The Jason Calacanis Special (cont.)
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All right, LPs, thank you for continuing on here with us. So, Jason, the question in my mind, as we sort of did the research and mapped out, of course, everything you've done, but everything you're currently doing is like...

Draw me the Disney flywheel. There's Launch Festival. There's the Launch Accelerator. There's your personal angel investing outside of the Launch Accelerator. There's the three podcasts you do, but sort of anchored by... Twist. Twist, yeah. What piece did I miss there, and how do they all feed? So here's a secret grand plan. Forget about the flywheel. Just think about a funnel. It's a little bit easier. At the top of the funnel is advice and entertainment...

which is the podcasts and my social media. And then if you enjoy that, and that's enjoyed by over 10 million people a year, and you get the bug, you might want to come see us in person at an event. Or you might want to join our Slack channel, which is a new thing. You might want to sign up for an email list. And you can come to one of those big events. And now we've gone from 10 million people down to an experience that would be 10,000 people or less. Then

There's a more intimate experience, which is Foundry University, which is a two-day, 60-person event where we have a bunch of speakers come in and I give feedback to people who are just getting ready to come to our accelerator. So we've defined our Goldilocks zone as you don't have a competitive Series A process running right now. Series A. Yeah. That's too hot. You don't need us. Why would you go to an accelerator? You got a Series A. You got multiple term sheets. Who cares? Who cares?

I get it. Too cold. You have an idea. You have a business plan. You have a prototype. You have a product, but you have no paying customers. You have a consumer product with nobody using it. But you know how to build it and you've incorporated and you have something that you could show me and pitch me. That's your sweet spot for the university. Right. Right for university. So too cold for an investment. Now what's just right? Just right.

you've got a product in market with customers we can talk to. Could be free, could be paid. In the case of FitBod, they had a couple of hundred, maybe 200 people who paid for the app and they were paying $100 a year. So you can just do the math. I think they were doing 2,000 a month or something or 1,500 a month. That's enough. We could actually diligence

Somebody using the app, we could meet the two or three co-founders working on it and say, you know what? Reasonable bet. We've seen 2,000 turn to 20. We've seen 20 turn to 200. We saw 200 turn to 20 million. And in the case of comp.com, we saw it turn into nine figures a year. They've been pretty public about their run rate. So we've seen this movie before. And so that's just right for us. So Founder University is a way for us to have 60 people come. And out of those 60, you should two or three make it into the accelerator.

And then there's the accelerator itself, which is a seven-person experience. So now we've gone from a 10 million...

to 100,000, 10,000. My book would be another one of those hundreds of thousands, 10 to hundreds of thousands. You've got a parallel track for people that join the syndicate that aren't founders but want to invest. Correct. So there's 4,000 people in there and we have Angel University. I just did two virtually. I did a tour. I did an Angel University on the East Coast where I taught it six times and we charged $500 a ticket. We had 250 people come.

We were able to basically cover our expense on that and I had to go on the road for 10 days. I just did a virtual one on Monday and 250 people came virtually and gave $100 or $200 each to charity to come. So we equaled that. And then the week before we did 150, so 400 people, which theoretically if all of them join the syndicate, I think half of them will, will grow the syndicate by 5%. Great. Mission accomplished, right? So that's why I created founder.university, angel.university, is to just...

Really educate people and they get to know us. Again, remember I said the more good we put out in the world, the more comes back to us? I just had the founder of...

play versus on the podcast oh Delane Delane was on the podcast and we get halfway through the podcast he says you know you're responsible for all this I said excuse me he said well Jonathan Treist I met in Detroit because he's a Detroit and he was sponsoring launch from Ludlow he was sponsoring it he gave me a ticket to launch festival I went to launch festival I blew my mind I went through the demo pit and then I met Thomas Cortay

And he offered me a job because he was going through as a judge of the demo pit. And I said, I've seen all the demo pit parties. I walked him around. I was like, so do I get 50 basis points for all this? He said, no, I don't give away free equity. But anyway, the point is I gave all that goodwill. I didn't even know it. Right. So the more goodwill you put on the world from your podcast is an example. Like your podcast is really good. I know you guys are neophytes. How long you guys been investing? Two years?

David, much longer. No, 10 years for me. Oh, 10 years for you. But across a whole variety of different- Ben, when do you graduate high school, Ben? You're graduating- Next year. Next year. So you'll be officially legally- You're 30? You look like you're 22. Thank you. How old are you, David? 35. Okay. So you guys have your own fund in your 30s. I mean, this is legit. Yeah.

What's going to happen is you're going to inspire people through your podcast. And we'll be sitting here in 10 years doing a follow-up. I'll be 59 years old. You guys will be in your 40s like I am. I'm 49 now. And you'll see this whole generation who grew up on your podcast.

And they'll say, "I started a firm because I listened to the Acquirepurgas and I heard you introducing that guy who retired." What's his name? Calacanis, Calacanis. The guy who retired and bought the Knicks. Like that guy. I heard you introduce that guy and you guys then went on to, and you guys invested in your four unicorns and da, da, da, da. And the whole thing, and this is why Silicon Valley is so special, is the cycle repeats. People inspire each other.

to go do it because they're like, if that idiot can do it, like I'm that idiot who did it, right? The kid from Brooklyn did it, right? Like, okay, if that idiot can do it and you know what? Delane is like that kid from Detroit who did it, right? Like we're all showing the people coming up behind us it can be done, right?

And that's why I try to give back. And I've done it like... Angel stuff in the syndicate is really my third act. Like, I don't need money now. I'm playing for legacy and I'm playing to change the world. I want to get to 10,000 angel investors in the syndicate. I've been doing the syndicates now for...

I don't know when Comm was, six or seven years ago. And so I've been doing this. What's assets under management in the syndicate now? Or does it, can you not really define it that way? 40 million. We've done 130 deals and I think 40 million or so. We did 25 of that last year. So it's accelerating. We did more last year than in the first like six years. When you're doing a deal, you send it out to the syndicate and then people raise their hand, say they want in, they don't want in. The breakup with AngelList was primarily because, you know, Naval and I have different philosophies

I want to be number one and coveted, and he wants to create a platform that's more socialist. And he doesn't mind me talking about this. We're very cool with each other. I mean, I have so much love for Naval. I just think he's tremendous, and he's done so much for everybody, me included. But I told him, I said, listen, I have a TV show coming out. I have the book coming out. I'm on CNBC.

And you're a recluse and you don't go out. I'm promoting AngelList more than you are. This is like the Star Chamber. You want the Star Chamber story? I would love that. And so I said, listen, here's the deal I'm proposing going forward. I get 20% carry, you get zero. On the homepage, I am the first syndicate mansion with my picture to join Jason Syndicate. In my book on CNBC, in my Twitter handle is angel.co.jason.

I promote the hell out of AngelList. You get the platform. I get to be the largest single syndicate on it. That's the deal. How does that sound? And I had a TV pilot with NBC at the time.

That had been taped and didn't make it to air because my partner turned out to be a monster. And it blew up. Thank God it didn't go on air. Harvey Weinstein was the producer of the show. No way. An actual monster. Like a literal actual monster. Who knew? I literally did not know, obviously. But NBC had paid for the pilot and the pilot came out incredible and it was about my incubator, et cetera. So I was like, listen, I have all the cards. Do you want this traffic or not?

And he said, "You know, Jason, I don't want everybody to have a different deal." You're like, "I already have a different deal." Well, I already had a different deal. He's like, "I want to revert that deal because it's causing too much strife because word's getting out that you have a different deal. And also, I have to pay my team. And so you taking ... us taking 2%." And I said, "Well, listen, com.com, that's worth a lot. That's a $250 million ... " At the time, it was like a $100 million company. I was like, "You're going to get a lot of money for that."

And I can just hire Assure because he was using Assure as the backend. And I said, I can just hire Assure to do this for me. They provide SPVs. And he's like, okay. And so we just had this like thing. I said, I want to, I have my own team. I want to give the 25% I'm giving to you. I want to give to my team. So we had this impasse and he's like, yeah, that's not what we're, that's not what we are. We're a platform for people who don't want to have a team. We, you've outgrown us. Totally valid. Which is totally valid. And I said, okay, fine. I'm going to leave.

And then he was like, okay, leave. And I was like, okay, I'm going to leave. And then we just went back and forth. I was like, okay, well, maybe I'm not going to leave. I kind of got cold feet. And the problem was I only, in my syndicate, they had obscured, I didn't have the email addresses of my syndicate members. I only had the email addresses of the syndicate members who had uncloaked themselves. So you had this sort of platform issue now.

Where you remember like YouTube you couldn't export your data you well they let you export some data, right? And so this was exactly what I had gone through with Mahalo and I said that to him I said listen, this is exactly what I went through with Mahalo in Google and now you're becoming Google I don't have my people's thing. I want everybody's email address and he said well I don't want you siphoning people off Angel list and we just agreed and he said, you know what Jason talking to you and negotiating eat with you is a nightmare for me and

Like, I never want to do this ever. And I was like, all right, I'm out. And then a bunch of people who were involved in Angel List really were like, oh, my Lord, Kevin Durant has left the building. And I told him, I was like, listen, I'm Kevin Durant.

Do you want me on this goddamn team or not? And if I'm Kevin Durant, I pick my seat on the plane. I get the biggest salary. I get my lunch first. I have the best locker. And I'll tell you when I'm coming out of the game. That's how it works. If you're the number one player on the team, that's how it works. And to Naval's credit, he was super transparent. He's like, I don't want to have a number one player. I want to be a platform. I don't want to negotiate with people. I want to non-negotiate anything. I said, all right, I'm out.

And then I went and I got the domain name, The Syndicate. I originally called it Jason Syndicate. It took me a couple of years to get the syndicate.com. And then Assure Fund Management got kicked out. Their deal with AngelList left. So how was AngelList then? Did they stand up all their own infrastructure to issue SPVs? Yes, they made Bellwether or something. They made their own because then they were like, oh, who's going to do these SPVs? So now you had the platform companies under there. So then I became friends with Jeremy from Assure. And I said, what's your plan? Because his company just got gutted.

because they lost the person who they were doing the most SPVs for. And he said, well, I'm going to just have to go out on my own. I said, can I put a million dollars in? So I put a million dollars into Assure and bought 5% of the company or something. And I syndicated...

an investment in the syndication platform to get super mad. So this is like, after having read Michael- It's turtles all the way down. Well, Michael Moritz said something to me early on, Jason, no conflict, no interest. And I said, okay, that sounds good to me. The other one was Doug Leone, who just looked me dead in the eyes and said, Jason, he said, well, what are you going to do here? And I said, well, I'm hoping to do this. And he looked at me and said, Jason, hope is not a plan.

Let's make a plan. That was like one of the classic lines. Learned a lot from that. But anyway, so Naval and I are still great friends. We don't see each other because I don't think he likes to, you know, he's like kind of, like I said, he's an introvert. He gets his energy from being introverted, but he's still one of my favorite people. I kind of miss him. It's kind of like the friendship I have with Tim Ferriss or like some of these introverts, like I'm a little bit much for them, I think.

Like imagine the most introverted person in the world and then you're the most extroverted person in the world. It's like a challenge, right? But anyway, I've learned that, you know, like in order for me to have like a productive friendship, you know, like you can't mix those business things. Remember I said, like, you have to be self-aware, like I'm a solo act. There's no number two at launch. There's no number two in our company. We're 13 or 14 people now. Like it's me with a band. Like I've got a supporting team. They're cut into the economics, but there's not going to be

like another Jason here. That's not the goal. I want to be a solo LP and everybody else is going to make a ton of money. I'm giving them a decent chunk of the carry. And eventually when I retire in 10 or 20 years, like, yeah, somebody will be designated or maybe the team will take it over and then it will be a team thing. But for now it's not a team sport because it doesn't work as a, there's a team, but when we're shooting the ball, you're passing the ball to me.

I'll let other people score too, but when it's crunch time, I'm going to put the ball in the basket. That's it. We want to thank our longtime friend of the show, Vanta, the leading trust management platform. Vanta, of course, automates your security reviews and compliance efforts. So frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance and monitoring, Vanta takes care of these otherwise incredibly time and resource draining efforts for your organization and makes them fast and simple.

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So Jason, when you said of the carry, talk me through. So there's this angel investing that you do where the carry is shared with these 14 people. Okay, very clearly. I have the funds. I don't do any individual angel investing anymore. All my angel investing for years has been in the launch fund. There are three launch funds. And you're a solo LP in those funds. And I'm a solo LP, but I give a portion of my carry, a non-small amount of carry to my team.

And they vest that just like anybody else would. They also get a portion of the carry of the syndicate.

And they get paid great salaries. The media company is separate. It's still called Launch. Then the funds. So the funds don't have to pay for the media company. That's self-sustaining on its own. But I own 100% of everything. Back to kind of deconstructing the VC firm. Do you view the media company as essentially like the equivalent of a management company of a VC firm? Like that's the... No, it's just marketing and fun for me. It's just marketing and fun. Like...

It's just a marketing fun thing for me to do. If it made $0 or it breaks even or if it throws a small profit, I don't care. In fact, we take a portion of the ad revenue and I don't know if you guys have ever seen us promoting our videos, but you may see sometimes our videos promoted on Twitter or YouTube or Instagram as an ad. Even though you follow me, you may see an ad as well. Yep.

And that's because we're just trying to reach people who don't already know about us. Right, right. And so we're just amplifying. And I suggest you guys do that too as well. So if you guys had 50K in marketing for your fund or whatever laying around, the best thing you could do is just market your podcast and get more subscribers, right? That's an incredible flywheel. And then you might get more advertisers and paid, and then that flywheel goes, it's great. Where it technically lives, none of my LPs are playing for...

you know, making a 20% margin and making a half million dollars or something or, you know, $300,000 in profits from the podcast. Who cares? At a typical VC firm, the management company is taking the management fee that's paying everybody's salaries, keeping the lights on. Yeah, I don't take a salary. I haven't taken a salary in any of my companies in, I don't know how many years, three or four. I mean, once in a while, if there's money left over from the media company, I'll take it and pay down some expenses. But generally, I'm playing for how many unicorns can I have

Can I definitively be the greatest angel of all time? Not just Mount Rushmore. And then can I get to- But GW himself. I want to be on the Mount Rushmore of investors next to Moritz and Doug and John Doerr and whoever is on that list, Bill Gurley. So how do you do that without being a VC? By owning the early stage. The person who has the most power in Silicon Valley, in studying the power, the person who brings the person to Silicon Valley and is their first supporter-

as Sean Parker was and Peter Thiel eventually was to Zuckerberg, or I was with Uber to a certain extent, a modest extent, or Chris Sacco was, or Paul Graham was, that person, or Ron Conway's before he retired, those people become legendary.

And they get a disproportionate amount of credit for the success of the founders they back because they were the first. I mean, you listen to Brian Chesky talk about YC. He doesn't talk about Sequoia one-tenth the amount he talks about YC. And they, you know, led investment after investment after investment. And YC put in that, you know. And by the way, Sequoia is the one who saved Y Combinator when it was shutting down and became their biggest LP.

which I think that Y Combinator holds something contempt for because it was such a good deal for Sequoia. But literally, I don't know that Y Combinator was here if Sequoia didn't bail them out and become an LP, from what I heard. When you said on the main show what YC hadn't done, what nobody had done, is YC plus Angel List that you're doing now. It always struck me like that was, hard to say mistake, YC's done incredibly well. But the mistake or the...

Power opportunity they didn't seize was do that. Did they not do it because Sequoia was their primary funder? I don't know. It'd be a good question for Paul. I think most people don't have the ambition to build the empire. They want to build something high-functioning that requires not a lot of maintenance. That's a better life for most people. So for Naval, if Angelus functions and requires not a lot of tinkering...

That's why, or Paul Graham, like both of those people, Chris Saka, all three of them made a shit ton of money and then, you know, went down to whatever, 10 or 20% of their income.

work product, I think. They owned a thing that was productive in itself because of the machinery and the people they had. And then where did they go? When's the last time you saw Naval or Paul Graham or Chris Saka keynoting an event or fighting for a deal? Paul's in England and Chris is in Truckee, I think. No, but yeah. But anyway, he's in another mountain, but yes. So anyway, the point is, the challenge in being an early stage investor is that in the likely case...

when you get past 50, 60, 70 investments here in Silicon Valley is to hit a winner. Then the winner becomes so pronounced that you're going to have a very hard time exceeding it. I told LPs, I made a joke, okay, when you look at my IRR from my scouts, at one point it was triple digit. And then at one point it was like 90 or something. And I said, listen,

I want to make one thing clear. If you take anything away from our time together potential LP, it's that my IRR is going nowhere but down. But we're betting that it doesn't go down that far and it stays above the average. Yeah. That's the old Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger quote. Like, you know, Berkshire's returns are for sure going to get worse. You have to be playing for a different reason. Just always go back to Doug Leone and Moritz and Jim Getz and the team over at Sequoia, which is my introduction.

and then Bill Gurley as well. And watching those investors, they were doing it for the love of the game. They wanted to play like Vince Carter until they dragged him off the court, like Michael Jordan on The Wizards. They just wanted to stay in the game as long as they could because they loved the game. And I think I'm that war dog. I just want to be in the game. The Uber IPO did mess with my brain a little bit, and I had a couple of moments where I'm like, what is the point of

And I found a renewed value in what I'm doing because the team I'm with is just so committed to what we're doing.

And the audience of This Week in Startups is so passionate that it renews my energy every day. And since I set up my Slack, and thank you for inspiring me to go back into it because I saw, you know, the vibrant discussion you guys were having with really high quality people. And I was like, I got to fire this up again because people are my battery. That powers my battery. Like talking to you guys powers my battery up. It makes me want to spend the weekend thinking about how to make my business better. And I, you know, that's why I read the business books. And I think it's like, you know, reading Michael Ovitz's book, like,

I think there was a point where it's like, okay, CIA, president of Disney, like, is there anything left? And, you know, at a certain point, you're like, do I want to deal with bullshit? And, you know, that's what you deal with as a fund manager, just constant nonsense and, you know, problems and bad behavior and blowups and bad feelings and sharp elbows and

Lawsuits, whatever it is. When you go from angel investing to managing a fund or even investing out of a fund, it's hopefully still your number one responsibility, but there sure are a lot of contenders in there. It just becomes complex. But you know what? I like to build. I'm a builder and I like building things. I like building brands and I like media. So all of this flows together very naturally. People are like, you must be very busy.

And it's surprising how much I get done that I have nothing to do with, but I get credit for. And so I... Oh, this is great. No, I mean... We wanted to ask the Jason Calacanis production function. Well, here's the thing. I have over the course of... We're just finishing up LA-17, Launch Accelerator 17, and LA-18 starting. And this time with LA-18, the team is so good. I said, bring me 20 companies.

And then I'll tell you which ones, or bring me 30 companies in the finals. I'll tell you which ones to diligence. And because of the coronavirus, we couldn't meet them in person. So I just did 30 Zoom meetings. And I said, which ones do you want to put in diligence? Their list was the same as mine. We put 20 companies into diligence. And then they started coming back from diligence. And as they came back from diligence, I said, just tell me what your vote is. Heck yes, heck no, or not yet.

And I make them put it in that format. Then I just make the ultimate decision, which is nine out of 10 times the same as my team's. And then when it's not, I explain to them exactly how I came to my decision-making.

And then sometimes they'll fight me for something, and then I let them have it. And I'm like, yeah, great, you fought for it. That's great, though. But by explaining your logic, then you're making it so that they can have a roadmap of your brain to be able to do that in the future, and you get sort of leverage on you. Well, and the next phase is, I told them, I'm not going to meet the companies in a future class by the end of this third fund we're doing. Sometime in the next five or 10 classes, the first class will meet me on day zero of the accelerator.

I will not actually ever meet the companies. I'll just look at the list of the dossiers and what you want, and I'll rubber stamp them. So when did you start building a team around you? Well, Emmy award-winning producer Jackie, who's been with me now six years, was producing the podcast. She was working at a company. My original producer, Gina, when I was in L.A., didn't want to move up to L.A.,

And she went to do the Two Dope Girls podcast, I guess. Oh, yeah, yeah. Two Dope Girls. And she had been working at NPR. And I think their passion was not necessarily in tech and startups, but she did a great job for me. So I was looking for a new person to do it. Jackie Deegan had been working at one of the startups that was at the launch festival. And she saw the executive producer. I hired an executive producer this week in startups. She did a great job there.

And then I said, hey, I'm doing this accelerator. So I hosted the entire accelerator. I said, just anybody who's been on the podcast who's smart, have them come, or anybody who's been at launch. And then I gave it the launch festival to program the content for. And then I said, hey, for the accelerator, you program the content. I'll pick the companies and do all that. Then I made her the managing director of the accelerator. So now she runs the whole thing with Presh, who's our associate, and they run the entire process. Then Ashley Whitehurst was my...

executive assistant. Then she became the VP of Ops and Operation. Then I made her the managing director of the syndicate. I have two managing directors and those two folks, and since hired a director and Nick as the producer of This Week in Startups. I just like to hire from within and build a team around me. I like to give people the chance to be venture capitalists who would never have had that chance and be investors. Because me competing against

sequoia or right if you show up at gsb's doorsteps and say like no don't take the sequoia offer come here yeah also those aren't my people you know my people are the underdogs yeah well sequoia would probably fight you on that and say they'd look for the underdogs too but they they'll probably look for him a little later in their life cycle i think they're looking for the growth manager or former ceo of a company or you know alfred lynn you know who's the ceo at um

You know, Zappos. I think they're looking for that type of prototype. Somebody who's got operational experience is now the gold standard. A few questions on, like, what's next? Is there anything you sort of haven't, that you're, like, slow rolling an announcement on or thinking about next? Or, you know, what's next in the Jason Calacanis empire? Well, we don't have a growth fund. We syndicate those things. So it would make sense for us at some point to just have a giant...

$300 million growth fund on the side. At some point, maybe if the portfolio gets that big that we have a Y Combinator-like problem where the pro-rata's get too big. Well, you could also think about it the way Sequoia danced around talking about thinking about it. But of course, they thought about it and now everybody's clear about how they think about it, which is like,

The comms in your portfolio, doing the Series C in comm is a great investment. Why would you want anybody else to do that except you? We started to do that on the early end. My current thinking on it is better to do three or four bets in the beginning, be capital efficient, and then keep working on finding the next ones and still having 15%, 20% of them early when I have a massive competitive advantage. And the competitive advantage is most people don't want to deal with

what I deal with, which is I work with 100 plus founders a year. Most people, like Bill Gurley, you saw he's not going to do benchmark 10. He said, well, I'm still on 11 boards. We have 150 active investments with one GP. Right. The typical venture model is each GP does one or two investments. Yeah, and everybody says it can't scale. And I'm like, yeah, it can't scale for you. But I figured out how to scale it, so that's fine. That's fine that it doesn't scale for you. It does scale for me. The big thing for me is...

I would like to see our accelerator maybe exist in a couple of cities. That would be kind of interesting if there was one in Sydney, one in New York, and one in LA or something like that, pick a couple of markets and be able to have them going on concurrently. And if I can hit my goal of hitting 10,000 investors in the syndicate.com,

and have one deal a week. Right now, I think we did 25 deals last year. I'm going to try to get to two deals a week eventually. So imagine 100 deals going through a 10,000-person syndicate. And if each of those deals averaged a million dollars, you start to understand the power of this. Yeah, they'd be putting $100 million a year to work. Do you set specific goals like that for yourself? Yes. Yeah, for sure. 10,000 has always been the number for the syndicate, by the way. You know why?

No. Neither do I. Sounds good. Neither do I. I just pick the number. I told my team I want to be five days a week for This Week in Startups. They were like, why? I was like, I don't know. Joe Rogan is. Ben Shapiro is. It's about being the best. Yeah. To be the best, you just got to do the work every day. In the book, I say, do the work, do the work. That's sort of the closing line of the book is like, you really don't have to overthink this. I think a lot of people...

And you experience this now from your podcast, which is you guys have a lot of questions for people. And we all talk about a lot of, you know, the mechanics of what we do, right? And the tactical mechanics are really interesting. But what we do is we anoint people and then we support the hell out of them, right? And, you know, find anoint support. That's really what we're doing.

And the finding is kind of sorting for me now. I don't know if you guys are, I suspect you're starting to have this experience. You can tell me if you're not. When you tip over and your profile gets a little higher, your job goes from like hunting to sorting. 100%. And so there's so much inbound, you're sorting through it. Then you're anointing it. Then you're supporting it. So it's sort, anoint, sort.

And the anointing part is, you know, what I got from Sequoia. They said, you know, to a certain extent, what we're doing here is anointing people and then supporting them to, you know, live up to that anointing. Because when you're a Sequoia founder, like I said, you know, I don't know, Dag Ventures or whatever, you know, Menlo, everybody's going to call you and say, hey, I see Sequoia did your A. Hey, you know, same thing happens. Bill Gurley invested in A. Like, it's not if you're going to raise your B. It's, you know, how many term sheets are you going to get? Which one are you going to take, right? Yeah.

We just lost a giant. He's got a couple more years. Yeah, well, I guess let's slip this one. So why is Bill retiring? I thought he was going to play until they ripped him off the court. Good question for him. Good question for him. But I think if I had to just take a guess, it's like how many funds did he do? I think he did. He joined in benchmark three, I think. No, he did six or seven. Might have been two.

Yeah, maybe two or three. So I definitely know he raised three. So I mean, three through nine. I think he probably joined during two. He has seven funds. I mean, how many more do you need to do to make it a career? Well, if he wants to, you know, announce his next fund, he's welcome to do it here. Well, I mean, I also think like for some people, like what's left? I constantly have to come up with new challenges for myself, right? And that's

Like, you know, making the syndicate really become something that's never existed in the world. Like, what I'm really trying to do with the syndicate is I'm watching the accreditation laws with... Crowdfunding. Like a hawk. Yeah, crowd... I did a crowdfunding for Insight. It's just pretty... I don't think the hottest companies are going to do equity crowdfunding. Right, you just have adverse selection there the same way that you do for first-time angel investors.

You will have equity crowdfunding companies have massive success, but I think a lot of the massively successful companies will not dip down into equity crowdfunding because of the reporting requirements. When non-accredited investors can join our syndicate and be part of thesyndicate.com, I will instantly have a 100,000 person army if that happens. And that will be mind blowing. To have a deal memo go out

to the 10,000 people in my list who specifically have knowledge and passion for SaaS products versus consumer products versus health-related products or mental health products, I'll be able to slice and dice that. We're already starting this process of knowing who on our list. We did a company called Contraline, and we had four or five, is it proctologists who would deal with a vasectomy? Urologist.

a urologist. So anyway, we had a bunch of doctors in that specific vertical of vasectomies, uncloak themselves and say, "Oh, I'm this type of doctor. I'm not tired. I can actually evaluate this deal." So I have this vision of, hey, if there's 10,000, 100,000 of these people, and maybe there's 25,000 in this bucket and 6,000 in that bucket,

When I have a calm.com, not only can I get them 65 investors to put 328K and I could get them 250 investors to put in $3 million, my fund could put in $3 million, and of those 250 people, 100 of them would be practitioners in mental health, 100 of them would be in the other 150 people.

consumer apps, you know, and like, whoa, now we've got an army of people who can really help this company. That's what people don't understand about syndicates. Yeah, it's really like scaling the... Have you heard of the collaborative fund structure? So like Oregon Venture Fund was sort of a pioneer in this. There's one at C-Change in Seattle. Define what it is for the audience because I'm not sure I even can define it. It's basically involving LPs in the deal process where ultimately the investment committee I think is still the GPs but the LPs are very much involved when they have domain knowledge on helping to...

figure out, you know, should we invest? So they're helping in picking, but then also in supporting the company later. You may work much more closely with an LP than a GP. And, you know, what you're talking about, if you really could get...

10,000 to 100,000 sort of LPs in the collaborative fund model or syndicate partners in yours is if you can get really tight data on them, then you can find like just incredible investor founder matches every time. Yeah. Investor product fit. Yeah. Investor market fit. Yeah. Investor customer fit, all that stuff. Yeah. So anyway, I think there's something there. Anyway, I'd like to be the greatest investor of all time.

I think Chamath has that same idea. Does that not ask it too much? You and Chamath are taking opposite approaches to this, right? You're going like, why Democratic everybody? And he's like, nope, this is my thing. No, he wants to cherry pick a deal a year. We've had explicit discussions about the two things and we collaborate a lot. And it's all his own money, right? Well, I mean, yeah, his and the SPACs. I mean, I guess every one of those SPACs has people put money into it. So yeah, I mean, I think for him dealing with LPs and dealing with 100 employees and all that stuff was not fun.

And I think he was not, and he said this in the interviews with me, I don't think his self-awareness was at the point where he realized that building an empire and having a bunch of different people debating this was not as much fun as him saying, Virgin, you know, Galactic sounds like a good idea. I will buy that and I'll take that public. Like I think for him doing one deal,

that he wants to do and he wants to spend all his time is better than having a team of 100 people and trying to keep up with Andreessen Horowitz for assets under management or against Bill Gurley and David Sachs at who's the best at series and Sequoia, who's the best at series A. Like,

This is what I was saying before about, you know, where does the power reside? The power resides in who brings the person here and then who can write the biggest check. Those are the two for, and I don't know how you feel about it, but I think those are the two locuses of power. Is that the right word, locus of power? I'm trying to be fancy here. I just think those are the two most powerful people, concentration of power. So for Paul Graham or Ron Conway or Chris Stock or now me picking up the mantle behind those three individuals, like that's power.

If I'm on the cap table and the founder is saying to me, who do I pick? That's power. And then if you are Yuri Milner or whoever's writing the 100 million or Masayoshi-san, that's power. Masayoshi-san came into Uber, the most powerful company, and lorded over them a $10 billion slug. He changed everything. And said, either you or Lyft.

I got to bust out two strategery frameworks here. So one, there's like massive aggregation theory here where you're aggregating all the demand. Like you're trying to bring all the founders to you, pick some and then pick where they get to go sort of on the other side of you. And by discussing like there's power at this very earliest stage and power, you know, when you're the Masa or the Yuri Milner, like that's the smile curve. That's the U-curve where like

In the middle there, there's like way less power. But if you're like actually interfacing on the very front lines with the entrepreneur or you hold, you're the very top of the supply chain and you hold the most capital, those are the power positions. Everything else in the middle gets ripped apart. Yeah. I just think about it in terms of like apples. Like I own the orchard.

And then there's somebody at the other end who owns like this giant Amazon distributor of apples, right? And there's people in between who move bushels around or whatever. But, you know, all the VCs, when I came into the business, the VCs sorted through, the VCs ran the orchard. And then the VCs were like, you know what? There's too many damn apples and trees in here. There's too many squirrels. There's too many people hopping the fence. You guys sort through this, put them in bushels, bring us the bushels, and we'll pay twice as much.

And the bushel sorters and the orchard keepers now are the angel investors of syndicates and the accelerators. They get to run the orchard. Y Combinator owns half the orchard right now. And they bring the apples to market and then all the VCs sort through them. And they pay $2 million and then everybody else pays $10 to $20 for the same apple, just 12 weeks apart. It's the same goddamn apple. It's polished.

But it's essentially the same. It's polished. It's a little more mature. It's on a nice table. It's been checked over. We know there's no worms in them. We know they're not bruised. So there is a sorting function. But they did not make that much progress in 12 weeks. Yeah. I mean, it really is a sorting function. It really is a sorting and anointing, accepting function at that early stage. And that provides massive value for a VC who's going to be on the board of 10 companies. They don't care about paying...

8 or 15 or 25. That's not what matters. They care about, you know, I didn't waste one of my slots. It's because of the asymmetric upside. Yeah, you only have so much focus and if you're investing in these ones that don't have the potential to be calm, it's a mistake. And in a way, I think we're moving towards a perfect system of democratization. And the point I want to do, my legacy is I want to make my dream is that I syndicate

an Uber, a Robinhood, a Calm, a Wealthfront, Datastacks, et cetera, to a bunch of folks who are non-accredited today but who have taken the course

Got certified however the SEC wants to do and that's why I'm working on the angel university courses I want the SEC to take the course he is gonna require a course. I Didn't put that in there. They said something about you know accredited education Like so if you have an MBA, I think or an economics degree Maybe that'll be the route to being accredited What I want is a course you can take whether it's my three-hour course and a test So I'm gonna keep revving on it and I'm gonna say to the SEC. Hey look I

I've had this many people take this course. You know, right now I'm up to, I've done 17 courses. I probably got, I don't know, you know, over a thousand people have taken the course. If I say I've had 10,000 people take this course and here's the outcome of those people, might you want to make this course, and you can have it as an open source. Like we put the Angel University deck out there for people to rev on. Might you want this open source course to be a potential endless test as a way for you? Then I get...

The equivalent of 250 cab drivers for Uber or 250 hosts for Airbnb to invest in that seed round, and I make them each millions or tens of millions of dollars, and I create all these millionaires. Can you imagine my legacy? It'd never been done before. I could fix the problem of wealth inequality. I believe the wealth inequality problem is that poor people

which is as defined by the SEC currently, 94% of the country are poor people. They're not actually poor. They could make a $500 bet. They could make a $100 bet. They could make a $1,000 bet. They're betting that much on sports already. We've put an artificial designation on them of stupid and unworthy. Well, they're consuming things. You consume something, you've just lost all of that money. You invest in something. They're betting on blackjack. And the SEC is not involved in blackjack.

but they're involved here's the crazy thing that i've thought about this too like the

The real tragedy of all this, and actually Bill Gurley more than anybody has been pounding the drum on this, is stay private longer, is Facebook IPO $100 billion market cap. Uber was, what, 60 plus at the market cap at the IPO. All the wealth creation, the only people benefiting from it are the GPs and the LPs who are all large institutions. It's not democratized. Yes, we need to democratize. Now, some of those...

you know, are giving back to society. Like the Harvard, you know, endowment. Oh, wait. No, theoretically...

Theoretically, they should be. I mean, the truth is Harvard is giving out all these scholarships, so they are. I mean, I'm kidding. Of course they are. Shout out Harvard endowment. Please don't ding me on Launch Fund 405 if you're going to. I don't have any of the big endowments, so I can joke about it. But, you know, like that's the – all that wealth creation from zero to 60 or zero to 100 billion is off the table for the public. Yeah.

This is both a correction of a previous point and to prove the point you're making right now, Jason. I was wrong. Aggregation theory is about aggregating suppliers, and the suppliers would be the capital, not the companies. But what you're talking about, if you actually take the next generation of investors and you serve, like you have all them captive in some way, or you serve as pipeline to companies, I mean, then that's a power position. They're both supply in a way.

So for the investors, the startups are the supply. And for the startups, the investors are the supply. So it is a two-sided marketplace. And if you can control both sides of the marketplace, I think it's a unique position of power. Yep. All right. We need a hot take real quick. What is the thing that you believe related to the coronavirus that is not a common or majority belief right now? I believe that very little changes after it. Hmm.

I think fourth quarter of this year, we are going to be surprised to find out. I think over the summer that the heat issue, like there seems to be enough consensus around that maybe helps. Social distancing helps. The masks help. And we now know quarantining people helps. So we now know we've got this quick education on a global level of how to resolve this.

Then it's a matter of if people want to resolve it or not. And so what I believe will happen is as people die and these dipshits in places who are being manipulated to think that this is a freedom issue, not their own security, when they go out and they do a protest and 200 people on the steps of the Capitol and 50 of them die or 10 of them die, God forbid,

People are going to realize like, OK, all you have to do is wear a mask, not get too close to people. And I think tracing is going to work. And then the protocols are working now. It seems to me that we didn't know what to do with the patients and the patients. They were telling people, if you have light symptoms, don't come to the hospital. If you have light symptoms and you come to the hospital, they can actually address it.

But people were scared to come to the hospital, so they waited until they collapsed and then they went. Now we're learning that's the opposite. You got to go early, get treated. Also, I know that testing is now available because I got two or three different people saying, I can get you a test this past week. And so the testing is happening. I'm going to get tested. I had symptoms like in January or something or February.

I'm doing an antibody test. And then Siemens and a bunch of other people have like new tests coming out that are gonna be cheaper, faster, better, 25 million tests a day or something crazy like that capacity. All this stuff's gonna happen. We're gonna figure out how to go back. We're gonna figure out test and trace. And we're gonna then have, I believe, there is so much back to power and fame and fortune.

There is such a big prize for the person who creates the vaccine. They will get the Nobel Peace Prize. They will be on the cover of every magazine. Whichever team creates the vaccine wins. There are so many teams right now trying. Yeah, there's so many forces working to make it happen. Right. And do not underestimate the ego of the scientists involved in wanting to be that person who goes down in history who they named the vaccine after.

Whichever doctor gets that is famous for life. They're on every talk show. They're on the cover of a magazine. They're getting the Medal of Freedom, every highest honor to be knighted around the world. I study human motivation. Those scientists are working so hard to find that vaccine that I think

we get a candidate before anybody thinks is humanly possible. They're saying 18 months. They say maybe a year. I think it gets here in Q4. I think we have mitigation strategies for the summer, which means I think we'll be sitting here next year saying, you know, pandemics, we know how to deal with them.

So you think next year we're doing this live, not on Zoom? I literally think if in a year from now we could do this in front of 1,000 people in an audience, let's put it on the schedule right now as a bet. We'll make a long bet. All right, great. What are we going to bet? We're going to bet sushi? Omokasa? You guys got accounts? You want to cap the Omokasa at 500 a person? And you guys already, I'll do two for one with you. I pay for you two, you pay for one. So you got two to one odds. That we could do this live in an audience with...

I know. We could do a podcast with a live audience for 200 or more people a year from now, and it will sell out immediately, and I'll come up to your town to do it. And either you buy me the $500 omakasa, or I buy you guys both. Perfect. Locked? Done. But we got to do the event. We got to do the event, too. Also, 200's easy. Like, if you promote this to your audience, like... Well, of course. My point is 200 people would risk their lives to come. Yeah.

And they will not consider it risking their lives anymore. And I think in two years, there will be some comedian who will refer to this as Y2 Corona. They'll literally be like, remember that? Did you just coin that? Remember when we did that? I just did. Remember that? Remember? We'll have one of these like, hey, you remember that time we all had to stay home for six weeks? Who are these people who stayed home for six weeks? Oh, these Corona babies now. It's literally going to be like that.

Fascinating. I could do my Chris Rock. I could do a whole bunch of them. Remember Corona? Corona's going to kill everybody. We may open that as our cold opener, but that was unbelievable. Unbelievable, okay? So many, many victories. And I think since we solved Corona, okay, Trump solved Corona, okay? We solved Corona, and I think that deserves a third term, okay? People are talking about it. Third term for Corona, victory. And Melania?

I mean, how much do we love Melania? I mean, is she not a great First Lady? I mean, she's a 10, okay? Even at 50, a 10, okay? I mean, Ivanka, another 10, okay? Not coincidence. And some pay, Ray Trump, on Corona, 10, okay? 10, 10, 10.

He's going to win too, by the way. I hate to break it to you guys. I know it's depressing. We can't make a bet on that. It's too depressing. I bet when he was... When there was like six or seven people left in the race, I bet my friend five grand that we were in the poker game and I said to my friend, Trump's going to win. And I said that after the first Hillary thing because I was like, oh my God, he's so compelling to this group of people. And he's just...

beating her up and people love the idea of beating up the incumbent like the establishment that this is going to take on a life of its own and then when Hillary hit 85% my friend said I'll buy you out of the bet for like three or four grand and I took the buyout

Was it a one-to-one odds? It was one-to-one odds. We bet you. And I said, you know what? You should have been, I'll bet you five grand with a 10-to-one payoff. Here's the thing. I should have. But it was just like a funny bet. But I said, I don't want to have this bet because if he does win, I'm going to feel stupid having bet on my own demise. But I think what he did now, I'm so cynical. The fact that he's putting it on the States.

And that he's taken the thing. He knows that this is going to get resolved. He sent everybody all this money. And then I don't know who Joe Biden picks as his number two, but I don't know how sharp Joe Biden's going to be in these debates. But I'm giving Trump, I give Trump 60% chance of winning. Are you buying an index of the Dow right now? I moved all my money.

from like a number three setting on Wealthfront, or a lot of my money from a number three setting on Wealthfront to 10, that week the market really tanked. The day before the bottom, I moved with Wealthfront into a bunch more equities. I told everybody I thought it was going to be a V recovery or a U, and it's looking like a W now because I tweeted that today because my friends were like, and we talked about this on the All In podcast with Saks, is it an L like a depression? Is it a V like I was betting V? Chamath was betting U and David was betting the L.

And now it looks like a W because it does not feel realistic that these things are going to spike like this. But I do think my pick is Disney. And I don't play the stock market. But I'm going to buy, there's these, I guess, what do you call them? Options? I'm going to buy options on Disney for a year from now or two years from now. Because I think Disney, like these people who are locked up right now,

when they get out of lockup and this thing is conquered, the first thing they're going to do, Disneyland, is Disneyland and a Disney cruise. That's the first thing I'm going to do. I mean, the Disney's heads, right? You're locked up with kids. You are for sure, you are never going to cancel that Disney cruise subscription. Nick, we got to get this bet in on Monday. Remind me, okay? Here's what I want to do Monday. I want to put $50,000.

into a Disney bet. How do I break that up? Should I break it into two year puts? No, I'm sorry. What do you call the options? How would you break that up, Nick? Do five options, 10K each and spread it out? All right. That's your assignment for the weekend. I'll give you 10% of the gain on the bet. Whoa, that's good carry. Oh, wow. I'll give you 10% of the gain. For public equities? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Thanks, everybody, for coming to this week in startups. Thanks to my guest. You guys got to come on my podcast. We'll do it live. Well, you talk this whole damn time. Like, we got to, yeah. That's all I do. My throat's not sore, so. You know, my super, everybody has to know their superpower. Yeah. My superpower is talking. And so, when you have a podcast, it literally pulls three or four hours of talking out that my wife doesn't have to deal with. Yeah.

This is why you do the podcast. I gotta run the dogs. It's like, I always tell people you gotta run the Mustangs, right? Run that engine. Acquired LPs, thank you for joining us. Jason, take care, boys. Have a good weekend. Stay safe, everybody. Cheers now, bye.