Not Boring (with Packy McCormick)
02:45:40 Share

Okay, we got to to get you over one hundred k this episode is a failure if we don't get you over one hundred case subscribers.

right? So let me time stamp where we are right now just so we know what we need to do. So we are at eighty eight thousand, four hundred and sixty.

Oh, we can so do that.

How i'll use this.

who. Get true. get. Easy you, easy you with you see me down. Stand welcome. Two season nine, episode six of .

acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm been gilbert and I am the cofounder and managing director of seattle based pioneer square labs and our venture fund, psl ventures.

And i'm David rosen tall and I am an anal investor based in separate cco. And I am back sort of from paternity leave.

an obviated partial, ongoing paterson leave.

Yeah.

we're making to work and we are your hosts. Well, today we've a first for required. We are covering a business that is only one person, not boring.

The news letter gone media and investment empire run by packing. Y mr. Ic, I did some research last night. Not boring is the number one sub stack news letter on business.

If packet decided to switch to the technology category, from everything I can tell, he would be number one there too. In fact, even in the cypher category, there are only two newsletters with more reach, and they've existed much longer. Not boring is only a year and a half old.

The not boring story isn't just impressive because of its explosive growth, panky is reinventing the media business model and size multi eusden. The start up investing business model is on all this with a very distinct personal flair, writing in a unique wim sc voice that makes us all just want to have fun and play the great online game. And we're very lucky that he is a part of our liquid super team here are required so he could join us today live to help tell the story. Welcome packets.

That was amazing. Thank you. When a David great to be here.

I was doing my best packing in pressure and trying to write, you know, windsor ally in the unique sile .

you've cultish IT was beautiful and some good buzz d bingo in there with not boring peace titles over, I want to say, years. But IT has not been IT feels like yours feels like always been here.

I had two more. I cut them. I turned into just like a long series of not boring titles. Anyway, packy, we do to let you know this, not to be all soft balls. We're gonna like actually do the full acquire e deep dive here, if that's okay with you.

I mean, acquired is, I think particularly for the first year when I wrote about soft ank, when I rote about ten and when I rote above these companies getting deep the worth that you did to go deep on those companies was hugely instrumental. And being able to write those pieces, I would expect nothing less, the full acquired treatment.

Alright, let's do this. Well, listeners, we have a huge announcement, a gigantic, exciting piece of news to share with all of you today. For the ninety eight percent of you out there who have not joined the acquired L P.

Community, we are opening up every single episode of the L P. Show back at aloe e. To you. today.

We have created a new public podcast feed in apple spotify, or wherever you get your podcast called the acquired or pico. Very creative. That is right. That includes our series on VC fundamentals and our start up deep dives on pricing marketplaces, sas investing with top investors and founders.

And in fact, we are about to drop an episode right there in that feed where I interview fifteen year president of blue origin, rob mayson on how he sees the space landscape today. Now, of course, members of the paid lp community still get great benefits, like exclusive access to new episode for two weeks before we drop IT in the public, feed the ability to join L P calls, book club, you know, all this stuff. But if you aren't an L P and you really want to start getting these episodes, you can click the link in the show notes or go search acquired L P show wherever you get your podcast .

and describe thank you to all L P S for being on this journey with us. We are very excited, and i'll share all this content more broadly. Some good stuff that you interviews Joseph gordon left at the other day on the L P. show.

Super fun.

Yeah, so fun.

That's kind of look like we've got that .

a few times since joe is a professional hollywood actor. I take that is a great, unbelievable compliment. So thank you, Becky. Okay, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about long time friend of the show service.

Now yes, as you know, service now is the A I platform for business transformation, and they have some new news to share. Service now is introducing A I agents. So only the service now platform puts A I agents to work across every corner of .

your business yeah. And as you know, from listening to us all year, service now is pretty remarkable about embracing the latest AI developments and building them into products for their customers. AI agents are the next phase of this.

So what are A I agents? A I agents can think, learn, solve problems and make decisions autonomously. They work on behalf of your teams, elevating their productivity and potential. And while you get incredible productivity enhancements, you also get to stay in full control.

Yep, with service now, A I agents proactively solve chAllenges from I, T, H, R. Customer service software development. You name IT, these agents collaborate, they learn from each other, and they continuously improve handling the busy work across your business so that your teams can actually focus on what truly .

matters ultimately service. Now an agenda I is the way to deploy AI across every corner of your enterprise. They boost productivity for employees and rich customer experiences and make work Better for everyone.

Yeah, so learn how you can put a agents to work for your people by clicking the link in the shows, notes, or going to service. Now docs slash A I dash agents well before we dive in the history. In fact, we should say this show is not investment advice, though David and I are both investors in multiple, not boring ing entities.

So not only are we conflicted, we want to be extremely open about that. We definitely have investments that we are discussing today. This show is for informational with entertainment purposes only. And I promise you, I will be both of those.

Like we're going to do the whole acquired treatment on you packets. But the first place I went what I was like, I I was to researching built descript here for the not boring story. I went here, you linked in, you know, I know that kind of a boomer thing to do, but I did. You are listed there as the court code founder of not boring. How on earth did you decide on what to put there is .

a really tough question for me still. And when I get asked to you, you know, i'm going on a panel or joining you that came for something .

I can ask to vera bio or C M B C.

Or you know, on C M B C. Here I get as very ort bio. Sometimes it's writer, sometimes it's author, sometimes it's founder.

I don't know really what I do or how to describe what I do. And then if you mix that in with nap, in capital, the whole thing, it's very confusing. Founder feels like a catch all, like I did definitely start this thing. And so anything else beyond that, I think, is subject to .

change that you are definitely the founder of the not boring empire, right? So let's tell the story. I'm assuming you were born in either one thousand eighty six or one thousand and eighty seven .

nineteen and eighty seven.

nineteen eighty .

seven generate twenty six, the same birthday when grazy vents Carter, a lot of the great athletes.

Okay, so january twenty six thousand and eighty seven in brand mr. Pensylvania, just outside phildee hia, there is the birth of a baby boy named Patrick.

Patrick.

also known as patchy maci. So urban dictionary tells me that packy is a very common dimensions form of the name Patrick that is especially popular amongst residents of county cork, ireland. Is that where your family is originally from?

I believe so. My dad has done kind of the ancestry to come deep dives on his side of the family. I think we're probably forth generation over here. And so we think it's county cork, but not one hundred .

percent positive. Nice all in the field of area.

all in kind of the lehigh valley. Allentown is where I I grew up. We have a much family and screens.

Ens, joe biden country. Yeah, lily, grow up in town. What would you like as a kid? Any little glimmer of the future? Not boring ing empire that we're popping up, but when you are growing up.

yeah, I used to make these little books or newspapers on post notes. So one of my dads, my day was a consultant at Arthur, luckily got out before. And ron, thank god.

But one of his early clients was the miami ero. And so when I was like, you know, six years old, I would make these little posted note versions of the miami herald. I also have this one that was called golden memories of a Young boy's life.

And so I had all these old pairs, and they would take me unlike, you know, the women's locker at the pool, or something like that. I was like a five year old kid, and I come home and draw stick figures of boobs in this little book called golden memories of a Young boy's life. So that was doubly the earliest version of network you could .

take in a very different career direction.

After that, I could have I wasn't a particularly good artist.

which actually has Carried through perfectly.

perfectly to today.

and still not a good artist. I think it's part of the charm. But you know, even in high school or middle school, we had an eighth grade teacher, mister L.

G. O, who would make you write a composition or an essay if you got in trouble. So for me, I i'd actually sometimes try to get in trouble.

because for most kids, that's punishment for me. Like, if I have to write as much as you write, I couldn't do IT. There's no way.

I mean, I did across country in track in high school too. And that was kind of a similar arrival for most people that's making them run many miles. And I love that.

But mr. Alj, you know, you decorate a composition. And I would love to do IT because I would try to write a composition that was so funny, that mysterious gio would let me read IT in front of the class. Or, you know, in high school, I would try to write essays that were a combination of very well done and well research, all that but funny, so that, you know, if my most serious teachers would have to laugh and give me a good grade, despite the fact that turn them into a joke. So I think kind of always combination of class close with the backing of kinds, serious research.

it's pretty rare to find those two combinations together in one person and right, somebody who is both the class clown. And has a work ethic.

And I think that comes through and not boring all of us who read every or close to every one of your posts. I think that the charm that is the style is that you're diligent. You've written many times about how the process works and how you go into your basement and spend the time and do the research and start writing and terror down and writes on the I M. There's real diligence there. And for sure you are the class clown of serious business newsletter writers.

If there are people who have read every year, close to every now, boring ing, thank you. I think IT takes work ethics to read all of the boring. That's been probably close to a million words in a year and a half at this point. To get people to read that much IT has to be both kind of informative and entertaining. I think i'm .

using your phrase here when I say that the reason IT works is because you don't put on your serious business pants.

I don't even an own serious .

business fans.

So where does the work .

at that come from? That is certainly from both my parents, my dad, I said, was a consulting, literally fly to germany for a day and come home, or fly on to miami to go to miami hair, and then make IT home by four o'clock that night to take us to the fair, and then fly back out the next morning. So was working all of the time.

My mom was getting her P. H. D. And working and raising two kids. And so like both entrepreneurs, they both ended up starting their own kind of consulting practices.

Both incredible work, I think, and then there was just a way that I parented. My absolute favorite story growing up was when I was a thinking faith grade. I told my parents everything was going really, really well.

It's probably going to get straight. Maybe I could be plus, but probably not. And then I got my report card.

And I remember my dad was coming home from a business trip, and you know, he was a fancy consultant. So he had a cell phone way back in the day. And his car, we ve got a report card.

And my mom made me call my dad and tell him the grades, and again, was like science, a english, a french sea plus bobbi, and is are packed. Y, i'm going to be home in an hour. Oh, by the time that I get home, I want all of your certificates, all of your tropes, anything that would suggest that you might be a winner?

I want them in a box in the, we're calling that box in the loser box because you're loser. And my mom said that might didn't want to like the moment of school parenting for this. I actually think he was awesome because what he was mad about wasn't that I got A C plus like that win the IT was that I lied.

Also, mastering said that I was doing really well in the class. And so I thought that was, know the best parenting lesson that I could have ever received because there was a really good lesson, but in honesty and in work at, because after that, I actually started trying in french and are taking IT all the way through college and pretty good at IT. I can't really speak anymore, but IT was a really good lesson that if you're not going to do well, least be honest about the fact you're not going to do well. Now I think know when I get things wrong and boring a lair from the rooftop s and probably comes back to that moment.

Yeah, you feel like an intense need to own the mistake. There is a tweet that you had around the crypto winter where you said that the rules you ve got to play fair. And I think you are owning the fact that a lot of things that you thought we're going to go up did not go up.

I mean, are ideas dinner podcast, I think is a testing to the back. But I get things wrong all the time.

Oh, we all do so. Okay, so you got to duke. You were on the debate team at duke, right?

I was shocking. We were able to unearth some pretty awesome photos from that time. Maybe we link the.

I was incredibly cool. I was the bike club. I was in an ocp ella group. No, there a couple of big, all my octel group. I was in the on the debate team, mean, in my partner, who was my best from high school also, we were like the cool team. So I was like in all the nerdy things and tried to be color than I was probably in all of those things that that was certainly my kind of college vibe was. I was getting involved in a lot of different things.

So, okay, you graduated in two thousand and nine, which I then I remember. I graduated to seven. I sail through.

I was a front literary major. I get the investment banking job. So this is course.

Can I just got to all three? But you got an investment banking jobs in two thousand nine, like nobody got investment banking jobs in two thousand nine. This was the middle of the recession.

Also, just to drive David's point home here, even french lit majors could get investment banking jobs in two thousand and seven. And by the time the dorr slam to o nine, IT took something special packets for you to get there.

Yeah, so I I was, to be fully fair, kind of investment banking light in public finance. But I started this before thousand eight when I got my internship. Things actually still pretty good.

So I got international at bank amErica on the energy trading desk. That was a wild experience in itself, because bank of america's energy trading desk was all x and ron people. And so they were not cycled to not be at iran anymore, and not sick to be on a desk that didn't take physical deliveries.

So there are two types of kind of energy trading this. Some like, you know, the bigger banks, Morgans and me, all of that which will take delivery, if they need to, of barrels of oil or whatever else. Like those are the kind of serious test.

And then there are more just peer financial as like we had a bank amErica worked my butt off that summer like there's the intern programs and there's drinks and there's speeches and there's all these things that you do when you're an intern on wall street. My death wouldn't let me go to any of those things. I had to sit there and you don't do anything.

When you are trading internally, you literally sit on these people's shoulders. You're not allowed to trade. You're not license to trade.

right? You're not license. You don't have the series seven, series sixty three.

that one exactly right. So asked them dumb questions throughout the day while they were trying to focus on these more time million dollar trades. IT was like the worst experience.

They didn't like me be on the test, but they also didn't want me to have any fun. So they ouldn't let me go to any of the other things. The summer before my internship, they didn't like the intern, and so they took about drinking until, like, four A M.

And then they came in a little bit late. The next morning, they marched him to the hr teams office and got him fired. And so that was the environment that I was coming into.

This is legal liars poker totally, but know definitely the work, I think, there, where I just didn't let IT bother me to got off to come back. Bank of amErica merged with amErica lynch, merge quote and quote, merge quote, quote. So we bought them, but there were higher quality turns, quite Frankly, at mary linch.

And so when emerge against the other problem was we all got put that on the back of america, said in a rotational program, so you got your offer from a specific desk, but you came back and how to rotate around different, where is mary got hired into specific desks. So all the mayor kids, for both of those reasons, they were probably smarter than I was. And they already have their death a placement locked in.

They got their desk. We rotated around about half the people on the trading program ended up getting spit into public finance, which for those listening at home is municipal bonds. So I worked, you know, on the sydney jersey bonds that were back to whether tax obligations or the pets of turn pike when they wanted to build roads to do that.

Sounds kind of a boring. He was a little of boring.

Hopefully that's the first of hundreds of funds throughout this fox. But I was boring. But I actually, I liked that I was number one in my class kind of each of years that I was there.

And I realized very early on because I had friends who were, I remember in new york times article, came out about the fact that really top quality and make analysts for getting their P. E. Offers way, way earlier.

And I think they quoted two of my friends in that article. So I had friends who just love this stuff, and I just wasn't not one of those people. So I knew that I want to get out of finance at some point. And so I was really just playing to be a in the top of my class and got a business school.

So you apply a business school and trollers of your link in profile will know that you do not have an M, B. A. What is through that and what happens?

One other thing to add was, well, as in finance, I started a company called through go, which was a terrible name. I bought the site for something else that I applied IT to building, this company that essentially took people from new york down to the jersey shore and the hamptons every weekend. So the party bus ride IT was so much fun, paid for my summers.

I took IT way too seriously and thought that this was going to be my ticket to a grape as the school applied to stamper, got similar projected from gsp, ended up getting into chicago, have made a posit down, was going to go. And then one I kind of visited, and IT was snowing, and IT was like April or may. And I also found the company called breather on Angeles st.

And I just started a conversation with the founder breather, where there was no guarantee, even an interview or anything. But I chicago, if I could differ, they told me I couldn't defer your deposit. I N if you were hard to stanford, they would let me defer.

But you know, they know that people might try to say they want to fer so that they can go to harvard, to stanford, so they wouldn't let me refer. And so I just that I called not going to go to school. I had already quit my job.

And so really spent kind of the next four months, I think, in this weird kind of winding interview process just with breather. Traded pretty actively, made some of the demonstrates in the history the world. I think I bought tesla during that summer like twenty nine dollars and sold IT. I bought facebook at nineteen dollars so that D A unch like apple options, the earnings IT coin .

at one hundred thousand .

of one fifty. So like, you really had N A N summer where a little return here. So first I found pretty so, you know, had this kind of summer where I had no job. I didn't have a future job lined up, but I was interviewing and trading and making a bunch of dumb decisions that I think i'd kind of make me Better investor later on.

I will say it's hard to buy and hold when you're in that position in life where like the cash is useful and a material amount of your network and .

you don't have a job required.

Wasn't around back them. But you could listen to us have all these people on over the years saying how great that is to let compounding do its thing. The picture, even if you're a deep student of all this on your own and you know this, you kind of can't at that point in your life when you're looking to a learn or b potentially use the cash in a pretty short period time.

I mean, the bitcoin sale was a result of going to october fest of my friends while I was unemployed, and they all had jobs in finance still. And so they went out to the club. And I was, of course, I can do that now.

I just got my bonus. And then I woke the next day in the hotel. I was like, you know what? That was stupid.

I shouldn't done that. I shouldn't served my cash. Let me sell these stupid bitcoin so that I, like, just kind of refilled the coffers with U.

S. D. And so that was why I sold all thirty .

eight of my bone. okay? We can let you go out over a couple things. Here we got a everyone, am I hearing you that you wrote your business school application about starting a quote, quote company to bus drunk people from manhattan to the jersey shore in the hamp tins? I mean.

he wasn't about being drunk people through new year to the jersey shore in the hampton IT was about community and bring people together. I mean, people who have never met somebody going to the beach town that they were going to make friends. People got married who met on the party bus IT was about community. But yeah, no, seriously, that is how I tried .

to be my business school. I wait. So to quote a writer impacting the corner, the hard part about being a great writer is that you can convince people that a really bad idea is a really great idea. And you just did that to me. That is another .

one of those formative experiences were obviously IT wasn't a start up IT was start up light. IT was stupid and IT was fun. And I made for my summer and all of that when I was applying to breathe, though, I mean, like I had done marketing, I had done upper and I had to deal with a bunch of city situations.

And so like that company in particular, the CEO is kind of an iconic class. He runs company now called practice. Julian greek. I, but he didn't care at all about the finance background of the IT prove that I could work hard and like maybe I could help with some business stuff but really careful that I like got my hands dirty and they had to deal with all of the junk in just being kind of one person running this company. So IT was definitely a silly experience, but I think I also kind of helped with the next chapter.

what was the name of the party best company through go.

I actually don't think i've actually technically shut out in that L. C.

So i'm one of us too.

It's funny to actually doing the greedy stuff of, like, dealing with our bus Operators. You gotta do that when you're an entrepreneur and so many people they go to business think, oh, i'm going to get all this glory. IT starts of internet company IT is like, you gotto be willing to sevel your fair share of manual here.

I mean, that's like the Chris C, A quote about, you know, he won't hire a work with anybody, hasn't had just a city job growing up. So watch dishes. I had my first share of kind of those sites of dozen. And I think that all helps because, mean, we will get to be there. But that was my first year s experience, was doing that exact same thing.

yes. So let's jump to breathe.

So that summer, I had thrown away my money in business school as well. That deposit was gone, terrible summer from a financial spectrum. But the way that I was thinking about IT was like, I mean, gonna spend the next two years not making a single dollar and paying for business school and wrapping king up that doing that, or I can go somewhere, anywhere, really, that will pay me more than negative dollars and learn on the job and get that experience. My energie process said where there was doing a bunch of really, really of things, I don't think they knew what they're doing from a higher perspective. I wrote the jd for the job that is up getting, which was new year city general manager.

how we goes the company. At that point.

he was six people in montreal. So I was going to be our first U. S. employee. One of my jobs was, Julian said, there is a guy at uber who does a job similar to the one that you want to do, go track him down and then get him interview you and then he'll tell me what he thinks.

And so that not being josh more, who is the university general manager at overs, so that he is, remained a friend, that that was a lot of fun. I think he works at levels now. Yeah, exactly.

He's that super sapiens competitor levels. Now that was one. Another was our other code. Karena was a designer by background.

And so he was like, go to a marriage business lobby and go to the S O. Lobby and then make a presentation on why they're different. They're obviously very different. But I not a designer, as everybody who reads not boring knows. And so I like had this whole thing about, you know, the vibe of both of the spaces and IT wasn't particularly good, but the fact that that I did IT is probably what they wanted to see. I learned later that IT came down to me and somebody who ended up working for the company later who is way more talented and smarter than I am.

And drilling and karina, one point by point on both of us in the lobby, actually a hotel, the night before they made a decision, and I won by one point and got the job, or else I would have had four months down the drain, and absolutely nothing. So after getting the job. So what brother did was IT rented out meeting in workspace in the beginning, these very small meeting rooms for as little as half an hour at a time.

So my job was, too, for my job was first convinced landlords to rent spaces to this random canadian company that wants brend m people to come in and out of the building for a half an hour of time throughout the day. So that was chAllenged number one. And I literally like, got to my needs.

In one case, this is actually like that mean literally got on my knees and begged to one of the lords to give us the space and banded up giving us to space. Oh my god. Red, if I get three spaces by x date and you're .

proud ly competing against, we work for a lot of these places.

right? Hours were really tiny in the beginnings. So ultimately we ended up competing with. We work in the beginning, we were looking for like the hundred and fifties were for really quirky space.

Somewhere in the building, something could come taken upper, like maybe get a little bit of work done. But the idea was that your phone should be able to unlock all these spaces that are underused throughout the city. Turns out one of the chAllenges of the thesis in manhattan, there's really no under use space in the city.

So we ended up to haven't to compete with whatever firm wanted to rent that space, ended up, I think, kind of figuring out how to make that pitch. And so that was one side of IT. Once we made IT, we had a design and furnish in all these things, spaces and then way to get people to clean them.

So we worked with one cleaning company that ended up getting acquired by a company that got acquired by google. And the day after they got acquired, they'll like, by the way, we don't want to do these terrible five minute jobs that we have to run all over the city for anymore. You are on your own.

So some of that was me going literally just cleaning brother space. I leave dinners with friends and whatever kind of after hours. The other was because I have met josh strings process. I called js, like hate.

You have that uber rush thing? Is there any chance that we can get uber rush messengers to clean breathing spaces, since they are moving around the city anyway? And so we actually, I was the largest consumer of uber messengers in the world for a while. We never had that outside the york.

I don't IT was the .

new york test that might have gone to a couple of other markets, but really kind of a new york test where the idea was, if you want to deliver documents from one place in the .

city to another, which is super .

common in new york.

IT was super come from, you know, our banking days. Oh, you're always .

caring documents around. And I think part of became ultimately, people are moving on the city on on their bikes. But we had a slighter in the uber APP where I would call, hopefully there was somebody nearby.

I would hit the button. I would drop the pin on the space, hit the button, and then has to text with that person to be like, hey, by the way, like this isn't a delivery job. You're cleaning a space and to be fair, that these people opted in.

So we had our own viewers, only people who opted in, and they made a little bit more by doing that. But I be like, so this particular space, you go into the room, there is a set of cleaning supplies under the couch. There's instructions there.

If you have any questions, just text me. This is my number. And so seven days a week, six, I am to eleven P.

M. Pretty much when we closed, I was just on my phone, texting messengers who are going to go clean break. So talking about startups not being glamorous like there is absolutely enough ing glamorous about this.

The fun part on the flip side of that was now I had equity in the company as our only the U. S. employee.

I designed the system myself. I chose to work with uber. And so it's all on me.

The funding about start is it's all on you. All the crappy stuff is a product of the way that you design the system. And so that was a really fun experience.

And then, you know, hired a team, signed a bunch of leases, got promoted a couple of times, ultimately ended up kind of like running our Operations and real estate and design, which doesn't make any sense, but manage a really talented design team and a button stuff that I C O, I didn't want to do. I did all of that kind of globally for us. So incredible experience of either, but none of IT was particularly easy.

And how big was your team in the company by the time you left? So in new york, my team grew about two hundred five people, about half the revenue uh in the company, which was ten markets. And then when promoted to V P of experience, which is a fancy title for a bunch, john jobs, not john jobs, but like, no jobs that would Normally go together to catch all.

Yeah, I was a cattle that sounded way and you than IT was, but that was about one hundred and fifty percent. Team, including our Operations associated to our full time employees, are brave and and clean to maintain the spaces all the way to our team of designers. Our customer care team are real estate team Operations seem in all that .

it's on a sampling sort of the cornucopia, the puzzle pieces that would become not boring. Eventually, I mean, started pure finance, pure analysis, pure spread. S shy jacky, so disconnected from what actually happens at any of the companies or even in the physical trading of the commodities that you are looking at.

Then, of course, you have one of the most Operational jobs one could possibly imagine. And of course you have the entrepreneurs moment before that of starting your own company. Now you have leadership. So you have that piece of the puzzle. Two of understanding, like turns out actually the harder thing that any these companies is the people.

And that was the most amazing thing, too. I probably need to, rather for two years longer than I should have, because I really loved the team of people that I was working with. I said the last turning point and the last kind of thing that contributed to not boring, was we deeply over expanded our supply because we had been given advice by people on the board and others who said, you're pretty much like uber. The job for uber is to get as much supply on the map as humanly possible. You should also get as much supply on the map as humanly possible, which we did.

The cats there was actually demand for uber.

The demand for uber and uber supply could come and go. And what did not to pay them anything? We signed five releases and did construction.

And so it's just a very different situation. So we added a space per day in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen for a body year there every day, we were launching a new space. And so we are deeply ever supplied our growth. Margins were awful LED negative, negative twenty five percent.

And then me and ben Roger to neurons, a company called composer, which just launched congrats span, who is kind of ahead of data science at the time, decided to spend a Christmas break just figuring out how we could fix this thing. And we had always have the thing where we only did your torto, we only did meetings, whatever. But we like just went deep into the country.

We read like a bunch of band thomson, and we read good strategy, bad strategy, and really, we're going to turn this company around using strategy. And so we wrote this like detailed memo full of his data science and my crazy ideas on how we can actually turn the company around by adding monthly space and competing kind of more at the margins with companies like we work and no tell. And then we send IT out the company. We got back at the blessing of the exact team we send IT out of the company.

Did you have gifts and tell us where preferences in IT?

I actually don't think that i'd just and how we d took this very seriously, you put on your serious business fans for this is a serious business fans for once the company is on really on the line. IT was going to be really hard fundraising or doing anything when we had negative growth margins and too much supply. And the crazy thing that happened was one everybody bought in and got really excited by this vision.

Even there was a ton of work that we had, a flip spaces. Part of the thesis was we have this crazy thing that nobody else says, which is that we can rent spaces out for as little as an hour. And we have the data sign seem that can Price space for as little an hour.

So if somebody wants run a space for one month and then we want to put that back online for hour bookings in three days, we'll fly IT back and forth depending on what the market is telling us. Which meant that for the other team, IT was an absolute nights for the design team, having design between the two type spaces, absolute nighter. But everybody bought in, and we turn the thing around.

We went from negative twenty five percent margins to positive twenty five percent margins. And like things were going really, really well. And so I think Better.

I like, well, strategic ally actually kind of matters here, having a plan and getting people to buy into IT and having something that make sense dates with in the market like all of that actually like it's not just bs, like it's a real meaningful thing. And so I think that was probably also part of why. And up in a news letter that was about .

strategy to four shadow, I think at one point early on, you described not boring, as if bill Simons and benton son had a baby. And so clearly, this is where the sort of benton inside comes from.

One hundred percent is quote .

from your first newsletters post, which is not called not boring, is about this course. They are taking this reading course, IT says. The first piece I wrote for the course was an introduction to benn t.

ops. son. And if you check IT out, I would love your feedback. IT was the spiritual godfather. It's spiritum godfather.

Of the same thing about that course was I took the course because then we ought, in a professional management team, and strategy was less valued in my brain was dying. And so I decided to take a writing course. And i'd read about anthropy because they are like, you know, instead of starting from scratch. And I think it's actually shot of my last piece, kind of like go remix other people who you respect, go remix their ideas and kind of just get a sense for what IT feels like to write about and to write like the people that you respect. So that's how the sole thing kicked off by writing about son.

And so that was David paris right to passage course. right?

Exactly right.

And you also did on deck at the same time.

I did on deck at the same time after I left me there. So you was a little bit later that I did on deck. But after I finally left there, i'd tried to quit a few times. In twenty nineteen, I took a ebata al vent to japan. And while I was there, I call her donal counselors like, get me out of here, please.

Well, you quit from japan.

The sabbath cal was like, the latest effort to get me to stay was kind of like, eric, go take a month off and see if there's any way that you would want to come back. And while I was there, just realized that I do not want to say there. And so I quit from japan facing our general council.

Does that ever work? IT feels like when people get to disconnect and they are already sort of emotionally disconnected, all that does is make them more sure that they're ready to be done.

For sure. I think it's also valuable to give. Like the team I had one hundred and fifty person team that I think i've got along really well with. And so I think this article also used for being like, look package away in japan right now and the company hasn't fAllen apart and your life is not miserable, so everything will be fine when he leaves.

They had a good point. okay. So when you did leave, you didn't start not boring, as we know IT today right away. Am I right that you started two things concurrently with the not boring club, the social in person experiment, but also a different email newsletter .

i'd had per my last email going. And that was really a kind of a link round up where IT was an assignment from the right of passage course to start a news letter and to get twenty people to sign up. And so while I was a breather, I was, I was writing that I realized I like writing, and occasionally I would do. And I say, but the most part that was, like here, the five things that i've read and listen to this .

week that I really liked, and they're all still in the not boring subject. You can go read dom.

but if you go to perm my last email, dots of SATA, on the day that I took IT down, somebody else took the site over. And I think maybe about tipping in poo, or is not my last, that everything .

turns to new a link farm? actually?

exactly. So I had that going. And then I use that till I kind of just think through and write about different ideas that I had for a company that I want to to start.

I mean, even while I was a bank of america, when I was in college, when I was a breather, I always knew that I wanted to start. But I thought, you know, that would be a real big start up. I just managed a big team.

And I thought I I was actually in A M. C, O. For a little while I breathe and that that I did to find job there. And so like, ah I can do this like every level that you go up in the company.

I thought that they were like this god like people above you who had all the answers and realized that there are all always dumas me. So why not to start something myself? And so I use writing as a way to kind of think through in public a bunch of these different ideas.

And somehow, despite that tall, the best idea that I came up with was a social club that kind of combine SOHO house in college for curricula. So I was a debate in high school and college. And one of the test of iran was starting a debate club in new york and got twenty friends to come in debate.

And people loved that. I had a blast. People really enjoyed IT. And I think that's a really good saying. This is going be a huge business .

because twenty people, like debate club. This is the N. Y. C. Debate club, right? Which you can go read about in the per my last email.

Yes, you can, but I was, I mean, like all of the stuff of blast, and I think IT all comes from the same spot as you know, the name of where and comes from, which is I had dinner with my mom and her business partner one night in new york while I was still breathe. And her business partner asked me what I like to do outside of work. And I, like, just did not have an answers like you other.

I like traveling and I like about my friends, like I had no passions, which is crazy, because in college, like that was all I did. I spent a lot more time doing other things that I did actually probably study. And so I think that kind of just like put a bug in my head that I wanted to figure out how i'll get some of that back.

And then I talked to much of other people, and they realized that they had kind of the same thing going on, that once you kind of got out of school, IT was work. And then IT was your tiger with friends and who ever became your significant and then your family. But you didn't have those that kind of small groups that were bonded around a particular passionate hobby.

So oh, cool like that. Plus how how sounds like the closing in the world. Let me go start that.

And of course, you're coming from a physical real estate company that you just spent six years at.

Well, that was part of the thing to like I that business, i'd have a lot less credibility even with investors. Then if I said, look, you know I know how to do all of this, I can go that here's the model, all the numbers work. I wrote a bunch, and you can see these S S.

To trying to justify, like how this could be eventually scale thing if you added a lot of stuff on top and started community first and like maybe that what have worked, I don't know. I mean, today, what not boring club would have been is really a dw, probably with physical locations. I think actually that model works really well for what I was to do at the time. That was a real stretch.

Did you pitch any VC or investors about investing in not boring club as IT was coming together at the end? 2.

yes, I had a few early conversations with friendly VC that I knew from now. boring. And some people actually like cold when you actually start raising, like let us know, is actually very interesting and like all back you you'll figure .

that out oh my god, if these people had actually invested in not boring wow.

I know might have shut that and down and started fresh, but you know is more of, I think i'll back you this idea like maybe you can do something whether they get interesting at some point, but pull back you.

But I got a bunch of advice from bunch of other people who were like, don't raise money and don't sign, at least please for the love of god, don't sign east before you actually try to build a community, because IT sounds like the other stuff is hard. But what's really hard is actually building community around this kind of subsidy. Started the slacker.

I used the newsletter that had foreign, the time to try to get the early applicants, got the community up and running. We were doing like some book clubs with the debate club. There's about one hundred and fifty of the first people.

And before we had a club to walk people in those like great, we're going to a do a bunch of small group dinners. Starting in debry, twenty, twenty late february, we had, I think, our first four ten person group dinners. There were a lot of fun.

People are really enjoying getting to know each other. And then I think I was marched tenth. We had these like separate slack groups for each one of the dinner groups and somebody like, you know what i'm not feeling particularly good. I'm not just bow out tonight. Other people were like, ah you know what i'm going to about tonight because i'm hearing a lot about this coveted thing and so you know I was trying to start that wearing club in the middle of this copy thing and so, you know we put IT on pause. Cancel that dinner, adam, an abundance of caution cancelled the next night's dinner and the next night and I was like, guys will will be back in .

two weeks here ever.

that we're all going to be .

back in two weeks.

all going to be back in two weeks. As soon as this blows over, will will be back.

I going to put a pin in here. I was trying to figure out listener is how to do the thing that I did doing the other episode, bring in the share Price at every moment throughout history. And I don't have packed y's internal number s so I don't have the this letter count.

But what I do have is his personal twitter following as of every month on the way. So here we are today where packy has one hundred and five thousand hundred and ten thousand, something like that, followers. Here in february of twenty twenty, taking us back to the story, nine hundred and fifty six followers.

And that was good. That was like a triple from earlier in the earth before I started writing for my last email. And we can talk about this. One of the things that I wanted to do, like very, very, very on, I would say, like, welcome to the new x subscribers. Now there are why of us here .

such a good girl and IT wasn't even meant .

to be a groth that I was really kind of like, just in case this works out and becomes the big thing. Like there are all these people with a big twitter following or big audience like certainly you were in that conversation or was like there's all these people that seem again, that kind of got like and like that was just like prior din that they're going to be successful in cases newsletter becomes anything. I just going to want to show you that I was just a random unemployed idiot who started writing this thing. And so we can kind of extract the whole progression of number of subscribers and all of that throughout .

the journey is so funny you had that impression of because I had like zero credibility before starting acquire. I mean, I felt exactly like you did like I they start up experiences and I .

had to be fair, there was a front page seattle times article about you before he started .

a quiet one day, one moment in time. Yeah, but packed. I like, I know that exact feeling and it's so funny how like at some point and there's no like clear moment in time when IT changes, but at some point then people look at you, like you're on the other side of that valley and you're like, weight, how do I get to the other?

What it's crazy and like, you know, i'd try to be the same idiot that I was in IT IT is as you like, I still treat dum stuff and maybe that's good. Maybe like S C is going to back down my door at some point. But i'm like really trying to just be the same person that i've been the whole time.

Not really like your fame as an change, but really just like I don't want to care that like i'm going to get responses from lunch controls. Now if I say up that I really think this breaks when I let that change me. And I like get a little bit safer in what I write about because or what I tweet about or anything, because there are more tools out there, more people who are paying attention to what i'm writing and all of that. And so that's been important to be the whole time is kind of remaining the same day that I was in the begin.

I get super important. This is that not boring epo de, not the acquired episode, but i've had a few conversations recently with people who have grown a personal brand very quickly online. And I think a lot of people make a lot of trade, ffs, to do that, where they play a part on the internet and play a character rather than being themselves.

And you sort of have this magical thing, at least my perception, knowing you personally and following your work, is that they're pretty much the same person. But you've managed to, like, grow very quickly by being yourself, which is remarkable. Because I think in three conversations that I can think of recently, people have told me like, I really wish I could be more myself, but I played a character on the internet so that I could quickly grow.

It's easy to make that trade off. And I problem did a little bit of that, Frankly, early on, unlike where I would do more threads in different things. So I try to boost engagement and all of that. But I still IT was like so small that nobody was paying attention by the time that night.

Anybody kind of following? I've just decided to be myself because i'm spending so much time doing this, both writing and tweet and meeting people in all of that that if you're not yourself, it's not like A B trudy yourself can of thing is like you're going to have a miserable experience because all of your interactions are going to be other people wanting to interact with this persona or if I were writing from a different voice, everyone would expect me to write from that. And I would just make IT twice as hard to both figure out the content and the voice every week. And so i've realized really early on that I just needed to, like, kind of be as close to myself as humanly possible and also is just going .

to begin much work. And once you admit that you're kind of like, okay, well, if IT works, IT works and if I don't have product market fit with some subsection ment of the internet, who can discover me, then shoot, i'll my go home. But if IT works, it's actually remarkably scalable for .

one person Operation. exactly. So we can debate when you cross this valley, but certainly at this point time, you have not. What are you feeling now in march twenty twenty, you're unemployed again, but you're older, you're married. Your wife is pregnant at this point, right?

correct?

You are working on A, I will say, her brain. But maybe I started idea in a physical real state space with maybe some issues with the business model.

not particularly venture vocable business.

not particularly venture vocable? Or what are your motions like right now? Are you just happy, go lucky, it's all going to work out? Or are you like kind of tearing your hair out?

I'm to a fault, and I know everybody has their double age. Sd, in mine is optimism. Never once was there a time. And I was like, my life is absolutely over when I joined breathe and to a lower area. And IT was a risky thing.

My mind was like, you know, my absolute s case in area here is that I moved back to my parents house, and I can still eat meals, and I can still sleep in a bed and the roof from my head. So like the floor is not that low. Certainly this time around, there's one hundred percent ego piece of this because I have a lot of friends who are doing really, really great things.

And I was no, when I tried to bring up boring club online, I was sitting their head, tributes tes that I like, expect all day, writing review questions of making slides. And seven people showed up. And I was like, this is with my due education, my school education, all my experience like this is incredibly embarrassing.

And so I decided to kind of just let not boring club the digital version for the wayside in february, early february, push oni that we were pregnant because IT kind of hit. And I remember at this, probably April, when I decided to really go well. And I was like a bunch of soldier to conversations with pusher, with my mom, talking to my mom.

I don't know what to do and he is like, I like the name, not boring club. Like maybe you just like, apply that to the newsletter and just go all in the up in things. So that was my mom's. I D had support the name over. nice.

wow. Thanks mom. Thanks mom. Should all think our mothers more. Thank you.

mom. Totally thank you mom. And even my dad has always been kind of like, don't close off doors and like just serious about me making sure that I did the best that I possibly could was super supportive of this whole thing, maybe just because they saw that there is like, nothing else in the table. I, to be fair, I could have got ten a job somewhere, but I, I T A earn the thing.

So I went to the beach with my brother for a week and was just like, right, like, what if I just start writing this newsletter? And what if I started writing essay and IT needs to be different than benton son? So I came up with this idea to do kind of a mixed between business strategy and pop culture. And so my early s says were like creative destruction and the mick mouse club to explain why covet was actually a really good thing, because IT meant that people were no long. We're going to be stuck in and bulshed jobs, and we're going to be freed up to go do the things that they actually wanted to do.

which is, ironically, also the subject of your most recent peace. A little bit it's a different twist on IT for shirts is more about this sort of community and societal impacts of that. But of the same inputs totally.

there are definitely some three lines through a lot of the pieces I rote about. Amazon had a fashion show, and I tried to examine amazon strategy through the lens of this fashion show, and did a bunch of those like direct pop culture x business strategy type essays that also, like pretending to be a character, became too much. right? Have to both think like the business side of IT and then also figure out what movie that businesses like.

And that became too much. So I kept the tone and I dropped that direct thing. But yeah, just like I asked push if I could have three months to grow the news letter and see if there is anything there. And like, maybe one day i'd start making money.

But for now, let me do you see if I can draw this, a friend of mine, Tommy gamba, who is an airbase in getting ready to leave, helped me out on the gross side of things and have this billion idea to launch a landing page so that we could launch on product time. And that alone, I think, took us from something very small, like a thousands describers to two thousand subtribes. So that was a hugely, and I remember sitting with the dinner like, oh my god, I actually like this new. There could be a full time thing. Two thousand sub people.

attritional. You have two thousand people on the internet. Maybe this internet thing is a good idea.

Like to say we're talking order as a magnetic difference here. It's A V C term. So yes, I mean, things like kinds started looking up from that point and wasn't making any revenue for a long time.

And I still remember having conversations like deeper into the pretense y where I was like clearly going to be a thing and I had plan to turn on subscriptions and decided to keep pulling off in that because I really like the growth. And I conversations with butch issue was like, are we're going to do like a revenue thing here and might now we're living IT at my inlaws house in the jersey during cover. And I was writing with her parents, with her parents and I was writing from a basement.

Like, none of this is glamorous, but like, are we like at some point will need a health insurance and bobble. Like you turn on revenue? Like not trust me, if we can keep not having subscriptions while then we can grow to a point where i'll be able to turn on subscribe. And if I convert ten percent of the audience at five dollars a months, and like we can be making .

a couple thousand dollars, brutes work is a business man of architect. Way, way. There's nothing wrong with that. And obviously end great with IT the journalist. But that's such a fallacy. That way of thinking of, oh, if I only get x percent to convert, uh, i'm so glad you want a different direction.

There is also the dirty secret, which IT seems like you kind of intrinsically new, which is even ten percent is going to a be a pretty big stretch. Creators can typically convert at best two to three percent to a paid offering unless they're significantly handicapping the main content where you d say like sorry, every other main post behind the paywall or something big like that. But even I think it's like ten fifty percent if you bring .

out your big stick and that prevents growth. And so like it's hard to model out exactly how that's going to play up. And my big thing was I was just addicted because I locked myself into this thing where I was telling people how many I grew every week.

Like it's kind of addicted to that number continuing to go up. And so I just kept pushing off kind of turning on subscriptions. So that number of degrade. And mario did IT well. Lenny tisa obviously did IT really well and and have a great business. So there are ways to do IT, I think a huge difference between like something like colli and then something like me is lenny's audience is so specific and like you know exactly who you are who should be paying for that, which is people who do product to people who do growth. And not only did they know that they should be reading that and that they need to pay for IT, their companies that can be willing to pay for IT for them, whether I could not imagine a company that would be willing to pay so somebody can read about the making mass club. And so that was the other kind of thing that kept me from going to the description models like I just don't know if companies will be able to pay for that where well.

I think that was the secret when I was the wall sty journal. This was in the days of, like, page content was such a thing. And there was, everybody thought, oh, the wall street journal.

L, they did IT so right. The new york times was wrong, was like, yeah, is the dirty secret. Most people who pay for the journal is their companies that .

they are paying for the journal. And it's hyper specific, as you know, business finance, it's the most reputable of that. Yeah.

if you're gna go the paid subscription without, it's great, but you need to architect your whole business and content strategy around that. And obviously, you had taken a different path.

Packets just can be packed y on the internet.

Yeah, too lazy to do this subplot thing too. And think about which should go behind the pay while, and which shouldn't. And like, could I possibly double the amount of content that I was doing so that I could still grow and have some things behind the pay well and hit the quality? And so I just Frankly couldn't figure out of that out until that was one of the reasons that I decided not to out to.

okay. So what month was your baby born?

Our baby was born on october fourth. I remember I had my laptop in the hospital. He was supposed to born like a day later.

And so I was going to be able to finish a piece. I was running about reliance. And so I was like, almost done that peace sitting in the hospital while we were waiting for him to be born.

And I just couldn't get IT finished. So he was born. Devin, who is the absolute best shout to death if you listen to this in the future.

Okay, who I asked for our tracker here or so you were talking about later into the pregNancy when puja was asking you, like here we're going to do this revenue thing i'm going to assume somewhere. And in the second trimester begin in the third trimester, you're at thirty five hundred twitter followers when you get that question. Then we fast forward to device born be good moment in your life.

You're already upset twelve thousand twitter followers. You're starting to feel like jez, i'm assuming that this maps similarly to newsletters subscribe. You kind of looking at this like, well, if it's gonna keep growing like this and it's actually gonna grow geometrically, not linearly, we could be in good shape pretty soon. But I imagine your Price also pinching yourself in going this can't continue .

right in the summer, kind of late summer, somebody was nice enough to reach out. Chris is marketer higher IT was nice enough to reach out on. Lk, I like your news letter.

Are you thinking about taking advertisers? And I like, yeah, i'd love to have you advertise and he is a great time. Me, you're deck and I didn't have a deck. And so I survey the audience and I asked them for their characteristics, and they all came back like exactly like you'd want twenty five to thirty four high income households, leadership positions, the companies, well educated, owning big budgets, decision makers. Is exactly this decades amazing?

By the way, it's still on the internet, willing to IT in the .

show is on the interact, which hat me actually, because people reach out, I love to do one thousand six at a thousand dollars, every Price I put in the decade that point. But after I made that decals, you know this. Thing has been prety amazing and twitter has been pretty great.

I'm just going to tweet the deck out. And so that filled up and you know public came in, market hair came in. A few other sponsors came in from that. But that filled up pretty much through the end of twenty twenty of all of my sponsorship flats, which was great early out.

Well, so then I remember having a conversation would push us like I know I things really well like I think maybe there's a chance in the future we can do three or four hundred thousand dollars this newsletter on sponsorships. You're optimist, optimist. And I kept lying on the math like I I had some sophisticated for more heroes like it's purely math.

It's just a cpm thing. And so as long as we have enough readers, the rates will grow. And this will be something that at least I can make what I was making when I was a twenty four year old the best back again.

So before a Christ, market or higher reached out to you about sponsorship, had you been thinking about advertising or what you totally focused on one day when we get to a certain point.

we're going to flip the subway pan? No, I mean, I think the other thing that means I an addictive personality. And so I think we had probably cross the point where i've just realized that I like the girl of too much, and I realized that I like the fact that know if I was going to be spending all of this time, like, you know, forty fifty hours straight essay, I didn't want a thousand people to read that essay.

And I want to people tweet about IT and talking about IT and all of that. And so at some point, I realized was probably going to go as I just like hadn't made the lee because I thought even ads, but slow growth and the people wasn't like me doing ads. And so I trying to hold off on that for a little while too.

But yeah, a few companies kind of push me in that direction, improve that. I can actually make a dollar doing that, which is great. There is another moment where I wasn't a lot to buy in an ipad until I actually made money from, not boring. And so finally I made, like, ten thousand dollars and put, let me buy ipad. So like a bunch of little winds.

late twenty, twenty. How proud are you at that mobile? It's great. Now, looking back on, if IT like these are the things along the way that sure you remember totally.

And IT is a glorified kindle for me. I've read books on IT, and occasionally i'll draw something and thrown the s this last week's title image actually, during myself, it's her. And this that was like, you know, i'm n thomson, is all all I need is an ipad like put connected, like dipping the savings here and good ipad she's like, no, you don't make any money on this newsletter.

You cannot buy yourself an ipad that you don't need. You have a computer. You're fine.

okay. So two questions for you. One, did you experience the thing where the period of time where pay this isn't GTA cover our lifestyle is long and then hey, the period of time where, wow, this is gona more than cover our lifestyle is long, but the period of, hey, this is great, where like, great, a break even sustainable is like, remarkably shorts. So you sort of like blow by IT. And then you like, well, holy crap, I expect to that to be like a longer period of the journey.

one hundred percent. And that that happened really quickly again, to be fair, covering our lifestyle was like not particularly difficult when we were living in my in laws basement, we had a baby. And so that was a real meaningful thing.

But when you have a baby, David, you know, this people send you probably with the first at least six months, or the cloth and diapers and all of that kind of, you don't really starting car ring expenses on the kid for a bunch of months. And we are living in a basement. And my mother in law is a phenomenal cook. And I was maybe paying for, like awa hoggy every .

once in a while, while a hog is, yes.

the best you guys need to do when I quired on on a at some .

point we totally said.

wait, okay, let me give you a question. Number two, that, and I ask question one because as i've talked with other creators who experience that moment, there's a really weird thing where you feel like because face one was so long and have been looking forward to face to the break even phase. I mean, it's great to be in face three, but it's like weird ly unsatisfying how fast you blew through phase too because you've been looking forward to IT for so long.

I guess it's the optimist thing. And like what is because I said the first three months up as an experiment and knew that I could go find another job somewhere, and that hopeful, ly, maybe the newsletter would have introduced me to somebody who might be willing to hire me, because I like what I wrote. So that wasn't like a revenue desirous period.

And then there were those ones between kind of after that, where was growing. And I like, this is gonna happen. So probably everybody around me he was relieved that that happened.

But for me, it's kind of like, you know, again, it's Matthew. And so like this will happen. And as long as IT keeps growing, then it'll become like a number that is really exciting.

I didn't think I was gonna as well as I did, but there was no point roles like I really hope that i'm like, you know, able to eat and that I can scrape things together again, probably because we are living in my last basement. But I think that probably would admitted a little more satisfying. I was like every month dreading the rent check, but fortunately that was not an issue for us.

Yeah okay. So then that leads me a question number two, which is you have pioneer a pretty unique sponsorship format like we thought we pioneer the unique sponsorship format and the presenting sponsorship, where in we like really throw our a lot in with the presenting sponsor for three months, shout to pilot obama website everything, interview on the top of the show and then here comes back in a comic and says, you know what, every week one of the two posts that I do is gonna be pure, unadulterated ated.

I am getting paid by the subject to write this. I am doing the thing that is going to make classically trained journalists freak out. And i'm just going to own that.

How did you come to this? And what were your fears around IT? How did you come to be all that?

So I really get the origin story somewhat wrong. I'd started talking to nick as at that mainstream, if you use twitter, you've probably got in a sponsor tweet from him about using main street also happen to be a phenomenal guy. Love neck, thank you.

And he was like, by the way, like these posts that you write on companies, you could write those on start off and bet people would be willing to pay. And he had just come over from shock capital to run marketing main story and and will be the first ones who do this. And I like, all right, cool.

Let's try that on the cavy out to help out of IT intelligence. Ty, right up front that it's sponsored. But I think main state is really cool.

So I would actually love to right about ministry and explain and like my audiences of one of entrepreneurs and founders. And I bet my entrepreneurs onder audience with love to make money back from the government that otherwise they might not have any mean. Street will get you kind of your tax cribs back in in an easy way.

By the way, what month was this you're having? This conversation is .

this was actually pretty early in the sponsorship journey. So this was probably often like the August.

september range. okay. So still at ten thousand years to followers.

sell at ten thousand is witter followers. My fears were obviously like, this is not what you're supposed to do. They are not the first. Use the news letter to show sponsored content is a dirty word because, you know, a Normal journalistic institution that has integrity. There's a wall between the people who write the actual journalists and the people who write sponsored content.

And it's a thing that is like optimized for seo and like kind of like click baby and like all that kind of sponsored content does not have a particularly great name. But I like art, right? So if I do this, really my kind of bar for myself has to be as high as IT would be writing a Normal piece.

And i'm only going to write about things that i'm actually bullishness on and companies that I would actually invest in myself in this before there is a fun to anything but that i'd put my personal money into. And so that was kind of the bar that I said for myself. I was like, you know, I like ask the audience even like, did you hate this? Please let me know if you hated this.

You know, one or two people every time I write a sponsor poses like you're shelling the sponsor. No sponsor content, please. But the last majority either don't care.

Although the open rates are actually like fairly consist may be a little but higher on the monday pieces or they get something out of IT. So you know, main treat, a bunch of people won't got a bunch of money back. So they love that. It's interesting because they serve a bunch of different audiences. When I talked to founders for apportion capital, now a lot of their favor pieces actually in a being some the sponsored posts because I get behind the scenes access into some of he's really fast growing successful startups and get to write something more detailed on them than anybody else has written before.

Oh yeah, I am an investor in modern treasury, and I learned a lot about the company from your recent sponsor post on modern treasury.

even ben thomson on his party. I was back in debrusk out calling me by name, was like, there is somebody who writes a newsletter who does this thing where the stuff actually pay him to write about them. But it's actually kind of good because he gets more information for these companies that are pully available.

He he was kind of saying that he doesn't write about private companies as much because as he doesn't have as much material to analyze, but that if I actually worked with the company, I have a bunch of stuff to analyze and i'm very artist with them that like I will talk about what I think isn't great if there are things that I will talk about competitors in a positive light and I will never say just like, you know, do a hat, a job on competitors in the piece and less competitors like a straw like. Now I talked a lot of ship on passwords when I read about stitching. That's fine because nobody loves passwords.

But you know, as long as I keep that bar high, and i'm like very honest, I say up front, every time this is a sponsor post, this is how that works. Here's a link to a dog that I wrote about how I choose them, people under black, the post. And so what I saying was founders end up making those because often times they are either at the same spot in their journey or there a little bit behind where those companies are. And so they're learning how divel practical on the ground things that those companies are doing and can take lessons from that. So those actually feed in a lot of different way is really well into the fund.

I want to pause for a second that in the action movie story of the network story, I think this is a good point to talk about. A few things kind of just going on in the world around you doing this. And one, obviously, what you doing wouldn't be possible without all the platforms and infrastructure sub stack, twitter, all of the things that we take for granted now, but ten years ago didn't exist. Like I just wouldn't be possible to have a solar corporation like not boring to be doing with even when bentos son did that, he had to roll his own for so much of this.

You are Operating a venture fund with no other employees. That angle makes that possible.

But it's interesting rate.

Like you said, a traditional media organization would have journalistic integrity and would never do this rate. Well, what is journalistic integrity, right? And like you to post twenty, sixteen and donal trump in everything, like, you know, this is kind of one of those second, third daughter effects of the last five years in the world in this country of lake.

Well, maybe mainstream journalism still has a great place, but maybe it's OK to also do things differently and maybe they don't have all the truth. And maybe maybe you can think differently about our journalism and contiguity means. And then you kind of liked to this, like geo of sponsored content.

And IT truly was a gato was IT a geo because I didn't have integrity or because nobody put the work to make a great. You know, you made IT great. yeah.

There's a lot time. First of the platforms like know all in a web through now certainly rely on web two platforms in a really big way. The most beautiful part of about sub stack is because we've taken such a strong stand for subscriptions and against advertising.

No one another team has ever even reached out to me. And so I failed zero dollars for my main platform because they want to pretend like ads don't exist. And I hope they don't hear .

this and start charging. They've never reached out to you, never reached out. Oh my god.

That is just like kind of this happy accident where my main platform ends up being free. So people will pitch me kind of new newsletters, platforms all the time. And I like that you're pretty bummed that you're paying temple of your revenue to substate. I don't like I actually have paid anything to twitter is free and I written about this before, but actually I pay for twitter blue. Now just out of like a thank you.

It's a garbage product so far, but just of a thank you for all the twitter has done at two ninety nine month for that now so that the cost but you know, these platforms have been hugely helpful in making that boring what IT is and and the cost on the other side that the point you're talking about journalistic integrity, we're catching me a time where i'm like kind of in this many self proclaimed nobody cares but like kind of war against all the sync m that's happening there. I think everybody has incentive and motives. And at least if i'm saying I am sponsored and this company is paying me right now or right about this IT is just very out in the open.

What i'm trying to do if I say invested in this company or whatever else, like everybody can go into the peace, kind of knowing that, that is the table stakes. I don't know what the incentives are for traditional tech annalists, and they're not certainly all this bad. But I think a lot of the reason that not boring works is because they're so much sark about tech out there for all of these companies that are one just groups of people not making a ton of money.

And like now maybe salaries are a little bit and all that, but for the past of decade, people of these small companies not making a ton of money and like actually trying to change the world, and that's like a corny phrase, but like is how you can recruit people to come work somewhere and not make a lot of money trying these new things, like taking different pieces off the shelf, going, trying to build something. And then there's like sark fifty year old men looking back like, no, i've seen something like this before, really stupid, or you like X, Y and z. And this is not well thought out enough even for me to like be saying this publicly.

But IT feels like a lot of journalism is like left over from an era where journalism was like really needed because not everything was out in the open and like you needed journalism to expose corruption and like take down to my hall and like all this stuff, and then you apply all of that to like these little test companies that have raised like five million dollars, and you like try to dig through the garbage. There is an article and business insider on spring health about their work culture of the other day that was like trying to be a hata job. But there was nothing bad in there was like people worked hard at the company.

Marketing guy said his team was working too hard and so they what he wanted to lower the goals and the C. E. O said, no, we we're not lowering the goals, but to hire more people for you.

That is a tale is oldest time and startups that you know, there's a battle between the C E O and the marketing team about what the goal should be in the C E O. That's an earthly aggress go. And the fact that somebody think it's worth investigating for four months this story about this company or like the hit job that they just did on row, which was like also total B S.

Like you can always find someone who's unhappy in the company when you're not making that much money and when you're working a lot. And then to use these people who have gotten fired as sources for these hit pieces that are barely done in, nobody believes that is just a business. More, I think, when the the market turns and when we enter a bit of a bear market in tech and web three, like it'll be really easy to throw stones at me like I am unicode optimistic about all of this and like things are going to turn out like of the is going to go out my pants, we're going to be down. I'm also totally fine with that because I do think that like the overall tone of technical ism is like what's wrong with these companies like they're making too much money. And so if somebody asked beyond other side saying, like now this is awesome.

i'm happy to be that guy. It's exactly what you said. It's incentives and its audiences, right? You planned your flag from the very beginning that you are going to be an optimist and your audience is founders and people who are also optimistic about this whole industry. There's a viable audience of people who are pessimists out there and you're dt like IT and that's what the other media outlets can rate for and til. But it's like nobody was doing what you're doing.

The only piece too is like, you know, I want to be optimistic. It's like naturally what I am IT goes back to doing the thing that you actually are in this a reason I worked at to start up and even that that started didn't do well. I'm still optimistic this because I think like a lot of really great stuff I ve come out of this.

I also want to be realistic. So i'm not going to just be like this is always the greatest thing in the whole entire world and my favorite kind of audience of the people who come in. And I was Frankly really skeptical about cyp to or about what three or about tech in general until I read this piece.

And IT explained IT really well in ways that makes sense. So I still try to tie this stuff back to like business principles and were both huge seven powers fans. So try to actually tie back like what is the competitive advantage of this protocol of this company.

And so I don't want you to just be like pie in the sky optimism. So if I can convert people who were like either pessimistic or skeptical over to at least being thought ful about IT like that's all i'm going for us be thoughtful about. And I think if you're thought for about this industry, you're going to come away at least being like done a lot in the past few decades .

when you seem to Operate under the same primary principle that we deo and David night, text ourselves this phrase all the time, or text each other this phrase, one one of us is string from IT. But role number wanted acquire IT is assume the audience is smart.

And if you assume that the cool thing as long term, that means you'll get a whole bunch of smart people as long as you keep doing your thing and you stay true to that, they will pay attention. That comes with these interesting trade, ffs, where you can never allow yourself to hide the ball, or else your compromising that long term goal. And so you always, to the extent that you are assuming your audience smart, you have to write well reasoned stuff, or else you are just going to take an enormous manner ship for what you put out in the world. It's like he didn't say, hey, he reminds me of this thing sponsored and then write a total fluff thing with zero serious analysis in there because everyone just going to look at IT and go, well, yeah, you told me that your independence was compromised and then IT wasn't useful then IT wasn't something that I enjoying thinking about.

You can't waste people's time. Certainly one of the test that I was run myself, and I probably actually would have failed this test, is if their notes that come to me on a sponsor post, you know, however, many years ago, fences are, Frankly, I would have written something positive unfairness because I assume the best. And i'm not technical and I am not digg into that machine of being like actually, you know the science doesn't make anything impossible with that of blood sample. How you possible.

And that tour investigative journalism has a very valuable al one hundred percent.

There are goods to both and they are bad things. My project, and I don't know which company probably of them, but maybe there's a company that even about that ends up being a total house of cards, you know, in five years. And I look like an idiot for writing that piece, I probably would have written about their nose.

And that's okay. Trade as long as i'm like nobody y's expecting me to analyze the science behind their OS. If I could analyze like the business side of the business at least and do the work and maybe somebody learn something that is, you know not just about there, not but about some other concept that are using to analyzed the company. And that's okay. So I guess that's the risk.

Will they get back to this? You know Frankly, I don't know he was intentional or not. But this brilliant you do sort of, judi, you did with sponsor content that was a geo and sucked because nobody actually gave a dam put in the effort to make IT great. You've done that. But you do have to put the effort to make a great one .

hundred percent. Yeah, the worst thing that could possible happens if I did one of those and wasted people's time because people would not subscribe, people wouldn't read the next sponsor post. So the whole thing falls apart if I lose my integrity throughout this process.

The lucky thing is that i've been pretty like open optimists the whole time and no one's like that. So weird. You're rip apart tech on monday and then on thursday when people pay you, you're like really generous to this old industry. So it's all consistent at least.

So I told you at the beginning this wasn't to be a soft balls. I don't want to pretend that every thursday piece is exactly as interesting as every monday piece because and again, I think this is okay, but there are a lot of thursday pieces that the headline doesn't sound interesting to me and I end up either not reading IT or just like skimming IT to make sure I like didn't miss some huge piece of information where i'm like I would be good for me to know this.

However, when the monday piece has come out like who this could be the next great online game, this could be the next CoOperation economy. And it's rare that I think that a thursday piece is going to be that actually, except t like salona summer, that kind of was that. But I I do think that, that probably in line with your sponsors expectations is that it's gna appeal to a group of people that they particularly want to appeal to who wanted to know about their company and happens to subset of your audience. But it's probably not going to be like, hey, let's all close our eyes and pray and do cumbria that this is exactly the same thing as the non sponsored content.

That's totally fair. I try to make IT as good as I possible. Can am often writing though about either a specific company, which is just like a smaller design space, then something like a great online game would be.

And i'm also writing, I guess, about you know company that has less of a history and like less complexity to IT maybe in some of the larger public companies that are are about. So my goal is the right the best thing that's been written on that company every time I do a sponsor deep type and chances aren't a lot of cases it's a two year old company. Like the best thing that ever been written on that company isn't going to be as interesting as breaking down tencent over twenty thousand words because tenant is a bowling business that has like crazy innovative business model.

And so well, I wanted to be as close to the monday as humanly possible. Like my real bar for myself is, can this be the best thing ever been written on this particular company? Plus is this the company that I would invest in, in all of that? So of the open rates, thirty seven percent and set of forty five percent on thursdays. I'm totally fine with that. And you know everybody y's come away very happy from the sponsor deep dives .

on the company side yeah to my mind, the right question to ask isn't necessarily is every thursday piece going to be as good as every monday piece? It's if i'm the company, if i'm your customer. Is this blatantly obviously the very best thing that I can do to get something written and a great deep analysis done about my company.

And that is so obviously, yes, what is their alternative? So i'm sure they'll be more people like you who pop up, and that's great. It's not a zero some game but if i'm a two year old company and am the founders that company and I want to I think i've got something great but I need to cross the casm to have people know about IT. It's not like you're gonna write a monday piece about IT otherwise necessarily.

The other fun thing to is like companies can almost choose how interesting they want IT to be. I think the best example of a sponsor depart that i've done was and this was this was a allama ramp then like they're kind of double unicorn round when they raised at one point one billion of evaluation in a one point value in the transaction.

And the reason that that one worked so well was because eric the CEO there was like to completely open commons. Ask us anything I will give you the time, mine of how this round game came together. I will give you exactly how we think about capable construction.

Do you tell me what you need to make the most interesting piece possible? And I will give that to you. A lot of companies make the train on the other side, which is also totally fair.

They want to keep some information private that they think there's an advantage to keeping private. And so that's the trade that, that I think you make there. But there's a reason like I think people refer that piece often when you know they are reaching out to me about sponsor pose.

And then a lot of companies aren't to make that trade off when I like cool the reason that would worked so well. So they told me everything and they like cool do that. But like, you know maybe ninety percent of the information .

before we move that I want to cover one final topic of journalistic integrity because, dave, that I think, like your take may come across when we go back and listen to this as a little bit too like. And this is when the downside of democracy started. We can point to this moment where David rosen all said the journal second.

integrity is not important.

I don't mean that that way. I don't think that's like really the right take away, but could be heard that way. I think there's like two pieces really on packet of like why is journalistic integrity important? The first one is that the reader is fully disclosed on the incentives and knows what they're getting. And we've covered that topic like packing y wave arms around all over the place and everyone knows what they signed up for. So that's almost like the microeconomic m acro like the micro to your business.

But then there's a micro one two where I could be a bad thing for the state of the republic if every journalist looks over at what you're doing packing y and says, um I could do that and you have the very best writers from the new york times or forbes or well, street journal that are just like I could go make five to ten times as much and have a much more independent lifestyle with control over my life. Okay, by opening this up, this independent journalism, according journalism, I think it's important, not called journalism, independent content creation that is entertaining to read and fully disclosed. Insane fied do we chase away at the third of state?

So one of the things that I think has been really interesting is that people have jumped over the fence from working for a to going independent, and then now have started to jump back and like, I couldn't do what they do. And this is not like, you know, a lack of respect for those people like my brain wouldn't work if someone hired me to be like, you have to go be an investigative journalists.

IT wouldn't work IT, right? And so that's one party. I do have respect for that, particularly when it's applied the right way. My problem is when it's applied to, like a one year old start up, that may be like overworks there quand quote overworks their employees a little bit as start up occasionally doing is a lot of companies ocasio ally do like when you apply the same rigor to that is like water gate like that when I I kind of have a bit of an issue with IT. So going back to the piece on kind of people jumping over back, there's a lot that goes into that.

And I think it's really hard to do that kind of alison, independently because you need lawyers who have your back and you need editors to make sure that you get everything right and you need a all this stuff to protect you when you're doing this really brave work that I think is tougher to do on the on the independent side. So hundred percent thing that there is a place for that kind of journalism. It's just like don't apply that to like start up that makes hot dogs and like came in over budget one quarter and like that shows how stupid startups are. Like that kind of article is what will they gets me?

Well, I think IT also works the other way too, which is that it's hard to do what you're doing. The goal of this episode has been to tell your story. And I think what are the takeo is i'm not surprised by as like your whole life and career lead to this.

So if you are an investigative journalist at X, Y, Z publication doing very much, not this, and then you're like, I i'm just onna, jump over and do what packy does. You wouldn't be equipped in the same way that you are. You worked for six years at the start up from employee through hundreds of people and through failure, which helps through failure. Yes, exactly.

That's right. There is definitely an empathy there too. And like I go into this knowing full well that it's wild, that I was an employee, not a founder at the start that sold for three million dollars after raising hundred twenty million dollars, unless the content stands for itself, like nobody should be listening to me, because there are many more successful people to listen to out there. So all of that has let in anything gives me a great empathy for what founders are doing. But the content has to stand for itself.

okay. So taking us back to the story you mentioned february is when ben thomson mentioned you as some guy who writes S A news letter whose name I can't remember something like that, of course. The funny thing about compounding, you went from zero and tomson mentioned your whole life to like now that feels like every few newspapers I read IT from him and like that there's packing again.

But at first no name name mention I think was in february when you had twenty two thousand twitter followers. You also send out a tweet in february that you wanted not boring to make one million dollars this year, which, as David has in the notes, sounds f thing crazy. And i'm curious what happened in your brain as you formulated that tweet was IT that the sponsored posts 还 been going well， where you already contemplating not boring capital? What was that moment like?

yes. So i'd been thinking a little bit about not boring capital. And so that was there, but really was sucking back, just purely making a million dollars off of the newsletter.

A couple of things that happened around that time, like me and bend from composer wrote this piece on excel that got picked up, I think, by two separate new ork times articles and to the top of paper news and all of that kind of things, like, wow, that was my first taste, like the thing really going kind of mainstream. I had a written, a sponsored post. I think probably you either that week or was in the middle of writing the post.

And the company was really happy with that. And I in miami and the wether was nice and I could have been in new york in the midst february, and I probably wouldn't have waited the same thing. But I woke up and the sun was shining.

And I think, you know what, life is pretty good, like i'm probably making at this point call IT ten or fifteen thousand dollars among there something like that. So not close, maybe twenty, I don't know, but I just woke up feeling like really good. And I you just going to say this like people really think I want us all, but i've struggled on zero dollars for the past x number of a months and i'm just going to say IT. And then as I think happens often with the streets, like the support was actually huge from them like nobody reads that as a hockey signal because first I didn't say like guess what I just did IT was really like I hope the rewilded of this happens. But also people like want to see other people take risks and succeed at them.

I think like a pack is making IT. Maybe i'm kind of making IT in the way.

The other thing is like there is like a tiny buffer between just me saying like i'm going to make a million dollars salary this year and saying like, not boring, we'll make a million dollars because it's still a business. And for a business a million dollars years like mine, you could probably raise a seed and maybe a serious day in the market on that and certainly not the media company. So no, it's not like anything crazy from a business perspective.

But you know that was that was when I came from to give us the update or now and it'll be december by the time this comes out. How we trend.

I think wag me. We were talking about pilot, and I certainly probably need the help of vocable vers. I just pulled my mercury account that you know, I do all my banking in and and I think that probably has about seven hundred and fifty thousand in revenue.

There's a bunch of invoices outstanding. Some people said checks, some goes to my personal backing like this is not a well run business finding stretch of the imagination. And I have a few pieces kind of coming up. And so I think chances are we're going to just kind of cross A A million dollars in twenty twenty one.

Wow, so great. What would you have .

put the percentage chance at when you sent that tweet?

I would have put the percentage chance that we got to a million other run rate pretty high. I thought probably given that I kind of couple that point and that wasn't the right run, right to get me there, I probably would put IT at like twenty percent that I actually had a million this year. IT, is the power of compounding kind of happening? really? The number is just keep getting bigger of the points.

Ts, like, you know what have taken me ten sponsor deep dives. I can not do once to a deep dive. And that all grows and compounds, I guess, but still absolutely crazy. I mean.

speaking of compounding, so you had gone from a few hundred followers to twenty thousand followers or twenty two thousand followers by that february when you sent that tweet, you d already double that. Then by june to forty two thousand, it's crazy that you are now over one hundred thousand. You definitely have this thing where you're growing somewhere from twenty forty percent per month. I can bump up and down. But at this point, it's probably for you more of a market saturation question of like when does the top of the s curve start to hit or when does this thing liner out a little bit?

There's a little bit of a bomber in those twitter numbers, which is a point of pride for a while that I had more subscribers than I had twitter followers and now I have more twitter followers than I have servers like one hundred and five or something on twitter and eight eight in the newsletter. And so like, let's change that. That probably means, and I should spend a little less time to eat.

Everybody who need to help, help you out here goes subscribe if you have been already.

In some ways, that would shock me. Actually, if I know numbers, why is there are people who listen to acquired, who earn subtribes? Not boring, but in my head of my, who are those people like we are a little bit less.

And this is something I wanted to talk to you about, like ethereal, theoretical, abstract, and Frankly, like a little bit less future looking. Like one question I have for you as at what point did you skeptically walk up to the web 3Cliff and then just jump off IT without a parachute because you did wait more that then we've done here and acquired？ So I can imagine maybe that's a difference in audience, but let me bring you back to if you're not subscribe, not boring. Oh my god, go subscribed.

Thank you. Not boring that cow. Yes, the web three point, and I think the way was a turning point.

And you know, I wrote about for a lot of twenty, twenty got a lot of competition that are super fascinating and that I ve always wanted to just like dig really deep into and Frankly, that you all have done way Better work on then I haven't was able to kind of build on the back of of what you've done there. Thank you. Not true.

Different approaches continue. You were first until, like I can tell you for a fact that without again, we will go to the tencent epo de but out the tencent episode unrequired, there wouldn't probably be that not boring to party on tencent. And either way, like that is just foundational stuff.

And I realized, I think, probably something that I realized when I was in finance in the first places, that there are people who are just so much Better at digg into public companies than I am and analyzing public companies than I am. And that wasn't really kind of that clean, a choice to say, like, you know what, instead of public companies going to do this of three thing. But when I started any about what three remember, there was one essay that I wrote, the value in the open metaverse back in january, were I was really apologetic, almost even in the intro to that piece that I was writing about cyp to in the members.

And I like everybody. This is really weird. My audience has become the fairly fin twit and finance .

v and that's this year that's packing a comic writing in twenty twenty one, apologetically, that i'm sorry, i'm talking about cypher.

right? I mean, so how much that the world has changed since? And this was before people, sixty nine million dollar sale in the bush of stuff I talked about kind of some of the early, early people.

people before you tried to buy the U. S. Constitution.

before I try to buy the U. S. Constitution with the unch of but you know that he ended up being, I think, really well received because IT was a again, optimistic take against encysted was non dismissive take at least on what was going on.

But IT was really back to the basics of like, right, take a value chain. What happens when you take the medal out? Like I didn't like the language that was used around corrupt the time and I think that scared me away. Where was like were going to take down the institutions and we're going to remove the middle and were going to be and no, right. It's just taking a step back.

If you take out somebody from the transaction and you let the consumer and the creator interact directly, more value accused to the consumer in the creator, everybody out there reading is more likely to be a consumer or a creator than you are likely to be facebook or twitter. So this is actually probably a pretty good thing for most of us that you know there's just more value that can accurate to both sides of this equation. That was kind of, I think my jumping off when into when people were like others actually really interesting.

And I didn't understand this stuff at all before. And now I really don't understand IT still, but I understand IT a little bit Better and I understand that maybe it's worth looking into. And I even said myself a rule that I would just do, kind of like, may be one web 3。 I'd probably called a cypher o back in the day before I was even called web one cyp to piece a month.

And then something else interesting happens. So then I was two. And then other ideas that I was thinking about, like I read this piece called power, the person which wasn't sensibly about crypto, but IT certainly was partially about the things that crypto, that's a solo creator, sop ur do. And there are a few more articles like that where I wanted to read about something else, and crypto just kept creeping back into IT. And then you wrote a piece that we discuss on a previous acquired epo de about a thereon, and then dive into salona.

And I think hopefully, what I can do, and I actually need to keep myself honest because i'm getting so excited that I might like actually lose some of this, but really want to give you like somewhere between this is a scam and this is like going to save the world and take down the institutions. I want to be able to give that take in middle that is like. Here's where it's good.

So I think the thing about this song of piece, maybe that worked is that like, here's what this thing is like. It's a block game and that's crazy. It's a platform and that needs to attract developers to build on top of the platform, and those developers need to attract users.

And if that happens, then people will probably be in a pretty cut shape. And like here's maybe one way you think about valuing the block chain and and go from there, but it's really that kind of the approach that i'm trying to take. All this is like this is amazing. And let's tie up back to some sort of like business concept that .

you're familiar with. I like that. That is a thing that doesn't exist. There is a clear divide between the let's look at regular companies world and invest in regular companies world and the people who have, for lack of a Better phrase, gone down the rabbit hole.

And that divide is really around business fundamentals and structure fundamentals because a lot of people are like, oh, well, with out, we throw everything out. So no one even like as a manager and like of course, there's no bored and of course is no shares and of course there's no contracts, of course there's no employment agreements. But like yeah this way everyone gets to do what they want. And I like your point when you are writing about the CoOperation economy where you should like, well, at the end of the day, humans are still humans and do need to organize in ways that if our goal should ship a product, we do have to figure out some structured ship product.

Yeah, I mean, nothing is a panic. I think this is a really amazing new ticket to have and opens up again. I'm just probably spent too much time attack in V, C.

S. I say design space now too often, but IT opens up this like new design space. We just have a new set of tools that you can build with.

And so double, I think you are really great in certain situations. I think eight out of ten downs might totally fail because they they have kind of that leadership issue or like who is the final decision? Make your issue.

But I think there's other two are going to do things that you might not have ever thought to do with a traditional CoOperation. They'll spend up faster and they'll more responsive. And so I think like nothing is all good and bad, but I think there are going to be some emergent properties to do s that are really interesting and probably previously would not have been possible.

And so that's a really good thing. So I don't want people to dismiss out out, right, because sometimes they can be a little bit chaotic or what ever mean, like I got involved in the constitution that which was trying to buy the constitution this week. And IT shows both the amazing things, which is you can rally a group, the people around this shared mission, and raise almost fifty million dollars to go fight to win the constitution and bring him back to the people.

And then it's also very hard to make huge decisions in a seven day time frame and to organize a twenty thousand person discord, all of whom has been told that there are part of IT down and has a voice. And so like what's the right baLance there? Then you go to the idea like progressive, the centralization, which I think makes a lot of sense, which is start out kind of like a company.

Then over time, particular, you're building a protocol, something that is not as like consumer facing. Maybe then over time, you can kind of progressively give up control and and see more control to the users and the owners. Sad again there.

The whole, the whole approach is like, here's where it's good. Here's where there's issues and like, here's something that might kind of work. And oh, let's go try IT that the worst thing you can do is just dismiss something.

Do you get blown back from people who were really into what you used to write about and are now like you gotten like spin something off or like I just can not buy IT .

before I I had and I still have IT on, but I I just don't read them. I had my unsubscribed turned on and and would literally go through every time I subscribe me someone that's strat now I don't care as much. I think this is kind of your point earlier.

About time getting the audience you deserve. Maybe there is a little for i'm not coming on myself to get pyo here. But like a little bit of the amazon shareholder thing, we're like, he had to work as ask off to get the shareholders that would actually appreciate what amazon was doing, but they did. That puts you in a really great spot as a company when you have shelter ers. The actual quote IT .

does make that the actual quote is not you get shareholder you get the shareholders you ask for in the long run, you get the asper exactly.

And I hopeful. Ly, I what I don't want to do is alienate everybody who has like some sense of the fundamental, have that like those are people that I really want to read up boring, and I want to keep me accountable. But if people are just like, hey, you're writing about web three and I think it's stupid and they leave them, that's totally fine.

It's really like the people who are like, hey, you're actually like losing all sense of fundamentals here like that am out like that when I know that I have there was one, there is seventy D M. A. After I wrote the piece on so long, actually that was like, man, I miss the old packed y.

When you would give us alpha, you would be early on things like snap or whatever. And then of course, I want to like three and half eight in the next. I just gave you a truck load of alpha, but like that still hurting. I don't wanna not do the thing that i'm promising to people, but I also i've never had a very specific focus and i've always been onest that i'm to follow whatever I think is the most interesting IT makes my schedule miserable because I pick each week what I want to write about based on what I think the most interesting thing happening is. But you know, I do want to follow whatever I think is is the most interesting .

thing going on and look that has attracted an order instead includes CEO of fan companies, I mean, that are active substance bed to newsletters. So unless they're unsubscribed seems like it's working.

Did you please send you that email?

Yeah jeff and I the thing that .

do not give the offer anymore this so I I .

ve never spoken he doesn't subscribe someone I think signed up with such in a dellis email address but I certainly wasn't him in that email dresses never opened in email so I think that was a prank. But like, no, I do know you see those of big .

companies in all of that. It's actually .

that would be messed up. I was so excited. All right.

So speaking of web three, you wrote in your power to the person peace another sort of crazy sounding prognostic that you predicted that within a decade or two there would be multiple trillion dollar market cap organizations that were run, quote, quote, by just one person that you called solo corporations. And your point was, hate already exist. It's called bitcoin.

Nobody works for bitcoin, and it's a trillion dollar market cap back to not boring itself. It's so us. It's like incredible. And like benin, one hundred percent in the camp that are cheering for you that you made IT to a goal of making a billion dollars in revenue this year a kind of old school way of thinking about that would be, like patchy, is the head of the distribution in the creator economy.

And one of the few people that have really broken out, you're going to be like an N, B, A player, you know, level in the a professional player in the creator account. Me another way to think about where this could go though is, no, you're building a solo corporation and it's not just that you're going to make a few million dollars a year reading a news letter. Not boring can be something a lot more. How do you think about that?

This is just one of the hy critical things about not what you maybe is that you analyze everybody else is strategy and plans and all these things. And they're really isn't one for up oring like what I love, not boring, to be a big and lasting thing that builds actual products and does, you know things that kind of outlive me a hundred percent? I would love that i'm right now worried about what i'm going right about on monday.

And so that's like both a blessing in a course. I think so far, I think maybe the good thing about not boring has been that you are fully focused on the content and making sure that as good as possible. The downside is that i'm not planning ahead, but like any stretch, i'm like one of the worst planners you've ever met.

Clearly, if you've been listening to this story.

so there isn't right now a long term plan for something like that, I think the really fun thing about kind of know the financial growth of this is that new opportunities kind of pop up. I do you think I need to put you know a bit of a structure in place, whether that's formal or informal, around not boring, so that I can have some time to focus on other opportunities, know either as arrival got a bit proactively.

But for right now, I mean, I think one of the things that I can this middle by media businesses are hard and have a hard time transitioning into into something a lot, lot bigger is that if I say, you know what I really want to like, go start building apps and i'm going to be like i'm a launch patchy coin and i'm going to build a bunch of apps and make like try to make like a billion dollars and I don't focus on the content, the whole thing probably falls apart. And if I bringing people to like help on the research and to go right for me all that that IT loses the thing that one that I like doing and two is at the corbit and on which everything else realize. I think there's a really interesting kind of web through angle here.

Like how do I figure out how to build, whether it's a dw or something kind of loose structure around this where other people can go off and like kind of tap into the not boring audience and network and all of those things to build things on top that are aligned with with what we're doing, obviously, networking capital. You know you can kind of scale the outcomes with bias, both the combination of A U M. And actual kind of ability to invest in the right companies.

But there is not a lot of plans beyond that. If this becomes a thing that is a couple million, thousand years, like you'll never hear a complaint for me about that. But like certainly, I think what i'm eighty, what I want to look back and say like that I build something that the second I stop writing doesn't fall apart like a hundred percent. Yes.

I think it's spending a little bit of time on that boring capital, which is obviously not web three other than you are able to invest in web three critics v IT IT.

Is this really interesting thing like and maybe it's unique to sort of our collective corner of the creative economy, but IT is a real business and IT is a real step towards going from just being, uh, you i'm thinking you would like the P A, so that we did your half ica, whatever I was. Where is IT her first agent from remembering, right? Who said, like, look, you can be the talent in front of the camera.

You like, you can make a few million dollars. You have a great life, right? Or you can own the production, you know and then then you can become Opera IT doesn't like what there's kind of this opportunity for creators now to go from just being like an individual, the talent in front of the camera to a lot more.

Yeah and I think certainly up in capital is a step in that direction. I think the three of us are very lucky that the type of content that we make is also really well aligned with doing ventura capital. Obviously, there a lot of creators who are starting to investment startups.

I'm less dismissive that know you can probably tell at this point then most people are because I think you know, they probably have really deep insights in the certain spaces that other people who haven't been creators and haven't built that kind of business wouldn't understand. But I think for us in particular, we're really lucky in Harry savings falls into this camping in a bunch of other people do as well. Lenin Turner all fall into this camp.

were worth living and .

breathing this stuff everyday. And this public back to conversation and journalist integrity. Really, I actually don't want to do this without having skin in the game, and I don't want to do this without kind of digging and getting involved in the companies that i'm writing about and trying to help shape their trajectory.

I love picking up the phone and talking to the founder, but not just like here's this idea that I came up with and wrote about kind of abstractly, but like, here's this problem that we're having right now. How should we think about solving this problem? And so I think like that is really like a huge benefit of being able to have both an opening capital and not boring the news letter and all sorts of ways that they work together.

And from a business respective, it's phenomenon because IT does scale a lot Better to run venture fund then to show up every week and get a sponsor and then right essay. But again, like this wasn't even planned. That's not where he really came from. Like one time where I wrote an essays to help a friend who was trying to explain how his company worked, and then he raised a syndicate with somebody else. And then that turned into my own indicate, which turned into a fun because I was too much of a pain in the ater right memo was every time that I wanted to do a deal and funders didn't want to wait three weeks to see how much money I might be able .

to give them way you're telling me as an lp in your fund one and fun to you. Don't write investment memo for every single one of your packy.

I write them up here. yeah. I I N I did anyone. Investments and not all live them have investment mbs, but in all seriousness, I do think that all of the time that I spent writing about all of these different kind of is and companies and all that really helped me show up kind of prepared and thinking about what to look for in these different businesses .

on a lot of your investments.

you've written about a lot of my investments. I've written about a lot of investments, Frankly, come in because, you know, I start writing about web three, and I write something like the CoOperation economy that unlocks like how somebody thinks about something. And then they want to start i've i've had that conversation with sounds a few times.

They like this actually like we make all of our employees read this because this is what were trying to do. And so like that kind of helps, you know on the sourcing and and winning deal side. But this wasn't planned either. And so I think the next iteration of morning, whatever like we can out on top here IT, probably won't be planned and probably because that makes sense of what i'm doing. But I could not do this and I didn't plan in this way. I couldn't do this if I didn't have some sort of skin in the game with what's going on here and some sort of like, I like, be honest, when I get so wrongly build up on my worst call of all time, being sure people come on only really the only time i've ever gone one kind of pessimistic, i'd like being called that when i'm wrong and stuff and I think to be able to run meta und says like call here the ideas but then also like i'm putting money behind IT. You'll see the results in how well fun one, fun two, fun three did and whether I am just like fully talking out of my ass or only partially talking out of my ass and got lucky a little bit, uh, in the results of of how these funds do well.

That does seem like you're publishing pretty much like, I think, god, saturday you send out the email L P S, and then come monday, you send out a public version and it's pretty much the same, the obvious. So there are some things that the companies don't want you sharing. But other than that, it's a remarkably transparent way of going about venture investing and IT also super different than classic venture capital.

Like did you lead a single round? Did you write any term sheet? Were you the biggest check in any one of those ninety one investments?

never. And that's all part of the strategy, really. I mean, we all love talking about strategy. And strategy isn't doing everything well. It's picking what things you want to do well and taking advantage of those things.

And so even like figuring out how to Price the round and figuring out what to go on to the term heat and spending time negotiating that and then being on a board got a bit like IT actually just doesn't work with my strategy because like IT is a house of cards already where you move one thing and like the whole thing breaks. And so i'm doing kind of the more deeply time consuming parts venture. IT, at least I am currently constructed, doesn't work. But IT really works very well when you know, I can talk to a founder and we have the specific area, either kind of internally or externally ally, where I can be helpful, you know kind of that that upon but put on your caches .

and that's a question yeah yeah.

But there's a bunch of things that you know you make trade off throughout. I wrote in both the public and private memo that i'm doing probably less diligence, a specific company than most people who are investing in a company well. And that's like an embarrassing thing to say publicly when L P. S. Are reading that or when the the world is reading up.

But it's a fact of the business at like there's just no way in the world that by myself here, while I have another job and investing in another companies, i'm going as deep looking for the flaws in the company and like calling references to look at what this person did wrong. Managerial like I trust that if a good fun is leading around or somebody that I trust is leaving round that they've done that stuff and my job is being as IT is was not boring to look for like what can go really, really right here. And so this will either blow up totally in my face.

I run this crazy bull market. I should have been a lot more conservative and like gone for like VC value investing or IT work. But the whole thing is transparent, which is a thing that's never worked.

by the way, even how an altis would probably agree with that, I would argue. And when I started doing very similar things with great inventors, with that is what you're doing with our cavo here. A certain and I are you selling yourself? sure.

With I how you know everything you have that is like emergent and it's not like you cooked IT all up on a White board, but it's kind of like the sponsored posts, right? People used to think about venture capital in a box. And only one way, you did a lot of diligence.

You rote the term sey. You came to evaluation, you negotiated, you join the board, you did all these things. And obviously, that won't work for what you're doing.

You know you've got a big business reading a news letter, but there's aspects of what you're doing that work way Better than that one specific way of thin. And you know you ve already skilled capital under management doing this. You could probably keep scaling even a lot further with this strategy. But what you're bringing to the table and how you're doing IT is just this kind of new way of thinking.

right? And there's a group of people who I think you're doing this, and I mean, you're certainly involved in this and it's maybe a liquid super ty, to quote myself, and but that coming together and like sharing deals with each other and like trading thoughts and advice. And here's where I think you may be wrong on that investment. The kind of things that maybe before you would have gotten out of a partnership at a firm and certainly that right now you get out of a partnership with a firm and it's not as Normal. And I will still make more mistakes than probably a firm will make, at least on the like, saying yes to things that maybe I shouldn't say yes.

to put picture capitals, never about the mistakes, building the matters in vegetable capital at the ones you get right. And that's kind of the point.

right? There may even be one founder committing fraud that even invested in and IT kind of doesn't.

to the best of my knowledge, not of my bouncer, committed, proud in their alysa. But I mean, you hope that doesn't happen, right? Like they don't want to like live room for people to commit from, for me to just kind of look the other way and make a quick decision. And really I don't really care, but i'm putting trust in the overall kind of ecosystem and system that other people are doing the drive which again could totally blow up in my face or not, but that just a trade off.

Well, the way you're constructing your portfolio with ninety one companies is, you know of course, like absolutely we don't want any for how to have and like that's hot the goal. But you kind of shift to the mindset from like playing defense of like we're going to make sure for a doesn't happen. But in venture capital, the zeroes are meaning the most you can lose is your money.

The most you can make us a thousand times your money. And so you want to maximize the winners. And the thing is, because of what you're doing with not boring, you're getting access to these great investment opportunities that otherwise, if you are a traditional venture investor, you would have to do all of that effort and work to build IT.

We're going to take both sees. We're going to give you great advice. We're going to do all this stuff for you as a by product.

I think that part is total, the chain. That portfolio construction thing is super interesting too, because I spent way longer than you should spend inside of even a successful start up at a start up that ended up fAiling. So I saw the other side of that where there are investors who are right off.

And at some point, you just kind of stop caring about that particular company and you move on to the next one. I really don't want to take that attitude towards that. If there are companies that are not doing well, I want to answer their call as quickly as the who are doing really, really well as I I know how feels to be on the other side of that, but at the same, timely.

This is why i'm totally cool with founders being investors as well. In all, you should diversify and not put all of your eggs in one basket. Obviously, if you're founder and you have a thousand employees or hundred employees or even twenty employees you people are relying on, you should be giving a best majority of your time to make sure that those people who are definitely putting off their exam on basket get the best possible outcome and as much cares they need from a leader.

But I do think there's obviously value to constructing a portfolio. And having been on the other side of that, I appreciate that. I think even more right.

we're talking about portfolio construction. You invest ninety one companies. You're on your second fund. First fund was nine .

point nine nine million dollars.

nine point nine nine. Your second funds, twenty five million.

You couldn't IT to ten.

You not allowed to get IT to ten.

Oh, I see you could call me up and give you next one hundred .

box and fun to where IT to exist would potentially be in the twenty five to thirty million dollar range in that range OK.

All right listeners. Our next sponsor is a new friend of the show, huntress. Huntress is one of the fastest growing and most loved cyber security companies today. Its purpose built for small emd sized businesses and provides enterprise grade security with the technology services and expect needed to protect you.

They offer a revolutionary approach to manage cybersecurity that isn't only about tech, it's about real people providing real defense around the clock.

So how does IT work? Well, you probably already know this, but IT has become pretty trivial for an entry level hacker to buy access and data about compromised businesses. This means cybercriminal activity towards smaller medium businesses is at an all time high.

So hunches created a full managed security platform for their customers to guard from these threats. This includes end point detection and response, identity threat detection, response security awareness training in a revolutionary security information and event management product that actually just got launched. Essentially, IT is the full sweet of great software that you need to secure your business, plus twenty four, seven monitoring by a elite team of human threat hunters in a security Operation center to stop attacks that really software only solutions could sometimes miss. Countries is democratizing security, particularly cyber security, by taking security techniques that were historically only available to large enterprises and bringing them to businesses with as few as ten, a hundred or one thousand employees at Price points that makes sense for them.

In fact, it's pretty wild. There are over a hundred and twenty five thousand businesses now using, and they rave about IT from the Hilton PS. They were voted by customers in the g two rankings as the industry leader in end point detection and response for the eight consecutive season and the industry leader in manage detection and response again this summer.

Yep, so if you want cutting edge cyber security solutions backed by a twenty four seventeen of experts who monitor, investigate and respond to threats with precision, head on over to huntress dot com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes are huge, thanks to hunt us.

okay. So I think before we move on from the boring capital this next race, maybe it's the final additional phase of not boring. Maybe there's more phases to come in the future.

We talked about sub stack twitter IT of the platforms, enabling, not boring the media company. Angela st. Enables not working capital, enables conducting capital.

Like I ve spent eleven, twelve years in venture. Now nine or ten of those as a traditional professional venture capitalist, this would not have been possible. You are one person.

You did ninety one deals in fund one. Who knows how many will deal in future funds? Now having the equivalent of sub stack for adventure from its game cheating, this was not possible before.

It's more than I take the equivalent sub stack for a venture firm because sub stack I still have to write everything and added everything and make all my own graphics. And all of that I worked with gene on the Angeles team. I will give general h out out anywhere that I possibly can because IT is like having more than just a team at like a whole team of people working with me.

Like I will come up with a crazy idea and here we need this crazy idea done, kind of like tomorrow is that OK? I'm so sorry and she's like, yeah, hundred percent. I went and talk to our legal team and we can make IT work if we do X, Y, N, Z thing.

And so having both the platform itself, which is great and makes IT really easy to raise money from L, P S and for L, P, S, to get visibility into kind of how the portfolio is performing all the data a little bit, let L, P, so is actually performing Better than that looks on there. But really like having a teammate over there who is, like fully responsible for making sure that things go smoothly. Let's all of this happen. If there was no generate, Angela st not boring capital would not, but hundred percent would not be a thing.

It's a total reorganization of the value chain by dismantling the vertical integration of venture firms. And it's so interesting that going into this episode, I thought, oh, I see. And this is a crude recipe vacation.

But for not boring capital, packy doesn't need to have associate that are pounding the pavement out in the community, meeting with entrepreneurs because he is a digital way, do that called not boring the news letter. And that way he gets deal flow from that. But it's so much more fundamental than that.

Like you look at a venture firm that has fifty employees, that has several funds and has been around for a while. It's not just that there is a massive back office that you now don't need to have to. I mean, traditionally, adventure forms, you have an I T person like I imagine you don't have an IT person. So not only does your media company not have a vertically integrated staff associated with IT, but your venture capital firm also doesn't have a staff associated with IT. And so you actually can leverage all of this new value chain that is completely reorganized for both the media and the venture capital business to stay a one person corporation.

I mean, none of this is possible ten years ago. I'm not nearly technical enough to make any of this happen on my own. I'm not organized enough to build the systems to even make that happen if I couldn't build software.

Having these Operators is the only reason that not bring is this mean this kind of the point of the the person piece was that there are just all of these things that you couldn't snap off of the shelf and so on set of having to deal with all of the organizational headache of managing and organizing a firm. It's very easy then to just snap one piece in at a time when you need IT. Now it's great.

You know subsection is not an as a thing. It's every week on sending on that. Angela st is like snapping a whole huge sophisticated back office in the place is really .

like subject for adventure for like A W S for a venture firm.

It's like in to be Better with a little bit of like also the person doing like let's I am not technical, also the person doing the innovation when setting up A W S. In the first place because that has been the big thing for me is not just that, the fact that there is a software there that makes IT really easy, but even when I don't know what to do, there's somebody that I can ask about the cape.

Is this a thing that we ask about, you know, nine point nine nine million dollars for fun, one that was a through conversation with generally like, by the way, like I looked into IT, this fun actually has this many benefit owners, but if they're less than ten percent of this and you can do X, Y and z thing. And so even Better than Normal software until A I gets a lot Better because like all the things that i'm too stupid to know that I don't know, they can kind of anticipate and show you the ropes. And so this is not dangerous. st. Ad, but IT is maybe a genes .

of Michael is also great. She's our person. You go.

Thank you to go IT is amazing that it's not just often are like there are when you think about the future and tacking like A I still union's job, maybe that happens at some point in the future. But I think the really great thing is it's just people kind like pulling resources in the right place and then you can go access them at the time. Makes them.

So Angeles model would never work if I only paid them twenty five thousand dollars a year to do what they're doing for up bowingly. I've got eight hundreds of thousands of dollars were of advice and service and all of that for magdala st. But they also have thousands of other clients. And so IT works. And the more there are places to get really, really good at one specific thing, the easier IT is for one person to start a business that .

draws from all you're champion specialization of labor like, hey pig, what happens when everybody is really good at one thing and we have a super, super liquid way of stitching all those together?

Exactly OK. So we're .

sitting here evaluating in all the most positive ways and sunshine and butterflies around this one person corporation thing. What is the tradeoffs here? A strategy person?

Where is IT hard? So the tradeoffs right now are, I don't have any now that investors, I mean, I have a piece for the fund, but if I get IT by a bus, my boring is just done. And that's like the extreme example in the example of everybody uses when that I want to put things. But that means every week, if I don't show up and write something, the momentum slows a little bit.

And so it's like very, very, very hard, I think from that prospectively deal here, zero complaints that of it's really hard to take a week off because i'm worried every time that the momentum will slow and there's not know somebody else in the team, he's just gonna go write something else and keep the momentum going that particular week. So I think that is the obvious one and the one that, you know, I don't have a solution to because they're set on another side that if I have other people writing, maybe people don't want to come in a way to V, X, Y and the other person, that's not the point. I don't want to be an editor and make sure that we all have the same toned.

And so like i'm kind of limited, I think, to whatever I can do as kind of one at least kind of front person on this thing. So that's one big downside. The other, I guess, like there's the whole turning group.

This is right that if you have a big audience that is loyal and dedicated, so kind of this like one particular thing, then you should be able to build businesses all around that person. And like I said, that I have zero time to think about building other businesses around, not boring. And the sponsorship model is like phenomenal.

And you know, IT works really, really well. But sponsorship, if I could be using that same kind of microphone to sell my own products, that probably is actually Better and higher upside and make more equity value and all of those things. And I don't have either the capabilities or the time to build out those types of things.

I guess here's another dog side with one person bottle to the more I do of that stuff, the more deludes the core thing and the more IT makes IT seem like kind of a shell factory. Like advertising is just kind of part of the model. But if I like, hey, you should also buy packy branded hat, right? Maybe buy hat. Can we get some sneakers?

I definitely pimps them. Not boring.

Sneakers will do some of working sneakers that we can do. But there are certain things really I could plug in also to kind of these off the shelf companies that let you launch on brands and all of that. But like at some point, because I did, we like you because we like to read yourself every once in a while, like chill out with building these other businesses on the side.

And so I do think it's limited that were other companies are set up expressly for the purpose of like building their core product and the expanding on top of that. And you know exactly what you can expect. I think it's all about expectations, and the expectation was not boring is that it's mainly about the content and the other things that like plugging in very clean little that content. And the more I do things that like seem like a stretch, the more people like, you know, never mind going to go read the other person who just .

does the content. It's funny. IT flies in the face of the most common advice I give, seed and series a founders, which is, until now, until product market fit, you were the only reason that the business could exist.

You uniquely figured out the product that people wanted and wilted into existence and needed to do everything. And now the only thing holding the business back is you because you still are doing all that stuff and you need to stop and pull yourself out and higher. And you know that sort of thing that is like exactly not true here. You will always be in that first phase. And David and I, too, because we're not willing to organization build around sort of pulling ourselves out of the core product because you are the product one .

hundred percent and for Better or worse, right? That has other benefits for you, i'm sure, as well and for me as well that you are the products you're probably more visible than CEO of a lot of company products you love, and that gives you all sorts of other opportunities. But for the business itself, IT means that IT is harder to kind of scale IT out in a predictable way.

Maybe we could both figure out how to scale these things out. Have been like I like business breakdowns a lot from the investment Patricks kind of figuring in out how to scale out the business that looks like Harry with twenty B C. Some of the data stuff that they're doing is figuring out how to scale out the business in different ways.

But it's really hard and that requires, like at least for me, to require a big pause and a step backwards. Ira, I can't do as much content for the next three months because I need to build out a team. And I know how hard is to hire.

I know how hard IT is to manage. I know how hard to is to manage on an ongoing basis. And that would be a real risky move to even hire people in and take that kind of step back that you need to build the structure to build organza on top.

It's to kind of go that morning brewed out where you're like, actually, there is a brand voice and a format here. And if we can hire correctly for people that can do the not boring thing kind of like they did for the, I mean, that's what is one hundred percent team now, something doing morning brew.

And I don't think Austin uh uh or alex are actually writing the letter anymore, but IT still feels like a pretty similar letter to what I was reading five years ago or four years ago. So that worked. It's a totally different way to go about IT though.

and you guys could probably a Better than I, right? I think the great thing about that business, they had both alex and Austin. So you know, one person could focus on the content, then one person could focus on kind of building new organza and take turns that again, a little bit with acquired because you're both the personalities and you're both kind on on the podcast. But IT is nice, something for them that had this partnership where be on sitting in the .

room alone here. But you have robots on the wall.

Robots on the wall. I have my brother, who edits the vast of people and me helps me think to the business side, pusher is the same. And in addition to kind of like working apple time job and managing our growing boy also, will you know she's dead tired on sunday read draft like, i'm not solely alone here, but I also can't be like our identity. Sh, you write the next up, barring, well, I think about building this organza you .

know Better and I talk about this IT is interesting, like i've been taking for a long time now.

And you know, certainly this is the path we're taking IT acquired of like what is the ceiling to the core thing? Like if the core thing is great and continues to be, do you need all the other stuff? Do you need more shows? Do you need more content or on the internet? Can I just get big? And then when you had the capital piece too, then that is very scalable and directly related to the content as well.

So so just I think I can scale with this one thing pretty well. And like everything also kind of continues to feed off each other were if I have bigger portfolio companies. But each time I mentioned ed, the company in the news letter, that has a bigger impact because the audience has gotten bigger IT.

All kinds scales with each other, which I think is really nice. And yeah, don't know. I mean, if this ends up being a thing where I do in a one sponsored post month instead of two, and get a little bit more time to, like, take a weekend off every once a while ilc, that would be great. But you know, there's a path to this being a million persons news letter. At some point the next five years, I would be very like about that .

from the graph i'm looking at if he keeps the shape IT would be in the next two years. So that's the question is how long can IT continue on this twenty percent months over months growth? What do you think the saturation point of your audiences?

I mean, you know he doesn't feel as exponential. The chart were like IT still grows a thousand to two thousand people a week. The newsletter, but a thousand to two thousand people a week is a lot different when you're at forty thousand verses eighty thousand.

So maybe IT does go a little bit more lenient than expansion, al, at some point, maybe we are hitting the as part of the Oscar. A I certainly hope that's not the case. I think probably the reason that, that would what happened is if I get really lazy on at Franklin, I like, look, I but big audience things are great, making money this.

So i'm just going to get keep doing what i'm doing and don't want to mess up on the content specifically. But I think if I kind of keep pushing on the content, I and keep attracting new readers who are interested and want to learn, while also kind of keeping the other to the audience that there already, then I think he continued to grow. And that's why I like on the content that other than just being kind of obsessed with the idea of constitution, that I was like, I can either read a Norman up warm peace, or could I kind of go goes on this and like, actually join IT and write about what's happening and like, take part in this whole thing.

I think where this ends up losing its team as if people don't think that they can get a glimpse into the near future from reading up boring and a glass in the near future that's explained in an approach able and not crazy building way, like if I go too far in the future and i'm just making stuff up, then that's bad but if i'm just like, hey, here's what happened last week, here's you're kind of the tack ground up then that's not kid. I think like what I will hopefully you to do well that is looking into like the very near future never being the released person on something but like kind of being the person who can say like this is actually probably worth taking a look at now. And here's actually like why it's not as wild as IT seems.

Or why this as well as the same. But I just might work that I think where I can hopefully kind of continue to grow is the future will continue to get crazy and crazy and crazy. And so I can just like kind of help keep translating what going on to make people feel more with IT, then I think i'll be able .

to continue to grow. I feel like you live three to six months in possible future, and we live one month into the probably future. I don't know if you think about that way all, but that's like whenever i'm reading your pieces, I like go i'm not there yet, but I bet this will help me get there by reading IT.

The fun thing for me has been that i'm writing this like very tech optimistic newsletter in the greatest bull run ever that somehow, instead of getting, you know, like hitting its own esq point, that keeps getting wilder. So if that keeps happy, that i'm really good shape. You know, IT can also slow down.

And like that, boring is still, I think, you know, even if there is a two year bear market, we come out the other side and reload and continue to grow and things ue to get Better in all of that. But like those two years are going to be a really interesting time and not wearing around like right, everybody. Just like here's another piece talking about why we should hang on and not lose up, that will get old pretty quickly. And so that's probably actually the biggest rise to the business in the short term, both on the metro side and the newsletter side is that people like enough with this optimism like things we're kind of tough right now.

okay. So just to highlight before we finish history in facts here and moving into powers the insane last month, speaking of compounding, like all this somehow happened in one month. And i'm just again looking at your twitter, you went from seventy eight thousand followers to one hundred and six thousand five hundred followers.

You major first and then second appearance on C, N, B, C. You with Christianson wrote a piece that was published in the economist and prove to the world that you can write in the economist voice, not just in the unique packy voice that I love. That brings me three to six months of the future today.

And and IT is a very different voice. And can you read that economist piece and you're like, well, this is written by the economist to, not by packy increase. And of course, speaking of Christ cks and you're working with entries and harrell z now the whole world, including packets they've hired.

So I want to point out all the result of this crazy compounding that unbelievably happened to you in mid october midd, november of twenty twenty one. And a, what does that feel I can be? What are you doing with a sixteen? Z.

yeah. So i've actually the biggest growth driver potentially was that marina, I wrote this piece on discord 哦， and then discord C, E, O, in the replies to my tweet about the peace, announced that they were adding web three integrations and then announced they were not adding three integrations, and said that brought out the deepest, darkest, worst parts of twitter, the replies that that were vast and furious, crazy.

But I also added, you know, I think about the followers and that happened that the same week that the economist piece came out, announced the a advisory and after back of that, so just a bunch of things happened at the same time that makes a totos PH look a little bit, uh, well. But I think that was an appreciate the one. It's weird. I have to pinch my myself every week that the sun is happening is so like, yeah, I don't know that was last week. Like what do we do in this week?

Like picky in the bread yeah.

take over the world. But I don't think it's compounding the same way that interest would would like next week, even cool things will happen and then next week, even cooler things will happen like there will certainly be ABS and flows. We're going to go to the holiday season here.

We're everything and i'm going to get panicked because my graph looks a lot flattered than that would have otherwise actually taking some time off. So maybe the same thing falls apart and we regret having this conversation in the first place. But you know hofus ly, the ABS and flows just kind of average higher over time in terms of the six scenes, the advisory, that's a really, really fun.

I we're just kind of mission and values of line. And I think Chris said that there is a lot of complex stuff happening in the overall kind of arc is really good and really positive. But if you can't translate what's happening and why this is going to be actually good for people and the actually what's happening beneath the surface here everybodys kind of just gna miss out and dismiss this all thing.

And I think really kind of the the advisory there is like you working with some of the companies in their portfolio to think about how they tell their story, writing pieces like I wrote with Chris and the economist dell introduced me to companies you know that they're investing, are excited about and not like you others know guarantee that I have to write about them or anything like that. But maybe I invest in them, maybe I write about them. But I think the main thrust of the partnership is that were both out there to try and explain what is going on and why this can be you know potentially good thing and where you can go wrong and why it's not as scary as IT seems.

And so I think it's really all about kind of that were both and wake or that I want to, but both kind of just like working in service of this thing that's happening. And one of the things that I think really impressed me, like I signed on, obviously, you looked to in the middle of them hiring all of these people. And so I was like, so excited to announce that.

And I was like, oh, everybody doesn't like, I don't know about that and so I was like going to do a starkey tweet, not starkey, but you don't like I was going to do a eet that was kind of like joining sixty and z two. And then I went out to the outside, the team did out at california, and I was so clear that, like this big team of people was there because, and reason was just kind of throwing its resources behind, making sure that this nicer movement kind of had the resources I needed to grow. And so there, you know butch people working on the regulatory side there there's a bunch people working on the technical there.

They have genius engineers who like other web 3 protocols and companies were trying to hire who are just in house there working on behalf of portable companies。 And I know that i'm like romantic zing, the services model of ventura capital right now. And there's obviously .

a reason that they're doing that.

We did a two part series on IT exactly and is good for them if the industry and their particular companies do really well. IT really feels like a group of people that just actually believes in this thing and wants to put the management fees to work in service of IT actually happening in docketing kind of choked at the beginning by overregulation and by people's lack of understanding. And so I came out of that feeling a lot more optimistic and just even like more excited about working with them after going to get into me more of the team.

cool. Well, thanks for clean. I said, I mean, it's faster to me yeah that it's not like you joined the firm and you are still investing completely separately out of a separate pool of capital. You have your own news letter that staying totally separate but that there's I think it's a smart evolution of the venture model to say, hey, actually crypto adviser, I don't know exactly what your title is, but it's .

smart yeah I mean, i've had that other conversation with funds too or it's okay. We want to come work in to be a full time partner. This fun. And no, like we've talked for the past couple of hours about how much fun of having doing this particular things that that would .

never be an attraction to model, deal with thunder on .

our big idea for grading. I going to talk about in greeting because I am curious to dig into that nose. So hold that thought. Now let's do powers.

You've got this concept of the net boring fly wheel, which I want to say it's kind like you can make an excel bread sheet, say anything, you can put a fly whil diagram down on paper and IT will always look good, but no one has amazon fly wheel. And so before actually naming the powers, you've got the not boring fly wheel here that has audience at the core that feeds out into founders. Their sponsors will link to this in the show notes. And there are sort of the monday pieces that really feed at all and go back in and grow the audience.

And was from great interview to with jack singer like a year plus ago that we use as big resource here .

actually right around february.

Oh wow. So he needs be updated.

They probably actually as a result of the million dollar tweet. I think that when .

he was like we should talk, i'm curious how you would describe the most powerful aspect of the fly will like, what is the thing where you are like? Oh, these mutually reinforcing aspects are strongly tied.

I think, is we talked about a little before audience at the center of the fly. Wales may be not exactly the thing that I had a million percent audience of people didn't care about start up or whatever like that wouldn't be kind of as powful.

I think it's really just kind of the alignment between the content, the particular people who are in the audience and then the investing and those three just, I think, really work well together because they all kind of feel you. So that's a cop out answer. I think I pretty much just name the whole fly will, but I don't think there's any one particularly strong link.

I really think that IT is that the content has attracted a certain type of audience member whose both more valuable to companies and who also include people who are starting companies and running companies in all of that and are all just kind of feeds back into each other. And I think maybe the core part is that the content itself is so alive with the venture business. I think that's the magic .

with what types of companies or founders do you have strong product market fit on the investment side versus week? Where has IT happened where someone's been like, uh, sorry, there's not really spaces in this round for this reason or .

you're talking with somebody about sponsoring. And then I actually .

know on the sponsor side. Really comes down to Price, Frankly. And I think if this were a business, i'd probably be more relaxed on pricing sometimes.

But because it's to me at the center of IT and equally happy not writing a sponsor, deep died and the giving myself an extra week off as long as I like the company, i'd like to write about them, but i'm gonna and pretty firm on Price. And so that's where that falls apart is not necessarily particular type of company. What's really interesting is like there are actually companies that all say no to that.

I think that I would invest in that. I think our great businesses, and I figure like have something interesting strategically that like just maybe isn't interesting enough to the audience, were like actually IT would still perform. And I done stuff like this a little bit in the past and had learned from that where IT still does as well, because maybe there are high A C, B product.

And if they get fifty people to sign up, coming out of the news letter like that is a huge win. The r is fantastic. All that maybe those fifty people, the only fifty people actually cared about that particular story. So I tried to do a little bit less of that on the founder side, I don't think it's a particular type of industry as much as IT really comes down to like none be gives a shit that I write. Not boring and that's why i'm like, I kind of bristle the audience exercise is being the thing because if somebody comes in to their introduced cold to me and someone like this is packed y from now boring and eighty thousand person audience said, ah cool. You read news letter um I think like the divide is did the person actually read up barring before and I really get value out of something that i've written or not and I think that's actually where where the divides such .

a good point because otherwise it's transact there. Like, so are you going to write about me for free? Why do I care that you have an unnecessary hundred percent?

And you'll get that sometimes from founders when that kind of the introduction path really I have found a recently email me and ask know after I said I committed that here's what I love you on the occasional side. He was like, great. And can you give me the open rates on your last five post and like your audience size? And I was like, this feels more transactional than I wanted to feel like this will be good for both of us if this works out.

Yeah, I really don't like what i'm on a pitch being like. Here's how the newsletter will like. This will change your companies projector. I think I can be really, really helpful for companies. And I don't want IT to be the transaction thing or it's like, right, we will give you seventy five thousand and allocation because you have a forty five percent open rate and eighty eight thousand describes and i've on the math let them feel ready is more like am I aligned with this founder and wanted excited at the story?

Put another way, the size of the audience is not important because that is reach that a founder or company will have access to after you invest. It's because the larger the audience sizes is of the right types of people, the more likely IT is that someone has read something you've written in that introduction is warm and appreciated rather than who are you .

and that mental leap is like automatic. If you're ready a apportion fan, then you're like, oh, I get IT right. Like people like me read that boring. I wanted get front of more people in my orbit.

This makes sense. The other way to describe that is I don't think it's gotten any easier convincing founders to give me allocation at fifty thousand readers or eighty eight thousand readers. If they are a reader, then they kind of get IT.

And if they're not, then on the sponsorships side, it's differently. There's more of an equation. There are people are willing to pay more with the bike audience, which makes total sense. But I do think on the founder side, that's really the binaries, as do you read, not working up .

yeah makes sense.

makes total sense.

okay? Powers.

seven powers for not boring. Yes, this a good, very fun. I'm going out to live here. I think it's not scale economies.

For folks, I don't know how this could possibly be your first exposure to seven powers because you either have listened to acquire a red not boring coming into this. But briefly, the real question is what thing enables this business to achieve persistent differential return so more profitable than their closest competitor on a sustainable basis for years and years and years in the future? So it's kind of interesting.

The first thing that I was thinking about when I was prepping for the episode is hamiltons helmer makes the point that actually public company shareholders are not short term oriented. They're long term oriented. And that's why when you change your guidance for the next arter, the valuation can change by billions and millions and billions of dollars because people are accounting for the next twenty nine and three quarters years after next quarter in the way that they think about the trajectory, the business. And so it's interesting thinking about the future value of not boring because it's actually much more near term then you would forecast in a public company with a durable organization and product market fit because it's so packy dependent. And I know that's not naming a power and then we should do that too, but it's an interesting observation and probably why you know media companies and small organizations and fairly run businesses get lower multiples.

I think that's right. I don't raise money because that I have buses, and I don't think I get evaluation that i'd be happy to self part of myself for.

Yeah well, David, where do you think the strongest one is? I had thought about this .

before going to the episode, but I think there's a strong element account positioning here with what you're doing, at least relative to traditional media companies.

Yeah, certain ly on the journalism side actually end on the .

venture side totally on the venture side. I think there maybe some kind of network economies here can only what you are just talking about with the fly weel and being a really like the more people in in your target audience is who are readers. The more powerful taking an investment from not boring capital or sponsoring not boring ing, or Frankly just continuing to read not boring becomes as more people in your circle are reading IT. I think .

that's probably right, but I don't want to get myself too much credit on IT. And I know like there's definitely difference between network economies and like some sort of kind of benefits to scale. And wouldn't all the scale economies either where hopefully IT gets Better, I think this is like data network effects or something really like maybe it's there like kind of sometimes like maybe people have IT, but probably like you say, there's in newark effects, just like pretend like there are network effects.

And I don't I actually if I if I have them, like if IT, means that I am able to write about more interesting companies because there are more readers and some more different types companies want me to tell their story. And all of that were the audience is getting bigger and I have more interest resting conversations because I have more interesting ideas like that. Maybe that is there, but it's certainly not facebook level netware economies where is very clear that one extra person coming on is really good for the people who know that person. It's well.

there's a factor of strength of network effects. And like, no, you're not facebook strike nearby but I do think it's there like IT is valuable to me that bend reads not boring we talk about not .

oring yeah it's weak though. Like you notably don't have a community. There is a suda community that exists in your twitter replies, but like you haven't organized the community in a way that actually has network value. I said that an opportunity now, maybe one that doesn't meet the bar, but an opportunity I think .

that's one hundred years that I definitely I think probably because we have not wearing club shed away from trying to like be a community manager again. But you think twitter is kind of word that exist now, but I think that they are absolutely opportunities.

And maybe that's where you know something comes in or even you know not wearing talking at some point down the line comes into play? Or then do you get all the network fix to come built in with dropped out. But for now, I don't think that it's particularly strong like it's pretty big.

There is one that I want to bring up for hamilton would try yet at me for calling IT the cornered resource of packy. So I guess it's probably more a process power. But you could not write a document such that you could hand IT to someone else and they could do your job like that.

They could create the product that you create. And I think that's definitioned process power that you can actually write down the process of creating the product that you create. And i've heard you try to explain IT a few times, and it's always a little bit different.

And you can never really articulate the consistent way that lightning strikes you such that you have a great idea. And IT seems like you go into your basement, you serve the internet. Magic happens and you might have to start that process a few times. But I don't think even you can really articulate the process by which the product comes out.

That's incredibly good point. I ve tried to explaining this many times. It's one of the first questions that I get from people. I got out of people and I never have a good answer for IT because there isn't a good .

answer for IT totally. It's why we get a lot to like what you process. So like, well, I can tell you mechanically, but it's not going to sound like.

well, ban opens up text dit and he has a document that as zilia functional IT because it's been clone from two hundred and fifty episodes and that texted document, plus David's notion has almost nothing to do with what our actual processes to create episode.

I think that's the beauty, right? I think for acquired, for not boring, for the good contact businesses. This is why I don't want to scale IT and have to right, like a brand guideline or the style guide or even the economist has their guide where you should be able to kind of plugged into that thing and kind of sound like the brand voice. I don't want to do that.

okay. So what was that process like? Great for the economist. Like what was the two position from era draft to final face?

IT was pretty close, so he goes, the editors. But the interesting thing is that they send you their guide up front and head of the things to vote to. Like one of those things that tonight, the word increasingly, which I then realize that I do all of the time in my writing, but they can do those things in front of that you come in kind of aware. And much of what you've written is, are compassion in that, obviously, I think just Normally like and that they before but I definitely tried to kind of know catch the economic style in the thing that we're up alright.

don't with powers yeah i'm with I think it's process power. It's the in the day it's creative .

business for sure. We want to think our long time friend of the show, venter, the leading trust management platform, venta, of course, automates your security reviews and compliance efforts. So frameworks like soc two I saw twenty seven o one GDP r and hypo complaints and modeling ing vent to takes care of these otherwise incredibly time and resort training efforts for your organza and makes them fast and simple.

Yeah, fanta is the perfect example of the quote that we talk about all the time here and acquired jeff basis, this idea that the company should only focus on what actually makes your beer taste Better. I E spend your time and resources only what's actually gonna, move the needle for your product and your customers and outsource everything else that doesn't. Every company needs compliance interest with their vendors and customers. IT plays a major role enabling revenue because customers and partners demand IT, but yet IT add zero flavor to your actual product that IT takes care.

evolve IT for you, no where spread sheet, no fragment to tools, no media reviews to cobble together your security and compliance requirements. IT is one single software pain of glass that connects to all of your services via and eliminate countless hours of work for your organza. There are now A I capabilities to make this even more powerful. And they even integrate with over three hundred 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 are start up or a large enterprise and your company is ready to automate compliance and streamline security like vana seven thousand customers around the globe, and go back to making your beer taste Better, head on over to vantage a combs required and just tell them that ban and David sent you. And thanks to friend of the show, Christina anta, CEO all acquire listening ers, get a thousand dollars of free credit vana com.

Slash acquired, alright, so packets, I was thinking about this, should you go work at a venture firm and without naming a venture firm, because then IT gets harder to talk about, let's say, where to go work at a big, big venture capital firm where a fun is like a billion dollars plus. And let's say, to reflect the very quick audience that you've sort of built, this relationship and community you've cultivated and you know the way that you're seeing into a very important future in web 3， you would become a general partner and the offer would be for like a big, let's call IT. I don't know what Carrier is a big firm because a double digit percentage of Carrier and a brand new multibillion dollar fund or at least billion dollar funds.

So you're getting like serious omics, but the returns are probably like seven and plus years out in the future. How do you make a pretty good salary like you probably make? I don't know half of what not worrying is baking just in salary.

So you have this sort of interesting question of like do you want to delay most of your upside, another five, seven plus years? And do you want to like cut down on something that is sort of at an inflection point right now? Or do you want to stay the course and hope that what your building now has way more risk, but what your building can eclipse, even what the greatest website would be from becoming a general partner at a big firm? Am I thinking about that sort of right in the set of tradeoffs? I think they're .

think about a right in the set of trade. Ff, I think the tRicky part is that a stronger skat is not right here. But maybe you will understand the right version of what i'm saying is that as soon as I go in, how somewhere I lose half of my value.

Or x percent of my value as soon as I go and how somewhere and that is kind of one even though, you know, I do do sponsor personal that there is like this independent voice that I have that obviously goes away. Everything that I write would go through a legal team, a compliance team and all of those types of things probably wouldn't able to even do IT at the cages or you know, even the schedule that I do. Now it's like i'm making my last kind of edit already my lessons thirty minutes before the piece goes out or even a minute before the piece goes out. So I think that would lose a little bit of that flavor.

And so I think probably, you know, you need to have a time dimension on this, which is when does that make sense to do this? And there's probably like when I deeply in that asking if I ve like gotten big enough that like somehow just because i'm packing people think now, think that i'm smart working now, I kind of be to prove that I can not value every week like maybe at some point in the future when there's a half millions of scribers people just assume that I know what i'm talking about even though I don't and i'm just making IT up every week, then maybe the trade makes sense. But for me, because there's not the exponential upside and for the fun, because I don't lose all of my value as soon as I set foot in the door of that fund. But I think for the time being, IT would be upside limiting for me, an option limiting for me. And I would be the fun would not I don't think that what I paid for.

it's funny. I'm thinking, as you said, that you doing this turning adventure firm would, to my mind, be almost exactly like amazon buying kiva systems, giv systems, rava tic warehouse company. They had lots of clients I think like maybe target was a client while might like lots of clients, including an lots of value. And then at a certain point, amazon was like, okay, it's worth more to us to buy you and it's worth more to you to sell to us. That evidence then continue and we're going to shut down ninety percent of your business, but the ultimate values is going to be higher.

I think that trouble, maybe you know where I would make sense right now is like if there is it's more than just be a kind of having A G P. It's their strategic value in another firm not hiring me or in maybe you don't have a web three practice, but like you need to play catch up. I still think there are Better people, Frankly, who are like way more technical.

I have to be me and some technical people who are like kind of deeply in space than me. Maybe IT helps you get a quicker leg up into an an area where you feel that you're behind. But I think you're absolutely right though, like amazon was not just making that decision bason kivas revenue and client roster because that all goes away. They're making IT to keep that away from other people and to do .

something themselves. There's this funny like game theory thing happening here where IT seems like you're willing to be reasonably public about the idea that like it's not that attractive and that doesn't make sense to go join, which then makes me, with my professor, venture capital has had on going well. I guess I don't do to take out acquisition here because he's not going to go join anywhere else .

either or makes me feel like should have gave there you this all the way. The fact he's gonna do IT at some point. Then do I actually need to make the over the top offer now to make sure that he doesn't go anywhere else in the future?

Well, i've been public about kind of everything in in the oring path. So if this does happen, if people start making big offers, i'll come back out and and let you know what those offers look like.

Okay, I said to me though, I think the world OK it's where you know it's our show. We get the great you you can try IT. I still think you'll look feeling on the unpacking y on this emphasised the after the question to me, if you had that offer on the table and be really hard to turn. And really, that's a lot of economics and that's probably underselling the amount of salary you'd make here from the management fees on mute. Billion dollars.

a lot of money. Yeah, I was trying to create this draw, man. That wasn't just like, well, if you want lifestyle, you do not boring.

And if you want a whole bunch of cash now and a whole bunch of cash in the future, then you go join. It's actually not life style. I'm sorry.

really restate that lifestyle would be Better actually .

in that would it's .

control yeah if you want control now or you want lifestyle and cash now and cash in the future could not Better from. But here's my question. Can you also manage billions of capital in applying capital? That's the question.

something it's such an interesting question key. Tell me myself. No, right. That we've actually had this conversation over text and voice with the script people before right now.

The answer is clearly now, like if I built out infrastructure, end up or keeps getting bigger, and I was able to highly a really phenomenal team, people are much smarter than around me. Wouldn't born be a platform from which you could launch a billion? Only one potentially IT changes the strategy completely. You can deploy a billion dollars in follow jacks.

You get to slide in a little yeah.

exactly. You have to be able to invest every even at all reasonable company. IT just wouldn't work. And so i'd have to change the strategy totally where it's not friendly and you'd have to go have to head with this big, reputable, establish firms with teams, full smart people. And so that, I think, is also a limiting factor.

That job lucky in the that group of people, has turned out of the soil capital thing into a bigger fun and their competing and winning deals. And so it's doable. IT is just a very different strategy that I don't know if I be good at.

not what help in recent itself, the Andrews ent story was that right? Like mark and ben were super Angels. They play days with everybody. They had everybody in the, except be benchmark after the world class experience. And then they were like, well, I think we can turn this into a firm and they did.

There are a little smarter than I am.

Well, it's a different thing than being a separate, but IT doesn't an is not possible.

Stay tuned to find out as the I don't know you, the primary or the sole shareholder of not boring you also can I just get to pick you're like all if this will make my life worse and I don't need to make more money, why would I do IT?

There's I mean, I think a lot of this is don't get greedy like that yeah I think getting greedy and that is hiring more people that is lowering the bar on who I write, sponsor post on or even who the advertisers are on. A Normal piece like this works if I know security and this stops working if I get created. And so it's like pretty actually clear binary there. And maybe that means i'm being too risk averse on some things, but i'm very happy with kind of the way things are going now. And I know that I can messed up by going into grey.

Very answer will accept.

IT, uh, you guess what do you car?

Fouts, yeah, let's do.

IT my David first.

okay. My kind of fitting for my status is new dad. This might be pretending a lot of parenting carve outs to come, but some people had told us this before we went to the hospital to get right that. And I didn't pay attention, and I wish I had. So if you are parent, you know, i'm talking about if you're not, 这是 may happen to you someday。

Baby comes out and then like babies need to be swallow, right? And the nurses in the hospital, they just like a regular blanket and they take IT and they put the baby in the blanket and they do some folds. And like, this is how you do IT it's so easy like, yeah, that's so easy.

I can do that. That's just like folding, you know, SHE to prefer no problem. And then the nurses leave the room and then you're like, the baby comes out, the song you get to swat low.

The baby like I got is just like, like, wow, how did they do that? That was magic. You can do IT new parents do not try and swallow le your baby in a regular blanket.

Get some dedicated baby blanket swales with veco and zippers. IT will save you so much artigue and bring them to the hospital for eight, six. Ah.

that's my Carry second did why David s.

Carvels have really changed.

Don't it's .

great advice though. I'll take a note. So it's unna in prepping for car bats for this. Normally I have like five or six. I can you from that i'm reading that are off the wall stuffer different things i'm watching. I'm watching succession, but i've already carved that out.

Everything that i'm reading or are listening to right now is either prepare for this episode or are next two episodes, which I won't spoil. So i'm going to do something that is wait too much talking my own book, but I think it's a awesome thing to read. And we were a tough few posts on hackneys yesterday.

So clearly, there's other sort of heat around IT. There's a minor square labs peace by dave peck, who's a veteran engineer on our team called an engineers, hype three observations on web and its possibilities. And I helped a little bit in this, and our goal was really till, like, take all the prolonged that our engineering team has done in the studio.

And this is people who have worked their whole career is not in crypto to and explore what actually on the technical merits of these technologies is what should be built. Is there a lot of discussion around building, but doesn't actually make a lot of a sense to us why you would build that distributed uh and try and write like a baLanced, honest take, unlike here's what the tech can do, here's what the tech can do. And you know we're going to try and ignore some of the cultural elements of web three and just do IT a little book or analytically.

And of course, you can help but throw in some cultural elements because it's a cultural movement. But i'm really proud of how I came out. I welcome all feedback and will put like in the showut.

So i'm going to keep IT in seattle for mine. I think last time that we'd talked, maybe I recommended to fight book. I've been reading a lot of side. I think just if i'm spending so much time in real stuff when i'm writing, it's nice to.

My brain off the other day, I finished the book in my google best, I I twenty twenty one and this one book came up and IT was described as herky my economy meets ready player one and herky my economy is my favorite of the ready player one. Maybe not the best written book of all time, but are certainly inspired a lot of the things that people are talking about right now. So this book is called rabbit, is this thriller about this kind of global game that takes place to save the world.

And you play IT by following a bunch of these coincidences that seem like incidence. Ces, but maybe they aren't. And ultimately, playing winning rabbit is how you kind of like reset baLance in the universe.

It's, you know, again, maybe not the best written book that i've ever read. I've heard the ending isn't great. I haven't gotten there yet, but it's been a really entertaining. I can't put IT down kind of read and IT has mi survives? If it's not quite as good as macomb.

I would I have to check this out and am learning .

a lot about seattle, which is make me feel closure. Man.

you welcome any time. My friend, uh, seattle had a great safe ten, you, a seattle connection, but also say, I and safe I books I am. So november thirty fifth, which will be proudly after this comes out before as we're recording IT, the last book .

of the expense is not coming out of wo one.

Oh my god, you ve got to read IT. It's the best.

It's so good. Have you watched the show? No, i've been told to read the books first and then watch a show. I can see having not read any of the books. At least the first two, maybe three seasons of the show were excEllent, like some of the best size I T V I ve ve ever watched.

I'm rereading to get ready for the final book. Ah so there's gonna nine books total eight of our to come out the night is coming out the first two amazing. So great. And I would say three through three is pretty to four, five, six and seven. And there's still really good like redoing through the first time I reread one into and then i'm rereading eight and i'm going to go in the night.

Have you read realizing the raising trilogy?

No, I need to.

So just what you said reminded me like Normally because again, like i'm happy and lucky after this kind of guy when people say that rather like, I like one to two. I didn't like three. I loved four or hide five. I don't have that kind of new ones in my brain but realizing IT feels like I was written by like, not only a different person, but a different species almost after book three, like books one, two and three were so good, and book four was an abomination. And it's one of the few books that i've stopped .

in the past few years. Oh yeah, how many books total in the service? I couldn't you just to wow, interesting. Okay, i'll to take IT out one, three.

three that you should definitely read once. The expense of .

great the expense is um if you only watch the T V show, you might not know there's two authors. So James, I say korea, a pending me of the two authors who collaborate. They are georgia Martin's assistance. No way. So the expense is game of throne in space.

Oh, I never realized that. Yeah.

it's really good.

I will.

I have Carried the books. Me do wild.

well packed. Y we can't. Thank you enough for being here.

Thank a dream of.

It's a very unique acquired episode for us, notably not a special we want to be very intentional that like this is profiling the history and strategy of a company either way that we the new york times, are standard oil or amazon and the company .

just happens to the packing person.

And eighteen was old.

It's surreal. I also.

as we drift on our closing notes here, I was going to tell folks seriously, you should go subscribe the public acquired l pico wherever you get your podcast now. But it's worth putting out the strategy to shift to make episodes and the whole back catalogue public to listeners on a new feed after two weeks of being just for the paid subscribers is totally inspired by u paci.

I mean, I think the realization that with such a smart, valuable audience, that attention is the scarce resource, I think that part of us realizing, oh, we should change the way that the limited partner program works and really make IT just the limited partner community with some early exclusive access to this content and actually encrypt U. I guess two weeks is forever so that two weeks is valuable, specially as we do more crypto stuff. But yeah, that was really largely inspired by you. So thanks for that too.

If my biggest contribution of the world is making more great content free on the internet, I very nice with that.

Legate awesome, well packed y where can listeners find you? Or not boring on the internet?

So not boring. Is that not boring? Duck coat, I have a powley produced podcast that you can find by searching, not boring podcast, revealing the podcast.

We are going to .

get you upgraded.

We're going to get you upgraded .

next time we do this year. That could be saying .

partly produce. It's not that point. That is how I read, not boring, is listening. Twitter packy K Y M.

awesome. And listeners will catch you next time.

next time.

why? Who got the truth?