goal. The goal was to make it so that there was an appropriate audience size for the quality of content that was being created with the caliber of guests that we were having on. I always felt this twinge of embarrassment when we would ask someone to come on the LP show and they know of acquired the brand and they don't really know that much about the LP show. And then we finish the episode, we post it and we share it. We say we're live. And they're like, cool. Like what?

how do i listen where do i see it yeah and i'm like oh yeah i'll send of course i've sent you a free subscription they're like well how do other people listen like well that you know they become an lp it's 100 a year and it's immediately just this awkward situation um and so we wanted to keep a lot of value for lps and we did that in the form of keeping all episodes exclusive for two weeks and by keeping things like zoom calls and some other web 3 related stuff we have planned lp only um

But the goal was like, well, okay, what's a decent audience size and how fast can we get there? And so we did this a month ago and the LP show now has 15,000 subscribers, which is about 10%. The main shows were over 160,000. And so we'll see how much that can kind of grow to and how fast, but...

I look at it like it's not going to be as broad of an appeal because it really is sort of deeper, nerdier topics. A lot of people are interested in SBF, in FTX with SBF and Mario. Less people...

But certainly a even more passionate subset of those people are going to want to hear the race capital story of how they invested in Solana and FTX. And like, we have that coming out with Chris and Edith from race capital. And like, it's always, I think going to be a smaller audience, but certainly a passionate one. That's amazing. So you're 160 or so thousand subscribers now, which is wild. Chartable tracks, monthly, monthly unique listeners. What was that at the beginning of the year?

around 60,000. - Oh wow. - Whoa, damn! - It was a big year. - Was there one thing that kind of like kicked it off or was it just all year, an onslaught? - David, what do you think? - Well, I think TSMC was very shareable. So that I think brought a lot of new listeners.

I think probably Berkshire too, just like doing that. Yeah. That brought, that brought the fin to it in, I think. Cause it's expanding the circles that acquired is interesting too.

The other thing that we finally figured out is like people share content when they get credit for being smart for having found it. And so it's not that we necessarily changed the type of content we were creating to appeal to that, but it helped me set my expectations for, uh,

when is something going to go versus when is, uh, when is someone going to listen, have gotten value, but then think like, will I accrue social capital for having shared this? No. And I think that for the first several years of acquired, that was sort of our, uh, that was a little bit, the fatal flaw is like, we weren't,

We weren't necessarily doing stuff that was zeitgeisty enough in the moment for you to feel like I just shared this super interesting thing about something that the world cares about right now. And I think we try and key a little bit more into that than we used to. Makes sense. Do you guys, do you see that people go back? Cause you do have this catalog and this library of episodes that aren't, you know, that for many years were not zeitgeisty and so are kind of more evergreen. Yeah.

Do people who come in and start listening go back and just rip through the whole catalog? Yes, it's crazy. It's the strangest thing when people join the Slack and they're like, all right, I listened to the most recent episode and now I've listened to 28 previous ones and I'm working my way through. It's astonishing to me because I'm like, I can't imagine listening to... Certainly the stuff from our first couple of years just isn't... Does that happen with you guys or is it a different dynamic with newsletters?

In terms of back catalog, getting access?

So it's hard to know because I don't think my instrumentation is particularly good in terms of read counts until probably three months ago. But broadly and anecdotally, yes. Like there are some pieces that seem to continually crop up on people's radar where they'll be like, oh yeah, I found you from this thing from six months ago or stuff like that. So there are, I think, some pieces that just become a little bit like reference points. I assume that's true for you too, Paki, right? Yeah.

It is. And it's interesting. I mean, like for me, I think this year, the great online game was probably like the one that people talked about the most, but was not actually even in my top five. It was number seven, most read. And so that's, I think kind of interesting,

Two, I would imagine it's brought a bunch of people in, but not enough. Maybe once they're in, they talk about it. But otherwise, it's not the one that grabbed most attention. Something like an Axie is where there's this huge community of people who are already bought into Axie and love it and want to share it and all of that. But maybe because great online game

didn't have like a particular company. It didn't share as well, but certainly the one that people reference the most. Well, anecdotally, I shared great online game. I'm sorry. I shared Axie with a few execs that I know in the gaming industry to specifically to explain, Hey, there's a new business model emerging called play to earn. And, um,

The great online game, I remember listening to it on a run and nodding and smiling along with it. People probably thought I was a crazy person on this run, but I felt like I was being enlightened by all this cool ways that you were stitching stuff together. But then afterwards, I was like, there's a general... I think I tweeted about it. I was like, this is eye-opening. But it wasn't like, hey, I can think of five people who must listen to this game.

as a form of education for themselves the way I could with the Axie piece. That's super interesting. I will say, though, I think that we're going to be reading the great online game in like 10 years time still. And like, you know, when there are those lists of like things you need to read to get started on technology and, you know, startups, like I think it'll be on there. It's such a good piece, man. Thank you. Well, say everything.

Thank you. I just think it's, it's very interesting just to your point, just what gets shared and what does not get shared. Mario, what was your most popular piece of the year? So I don't really know because I only started to do read tracking and like three months ago, but since then tiger by a lot, um,

And I think it probably is regardless. But yeah, that one had a little zeitgeistiness to it in the way that you guys are talking about. And I think probably put together a few different pieces of the story in one place. So that one I think did well. And then...

The other ones that... Also, Mario, David and I have talked to some founders recently who specifically read that to prepare for engaging with Tiger in a fundraise. So, like, I know it's... In the same way that I... That Packy's was sort of the definitive piece on you need to learn about play to earn. It's like, if you need to learn about Tiger, you know, there's your piece and there's the one from Everett Randall, which is also great, which was a little bit earlier. And, like, that...

Those are great primers on and like specifically actionable to help with a thing that you have upcoming in your life.

Yeah. That's really cool to hear. I didn't know that. Yeah. Everett's piece is amazing. I definitely like used a lot of his thinking and research on the tiger piece and hopefully added something to the conversation, but that one, and then the Dow's piece ended up being a pretty big one, I think for a similar purpose. Like I've heard from a bunch of folks that are like, Hey, this like,

ended up being sort of the thing that helped me put this together in a complete way and like understand the landscape. And then similarly for tech in Africa, which someone sent me a screenshot that it's like included in the curriculum at one of like, I think University of Michigan's master's program or international development program or something. So that was a trip. That was really cool. That's awesome.

Wait, Paki, was Axie your number one of the year? It was my number one of the year. Give us your top five. So I tweeted this yesterday. Let me pull it up. But I think that just has such a passionate community of players and people around it. And the Twitter account has a huge following, and they shared it. All right, so if we do the top five.

Number five was the Pareto Frontier, which wasn't, I don't think one of my five best pieces of the year, but I think it was just recent and the audience just keeps getting bigger. And so that helps. Number six was Solana Summer. Number four was the piece that I wrote on Shein with Matt Brennan.

which I think it just took off in China. And like, you know, sometimes, sometimes things like that just kind of help that we have two different audiences that it was able to kind of just catch fire. Number three was on the internet on Ethereum. Number two was Excel never dies. And number one was Axie. So the really interesting thing there is that like, other than Pareto frontier, which I think it's just a, you know, had the benefit of being a recent, um,

It is, you know, even if I write more like kind of broad think PC type stuff, like the ones that really like catch hold and spread fastest are the ones with one particular topic and subject. And how many of those were collaborations? Of the top? Yeah, good point. Of the top five, two of them were collaborations. Huh. And I wonder if that's, well, maybe there's no signal there because it's like an equal, it's equal to the percentage that you, well, no, you don't do that many collaborations. You've probably done...

eight to 10 ever. Yeah. I think that's probably right. I think Excel is one of those things that you're saying with TSMC where it just, it hits the right number of like different groups right in the chest that, you know, I could have written like the word Excel on a piece of paper and people would share it because they love Excel. Well, there's that woman on Tik TOK. Yeah. Wow. Pretty awesome. Yeah.

Yeah, did you see Rex Whitbury's thread about her? Miss Excel, we're talking about, who's this influencer on TikTok who's making up to 100k a day on her courses around Excel. It was a really great thread from Rex. That's how I learned Excel. Is that right? No. I hope the timeline doesn't match up there. I just learned Excel a couple months ago. Okay.

Should we do lowlights? We got to hear the generalist, your interview. But first, Paki, so Solana was a sponsored piece. Were any of the other top ones sponsored? That's a good question. The next one was Replit at number eight. At number eight. Wow. Wow, that's pretty good. That's pretty awesome. Like six and eight were nine or 10 sponsored?

No, 9 and 10 were not sponsored. It's still a pretty good hit rate, I would say. Yeah. I mean, if you would have asked me, like, would a Substack writer get paid a meaningful amount of money to write a piece and have it be one of their top and be on the top of TechMeme that day with it, I'd have been like, hell no. It's just like, it's unprecedented. Yeah, I think hopefully also I've gotten...

you know, better and continue to get better and just have like a wider set of companies to choose from at like picking the right companies to, to write about. And so like really at this point, everything that I'm writing about in the sponsor deep dive is something that I would write about not as a sponsor deep dive. And that was true ish before, you know, like, and there's nothing that I wrote that I didn't believe in, but I think it's particularly true now that like, I feel lucky to get to write about the companies that I'm writing about now on the sponsor deep dives. Pretty cool.

Very cool. All right, Mario, give us some high level. What's shareable about the run that you've had this year with the generalist?

It's been a good run, man. I can't complain. I think, you know, growth-wise, I looked and I think it was 20,000 subscribers at start of the year and 50,000 now. Not quite, not quite. Which definitely surpassed, like, all of my expectations for it. So that was a bit nuts. And I think also I learned a bunch about sort of, like,

what the journalist should be. You know, when I started the year, I had sort of maybe three, four more newsletters I was trying to run simultaneously as like part of this suite. And I think what I really became clear, especially in the second half of the year is like,

just do the weekly briefing fucking well and as deeply as possible. And actually, weirdly, people will happily read 10,000 words or 8,000 words on a subject. And that was both, I think, a lot more fun for me. I mean, I've always had a ton of fun doing this, but...

I feel better about doing that at a high level and also seems to be more successful. So that was good. And then revenue wise from zero to a good business, which was nice and feels sustainable. And didn't you move to your own custom website and platform too and away from Substack this year?

Yeah, so I always like or very early on I switched to ConvertKit for sending emails, but I was posting them on Substack and I moved the generalist to a new site at the start of the year and then also launched sort of a private community which now has a much an actual page for it and all those things because that's like going to be a big focus this year. And I've really been glad for having done that. I think it

gave me a chance to cast the vision for The Generalist a little bit and also gave me like a bit of a digital terrain, a product that I can like continue to work and improve. And so that really is something that excites me about the year ahead for sure. And then the final thing that was, I think, sort of a bit of a highlight this year was Philosophical Foxes. Like that was just like,

the pure joy and magic on the internet and uh i'm really excited about that for next year definitely a lot of things like cooking and like brings in my uh fiction storytelling brain that uh you know i don't always get to exercise as much so i'm super pumped about that and give us for for folks who don't know a lot about it what was the what is the philosophical fox's project

So Philosophical Foxes are like profile picture NFTs. It's at Foxes NFT on Twitter. And so I wrote basically a piece on OpenSea. And as part of that, my fiance was like, you know, you should probably buy an NFT off OpenSea if you're going to write this piece. I was like, yeah, I should. That makes sense. So I bought one. And then I was like in the shower just thinking, I was like, what if I like make a collection just to understand how this works? And then pretty quickly, I'm sure you guys are the same. Like you get an idea and then you can just like start writing.

snowballing with it and thinking of where it might go. And so I sort of started to think about what existing PFP projects may be, why they failed to resonate with me as much as I would have hoped. And I think part of the thing I decided was that like,

The IP for NFTs is purposefully thin a lot of the time for these projects, like a Bored Ape or a Punk. We're now seeing them create partnerships with talent agencies and things like that to bring movies, film, TV shows into the market. But it's kind of impossible to know what a single Bored Ape is.

is like as a character. There's no depth to them as a character beyond their visual element. And so the thought process behind Philosophical Foxes was what if you could create a PFP that had sort of three dimensions to it. It had

a thought that you could see, so you had a sense of what it was interested in. It had emotional baggage in its metadata, so you could see what its flaws were and what its peccadilloes were, and virtues in its metadata. So it's like, you know, this one is a good listener, this one is funny, this one is good at handling spicy food.

It's like their little Tinder profiles for your NFTs. Yeah, exactly. And the idea was that you can give that to people and they actually are buying a character that if you ever were to extend the universe for it, not everything would be permissible. That fox would have to act in certain ways that corresponded to its character. And so in that respect, it's more similar to how we treat IP today, which is like if you take the James Bond books and turn them into a movie, there are certain things that

that have to be a part of it, more or less. There's like a D&D-ness to it. Yes, yes, exactly. I think about that a lot. Like, what are the alignments of them almost? And like, how can you set them off onto little adventures or dilemmas or things like that? That essentially building an on-chain personality and backstory. So that's like something I'm going to play around with this year that I think will be really fun.

Great. It's like the most Mario possible way to do an NFT project. Mario Max to the max. Yeah. Well, it's I mean, he's on when you said like I learned a lot this year about what the generalist should be. I feel like David and I did, too, with Acquired. And I think that.

I mean, we've said this a zillion times and I think we all say it in different ways, but like the internet is a big place. So just go be extreme in one facet of it and you will attract the tribe of people who are as into whatever that extremeness as you are. And of course that could be very negative politically or, you know, ideologically. But if your thing is like really deep dive, extremely ridiculously deep dives on companies, like it's, it's,

there's clearly some audience for that. And it's not as big as like for us, it's like, we never want to be how I built this. Well, we kind of can't be how I built this because we're not as how I built this as how I built this, but they're not as acquired as we are. So there it's a sort of nonsensical to explain it that way. But I guess what I'm getting at is for, for us, at least we figured out,

the thing that makes a choir differentiated is actually not the interviews with big name guests. Like for most podcast shows, they'd be like, well, who'd you have on? And my answer to that now typically is like, well,

Our really good episodes have no guests. And that's not because David and I are... Our best episode was 10 hours on Berkshire Hathaway with just us. It's like, I don't know, because we're so, like you guys, so willing to go down a 100-hour research rabbit hole to write a doctoral thesis on...

this story that's in most of the time still being written or, or like, it's sort of like an investment memo where we don't get to invest at the end that like, uh, uh, it, it creates differentiated content. Cause it's not just doing a couple hours of prep work and then putting an interview guest in a chair. Yes.

One of the concepts I think about for what we're all doing is value over replacement. And I think finding the place where you can increase your value over a replacement pod. Yeah, you can get the same guest in a chair at 100 different podcasts in some respect, and you'll get a version of the same spiel. But it's pretty hard to do 10 hours on Berkshire at the same level of detail.

That's been such a... I think that was actually sort of in the low-lights challenges for Acquired this year. I think...

That we had already figured that out by the summer, like after in the aftermath of the Berkshire trilogy for us, I think we figured that out then, but then the back half of the year with my daughter arriving, thanks to both of you guys and a bunch of people, we had a little help to finish out the season. And we did basically all guests for the last two, three months. And like, I think we had some great episodes, uh,

but like it really hit home for me that like the core meat of what makes acquired acquired is the episodes that are just us. Right. Like we had some things that spiked on quality for interviews. Like the Michael of its thing was just, you know, that is one of my favorite interviews that we've ever done, if not my favorite, but it wasn't as differentiated as our content. That's just us because, you know, a lot of people can conduct an interview and,

any other lowlights that like came to mind for you guys? I mean, we have a big 2021, which is like our, uh, we, I don't think we've talked about this yet, but, uh, so 2020 March hit, we felt it was completely inappropriate to be like, no one wanted to listen to content on like, yeah, but how much of a multiple did the investors get on that thing when the big company bought the little company? It was like, it just felt very wrong. So we, um,

We changed the show, and we actually retitled it. We called it Adapting, and we did three episodes of companies that were adapting. And we told one historical about Intel and Andy Grove, and we did this amazing interview with Mark Canlis, who's one of the Canlis brothers of Canlis Restaurant here in Seattle that just was...

totally on the forefront of saving that business and all the employees and being incredibly creative and inspiring in the pandemic. But ultimately like,

A lot of people follow the show for something, and that was just not at all what people were following the show for. And you can see it in our analytics, like whether by people's commute habits changing and therefore their podcast listening changing, or because we decided to completely change the show and change the name of the show, our analytics took a gigantic hit on every measurable axis last March, April, May, June, and took a while for us to dig out of that. Yeah.

Well, good for you guys for giving it a shot. I mean, good to test it out and then not stick with it. Importantly, the Bezos two-way door, fortunately. Yeah, was that a metrics-driven thing? Or what made you decide to go back? I think it was a combination of... Certainly the metrics and the data were telling us that it wasn't working. But also...

You know, at that time, like by the time we got to May, June, I think we realized, I mean, you guys were writing about this, you especially, Paki, like, yes, COVID and the pandemic was terrible. But like, it also just opened this door to so many new possibilities, too. And like, it wasn't doom and gloom anymore. And the stock market was ripping. We're like, huh, maybe we should be a little more optimistic here. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, in fact, we were like, actually, our normal type of content is exactly what people want right now. There's a massive opportunity cost to us trying anything new at the moment. Yeah, everyone just wants to buy stocks right now. Also, we haven't said it on this episode yet, but this is certainly not investment advice in any form, and everyone should do all their own research. Amen. Never is. What about you guys? Yeah, lowlights.

Yeah, I would say the summer was kind of a little tough for me, metrics wise in particular. Everything just grew more slowly. And I think I had also been sort of

primed by the COVID appetite for online content that like suddenly disappeared a little bit during summer. I was like, oh man, what is happening here? Things aren't moving in the way that I have like grown accustomed to. And so I think I had to like learn a bit of patience on that. And then I'm actually going to share more about this soon, but just as a preview, like I wouldn't say this was necessarily a low light, but a

necessary lesson for me, I think, was doing some fundamental work on the generalists value proposition and business model. Like it works well as a subscription business, but I think content like this, like wants to be free in many respects, especially when it's broader in scope. And so I spent a lot of time in the summer, you know, sort of during that slower patch, like

with a friend who like very generously offered to help me to think through this, like,

Thinking from first principles like what are the three value propositions? The generalist is doing like who very specifically are the audience profiles and all of those things that I think I kind of skated past when I was just like in Keep keep things alive and like stay above water mode and so that was very important, but not always that fun because it forced me to to do a bit of

and some harder thinking. And for me, lowlights, it's just...

I mean, like it's the greatest thing in the world. This is as much fun as I've ever had professionally. Like there's zero complaints. It's also just like a lot like content is one of those things that can just fill every crevice and nook and cranny. And, you know, like you feel guilty if you're not thinking about the next thing that you're working on. Yeah. Yes. It all ends up pushing for me at least into like the last day or two before the pieces do, no matter how much advanced time I give myself, like,

all that kind of stuff. Just like, you know, normally I'm very happy and optimistic and even keeled. And like, there are definitely times this year where I was like, I just have zero idea how I'm going to make anything in life work. I suck at everything that I'm doing. Like none of this, you know, like,

And that happened multiple times this year. And so like, again, it's, you can't complain and like zero complaints on this, but it was definitely like a pretty challenging year just from like between the fund and the writing, particularly the writing, just like keeping everything going. Like if, if you're out there listening and you have an email in my inbox and I haven't responded to it, like you are not alone. I had to like just let certain things break and, you know, I hate not responding to people and that kind of stuff. But like,

there's just zero way to juggle all of this. I think my low light was that and the high light or the kind of takeaway for 2022 is like, I need to finally just man up and hire somebody, which I've really tried to avoid doing, but I think it'd be really, really helpful.

100% parenting that you've been doing this whole time too. Like parenting for three months now while quasi doing this. I'm just like, wow, I can't imagine you doing this the whole time. Right. Cause that's another thing that like very happily happens.

takes up any kind of crevice of time that you have because as soon as I don't have to work, I want to go hang out with him. It's just a lot of competing things for time. If I had the Hermione time turner, it would have been the easiest best year ever. Our work, content creation, it feels pretentious to call it creative work, but it is creative work, and parenting are both

that will infinitely expand to fill time, not allotted to them, but that they possibly can. They will both take every ounce of your time. And middle of the nighttime even. Whether it's a kid waking up or you waking up with an idea. It takes every hour of the day. Especially the...

doing it with the personality type that we all have in order to have started each of these things. It's like a necessary personality type of like,

how can I make it better and just continue to go all out to make it better. And I'd almost a guilt that comes with not giving it the energy that it needs to make it better. Like I, I used to feel like, Oh, David and I'll Google around for a few hours before, uh, uh, and then we'll hit record and like, we'll see what happens. But now if I'm like, Oh, I didn't consume every piece of media ever written about this topic before I started, uh,

I must have missed something. And I could have had a better perspective on this if I had consumed every piece of media. That's one of the funniest, one of the funniest pieces of this whole thing is like, if I leave something on the cutting room floor, I'm like, God, they're going to know that I didn't write about this obscure thing. Nobody, I've already written so many.

six times as many words as anybody wants to read on a particular subject, but I feel guilty leaving everything on the cutting room floor. And somebody's going to know. Yeah, exactly. Don't you find there's always like one sort of finger looking for a bruise that's like, aha, you didn't do this. Like, no, I'm sorry. That I've gotten a lot better at this year. It's like just not giving a shit about

That's a good practice. About the nitpickers. There are just going to be people out there who will find flaws in everything that I do. And as long as I'm giving my best effort and think I'm directionally right, at some point you just can't care. Question for you guys.

I think we're all sort of recognizing that there is some emotional or mental health toll of this work. What have you guys found works for keeping your stamina up, keeping your sanity? Any hacks that you feel equipped to share?

so uh it's like a little bit of like a flex but i think you could totally switch to it too dave and i just don't do that much content and that totally helps like or at least we don't do that much of the like uniquely acquired thing we don't we do it 16 times a year and like we have to prepare a lot also for these guest interviews for the specials we have to prepare some for the lp interviews but at the end of the day like

I'm looking at you specifically like a Monday and a Thursday piece at the level of depth that you do them. What the hell? Plus one. That is exactly what I was going to say too. And it's, it's great. Cause I don't know. Apparently Betty white just died. Just, um, no, I know that. Damn. Um, well I guess 2022 not boring goes out to Betty white, but, um, yeah, I don't know.

the Thursday ones that actually ended up being like a little easier for me to do because I know what I'm going to be writing about at least. And I think that there, if anything, I think that maybe like the one challenge about the Thursdays for me is that they make me want to do fewer like company specific deep dives on Mondays. But otherwise I think it's just nice going in and kind of knowing what the topic is going to be at least. And then like at least one thing is kind of ticked off the list there. It is interesting.

a lot and I would imagine 2023 2024 I don't write those this year I already told myself like only two Thursday pieces a month and I'm already breaking that rule because

Like these are, like I said, these are stories that I want to tell. It's like not at some point, you know, about the money on those even. It's just like their portfolio companies or their companies that I've been like dying to dig into. And if I get a chance to do it and they like have timing that, you know, needs to work out, then I just end up saying yes. And then I hate myself for it in the middle of whatever stretch of, you know, multiple of those in a row that I have. But I don't know. At some point I'll figure that out. One thing at a time.

I'm trying to think of any other, other than these, like, structural changes, any other, like, mental health... I mean, one thing Mario is, like, I do think...

picking your battles on what's going to be a flagship piece and what's going to be a really good piece that people will be glad they read, but it doesn't define your publication for the rest of your life. Like we realized halfway in that like the TSMC one, we were like, Oh, this is going to be signature Berkshire. This is going to be signature. I think we kind of knew going into doing the FTX one. We were like, this is going to be a really good interview. Um,

And like, I don't think it will be like when people think of acquired, they're synonymous with this thing. And I picked the FTX one because that's when we did together and you know it the most intimately. But I think that's true of a lot of them. And at least for me, I,

It's like there's two quality bars. One is making sure that everything is well above the bar of will people be glad that they spent the time to do this? Because I do think audio in particular is a risk to ask people to spend their time doing that given it's hard to quickly bounce. They invest their commute or they don't. But the...

Then there's this other quality bar where if you can kind of feel it coming halfway into the research where you're like, oh, this has a chance of being one of our defining ones, making sure that you leave it all on the floor there. All in the field? All in the field. Either way, leave it somewhere. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I think that's a good way to think of it. Sorry. The other one I'd add to is just like, for me, a big thing has just been accepting that like, this is, this is the field we're in. Like we're, you know, the, we're in a creative medium field and there are like, um,

emotional aspects to our work that come with that uh and then that actually was like a big thing for me to get over because it's so different than the first you know 13 years of my career where it was like i have a job it's like measurable on these things it's you know performance oriented it's not uh not that it wasn't emotional i didn't care but it didn't feel as like

it wasn't a creative uh process and i think just accepting like oh no this is different some of the things we're gonna do are gonna fail that's okay some of the things we're gonna do are gonna succeed far beyond like whatever we ever expected uh and just being like oh okay i'm okay with that has anyone watched uh the the taylor swift documentary miss americana

I have not. Only 17 times. Really? No, I've watched it. Oh, it's really good. You would all really enjoy it. There's a few parts that are worth calling out here, but the one that always sticks with me is she talks about how she built, and none of us are this extreme on any vector compared to Taylor Swift, but she talks about how she built basically her whole life from age seven of like,

being good, being a force for good in the world and having people like her and having people give positive feedback on the things that she makes. And when the VMAs, that whole thing in 2009 for the first time happened with Kanye, like that was the first time in her life she experienced a thing of like not feeling that

positive external validation and how she had to like spend a long time, like recreating her whole psyche in order to make it not about, am I about to produce something that will create external validation for me? And much more about the like intrinsic gratification of doing a thing she loved well, which are super different things. They're super connected, but I think they're super different things. That's, that's such a good point. Uh,

So hard to do that. Much easier said than done. Yeah, gosh. We should all just be like T-Swift. I actually went to the same beach town growing up. Which is Stone Harbor, Avalon. That's right. So you're kind of a celeb, Paki. Yeah, so what you're saying is there's probably a song about you. So you're saying you dated Taylor Swift when you were younger. I'm saying that I... Which one's about Paki? Speaking of, this is good.

Preview. What are we all excited about for our respective media properties in 2022? Do you guys want to kick it off? I'm just bouncing it back to you. Yeah. Well, we don't want to foreshadow too much, but the...

Kind of like we talked about earlier, Acquired has been this series of like expanding the concentric circles of things that we cover, starting with tech acquisitions that went well and ending up at, you know, wherever we are now. We're going to add a new concentric circle of

We're going to try. We're going to try. We are going to add one. It may work. It may not work. What we're saying is we're more open to telling great stories that are loosely business stories in the format of Acquired. As long as we do the type of research we do, we craft the narrative the way we craft the narrative. We do the analysis. They don't all have to be

Delaware C-Corps that become public companies. And I think we realize that in doing Bitcoin, in doing Ethereum, it's like, okay, Web3 is interesting. But what if one day we went full Mario and we were like, let's do an acquired episode on a country. Or you could imagine sort of crazier things than just, hey, this looks like a company but kind of isn't because it exists on the blockchain. That's cool. Color me intrigued. Yeah.

So that's an exploration we're doing. I think it'll always be from a business perspective. But yeah, we want to experiment with telling slightly broader stories. Can't wait for the acquired on France. That is one I am equipped to talk about. Yeah, no kidding. What about you guys?

I gave myself these two weeks off to think and whatever, and then I got COVID along with everybody else. But my brain just kind of shut down on me for a week. So I read a few different books, but not a ton of long-term planning. I mean, I think hopefully kind of more of the same. I already kind of know the first quarter's worth of sponsored deep dives at least, and I'm really excited about those. But then I also want to add more...

More in the really hard problems category, more healthcare stuff, all of that. I think Web3 has been so much fun to explore and will obviously be a key focus of what I continue to do. But what are those other huge things that I think I haven't spent nearly as much time on that I should be? Web4. Web4. Web4.

I will be very excited to read those. I also do not feel like I've spent much time on things like healthcare or climate, but you will do it great justice, I'm sure. I'm reading Ministry for the Future right now, which is really interesting if you guys haven't read it. What is it, Kim Stanley Robinson? Mm-hmm.

It's on a bookshelf right over there. Take it up and read. It's interesting. There's a few different stories and things and ways that different chapters are written all getting woven together. But I think ultimately it's just like... I'm halfway through, but it sounds like their plan is something like Klima, like a carbon-backed currency. But we will see. What is Klima? Klima? KlimaDAO? I was looking at the website, and it seems really difficult to figure out what...

But this is me and everything in Web3. I look at a website and I'm like, shoot, I don't get it. Am I dumb or is this esoteric? And the answer is somewhere in the middle. Yeah. I mean, well, it's certainly you're dumb, but you have now a corpus of work to suggest that that's not the case. Yeah.

So what is Klima? Klima essentially is like a black hole for carbon credits or carbon offsets. What they want to do is be able to just suck in as many kind of 2008 and beyond VERA certified carbon credits and by doing so drive up the price of carbon credits. It's an OM fork. So if you're familiar with OM,

They essentially like they're trying to build a currency that's backed by instead of a basket of different cryptocurrencies and stable coins like Ohm. They're one of the forks that's trying to do that exact same thing, but with

carbon offsets. And there's a million challenges with it. Not all carbon offsets are created equal and all sorts of things. But the idea would be you buy a carbon credit, you put it into the pot, you get your klima at a slight discount because you've bonded your BCT to

And then you can stake at one of the like Omfork ridiculous APYs. I think it's currently probably like 30,000% APY because they just kind of inflate the supply over time. But ideally where this goes is that they can suck in more different types of carbon offsets. And in the future, it just gets way more expensive to pollute because they're artificially driving up the price of all these offsets. That's super interesting. Wow.

Wow. So you have to be a big player in the market to actually move price like that. But presumably, you know, yeah. And there's like early signs that they have been, and this is, you know, the voluntary market and not the government. So it's a smaller market, but they are, they have already kind of made a dent in terms of, you know, it's millions and millions of tons worth of offsets already purchased. So it's kind of graphic. Like Macquarie did or something, put together something where it's like the normal kind of market

offsets purchased and then October when climate launch it just like shoots straight up so there is you know in that piece of the market they're having some sort of an impact so it's kind of like what the Fed is doing to the US economy they're trying to do to the carbon credit economy yes huh all right David what else we have in our little agenda we got to hear from Mario yeah what's Mario up for

I think I sort of previewed the big things. Some new Fox stuff coming in January. So all will be revealed shortly on the sort of roadmap for that, which is going to be fun. And then again, some things around the community that are being formalized that I'm excited by. And then content wise, there are a few pieces that are in the works that I'm like really looking forward to. One on sort of like

an internet OG where hopefully I'm going to get some, some really interesting access to tell that story at a level of depth. I haven't, haven't colored me intrigued. And then similarly I'm working on a trilogy in the crypto space that I think is going to be

also really cool. So those two are cooking and I'm not sure when they'll come out, but I really want to do more of the trilogy pieces when I find a compelling subject just because I do think it's like a really fun way to tell the story and like pseudo write the book in yeah, in a definitive way. And then beyond that, like

I'm sure I'll do Web 2 stuff, Web 3 stuff. I would love to spend more time on frontier emerging market stuff. That's always been like an interest. And I did a decent amount of Latin America last year, but would like to do sort of more there, more sea and more Africa. Just because I think that's like,

very fascinating. Yeah, man, I bought Bridgetown Two Holdings after one of our idea dinners. I think that might have been your pick. That was, right. Oh my gosh, is it de-spacked? I don't think so. This was like the Peter Thiel Southeast Asia SPAC. Yeah, it looked like it might be Tokopedia, but that obviously didn't happen.

That was the target that was looming at the time. Interesting. We'll see what happens. Can you believe SPAC Mania was this year? No. Oh, my gosh. Oh, here we go. It de-SPACed into Property Guru? Oh, that's right. It was announced anyway. Okay, yes. Wow, fascinating. I totally missed that story. Interesting.

Maybe to wrap up, we had a bunch of other stuff on the agenda, but I think we've actually hit on a lot of it. Um,

Maybe let's do best investment for each of us. Best performing investment of 2021. Again, not investment advice for anybody, but I think this is fun. This was fun for me to look back on. Well, we're all going to have the same one. I know. Are we? No. Likely. Okay, so I was going to say a very good investment for me was Roblox, which in part was getting lucky on the volatility, but, you know...

whatever. But then I was like, oh, wait a minute. Nope. Solana. Raise your hand if yours isn't Solana. No hands are going up. Mine is not Solana. Oh, okay.

Okay, well, okay, so Paki, you go last. I'll do real quick. I thought mine was going to be kindergarten's investment in brain trust, which it was for most of the year. But here at the end of the year, as brain trust has declined a little bit and Solana has gone up, Solana has surpassed it.

I think I missed some of the truly jaw-dropping Solana games, but thankfully I bought in when Paki's piece went out, so thanks, Paki. Thanks for the alpha.

You know, Ethereum, just like continuing to DCA and, you know, build that position over the past few years. This obviously was a good year for that. And then Terra. Terra has had essentially a wild second half that I don't know which between like Terra and Solana, like I'm up more on just like I haven't taken a close look, but I'm sure it's one of those two basically. Right.

Mario, I did a bunch of research after being inspired by your piece and bought a bunch around that period too. So thank you. Let's go. I love it. This is what it's all about, guys. Friends giving friends alpha. So for me, there's a few different that it could have been...

Axie actually did really well, particularly if you staked your Axie at like 130%. So that one was probably somewhere around, I don't know where it is today, but at its peak, probably a 10x on the original investment. When I wrote the interface phase, I just bought like a little bit of all of the metaverse, kind of like decentralized metaverse tokens. So like the Sand, Mana, the Somnium Cube, those tokens.

Shot up when Facebook did its meta things of those really 10 X's but I'm very very small amounts but the winner is actually not an investment but a contribution and not boring capitals contribution to Constitution Dow ended up being investment of the year so far so Is that because the people token? How did that work?

Yeah. So the interesting thing about Web3 is that anybody can start a liquidity pool. So we lost, but people had their people tokens. And so somebody started a liquidity pool on Uniswap, started trading. And now it's been picked up by pretty much every exchange outside of Coinbase. So it's on Binance. It's on a few other kind of like weirder exchanges. So waiting for Coinbase there, but took a bunch off the table so that my

LPs didn't murder me for investing in that. Thank you. Yeah. If we get to a dollar, we return the fund, which would be just absolutely unbelievable. Wow. That is the most 2021 thing possible. That is so on the nose. We're not going to get to a dollar, but a boy can dream. I love it.

Can we do a little lightning round of like, I had one topic I wanted to discuss with you guys in the style of the original idea dinner, like an investment idea, or at least like help me understand why this thing is this price. Let's play that game.

So after doing our FTX episode and better understanding the way that crypto exchanges work, I was looking at Coinbase's stock and I set up a little template in KoiFin, which is like a very cool, has a great free tier to be able to do some just basic analysis of stocks. And so Coinbase...

has had this big decline recently, but also the fundamentals have improved dramatically recently, which leads to some charts looking really crazy. One of which is...

It used to trade at a price to sales. This is last 12 months sales. So last 12 months revenue of like 50 X and has taken this huge plunge based on a making more money and be the stock price falling apart where it's now on a price to sales basis below Microsoft and almost down to Facebook. So like if you think about the like Fang companies or the big tech companies being sort of like reasonable, uh,

but sort of like low multiples at this point. Coinbase has fallen from stratospheric into less than Microsoft. And then when you look at their growth, you look at the annual growth rate, Facebook is growing at 40%. Microsoft's growing at 20%. This is top line numbers. Amazon at 30%. Coinbase is growing at 626%.

So it's like a growth monster when you look at their net income margin. So you look at, again, you look at like Google's net income margin of 30%, Facebook at 35%, Microsoft at 38%. Coinbase is higher than all of those at 50% net income margins. So it's the best net income. It's growing way faster on a revenue basis than any of those companies.

And the stock is falling off a cliff. I was trying to figure out like, is this just crypto risk? Like do people view, look, it's a crypto exchange. So hard to give it 30 years in the future of, you know, let's just give it a few years in the future. Or the other thing that I was trying to think of is like,

Maybe investors are just braced for incredible margin compression in crypto exchanges as it becomes more competitive and Coinbase becomes less of a, you know, they kind of were first to market and enjoy some really healthy benefits from that. But does anyone else have other theories on why this thing's not valued 5 or 10x higher? I would love to see what their revenue is.

today, like December 31st, 2021, just for this single day, because watch trading is still cool in crypto. I think anybody who has a loss on anything is selling and buying back in and paying. I paid hundreds of dollars to Coinbase earlier today, and I would imagine a bunch of other people have as well. That's not a bear case. That is a bookcase. I actually kind of think...

I'm less worried about competition than I would have been before. I was slightly skeptical on Coinbase before because of that reason, because there are more exchanges and more DEXs that will ultimately win out because they're actually decentralized. I think just being the really easy on-ramp is a really great position to be in. So I don't know, I'm more bullish than I was in the middle of the year on Coinbase.

Yeah, I'd say the same. I feel like they've shown a desire to be more progressive on product than I expected at the IPO. Like it felt like it was a really sluggish product organization at the time. And so it was kind of like, man, they're going to get lapped by FTX. They're going to

to lose share to all these DEXs. And then just like with the single emergence of the NFT exchange, you were like, oh, they're like not going to go quietly into this good night. And they're also...

sorry yeah they're like they're also ten cent like uh in you know like they have a portfolio of pretty much yes any crypto company you know worth salt out there coinbase ventures has put money into um and so i would imagine that the folio is worth a shitload of money and it's i think i believe it's just all off balance sheet all right so flash survey among the four of us who i would say to varying degrees are all

very sophisticated to on the bleeding edge of crypto investing and adoption out there. Do any of us not use Coinbase meaningfully? No, I use it a bunch. Me too. Yeah. I think that's your answer right there. There we go. There we go. What are your decks of choice, guys? Uniswap. Uniswap. Uniswap. Okay. I'm Sushi. You're Sushi, yeah. Sushi has been... I tweeted about it the other day.

like the insufficient liquidity thing just kind of pops up even when it's not true. And it's a really sluggish front end. I've not had the best sushi swap experience. Um,

I'm trading such small amounts, Paki, that... I'm not actually, to be clear, breaking their liquidity. I could put 0.01 something in and it would just say that it was broken. Really? Yeah. Okay. I haven't had that happen to me, but yeah, I should probably play around with Uniswap more than I have, to be honest. I have had such a confusing and expensive experience with DEXs, at least in the Ethereum world, that...

I basically, I have opened centralized exchange accounts at like every centralized exchange that is legal in the US. Because like, if I can get something on a centralized exchange, that's a way better experience and way cheaper in most cases than finagling my way to buy some ETH, flip it over and then trade it on a decentralized exchange. A million percent.

i know i'm like not a true crypto like i'm not cool for doing that but like it's just as long as you buy it somewhere as long as you don't buy it on robin hood or somewhere where you can't actually like transfer right do anything with it then right i think that matters

Right. By the way, the other bull case on Coinbase is exactly this topic of like, it's a freaking centralized company. Like they're in a position to do what Facebook did to the internet, to crypto. Like if you think about this ETH2 transition, like I'm pretty sure Coinbase plus one other party is going to sufficiently control the ETH2 majority. So like...

I'm sure this is not novel, but I just put two and two. Yeah, this is why Jack is going to war here. It's about Coinbase. It's got to be about Block versus Coinbase. Interesting, yeah. And particularly targeting Andreessen. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Interesting. Games within games. Indeed. No, I think Jack made it pretty clear from his tweets that he's pure of motive and incentive, so it couldn't be that.

You're right. As a Twitter shareholder, I can tell you the guy is not giving a shit about profits. Oh, man. We all thought this was going to be a bigger year for Twitter than it was, I feel like. Yeah, Paki, are you still a big Twitter bull? I am currently harvesting those Twitter losses, but we'll be back in the beginning of 2022.

He's taken about 31 days as a bear here. Yeah, I'll take a short bear period. Hopefully, I'm sure they're going to rip now while I'm on the sidelines. But yes, I still remain a total addict. I think most of us have Twitter to thank for a lot of our business. But just beyond that, so much of the conversation, the discourse still happens there.

I can't believe they've done such a poor job monetizing it. Is it actually that poor? I haven't actually looked at revenue numbers there for a while, or is it just that the narrative is that it's poor? No, it's both there. I think that like 5% maybe a Facebook's monetization or Facebook's revenue somewhere in that range. I mean, Facebook's a behemoth, but Facebook also doesn't monetize, you know, WhatsApp and there's more than Facebook could be doing as well. Um,

Yeah, I think it's like 5% of Facebook's revenue. Somewhere around there. Do we have time to do a round the horn quick favorite products or apps? Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Let's do a lightning round carve-outs for best of 2021. We don't need to go through every category. Everybody pick one to start. Pick one and then we can keep going afterwards and just do favorites. Go for it.

okay um my favorite book was Ada or Ardor by Nabokov or Nabokov as apparently it's more correctly pronounced uh really long and uh intricate but very interesting discussion of time and always beautiful writing so I took me ages to finish but I really enjoyed it I did not I've not heard of that is uh he wrote Lolita right

Yep. Lolita and Hellfire are sort of like... I've only read Lolita. I've got to add that to my list. It's a good one. It's a slog, but a good one.

All right, sticking with books, I've talked about this, both of these a lot on Acquired, but actually I've got a few books out there on here. Anything by Arthur C. Clarke, who I discovered this year. So good. Classic old school sci-fi. Childhood's End, I think is my favorite, but you can't go wrong. He wrote 2001 and then a bunch of sequels to that, which I didn't realize he and Kubrick collaborated and wrote...

the screenplay for the movie for 2001 together and then he was writing the novel kind of simultaneously with that. It wasn't like it was a book before a movie or a movie before a book. It was a deeply collaborative project which the movie never made any sense to me and then I read the book like

Oh, this makes so much more sense. Like, I understand what is going on here. I watched 2001, the movie, pretty recently in the last year. And I cannot believe that that was created in 1968. I mean, the visuals are stunt. I know they took on easier challenges than Star Wars took on, but it looks 10 to 20 years after Star Wars, which it was actually nine years, 11 years before Star Wars.

Wow. Love how you have that star Wars date. Just lock and load it in there. Oh my gosh. Well, I was right the first time nine years. Yeah. Uh, well you got 71 or 77, 81, 83. Yeah. Too much. But yeah, like Kubrick and, uh, and Arthur C. Clark, like from a filmmaking perspective for just decades ahead. Um, Kubrick, CAA client, Michael, it's client, uh,

Let's see what else in books. I've got The Expanse that I've talked about a ton. Cannot recommend highly enough for recent stuff. Last book in the series just came out. Thought it was a great way to end it. And then...

A fun one, I got so many parenting book recommendations, but the one that stuck with me and I think is good that like is just so fun is Michael Lewis's book, Home Game, about his experiences in early fatherhood. And like, there's no, you know, advice. It's a Michael Lewis book. Like, it's not like, this is how you're going to get your kid to sleep through the night by 12 weeks. Like, you know, it's just really heartwarming and like lovely. Highly recommend them. Yeah.

That was a great one. I read that one too. All right. I got a book. I just read this on vacation on my 10 year old Kindle, which is still a great device. The book is Project Hail Mary. Other folks read it? Awesome. Andy Weir? Andy Weir. Yeah. It's his latest. Yeah.

Same author as The Martian. I think this is probably the best fiction I've ever read. Certainly read in the last five years and was such a good reminder to me to go read fiction. Like, I keep reading these, like, business books and business, like...

I basically have been on the hunt for shoe dog or something like it ever since reading shoe dog. And I found like a dozen and this is a good way of shaking me out of that very specific. I wouldn't call it a rut because I really enjoy them. And I think they're, they teach a lot of good lessons, but yeah, it's such a well-told story and it makes me look to try and apply science everywhere because Andy Weir does such a good job of like,

making every plot point about how the protagonist scienced their way to figure it out.

You know what's cool about Andy Weir is, if I'm not wrong, he wrote The Martian in newsletter format. He would post sections and get feedback from audience. Yeah, which is so cool. I really want to write a book like that someday. I think it's such a cool idea. And then he got a book deal and then pulled in an editor and sort of rewrote the whole thing with the editor to be more of a novel format to then publish it. And I think when he was writing it, he was actively employed as a software engineer. Yeah.

Interesting. Dude, Meyer, you should totally do that with The Generalist. It would be fun, right? I mean, maybe like chapter two of The Generalist at some point when I allow myself to share more fiction. There's just a good novel to be written about like

tech culture like from like an insider who like understands like not like a not like a new york circle list is gonna go right yeah i got halfway through the circle and i just gave up yeah it's

Like, Secession for VC would be... I mean, that's a very high bar. But that would be the best. That was my favorite show of the year forever. Bebop! Me too! So good. It's just unreal. It's so good. Jesse Armstrong as a writer is like...

Just elite. He's like as funny as Armando Iannucci, like does Shakespearean low points and has like Sorkin snappy dialogue, but not corny. You know, it's like, that's really so impressive. Do you follow no context succession on Twitter?

No, but I'm going to now. Is it really good? It's incredible. It's just screenshots with the dialogue, look at the closed captions enabled. And it's just like you get Tom's one-liners or Greg's one-liners. And like they just, it's a wonderful treat to see in your Twitter feed two or three times a day. Did you guys ever watch Peep Show? No. No.

It's Armstrong's like most famous show pre-Secession. And it's like a British comedy that like won a bunch of awards as best British comedy for several years. It ran for like nine seasons, but I watched that like, I guess when I was younger and always thought it was like maybe the funniest show I'd ever seen. And so now when you watch Secession, you're like, oh man, he's like doing the same kind of jokes, but like,

in an American voice and in this high drama style is very interesting. - All right, on the list, Packy book. - Oh man, all right, so I think we're doing a lot of sci-fi, I'm gonna stick with that. And I'm gonna do a memory called "Empire" and "Desolation" called "Peace," two books by Arkady Martin.

i don't know i've just i pretty much only you know i've gotten i think from reading a lot of non-fiction to mostly fiction and mostly specifically sci-fi this year um so i would say that those two i'm trying to see if there's anything else looking through the old kindle i'm on a 113 day reading streak and not to write this but according to my candle broke my previous record while you're looking i just finished uh here on vacate the airbnb a um

tour through rabbits which I greatly enjoyed I thought it was a fun romp

It didn't quite live up to Ready Player One status for me, but... Have you finished it yet? Yeah, I finished it. The comparison that the person made was Ready Player One meets Ruki Murakami, and Murakami is my favorite author of all time. So it did not meet that bar for me, but certainly a fun, I couldn't put it down kind of read. Yeah, totally. Page turn. Ready Player One is pretty bad. Do we agree on that? Yeah. Okay.

It's just popcorn. It's popcorn. It's popcorn, but I feel like it kind of presaged... It kicked off a zeitgeist. I don't think Rabbits is going to do the same. It's very good and a page-turner, but...

I agree with that. Have you heard of the term in the music industry, a bop? It's a bop of a sci-fi novel. Totally. Yes, it is. Totally. It could be written by an algorithm. Oh!

That is shade coming from a fiction writer if I've ever heard one. To be fair, I am not a fiction writer compared to Ernest Cline. Ernest Cline has actually published shit. It is purely from a reader's perspective, but I did not think it was... It was not my favorite book by a long shot. To be fair, that was very, very, very good compared to Ready Player Two. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. I haven't even touched that. I haven't heard of that. Oh, gosh.

Well, favorite products, guys? My 16-inch MacBook is the finest product I've ever owned. It's just absolutely incredible. Is it worth upgrading from an M1 Air?

It serves a different purpose. So I have stopped thinking about this device as a laptop in the same way that I thought about all the 13 inches I had before this as a laptop. This is like an aircraft carrier, but it's an aircraft carrier. Like it's a complete home desktop setup that I can fit in my largest backpack.

And so like, it's great if you're planning on working remotely a lot, or it's great if you want to be able to like do spreadsheets on vacation or in coffee shops where you're like, I'm not going to be at my big monitor for a while or something like that. But it is a totally different device than like a 13 inch air. Yeah, but it's amazing. It's fast. The screen's unbelievable. So fast.

I think I went through 50% of the battery on a flight from Lisbon to Seattle. Wow. Amazing. I'm literally looking now at my 14-inch new MacBook M1, my pro whatever iPhone and my iPad and talking shit on Apple on Twitter that they won't be in the top 10. I'd stand by that take and write it up at some point. Yeah.

they make a hell of a good product yeah it's hard to argue against i guess mine i'll go a slightly different direction mine has just i think been metamask this year um you know or rainbow just like kind of the idea of having a wallet that you can go log into a bunch of different things and just play around with and bring inventory with you i think is very very cool right now and it's like you know open up a whole different side of the internet uh this year but i think we'll get

increasingly compelling over the next year or so as people build kind of more experiences for the fact that you're showing up to their site with an inventory. Yeah. I love that take. That's a good, that, that, that, and it's basically OAuth, but without needing to trust Facebook or Google with, with holding the keys to all of your kingdoms. Yeah.

Yes. I was going to shout out Phantom for that reason, too. I think Phantom is like a beautiful product and really good. I'm a big fan of Rainbow, too. The other ones that I had on my list were, Pathy, have you ever been to a Blank Street in New York? One just opened up across the street. I know those guys. They're great. They had a real estate kind of fund before, and then they just decided to start Blank Street.

Yeah, so I go now every day I'm in Brooklyn, at least once a day. ESOM is one of my favorite people, so part of it is very self-motivated, but I also just think it's a really good product. Okay, what is this? I haven't heard of it. Oh, sorry. It's a small format coffee shop, so it's trying to be like Luckin for the US minus fraud. Okay.

which I think is a good playbook. And I mean, these guys are so deep in the economics of coffee shop stuff and real estate. And the way they started was with basically like coffee carts, which are something you see in New York kind of a lot. But they have these really beautiful sort of, I don't know, not mint green, sage green truffles

trucks that you can order ahead via the app, which is very nice and just like go pick it up. And the coffee is really good. It's like as a result, at least a dollar to two dollars cheaper than like every other New York third wave style coffee shop. And yeah, like rapid. So I like go every day and I'm biased, but a bit of a super fan. So is it one of all spaces or still just trucks? Both. They do both. Cool.

I would go a lot more if it weren't for my actual favorite non-tech product of 2021, Comiteer coffee. Oh my God, you do. You should go to comiteer.com slash not boring to get 50% off your first box. I will say, I don't think I've ever seen a more effective... I've seen a lot of people on Twitter say, I've bought Comiteer. And then the second sentence is, because I read about it on Not Boring. It's like...

I, you know, you know the numbers or maybe you don't and they know the numbers, but like this has to be a wildly successful sponsorship sponsorship for them. This worked. There were a bunch of them this year. I don't know if you saw the, uh, Wilmanita's tweet, which was my favorite all the time on the success of the, uh, science IO one. So there were a bunch that were up there, I think this year on the sponsored deep dive front, but certainly for a consumer product, this one takes the cake by, by far. Um,

It's just really good. There's not many products that you can recommend that then everybody comes back and is like, this is fucking awesome and then spreads the word themselves. Not one person, I think this is true, the whole time has replied and said, yeah, it was okay. Everybody was like, this is awesome. When you guys were chatting about doing something together, how did that...

NordVPN is one of our sponsors at Acquired. That's sort of a consumer product, but it was more about telling their story as a company and hiring. How did that conversation go for you? It's always been in my mind that consumer products would not work on stuff like us. We're not. But clearly this has worked for you. This is a high...

high AOV consumer product, which I think is important, has enough of a tech story to it. And it's one of those things like Excel where like,

Nobody in the whole audience doesn't love coffee. And so I think that that's a really important piece. But it came about Austin Reef, Morning Brew was investing and told me, it was like, I'm doing this thing. Here's the valuation. It sounds crazy. Please just go meet these guys. And so I talked to them and I was like, oh my God, I need to invest right about now.

during all of the above this product. And so just decided to do the normal kind of not boring treatment, tell their story, talk about business model, and then a little bit about the product. But I'm not a coffee reviewer, so that wasn't kind of the thrust of the thing. But I think it was just people kind of being aware of the fact that this thing existed, where literally it just takes me two seconds to make a cup of coffee in the morning because I just run it under hot water and dump it in a cup.

And so I think the kind of quality combined with the ease just resonated, but I was not expecting it to go as well as it did. Huh? Oh, I just ordered some. So I'll give you my review. Can I shout out one other product that I just started using in the past few days? I don't have any affiliation with it. I just think it's really good. Craft docs. What is it? I don't know. What is it?

It's like a Notion competitor, but it's just very fast, very elegant, really pleasant to use. And I just have been playing around with it over the past few days, and I think it'll be the place that I store the more evergreen pieces of the generalist sort of inner workings. Shareable, nice.

It's amazing that people still have the balls to launch new note-taking apps. Yeah, totally. Well, it's like, so the way I started my developer career was by building two to-do list apps for the iPhone when it first came out. And I realized the cool thing about to-do list apps, and I think note-taking apps are exactly the same way, is

there's a super fragmented set of needs and everybody has their own opinion on like how the perfect one should work. And so there's just like lots of opportunity to make one that like there will never be winner take all dynamics in to-do lists or note taking apps. Yeah.

It's a good point. Totally. I'll go quick. My product, uh, is AngelList. Uh, we talked about this a bunch on, um, the Not Boring episode with Paki, but like, I can't like, uh, I have no, I am just a customer of theirs. There's no other affiliation, but, um,

Like it's unbelievable. Like we, we would not, Nat and I would not be able to do kindergarten without it. And like the level, just like for us personally of like being able to run a venture fund, like a professionally run venture fund on the same order of like Madrona and all the other great places like I had done in the past with no upper, you know, no full-time staff doing it with Nat and I both having other full-time occupations, like is a complete,

Game changer. I mean, the deal, and we don't need to go into specifics on it, but the deal that we just last did, I think, just shows what you can do in venture in the year of our Lord, 2021. It was like the fastest transaction of all time. Totally. And that's just one example. We've done many together. I think we did...

Nat and I were just going over this. I think we made 37 investments in- This month? We're not at your level, Taki. We made 37 investments in six months. I don't think I had made 37 investments in my entire 12-year venture career before that. Yeah. It's amazing. I think this quarter is going to be like 50-ish.

you're just as always you're in your own league i mean who knows if that's good or bad or what but i mean without angelus that is i mean maybe you can do like three you know like it's just it's good and bad but it didn't like the thing about venture like and we've been talking on this about this on acquired for years you guys talk about it too it's like

It's about the wins. All that matters are the wins. Nothing else matters. And how do you get more wins? Like, you could either be really, really great at picking, which, you know, some people are. And that's why Sequoia exists and Andreessen and the like. Or you could invest in 50 companies a quarter.

I know. And it's weird. Again, I keep looking back. Not that you're not great at picking too packy. Of course, incredible picking. But I keep looking back at the list of companies and I do this like every quarter. I go back in the list. I'm like, are there things on here that like I'm just doing because I'm wanting, you know, because I invest in a lot of stuff. And I really feel really good about a lot of these companies. I also think that it is true. And I think Bology put this in his most recent post on Mirror Table that like,

There are just way more good companies being built and so many fewer entrepreneurs making like, it feels like just the level just kind of raises every year where like there's a certain set of mistakes that the previous generation of entrepreneurs made that like you just no longer make or like a certain level of things like the best entrepreneurs knew that now everybody knows. And like, I do think that that bar just kind of continues to raise. Obviously markets are much bigger and global and all of that, but yeah,

It's a wild. I'm really excited to see kind of five years down the line what happens in terms of like liquidity for all of these and all that. But I really do think there's a lot of great companies being built right now. Well, on that, it feels like a good place to end the year. It does. It's a great place to end the year. I'm pumped for great companies and great stories to come. Well, awesome. Becoming...

friends with you know we all knew each other a little bit before but i mean amazing getting to become closer friends that is one of the best things this this has been uh so cool like uh i mean you guys live next to each other in brooklyn but um we all live around the country and uh we gotta do something together in person let's figure it out we'll do some kind of like

multi, I mean, we all have these, what is it? These acronyms, A, C, Q, N, B, T, G, whatever. But some kind of summit or something. I would, would be super fun. An idea dinner. An idea dinner. An idea weekend. That would be awesome. That would be a lot of fun. That would be great. Also, we don't even have to, I mean, we should, we should try and work towards a summit. I love that idea. But we also should just do something in person.

As friends. Yeah. Yes. Nope. Strictly, strictly summits. With the mic on. Ben's only in this if it's going. You guys wouldn't drink with me today. So all friendships are off. That's true. Saving it for in person though. Great. All right, everyone. Have a great New Year's Eve. Happy 2022. Happy 2022. Thanks everyone for joining us today. Happy New Year.