Acquired - Kevin Rose from Web 2.0 to Web3

0:01Welcome to Acquired. Today we're sitting down with Kevin Rose. Kevin was one of the pioneers of Web2.0 as the founder of Dig and then became one of the Valley's first super angels investing early in companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Square. Today, he's a partner at True Ventures and host to the Modern Finance Podcast. Let's chat with him. Alright, did you like that? Should we put that in? I've always wanted to do that.

0:30Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund PSL Ventures. And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor.

1:02based in San Francisco. And we are your hosts. This was so effing cool. Oh, yeah. Kevin is so great. We had such a blast. Of course, we went deep, covered the screen savers, the real origin story of Dig, the Dignation parties that South by the Ben you were at back in the day. Totally. I wasn't expecting him to, he like corrected the record. All the previous dig founding stories are wrong. I know Wikipedia is wrong, apparently.

1:30Well, listeners, this episode basically has two chapters. We start in Web 2 and we end in Web 3. And obviously Kevin is super deep on all things. Crypto, blockchain, NFTs, and he's doing a really cool thing on the modern finance podcast. And he even ends the show with announcing a new thing that he's doing. So stay tuned for that. But I had so much fun this episode pattern matching everything Kevin learned from Web 2 to the Web 3 world. All right, listeners.

1:58Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired. LaGora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. LaGora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

2:25So the founders did exactly what great founders do. Operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love like tabular review where you.

2:45drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lagores Bed here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work, and this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

3:04And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early LaGora numbers essentially speak for themselves when they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor they win 70% of the time LaGora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries and crazily they went from one million to a hundred million in ARR in about 18 months truly insane numbers and that is the real test

3:57Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right, two last things.

4:21One, as usual, this is not investment advice from either us or Kevin, do your own research, come to your own conclusions on making your own investments. This is for entertainment and informational purposes only as usual. Two, join us in the acquired Slack, acquired.fm slash Slack. We are nearing the 10,000 person mark. It is a great group and we'd love to have you now onto our conversation with the one and only Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose, so great to be talking with you.

4:50Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. It's gonna be fun. I think many, many episodes of my teenage years watching Dig Nation later, I feel probably the same way a lot of our listeners do when they run into David and I are like, oh my god, you're like a real human. I feel very, very similarly talking to you today. So thank you for all the just massive indulgence of nerdery over the years. Yeah.

5:13There is a bunch of nerd stuff there, a little comedy. Hopefully I didn't convince you to start drinking at a young age because we were of legal age, but we did consume beers on each episode. No, no. I was lucky. I actually started watching you on screen savers when there was no alcohol involved. That's right. When I was tech TV days. On middle school take. Yeah, tech TV. Oh, we're going to get into it. Let's start because this is acquired way back. So Kevin, I think...

5:40We have it right, you grew up in Vegas, but your family is from Wisconsin, which is a state we've talked about recently with Marc Andreessen growing up there and people on your show. What was that like? Yeah, you know, I, my earliest memories, I was born in Reading, California, but I don't remember it. And then I remember living in Oregon for a bit, which is where I am now in Portland, but we were living in a little town called Salem.

6:06And then when I was in second grade, we moved out to Las Vegas because there was just work there. That was like a place where my dad could find a job. And so we moved out there. I kind of grew up thinking it was normal for, you know, 7, 11s to have slot machines in them. Like there was just a lot of things that Vegas does to you. And, you know, it was one of those things where I got geeky and got into computers and then quickly realized that the action really wasn't in Las Vegas. If you wanted to be in the hotel industry or working gaming in some capacity, that was the place to be. But when I was around 18 or so, I realized, well, I should probably think about moving someplace else like Silicon Valley or some place that had a bigger tech scene. I'm super curious. How did you figure that out? I felt the same way. I grew up in Pennsylvania.

6:56But I had no idea that Silicon Valley existed like what was the process by which you like learned that this was a thing because like there was no you know there's the internet right but like it wasn't obvious in the way it is now yeah so basically when you started to get into computers back then you're right there wasn't like the internet where you could just go and figure all this stuff out so I was on bolt-in-board systems and kind of dial up and I remember going into computer stores and buying computer magazines, because that's what we did. To stay up with all the latest trends, you would just buy a magazine that was about computers, take it home and read about motherboards, right? So, I just basically would hear about these conferences, and there was one called Comdex, which was the world's largest computer convention. And it was held in Las Vegas. And so, I was like, oh, I gotta go to this Comdex thing, right? You're in high school at this point?

7:46Yeah, I was in early high school and I Filled out a convex application to go because it was free the passes were free But you had to have a business so I just made up a fake business name I called it foliage software and then I would apply and I received a badge in the mail and I was like okay, I'm going and I talked my parents to the drive me down to the convention center This would be for CES or CES was very much much smaller back then and I would go and just walk the aisles and look at all the different processors and other boards and video cards and all the crazy, every big manufacturer had a block of display there they could go and walk up and try out all the new products. And it was like the coolest thing ever. And this was stuff that hadn't hit the market yet, right? It hadn't hit the market yet, it was brand new. And that's how I realized that all these companies were not based here. They were based, most of them were California Silicon Valley based.

8:39But I was the youngest kid on the floor, like I had to kind of dress up. I put a like a collared shirt on and then it was funny because they noticed a couple kids started coming and they banned. You had to be at least 16 to get in. And so the next year, I think I was 15 and I was like, oh, how am I going to prove that I'm 16? I think if someone asked me, I just told him I was 16, I had to have my birthday memorized for a year earlier. And then the next year, they made it so we had to be 18 to get in and I was like, crap.

9:06And so they just kept moving the gold line. Yeah, exactly. A fake idea to get into a computer convention. So anyway, that was their early days. Oh my gosh. All these silicon companies that were like all the companies were exhibiting a complex. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're all based out in Silicon Valley. It was really Silicon Valley, but they weren't building fabs anymore. And so they could just move it such a faster face. I remember this. And it was like all this new product, all these chips, all these, you know, PCI plugins for motherboards. I'll hit in the market so fast. Oh, that was awesome. It was so exciting. When you hear about a new clock speed come out, right? Like Intel would announce something and you're like, wow, a 66 megahertz processor. Or, you know, AMD would have out their new chip. And then, you know, you have the weird folks that were all like the deck alphas, like a completely different risk versus sisk based processors. And yeah, that weren't compatible with windows. And they weren't compatible with a, it's you're like, whoa, wait a second. What's this unique thing? And it was just, it was a crazy time.

10:03Okay, so before we move on from Vegas, obviously you were, died in the wool computer geek, speaking to Goddecks, that's amazing. Was there anything like sort of presaging your soon-to-be future career on in front of the camera? Like, did you do like drama in high school? No, like what? No, I think I was like the most shy kind of kid growing up and just didn't have a ton of friends in high school.

10:31Back then, I don't even know what this holds true today, but back then it was not cool to be into computers. And so you got made fun of a lot and didn't have a lot of friends. We were definitely not the popular kids in school and got picked on. And so it was not in my DNA to be, I didn't apply to work a tech TV to be in front of the camera. I just wanted to be behind the scenes. And so I was kind of like setting up all the technical demos and if they needed certain version of Linux installed, I would install that and just like.

10:57You know, making sure that things were moving smoothly in that regard. So it was just by chance that I ended up on camera. Yeah. Do you remember your sort of like break like the moment where someone was like, Hey, Kevin, you should be on air talent. Yeah. I mean, I had discovered a vulnerability in Windows that was a way to spam people using this kind of internal messaging tool. And so you could basically just send a message to any IP address and Windows would display it on the screen.

11:26And well, it wasn't necessarily kind of a vulnerability in the sense of the person wasn't getting hacked. It was definitely a way to spam people. You could just write a little utility that would just go through IP addresses and deliver, you know, little notifications to their desktop. And so I told the host about it and they're like, well, you figured this out. You should come on and talk about it. And so they invited me on. We're Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton hosting at this point. Exactly. So Leo Laporte had me next to him. And I was so nervous. I was just sweating and just like.

11:54And I went on and I kind of delivered it and explained it. And the executive producer, Paul Block, was like, hey, I like what you did there. Like, can you find more weird things to talk about that are not really known? And I was thinking like, well, I know a lot of these like hacking tools and stuff that I mess around with at night. Like we could talk more about those types of things. And he was like, yeah, do more of that. And let's see how you do. And let's have you come on once a week and talk about a certain tool. So You know, I look back and kind of cringe at some of that stuff because it was you could just hear in my voice and the way I presented especially in the earlier episodes I just didn't. It wasn't in my DNA to be on camera and actually they sent me to a talent coach so it would come in and record you and play back footage with you and make you watch yourself and talk about how you hold your hands and like there's these dedicated coaches that will teach you everything. I did that once. I was.

12:46at Microsoft and I was going to go speak on behalf of the company to a newspaper and they had me speak with a coach first and she videotaped and I think it was like 5k for like two hours like it was this exorbitant corporate markup and she videotaped me for some of my talking points and then like made me watch it back while we were sitting there at the table and it was the most painful experience. It helps a ton though. I mean it's a good strategy for sure. Totally. You were the dark tipper on the show, right?

13:15That was the horrible nickname they gave me on the show. Yeah. Was that from that first episode to Leo just like riff that like where did that come from? Well, we used to have these things called like Windows tips and like it was like a quick check in. You're like, okay, when you're doing a segment.

13:30So everything in TV is broken into blocks and so they'll have like the A block which is the very beginning of the show and they break it down into individual segments There's a person keeping kind of a timer on making sure when you're doing live TV making sure the blocks don't go too long because it impacts other people's segments and there's it's very tight well oiled machine that has to run perfectly to pull off a live show and so they had these little kickers that they would do like when you finish a block You bump out to a Windows tip or a little, you know, 30 second, 45 second, one minute long max, little tip. And so they're like, okay, well, we're going to do Kevin's going to do tips that are about the dark side of the internet. Let's call them dark tips. And then they call me the dark tip or as a joke. And then it just kind of like was a funny little thing on the show. That's so great. Screet savers was live in front of a studio audience, right? Yeah. Where they like change you go over the set while you were doing this on the main segment.

14:22Well, the cool thing is that they could have basically because the number of cameras they had and the locations on the set, you didn't have to do a lot of change because there's always two locations to shoot and so you would have like one off to the side and one primary like front location and then even one of over in the neck where we took live calls. So there wasn't a lot of quick set change unless it was like a guest interview and that was typically done between commercial breaks.

14:46We go off to commercial you know you have three minutes and change and then they swap out roll away the main center console and then you know put in a couple chairs get the guests seated all the mics checked all that good stuff so it's a crazy thing because weird stuff breaks you know like a guest microphone goes out and somebody's running in 30 seconds before you come back on TV swapping out mics and like just demos break computers reboot randomly like weird stuff would happen and you just have to kind of roll with it so that's the fun dynamic of live television David we're so spoiled with acquired like infinite retakes just audio I was literally thinking I'm kind of jealous like that must have been such good Trailing this explains like why you're so good because you had to just like roll with it whereas yeah, we just We've been doing this for six years, but like we have somebody luxuries, you know Well, there's something nice about just being able to say okay screw it like if I mess up

15:40like so be it. And we're done. Then you're done. You know what I mean? Like my podcast and stuff that I do now, it's like, I'm always going back and, you know, I'll listen to an episode that I think is really important. I want to make sure the editor got it right. And you're like, listen to it again. You're like, okay, we can trim a little bit here. And you know, it's like, you just walked out of the studio and you're like, okay, we're done for the day onto the next day. So there was nothing you could do when it goes out. You really can obsess for like a week. Like until it is out there. And even after like you get any feedback that it was actually good, you're like,

16:10I just release something awful like this is just I have this pit in the feeling my stomach. I wish I had spent more time editing even though I'm sure I just spent way too much cognitive load on this. Yeah. Well, you never know with your guests, right? Like you'll have a guest and you're like, okay, this is a very important person to have on the show for X, Y, or C. And then you get them on and you're like, so tell me about your background and they're like, it was great. And then they just like stop talking and you're like, oh, come on. Like I got to pull more out of you. This has to be entertaining.

16:39You know, so it can be challenging, you know, is it someone doing the interviews to kind of get people to actually open up? Totally. Well, because we're having that enormous problem here, I'm going to pry even deeper. Yeah. So you did not move to the Bay Area to work at Tech TV. You were, was your first job digital marketing for like an online furniture retailer?

16:58That's right. Basically, there was a company called Next Office that had hired me to come out and just really track all of their ad campaigns and ad spend. They had a marketing team that was going out and buying banner advertisements. People were click on those and eventually lead all the way down to a checkout. They wanted to know what the conversion rate was like and where they should be spending their money.

17:22And it wasn't ideal for me, but I knew at that point, I'm like, I'll take any job that gets me to the Bay Area. Like, what can I do to get me out there? Because it was the .com boom. You know, I was reading about magazines and it was a crazy web 1.0 and just like insane valuations and parties and like, just all the madness that you saw, I POs and I was like, I gotta get out there. I gotta get out there. You know, so I just went online and posted something on, I think it was monster.com, like the jobs board. And, you know, Mike Mazer, who later became really good friends, reached out to me and was like, Hey, I think you'd be great for this role. We had a phone interview and then they flew me out and gave me a job offer and I took it. Super cool. Do you recall how many years you were on screen savers before the whole G4?

18:13Seemingly debacle from the outside yeah, it wasn't that long actually because I think it was two and a half years that I was a tech TV which at that time, you know, it was the longest job I'd ever had and it was just oh, it was so awesome It seemed like it was a special place a really special place or the majority people were in their 20s that kind of like were around the set and hanging out and we would all just Party with each other afterwards and go out and we were all really close We were just like a family and it's still even today when I see those people it felt like a very special time in our lives and we just had no kind of no idea what we were doing But also we knew what we wanted to create and it was a very creative group of people and the content was good and Leo was like a great anchor host who's a little bit older than us but kind of brought everything together and

19:04had a great executive producer that was hilarious and fun to work for. Yeah, it was awesome. But the problem with tech TV is that we weren't as a network really making that much money. It was indie, right? It was owned by Paul Allen. That's right. So Paul Allen owned it and he was pouring a lot of money into it to keep it alive. And it was an expensive network to operate. I mean, we had hundreds of people and eventually they said, okay, I can't keep spending more money here. We need to actually do something and be acquired. And so G4, based out of LA, came along and said, we're a video game network. We think this is the future. We're going to acquire tech TV more or less for the subs. So they bought tech TV and they also thought it was a very similar audience. And they didn't want to lose that because we had some shows, a couple of shows, screens that was being one of them that were getting decent ratings. So they're like, okay, how can we kind of bring that audience along, merge it with our video game content?

20:01And so that's what happened. They bought us and they said, okay, by the way, we're going to shut down San Francisco. We're moving folks to LA. And so, you know, they gave me an offer to come down and continue to host the show down in Los Angeles. And so that's what I did in retrospect. It seems so obviously silly because especially, I mean, even now, but at that point, the Bay Area was the center of everything that you guys were doing with screen savers to move it down to LA. Like, because G-Port was owned by Comcast, right? That's right.

20:31Yeah, not to mention just the culture clash. That's been rough. They knew it was really rough and they knew long-term that they wanted to morph the screen savers into another show and they weren't going to tell us that, but they knew that was the plan. So when I saw that was happening, that's not what I wanted to be long-term. I didn't want to be an on-air TV person. So for me, the kind of writing was on the wall that I needed to go do something else and hopefully get back to the Bay Area.

21:00let me to write around when we created dig and then also I created a podcast network called revision three that was about creating that more that type of content like more geeky style content in podcast format does revision three predate the term podcast Yes, yes, because we were doing video only and there was no way to do a feed of that and so Steve Jobs had announced that there was something called podcast that we're gonna support and build that into iTunes and that's when Alex and I said, okay, let's get together and do a show called Dignation because now we have a place to distribute it. At the risk of like being way too far down the rabbit hole of internet nostalgia, I seem to remember an opening jingle from Leo's shows that was like net casts you love from people you trust. That's right. Funny thinking that like net casts almost became the thing.

21:56Yeah, he didn't want to use the word podcast and I'm not sure why that was. I think that he wanted to brand it his own thing and Yeah, I don't think he had quite the momentum. It was it was Adam Curry that coined the term podcast and I think that Leo was thinking at the time and I believe this is accurate that he was thinking that it shouldn't be just about Apple And about the iPod, because that's what podcasts kind of like, you know, referenced. It was always big open source advocate and things like that. That's so Leo. So Leo, like how can we make this more broadly applicable? Which yeah, that makes sense. But once the kind of snowball of the term podcast, grab hold, there was no going back. Yeah, it's like here I own zero iPods and listen to my podcasts on Spotify, who's actively suing Apple.

22:50Right. Like it stuck pretty hard. Yeah, totally. I always thought a lot of those terms were just hilarious. Like the iPod, like I, when you used to put I in front of things, it meant like internet. Yeah. And so I always used to like to say these things out loud, just to hear how ridiculous they were. Like sometimes I still tell people to send me electronic mail because like that's what he stood for in anything. You know, it's like it's so funny when you like actually pronounce them out. It's amazing how long these things stick. Yeah.

23:20Alright, so thesis with revision three though, like there's a very clear, loud part of Twitter today talking about the creator economy and like beating the drum that this is the next emergent thing. David and I feel like we've sort of experienced it firsthand. You've been experiencing it through multiple generations of the web. Did you have a thesis in starting that about the web in the internet is this new direct way to reach consumers?

23:47Yeah, absolutely. When we started Revision 3, the thinking there was that video was working online, like it was starting to take off and people could consume and watch video content. It was easy to produce on our side, like we could have some kind of mid-range cameras and gear and editor that we would just, you know, pay part time.

24:09We could turn that out and if we got enough people interested and excited there would be brands that wanted to sponsor it and that ended up being true and so we had an ad sales team and we had a network of shows and revision three grew pretty quickly because people were starting to tune in and we found that niche audiences were quite large and when they would talk to each other and use the internet to kind of share that this type of content was out there.

24:37we didn't have to rely upon these distribution agreements of these big old school television networks to get viewership and we could actually measure it in a much more accurate way and so that's what kind of started revision three and yeah that went on for many years and actually had a great outcome it was sold to discovering networks for 35 million and even though that sounds small these days at the time it was a big deal yeah and it became discovery networks kind of digital arm.

25:04Basically, they were all about, you know, traditional media. And so for them to get into digital has gave them a handful of folks that could come and lead that effort on the digital side. So it was pretty cool. That's great. And so at what point did you realize the like flywheel effect of having a media stream with Dignation and other ways that you're reaching people and being the founder of DIG like having this web 2.0 property? Yeah, it's a good question. When We started Dignation, we thought of it as a way to because we had a base of people that really loved the dynamic that Alex and I had back when we were hosting the television show together. So when we started this, we were like, okay, here's a great way for us to talk about the stuff we would normally be talking about, which is like the geeky news, our favorite stories. I also happen to have the website dig and so it's a great way to surface the best stuff for us to be chatting about. And it became this kind of like

26:02way to engage the community and highlight their names. I had a top leaderboard back then on dig and it still is it sounds like it was really people love seeing their name and lights like like Kevin and Alex mentioned me on the show like that's they mentioned one of the stories that I submitted so it just led to more usage of the website and yeah there was this little kind of like flywheel that happened And then eventually at some point dig became much bigger than Dignation like it was like clear that there were so many people listening or watching and reading and consuming dig and Dignation still had a pretty niche following of the hardcore original people But that was totally fine with us. We were just having fun doing the show dig was reaching I think that wanted to cap out at like 38 million monthly uniques. That's right. Yeah Wild. I mean at that point that was an enormous audience to be reaching on the web. Yeah, it was

26:54Pretty big. It was like top 10 web property. And it's still pretty big. I would love to have another site that does. Well, I guess when I say at that time, like, because Facebook now reaches what three billion monthly active users, I think if I have it right, you were out ahead of Facebook. And Facebook hadn't really started becoming the juggernaut that it is until the sort of late 2000s. I think that was started in 2004.

27:22But at one point, didn't Mark come visit you when you rolled out the dig button that was like letting you upvote articles on their websites when they were thinking about the like button that is now sort of famous and everywhere? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so we had a common investor, Greylock. And David Z, who was at Greylock, who's on our board, and also on the board of Facebook, was like, hey, you guys should get together and did an email introduction. And he's like, this is company Facebook. It's like really taking off. You guys should chat.

27:52And Dave had already kind of taken off and gotten a ton of press. And so yeah, Mark hit me up and he's like, hey, let's, you know, I'll come to the city because he was down in Palo Alto and he's like, I'll come to SF and love to see your offices. And let's go grab some food. And so he came to the office and we chatted about kind of just what voting meant. You know, for us, it was voting on content was helping us serve as the best stuff. And it was feeding back into our algorithm that would eventually recommend similar content to people.

28:21that we had suggested stories, portions, where we had a couple. It was early AI machine learning type stuff that we were applying to articles. So if you like this, you might also enjoy these articles. And so, you know, Mark was really interested in that. And this is before they had the like button. Pre-news feed. I think even pre-mini feed.

28:42Yeah, I don't remember what was going on at Facebook. It was locked down to just colleges and then they started opening it up and that's when I got an account. But yeah, he was very curious and yeah, it was nice. It was like, Mark was a nice guy. Like we ended up hanging out a handful of times and doing a handful of dinners and he was always just like a very thoughtful and and even once Facebook took off to the, it was clear that they were going to be much larger than dig.

29:08You know he was always really helpful he was he just said if you ever you know need anything like shoot me a text like happy to collaborate in different things and you know he invited us into the early. Facebook platform stuff so we were like really partner there when they first launched their platform and yeah I mean I have nothing but good things to say about how we got to know each other okay there's a lot of questions I got asked we've seen it it's been reported but I don't think I've ever heard you talk about it so.

29:37Supposedly, the story goes according to the media. You were inspired to start dig to make the leap and actually start this after you had lunch with somebody. Is that true? Are you talking about Commander Taco? Oh no, the story I heard was you had lunch with Waz. Oh no, it was not Waz. No, oh interesting. Okay, so this is from the business week story. We read the story that was the famous cover.

30:03And they reported there that you were inspired to start dig because you had lunch with laws and you were like, I'm gonna go be an entrepreneur. That's so funny. There's so many different. That's Sarah Lacey that wrote that story. That's funny. Yeah. This is the problem. Like, and this is so true with so many of my friends startups. Like success has a thousand founders, like they say, or they used to say a very like a thousand fathers or whatever it was, but that's like not PC. So there is so many different lore stories. Are there was even Wikipedia is completely wrong. So when I look at Wikipedia and the founding stuff there, it's completely wrong. It's just amazing. Yeah. So do you want me to just like cover the? Actually, yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. What is the like non-apocryphal as you remember it, even if it's like a bland, the real, what happened? Well, this is the truth. This is exactly how it went down. And I don't know that I've ever told the full thing, but I'll just do the quick version of it. So basically what happened is

31:03There was a site out there called delicious that was created by Joshua Shactor that was all about social bookmarking and he would bookmark things and he would count the number of bookmarks on things and This was one of the very first web 2 properties and it would surface interesting bookmarks But it wasn't news because people didn't typically bookmark news. They would bookmark things that they wanted to return to later and I would see that I was like, wow, it's servicing cool stuff here. I wonder what would this look like if you applied it to everything, okay? So that was one piece of it. The other piece of it was that I did have lunch, but it was with Commander Taco, who was the founder of Slashtop. Slashtop, yeah. And so he came and he was a guest on the show. And when I had lunch with him. And this was on the screen savers? Yes, but it was down in LA. Okay. And so I had lunch with them. This is 2004, early mid 2004.

31:59I asked him where all those user submissions went, because it's great and it promotes their favorite stories to the front page, and they're all user-submitted content, but you can't see any of it. So I was like, gosh, there has to be just so many good submitted stories here that they're just not surfacing. And I was like, why don't you make it? I literally told them. I was like, why don't you make it so we can see all the submissions, and then we can vote up the best ones. And he's like, nah, I don't want to do that, blah, blah, that's not the way it works.

32:24And so I was like, okay, well, I'm going to go build this. This is like when Vitalik proposed the idea for a distributed world computer to David who it was the colored coins and master coin. The Israel Bitcoin to that. Oh, projects. He was like, you guys, we should just do this all as one like master thing. And they're like, no, we're not going to do that. And he's like, okay, cool. I'm going to go start something new. Yeah. I mean, that was basically what had happened here with slash thought as I said, well, I'm just going to go start something new then. And then I went out and I kind of Basically just sketched it out like I sketched out what it would look like what a dig button would feel like what an upcoming section would be Where submissions would go like the whole thing I found a freelance developer. I hired that freelance developer to create the first prototype his name was Owen It says on the website he was a co-founder That's not true. He was a freelance developer and but you know he's the closest thing I had to a co-founder because we were in this together and he built it

33:21It also says that Jay Adelson was a co-founder that is not true. I hired Jay to be the CEO like four or five months later. It also says that Ron is co-founder. Ron was my first technical kind of backend hire a few months later. So it's like, and I'm not claiming that these guys claim that. I'm just saying this is the way it was written. So I don't have any like ill will against any of these people. But like when people see who the first few people are, they call them all co-founders and all this thing gets written about.

33:48Who did this and that? And I'm just like, whatever, like, it's fine with me. I don't care that Wikipedia never gets corrected, but that is the origin story. Oh my God, that's so great. Well, it gets so twisted because so in the lore out there, like having a guest on the show on the screen savers and then that leading to part of Dig is out there. But it says that you had Jay on the show and then you brought him in. But it sounds like, no, there was Commander Taco.

34:13No, Jay was on the screen savers. And I met Jay through going out. He was one of the co-founders of a company called Equinix, which was a big data center company. And so, yeah, huge. And so I went out and met him through that. And then he, you know, about six months into, well, he really wanted to do revision three. And he was the first check into revision three to create that content. And so that was awesome that Jay supported us back in that day. But he told me, to get rid of dig. He thought it was a distraction to revision three. And he was like, Oh, you should sell it. Like, dude, just focus on revision three. This is our thing. I put money into this. Like we need to focus on this. And I was like, Jay, you don't understand dig is going to be big. It's growing. We can do both. And so eventually about three or four months later, Jay was like, Oh, I see. Yeah, it is growing quite a bit. And I was like, Hey,

35:07How about I give you some equity? Would you come on and run this side? I don't know anything about raising from venture capitalists. I've never done it before. You've clearly been on this path. You've taken a company public. You can help out here. And so we agreed to I give him some equity a few percentage points to the company. He then built out.

35:26the right legal folks to work with brought them on board. You know, I had formed the company using like one of these like it was there was no rocket lawyer at the time, but it was like a rocket lawyer asked type like thing. So the docs were all done wrong. I didn't have any like board meetings or meeting notes and like it was all jacked up. So we had to have the docs already done. And so Jay was very good at helping kind of correct a lot of my mistakes that I had made early on.

35:52But yeah, he didn't actually come on until like six or seven months later after there was some real momentum there. There's a thing that I've referenced and you've referenced here, which is Web 2.0. What did that mean to you at the time? I didn't know. I didn't even know what it was called. Like, I literally, Jason Calicanas came up to me, who had run web blogs ink, which was in gadget and a bunch of the other sites. He tried to buy dig very early on. He saw that it was driving traffic to his sites and he sat down with me at sushi in LA.

36:21and this was after digs started to hype, it was very small and he's like, I'll give you a million dollars for this. And then I was like, okay. Which a classic low ball. So jcal. Yeah, well, honestly, I was like, okay, you know, I came from nothing, man. Like my parents had zero dollars as did I. And so I was like, yes, let's do that. And he sent me. And you just been making a salary, a taxi. Yeah, exactly. You didn't have equity in that. No, I had like $10,000 in savings and I spent a lot of it on building the prototype of dig. And my girlfriend was pissed at me for that.

36:49And so basically, you know, he came in, but then there was like, he sent me a term sheet and it was like, you get 200K upfront and then if you hit these milestones, you get like another 100K here and it was like this really complicated. I was like, I don't like this. Like we're growing a lot. And so ended up saying no and actually raising money instead. But he said to me during that lunch, he was like, you're like one of the biggest web 2.0 companies. And like literally, I thought, Is there a software I need to upgrade on my servers that makes me web 2.0 I was like there's something I'm not aware of I need to upgrade because I'm not web 2.0 I did not do that upgrade like I had never heard that term before which is so fascinating because to me and maybe it was a couple years later

37:34Dig was the embodiment of web 2.0. It was dynamic content. It was Ajax. It was user-submitted content. It was what became social media. Oh, dude. After I found out what it was, I was like, of course I'm web 2.0. Yes. Yes, of course we are. I have no idea what it was. It's this amazing thing that, like, I think the people who are the deepest in a thing that's becoming a thing in the world.

37:58aren't the people who get to name it, which is the most fascinating thing. When we were interviewing Vlad from Webflow, he was like, oh, I found out two years ago that we were a no-code company, but our company is 11 years old, so good to know about this no-code thing. Now, of course, they have embraced it and have the no-code conference and all this stuff. On your show, you're having all these awesome NFT artists on. I feel like that's their story. People, everybody, they're like, Yeah, I don't know like I'm just making my art. Yeah, it is one of those things that almost everyone a lot of entrepreneurs that I meet It's a dirty secret. It's like you go back and you look at these different covers of magazines and this great success and like no one really has a clue That they're ever gonna be as big as they become when you talk to the top companies that are out there. It's always like this should exist. I'm gonna go build it

38:50But it's 99% of the time, it's quite shocking that it gets as big as you don't really plan that. It was kind of like, I remember when Uber first came out. I was like, oh, how many people are going to get to other people's strangers cars? I guess it'll work for black cars. It'll work for black cars. That's what it'll be. And that was the launch. The plan was like, black car service with an app. Never did the founders ever dream it was going to be applied to a random Toyota Corolla. That was never imagined that you would feel comfortable. What are you?

39:19You must have known Garrett from this whole era, right? Garrett and I were really good friends and he had created Stumble upon and we didn't see each other as competitive really. So we had always go, Garrett and I just like were really close in the web 2.0 days and we would just go have beers all the time and talk about features and building out some of this stuff. But then yeah, I later ended up dating his ex-girlfriend and then we kind of had a little that didn't go over so well.

39:47But we're cool now. So that's why you jcal invested in Uber and angel invested in Uber and you didn't that would be a big reason why I did invest in Uber. But we're good now. It's like the dumb dumb shit you're doing your 20s. You know, it's like it was it was such a small thing though. Like you got to remember that web 2.0 and you know this whole world. It really isn't as big as startup scene as it is today. And so when we would go meet up at a bar, we say, okay, okay, fly bar into Visitoro and in SF.

40:17Let's go hang out and grab some beers. It was easy to grab Garrett from Stumble upon and you know get Josh Echter from Delicious to show up to something or you know, Ev from Twitter or whatever like we would just all hang you know, so it wasn't like We never knew that these projects were gonna be that big. We were just having fun building software Meanwhile, let me just insert a midpoint so today Tech is like the five biggest companies in the world and Kevin you're describing this era where like Basically all the people that run a lot of those big companies or started them or were involved in the founding or were angel investors are like hanging out getting beers. There's this interesting midpoint that I remember viscerally where I went to South by Southwest and I want to say 2011 and you and Alex were doing a live dig nation at Stubbs barbecue huge sort of like outdoor like great barbecue but like concert venue and 4000 people it was huge and I'm pretty sure

41:16After you did the show, the food fighters played. Was it the food fighters? No, it was a big band though. Was it the food fighters? I wasn't a fan of the food fighters. So maybe it was, but I remember there was a big band we had played one year that I was just kind of like, I don't know. I wasn't a huge fan and everyone thought it was a big deal. And then we had the Walkman play another year.

41:40which I was a huge fan of and so that was awesome I stuck around for that one I was like oh this is really cool but yeah that was the cool thing about South by right as you have these big bands coming in because they would play music the next week and they'd come into town early and it was easy to book someone like I remember Snoop Dogg was going and doing different South by things because he was gonna be out there anyway for the following music week or whatever so It was easy to get a big name to complete your little gathering of accents podcast live show. Yeah, it's still definitely accomplished this feeling though of me feeling like as someone who was totally following this all that from the outside because I was in high school and early college in like oh five to oh nine and feeling like there's a bunch of insiders and I'm not part of the insiders, but like

42:26They're like spinning distance away, where like when I grow up I want to be like one of them. That Dignation moment where I was looking around at South by I was like, oh this is like pretty mainstream. This has become a part of culture. Dude, it shocked us all. Literally we booked that venue and I'm like, I hope it looks like there's enough people here. Otherwise this is going to be a little awkward. We had no idea that that many people would show up and it was crazy because I brought my dad out to that show.

42:54And my dad had really no clue. I mean, he'd seen that we did these live dignations and and I kind of hid it from him because he didn't like me swearing a lot, even though he swore. So it was just like, what do we do? Like, you know, I think he'd be cool with it today if he was still around. But anyway, he saw that show and saw all those people and then when we left the venue, you know, all these people were back in the day trying to come up and get my autograph and all that stuff and like they kind of followed me out to the car that we were getting into which was just crazy because I was like a geek and had to have that kind of treatment was odd. But my dad saw all that and my dad was just blown away and he ended up passing away two years later. I remember just being like, you know, it was a special moment for me because we didn't have a whole lot growing up and my dad was really proud.

43:45I'm just really glad I had that. Because I didn't, I didn't. I decided to fly him out. I didn't know whether I should or not. And I, and I was like, okay, I should fly my dad out because he should be part of this. And, and it was just like, it was the right call. Those are very special moments for me, for sure. I bet. There's an interesting like looking backwards moment there where that probably applies universally. It's almost always the right call. If you're like, should I do something that overextends myself financially or is You know, an inconvenience or something to have a family member come see something that could be special. It's almost always the right thing to say yes. Yeah, and experiences I would say are definitely like the number one thing to invest in like to the best money spent. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture.

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46:16Well, gosh, I could do this absolutely forever. I do want to talk about some Web 3 stuff and I want to make the point and I think we have a little interlude in the middle where I want to talk about before you became Mofi Kevin, but after dig there's some interesting chapters in there. A lot of the things that you're observing about that era.

46:37feel similar to what's going on in crypto right now. Like it's kind of the true believers. It's kind of everybody knows each other. There seems to be a lot of like real genuine information sharing and just like belief in a common purpose, even though everyone kind of interprets the purpose differently. Does it feel like that to you too? It does. Yeah. I would say this is the first time since web 2 where I felt that type of connection and camaraderie around a new technology that the mainstream has yet to embrace is starting to embrace but is yet to embrace and we're all early and we all see it and we all believe in it and it's just a matter of time yeah time creates confidence it's interesting you feel like it's the first time since then because you look at like all these theoretical waves since then that like the media and VCs were sort of calling the next big thing some of which

47:35sort of have been, you know, machine learning is, you know, a reasonable one. And like, obviously there was the mobile wave after the sort of social wave. But the mobile wave felt like a kind of land grab. It was very obvious, you know, the mobile wave was something where when the iPhone came out, everyone's like, oh, of course, this is going to be huge. There was no doubt, you know, and it hit consumers hands immediately, right? And so there was none of this you have to believe. It just, it was a given.

48:03Well, it was also just, it was an expansion of the existing web 2.0 market, really, right? Like, Instagram was flicker, right? Like, WhatsApp was, you know, AM. Like, it's not, uh, the analogies were one to one. Right. And then, and then the big players were like, okay, we'll just make apps, like Facebook made a mobile app and like Twitter made a mobile app. And like, that was just an easy kind of transition for them.

48:25And in Web 3 is very much like Web 2. When Web 2 first came out, people were like, I don't know if this is gonna be big. What are these social network things about? Am I really gonna show people what I'm into by voting on things? Like there's a lot of like, just I don't know that I believe this to be true. And that's the same thing that's happening in Web 3 now. Like does this crypto thing real? Is it really gonna scale? Are these NFTs really collectibles? Is it just people?

48:49you know, making up stuff and, you know, there's a lot of doubt there. So I, that's, that's the kind of excitement because I love, there's an excitement that you get when you see something early that you believe to be true, but everyone else disagrees with you. That's always kind of fun. There's so many more entrepreneurs, like we say, like, you know, NFT artists entrepreneurs, DeFi projects where like, they're building stuff because they're like, oh, I'm in this community. This needs to exist. Right. Not like, hey, I've got this business plan. And there's this obvious, you know, see I'm going to go attack.

49:19It's true where I'm a partner over there. We don't invest in business plans. We sit down with an entrepreneur and we listen to their idea. We want it to be new, novel, exciting, and if it works, it should be massive. And that's what we get excited about. We want to back incredible people building very ambitious things. Okay, so let's talk about kind of during this transitionary period. What was your journey like in crypto? Like when did you first hear about it? When did you buy your first Bitcoin? Like how did we go from?

49:48the end of dig to mobile. It's a great question. I'd have to go back and search Twitter. I think I first tweeted about Bitcoin in 2012. Have you ever searched your Gmail to try and figure out? You can use like the before search operator. This is kind of a fun thing to do is like open your personal Gmail search Bitcoin or crypto and figure out what the very first mention of it is in an email exchange. Oh, that's interesting.

50:15The question is, yeah, I guess I would have had that in. I never even thought to do that. I mean, can we stop down for a second? I do that really. Yeah. Let's do it. Let's see here. So the first email I have about Bitcoin is June 12th of 2011. And it's an angel investor business plan. Andre from Canada says he likes Dignation and Foundation and wanted to tell me about this idea around Bitcoin. That is the first time that I actually see it mentioned in my inbox. And then the first Coinbase transaction I have is from, okay, yes, apparently I tweeted out my Coinbase link to get referrals. And they were sending me on Tuesday, August 14th of 2012. I started receiving

51:11a 10th of a Bitcoin. 0.1 Bitcoin. Oh my god. Which is what it says. High cap and rose Coinbase to set you 0.10 BTC worth $1 and 13 USD using Coinbase. Hell yeah. Congratulations, your friend. And then there's email address has verified their account on Coinbase. We've credited you 0.1 BTC to your account. And so I was started getting a quarter of a Bitcoin and then I have just like dozens and dozens of those emails.

51:39with the $1.16 was a quarter. So yeah, Bitcoin was pretty cheap back then. And that, so that means that I had a Coinbase account back in mid 2012. Okay. Awesome. We're gonna get back to Coinbase in one sec, but we got to have one little digression. You mentioned foundation. It's Trent Resner, right? Is the music in the beginning? Yeah. Yeah, the starting music on foundation. Yeah, that's another little show I did where I interviewed entrepreneurs. Okay. How did you get Trent Resner music?

52:08Well, he released that as a complete open source and he got rid of all the rights. All the stems, right? Even the tracks. So he had one album where he just released the entire thing to be used for any purpose. And we were doing, I don't know if he had commercial, right? I don't think he would say commercial rights in there, but we were non-commercial. We weren't putting any ads in or anything. So we used that. I had a chance to go and visit Trent at his house because we had him on before we used to do these, before they were asked me anything, we did these things called Dig Dialogues, where people could vote up their favorite questions for people they ask. And so we had the community vote up their top questions for Trent Rezner, and then I went and interviewed Trent, and that was a ton of fun. Oh, that's so awesome. I love searching old tweets and all the emails, as you can tell, in preparing for this episode, I think the first time I tweeted about Dig was a link to the Dig Dialog with you and Trent. Oh, that's awesome.

53:02Yeah, that was so much fun to do that show with him. His house is crazy. He's the most rock star coolest house ever. It's all dark and like, leathery and cool looking dogs. Everything about his house is cool. He's such a pure artist. Yeah. Well, it's crazy. We were chatting and we were talking about all this different stuff and we were walking out.

53:23and he's like, do you want to see my recording studio? Because he's got one in his house. He's like, no, I got to go. Yeah, exactly. In my mind, I'm like, you don't understand. My high school years were all about night snails. And that was my favorite music. And so I was like, that kind of nonchalantly. I was like, yeah, yeah, you've got time. I'll check your recording studio. And so we just walked down there. And it's exactly what you expect. It's like, you walk into this room. It's all sound-proved. And it's like, Racks of old analog equipment with like wires going between them like a mad scientist like room To be a fly in the wall in this room. It's just so cool like he's creating all this music with real analog Yeah, yeah, which is how all those guys used to do it like fat boy Slim and like they're bunch of great documentaries so cool that era now where like it wasn't

54:18It was digital, but it wasn't like the source was analog. Right, exactly. I love it. All right, Kevin, bring us back. I found your first three tweets with Bitcoin in it. In June 2011, you tweeted, testing out Bitcoin, can someone send a couple cents to this address? Thanks. And then you have a wallet address. Yeah, that address I lost the keys for. So you can look up that wallet address. And I think there's over a Bitcoin in there or something like that. So there's like, Whatever the prices are lost 50 granders you and everyone else man. Yeah, I'll never recover that if you pull up that tweet, please do not send anymore

54:54second one for those asking about Bitcoin. This is also in June more info here. We use coins.com still haven't got any coins must be doing something wrong. I was started mining. I think back then. Oh. And then here it is the big one 2012 playing around with coin base. A new startup that hosts your Bitcoin wallet. Check it. Yeah. So that I was Brian. I had him on foundation Armstrong the founder.

55:22And I saw him at demo day at YC and I told him I wanted to invest and I was investing at Google Ventures at the time and so I was a partner over at Google Ventures. I brought that to the Google Ventures team. I won't call it any partner in particular, but let's just say one partner who I absolutely adore and I'm not going to call them out, but if you hear this, I adore you called it tulips and basically said that, you know, we can't The fear and this is a valid fear back then and so I'm not not slamming this person You have Google corporates money What if you invest Google corporates money and it's something that becomes or is called a scam later down the road That does not look good for Google. Oh, this is like a great argument against corporate venture because like that is basically what venture capital needs to do in consumer right so

56:14It's okay, I ended up investing in Coinbase a little bit later personally. It all worked out, but Brian's an awesome human. We got him some great early exposure through that foundation and I just delighted that we helped get that company off the ground because I know that foundation episode. He told me later, really recently, like maybe like three or four months ago, he told me that people still referred to that foundation episode where he was on as like the first time they actually got into crypto. So we got a lot of people onboarded into cryptocurrency with that.

56:43And at the end of the day, that is the thing that gets me excited about doing the foundation podcast, about doing podcasts around finance. The reason I don't take sponsors and I don't try to like monetize this stuff is like, that's not what it's about for me at this point in the stage of my career. It's about getting more people on board and then excited about these new and upcoming technologies and hopefully helping them avoid a lot of the crap that's out there. Because with anytime there's money involved, there's people that are trying to scam and take advantage of others. And I want to put out content because there's a lot of that other content out there. You know, there's a lot of people on crypto Twitter, not the groups that I run in. But if you just go a layer too deeper, you'll see so much chilling and flipping and trying to like pump and dump. And like that's the stuff we need to get rid of. Do you have any hot takes on something that has a large user base, but you feels pretty scammy? Well, I would say that.

57:40It depends on what the goal of the project is like there's a lot of knock-off projects that happen like Dogecoin for example when it first got started I had Jackson Palmer the founder on my podcast as well on foundation and It was meant to be a cryptocurrency that could be used as a way to More or less give away for good deeds so people were using it to kind of tip there was all these dogecoin tipping bots and reddit Vitalik got a ton of does yeah, I mean people were like back in the reddit days of when doge first launch people were using the tip bots and they would send you know a thousand doge here like two thousand here. Oh, that was a great comment. Here's 50 doge and so that's why the supply was so large is they he wanted to create this enormous supply so it wouldn't be hoarded and it would just be thought of this fun thing to kind of like create this little tipping economy

58:33And I thought that was a really cool idea and one that was worth playing around with. Now there is a lot of knockoffs and clones of that with not the intention of pushing technology forward in any meaningful way, but with just the intention of price appreciation because they want to jump on, ride it, sell it, make money and rinse and repeat. And you see that happening over and over. So those are the projects.

59:02that I think are to be avoided. You know, I certainly believe that Doge did not have that intent. I know that if they didn't have that intention when they launched, it was not a pump and dump scheme. It was just like, let's have fun with this and see where it takes us. And that was the thinking there. It makes total sense. I mean, anytime there's a new paradigm or a new opportunity, let's just phrase it as new paradigm. Everyone's mindset has to shift to become a believer in the new thing. Look at web too. The easiest thing to do would be to say like, no, why would I submit stories that other people could see or even worse? I mean, I remember my parents, Ben, I'm sure you remember this being like, don't put your personal information on the internet. Like, don't join Facebook, which it turns out may actually be pretty good advice. I should be more succinct. Anytime there's a paradigm shift.

59:52It requires a leap of faith to become a true believer in the new thing and the earliest people that have to do that there's the most upside for them because they get to be early to that thing which could accrue them reputation or actual you know shares and whatever the new thing is but it requires that leap and so it's really easy when you you are someone who's looking around and seeing other people become awakened to this new thing to have some shyster convince you that Oh, you should just become awakened to my new thing too that looks a lot like the legit awakening that's going on with other people that's paying big dividends for them. Right. And I get that. I think that you have to ask your question, this is happening in the NFT space as well. You have to ask the question, like, what are the real motivations of this project? And so I will certainly miss some things that start off as a joke and eventually have real legs to them and evolve.

1:00:49into a place where they are innovating in some interesting capacity that means multi billion dollar kind of ideas out of a joke, right? Like that will happen. Communities will form and they will evolve and make something that is more than just that initial kind of hype cycle that happens. We see a lot of. But for me, when I evaluate new cryptocurrency projects, I always look through the lens of one, is there a use case here that needs to be solved?

1:01:19that this company is going out and solving, is it a credible team behind it? And is there a discussion of price appreciation? Is that the main topic? Because the easiest way to see through a scam is to look, what are people talking about? Are people talking about the moaning of the coin, the price going up? Or are they talking about why the underlying technology and what is being built is so important for the future of the world?

1:01:42And if the conversation is around making money, there's a good chance you're in something that is going to be some type of pump of dump where eventually it just has the bottom fallout from underneath it. So, you know, that's how I try to evaluate things. And it's part of why I want to start focusing and having more NFT related content is because there's a lot of that happening in the NFT space as well now. It's like anyone armed with Photoshop can instantly turn out 10,000 characters with different glasses and hats and goggles and all that other stuff right and People they call it aping into something where you just kind of go all in people see this and they ape into something and You know a community can be built around that and you can have some serious growth there But I worry about the long-term durability of these projects like is there gonna be so many of them that they just seem all like kind of copycats and clones

1:02:38And so for me, that means I'm very selective about which investments I place there. And I do consider them investments. You're talking about when you personally buy an NFT. Right. Exactly. An NFT or cryptocurrency. But when I personally buy an NFT, I'll say first and foremost, what's the price point? The price point is hundreds of dollars. And it's something that you could afford to lose if you had to. Then I want to love the art. You know, I bought some cool cats like A few weeks ago it wasn't because I thought cool cats were gonna be the next crypto punks I just thought they were cute little characters and I like to swap out my avatar from time to time right and they had a great community that was following them and they had plans to launch other little cool cats related things and I'm like this is a fun little community and so That is why I went in and bought a few of them

1:03:24At lower prices and I'm okay with losing that money because there's no money to be lost I'll always consider them fun little things that I can put in a digital frame or have them up around my house and it kind of marks a moment in time of when I thought that was cool right so that's fine now when it comes to spending like real dollars and like actually making an investment then I'm looking for more blue chip related stuff and so that is in my mind projects that are not clones, but that were actually the first at something like, you know, the first fully on chain generative artwork or, you know, crypto punks to finding the ER C721 standard and being the first to kind of put that out. Those are the projects I look at and saying, those will always historically look back and say, those were important for this space, if you believe in the NFT space. And I think they will have long term

1:04:16collectibility and durability from a price standpoint. So that's how I look at it when I'm buying those things. It's funny. Implicit in what you're saying is the very same reason why the founders of some new groundbreaking consumer thing always have way more upside than any investors or anyone who comes later, it's because they were true believers in the thing for the value of the thing even before it had any notion of being an investment. That's right. And that's why Often times anybody who's seeing a trend and saying, oh, I got to get in on that and they developed their business plan just to use the same parlance that we used earlier. That's why there's always less opportunity there than for that like initial core sort of like community where there's a lot of heat. Right. It also strikes me like, man, the parallels to modern art, right? Like, you know, anybody can

1:05:09make a knockoff painting of a Campbell soup can or Marilyn Monroe, right? But nobody was doing that before in Warhol. It's just like such an obvious analogy here. Yeah, I mean, there's things on the NFT side that are first, you know, there's certainly some of the programmability that you can do on NFTs and what's coming there is really interesting. There are going to be new genres of art that are created, which is a very exciting thing. I mean, this idea of generative art, like what's happening with art blocks and that the user doesn't know what they're going to receive when they make a purchase for the first time, and that transaction hash is used as part of and fed into the algorithm that actually generates the art. I mean, that has never really been done before in a way that we could capture it and hold on to it. I mean, it could have been prototyped and done in a way that could be displayed a decade ago, but there was no way to prove ownership. And so, yeah, there's some really cool things that I'm just seeing. And I'm excited for

1:06:05The depth that is going to be coming to NFTs rather than it just being about a place to mint a JPEG or a GIF. It's going to be, or I guess it's called GIF. I was get corrected when I say that. Oh no, it's GIF. It's GIF. It's GIF. It's actually GIF. We had a whole debate on this. I know technically, but like the developers that created it say it's GIF like the peanut butter.

1:06:26The community has rested control of it. Yeah, it's crazy. But anyway, yeah, so there's some really cool, you know, new thinking there that I'm excited to hopefully invest in. Were you into art before NFTs? Yeah, I have been for quite some time. Not in a deep way, but it's something that as someone that has built a bunch of projects, I've always kind of been a usability, a feature, and a branding kind of person. So, you know, everything that I've created is always been the names that I've come up with logos things like that always work very closely with designers on iterating and kind of refining and so I'm someone that can appreciate it and you know I've always been a big fan of certain artists but yeah this is just like a whole new level like these new digital first NFT artists like X-copy and some of the people that are just doing really bold fun things I just get really excited about I didn't realize it until now but

1:07:24You're kind of the perfect person to really understand a lot of the value with NFTs because in a lot of ways you're an artist yourself you look at a lot of the products you've built that have always had really strong design sensibility or literally been you know in things like watches or I mean even the the more recent apps you've built with fasting and it's called oak right yes oak the meditation app yeah it's very clear that you have a strong point of view on how something should look and feel and be as an object to use. And also you have this great investing lens at true and formerly at Google Ventures and doing all these incredible angel investments have been a founder. And so it really is this fascinating sort of convergence of art and investing and the internet that is kind of like this like Kevin Rose stew. I like that stew.

1:08:14It's a good to do that's a great way to describe it. Yeah, those are all the things that I care about and for me that's what makes doing these types of podcasts like just a lot of fun. That's why I want to produce more of this type of content is I love chatting with these artists and these founders and these creatives that are doing new and exciting things and bringing that awareness to other people. So how how do you get hooked up with true? Do you know home from the I knew home for back in the day. Yeah, and he used to cover dig a lot when he was a writer. But True had actually backed and invested in my company milk that I sold to Google Ventures. Then they went on to back Odinkee and Zero. And so they've backed several of my companies. And so I just met them and just fell in love with the people there. I mean, they have a fantastic team of very low ego. I love everyone at True. Anyone that I've worked with, I always walk away feeling like that person has the longest view in the room to use a Sam Hinky parlance of

1:09:12Caring deeply about relationships above all of us. Yeah, I mean, that's it exactly. There is such long-term, long-view kind of investors. We pride ourselves in trying to take all the pressure off the entrepreneur. You know, like we backed Matt Mulmuegg from WordPress 15 years ago and we still have a board seat and we still have stock and we're not saying, hey, you have to go IPO or you have to sell. Like, that's not in our DNA. We want entrepreneurs to, it's their babies, their company. They invite us in.

1:09:42for the right. So it's like, who are we to go and try and force outcomes and do all the mean nasty things you read that other VCs can and have done in the past. And so I realized that working with Truth early on, you know, when I was going to sell to Google, it was going to make a tiny bit of money for the investors, but not world changing money. And the partner I was working with was like, Kevin, this is your company. Do whatever you want, man. If you want to go sell it, then then sell it. If you think the time is right, like make it happen. And so it was just that kind of like, It just makes me, as an entrepreneur, you have so many things that you're trying to juggle on your head and wrestle with. And just knowing that your investors is not one of them is one of the reasons why I was attracted. I said, I have to work with this group. And so, yeah, that's how we got hooked up. And you initially became a venture partner, right? And then transitioned into a full-time partner role? Yeah, it was a venture partner. So I was still building stuff. You know, I built zero and then we decided to bring that and Mike Mezer took that over to CEO and then we funded it. True.

1:10:40Wait, Mike Mauser, your first boss. Mike Mauser, the dude who hired you? Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Mike and I just remain friends for a long time. So I hired him to work for me at Dig. He first hired me, then he left the office company when it started working electronic arts was a VP over there. Yeah. Left EA was a VP at AOL for a while left there. And then I hired him to run marketing in BD at Dig.

1:11:09Wow. And then eventually he's the one that got me into fasting because he had about with a really serious stage 4 cancer that he beat back and went into remission. And in conjunction with chemotherapy, he also implemented fasting. So he's a big believer. And so he took it over his CEO. It's so cool. That's awesome. Okay. So how did you make that call of?

1:11:33You know sitting in that emotionally of I'm a venture partner so I'm helping to bring great entrepreneurs to the firm It gives me lots of flexibility where I'm not were you sitting on boards at that point? No, so you're you have time to sort of tinker and explore and start things and build and do media and Transitioning into that you know full-time partner role to have investing be your day job How did you make that call and how is that felt?

1:11:57Yeah, well, I will say I was sitting on boards just not related to true so I was on the board of Hordinki and Harlan estate and the Tony Hawk foundation and a few other things but like I was just it was one of these things where Building is a lot of work and it just it is one of those things that you have to kind of go all in and give it your all and so for me We had just had our first kid and I was just at this point in my life where I realized that I didn't want to go and do another startup. So that's kind of the venture role thing is like you're trying to figure it out. Like, should I do another startup? Should they fund me again? Should I go into this? And I thought, you know, I want I want to optimize quality of life a little bit more. And so I was like, you know what? I think I'm going to come on and if they'd have me, I'd be an investor there. And they were like, yes, hell yeah, let's make it happen. And so I joined a full time a couple of years ago and have been doing deals ever since. That's really cool.

1:12:56Are you looking at crypto stuff in particular? Yeah, I would say that 95% of my day job is evaluating cryptocurrency or blockchain related companies along with NFT related stuff. So, you know, we've probably deployed a head to gas probably 75 million this year into blockchain related startups. Wow. So it's a decent chunk. We have a 750-ish million dollar fund. So it's a big chunk of our fund.

1:13:24Yeah, 10% of a fund in a particular industry is pretty heavy. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty well diversified in that that spreads across a whole slew of different protocols and coins and DeFi and scaling solutions and, you know, NFT projects and like a bunch of different things there. So, but yeah, we're firm believers in the future of blockchain. There's no doubt that this technology is going to change everything, especially the financial and collectibles world and gaming as well. All right, listeners.

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1:15:28So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. Okay, so this brings us to, I think the perfect place to start to wrap here is, you know, Mofi. Obviously, I'm going to keep explaining throughout the whole thing why you're doing it. This whole conversation, where does it go from here? You know, you could just keep doing what you're doing and it would be great. It's got magic. It's wonderful.

1:15:57but it's all about crypto and web 3. And it feels like there's also so much more that what used to be social media can become in web 3 world. How are you thinking about it? You could have a doubt, you could be doing all sorts of stuff. Yeah, it's a good question. And I think that I'm starting to see two individual worlds starting to separate a bit.

1:16:24In some sense, you have traditional cryptocurrency scaling solutions and DeFi in one bucket, and then you have all the craziness that's happening with NFTs in another bucket. So, I'm actually going to be launching a new podcast, if I don't already have enough podcasts, that is dedicated to all things NFTs. So, just NFT content. Awesome. Yeah, it's going to be called proof. So, it's proof.xyz.

1:16:49is the domain name. That's awesome. Thank you. So I'm excited. Proof is going to be just going really deep on all things NFTs and that will cover everything from the art and programmable side of things to the generative side to tokens that cover DAO's and what DAO's are doing to the gaming world and how NFTs unlock different assets and how people are buying virtual land as NFTs will discover it all there.

1:17:17And then modern finance the podcast will still do an occasion a little really important piece on NFTs so that you won't miss the people that listen to that won't miss out on the the big deeper like peoples of the world or when you have someone really big on that you want to get out there but that will focus more on everything is happening on DeFi and scaling and new coins and that that world so I just was getting a lot of there was two camps with people saying give me more NFC content. And then there's the other camp being like, hey, get back to some of that crypto stuff that we miss. And I'm like, I can't please everybody. So I got to break it. It's funny. We're getting that out acquired a little bit of like, hey, give me more than, you know, Atari like the classic tech history or even just, you know, non crypto stuff and people are like, give me more crypto stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So it's you know what I'm talking about. It's like, you can't please everybody. So for me, it's just easy to carve out a separate feed and

1:18:10and say, listen, the best of the best from Proof, like the big names will always make it to the main modern finance podcast. But if you want to hear about the new and upcoming artists that hasn't broken out yet, but I think it's really cool because they're doing something unique and novel, you're going to find it on the Proof podcast. So it should be fun. Okay. So like nerd out a little bit. What's your strategy for launching? Are you going to have like do the first couple of episodes of Proof in the MoFi feed and then spin it out? Yeah. Most likely what I'm going to do is make an announcement. I have the CEO super rare.

1:18:40which is one of the big NFT platforms that I just recorded. I'll announce that at the beginning of that episode when we drop it on MoFi and then people can go subscribe. I'll probably backdate and put all of the NFT content that we have in MoFi into the new feed. So if you come into that feed, people can always jump back in time and say, hello, I want to listen to that interview with SnowFro, the founder of our blocks, and they'll be able to jump back into that. Or here when I interviewed the founder of CryptoPunks or whatever it may be.

1:19:07it'll be pre-populated with probably five or six episodes, and then I'll start releasing a new NFT episode, hopefully every week to week and a half. And I would say probably one a month or so of those will make it to the main modern finance feed. And if you subscribe to both, you'll know you're like, oh, I already listened to that one. I don't need to click it on Mofi, but then Mofi will be more just like big name people in the crypto industry both in terms of creators and then people are analyzing it where it's going and so I want you know talking through where DeFi is how it's evolving and some of the new and interesting projects and more of that so yeah it's going to be a lot of work but this is the stuff I love to do because I feel like both of these industries are filled with confusion confusion and a lot of hype and a lot of you know back in remember the ICO world a few years ago there was so many scammy projects there and it's like

1:20:00I hope that people can come in and know to trust me that I would not want to promote something that is a scam or that is just there for the hype, but actually I always call out why they're on the show and why I think it's worth covering. So it won't be everything. It'll be a subset of what's out there. I'm so glad you're doing this because I would say I've been a late-comer in almost everything in crypto.

1:20:23But I guess in some ways all of us who are currently participating in the ecosystem are early adopters because there's going to be 10 to 100x more people after us. But I would say it took me listening to the Beeple episode and- Which is so good by the way. Everybody can listen to it. Oh my god. Beeple, what a character. I love that character. I just want his accent. Like I want his manner of speech. It's so fun.

1:20:47Oh my god, he's the best. He's hilarious. I mean, you couldn't, it couldn't have happened to a nicer, crazier dude. Truly, but it took me listening to that and several other of your NFT episodes for it to kind of click when NFTs first started becoming buzzy. I was definitely one of those people that was like, uh, the whole point of digital art is that it's infinitely reproducible. And like, why would I pay for so big? I give you an instant. I was definitely one of those people. And I think it took me till hearing people, first of all, Learning about the artists behind the art is actually the value, feeling close to those artists and why they're doing what they're doing. That is the reason to buy it, at least in my opinion. And sure, it's cool and it's fun to look at. But it was also the realization that he brought up of like, people aren't buying NFTs. People finally have a vehicle to value digital artwork. And like digital art has been a thing for like 10, 15, 20 years.

1:21:44kind of in this format, but there's been no incentive to make it since it's just infinitely replicable and easy to rip off. And finally, now there's like an incentive for artists to make incredibly cool stuff and rare stuff in a way that is totally driving the level of creativity and innovation here because there is actually now an incentive for it. Yeah, there's so many pieces that unpack that is a major one. You nailed it. But then there's also just imagine We're sadly, you know, you say I'm a little older and you guys you guys are old too There is a younger generation that grew up skinning their characters in games and are so used to purchasing and holding virtual objects and virtual goods and there was a survey that was done that there is a very large subset of gamers that consider it was like more than 50% it was something really scary

1:22:39they consider their online identity in their games to be more important than their offline, like in-person identity. Wow. And so you have this world... It actually makes total sense, like when you think about it. It makes total sense. And you have this world of people that have grown up digitally native that say, I want to be able to show my friends something cool on my phone that I own. And when they get older, they're gonna say, or flip it up on my wall and have it as something I can show my wall. And guess what?

1:23:08If the house burns down, I don't lose my painting or I don't have to worry for me. I think about my kids walk by something. I don't have to worry about them taking a marker to it. There's just so many beautiful aspects to the portability and how you can showcase your favorite pieces of art and also just how you can unlock the potential. When they're programmable, what if my art changes over time and the artist bakes in certain things that unlock it the longer I own it? Some of that is just so cool.

1:23:38There's so many aspects to this ecosystem that what NFTs brings to the table that you can't have with traditional art, that I think they're going to take another decade or so for people to really wrap their head around. Do you know that back in the day, so when people moved from when Canvas was created? Do you know that there's a huge blowback on it? No. So yeah, there's a huge blowback on Canvas because everything was painted on walls or on these wooden... Yeah, frescoes.

1:24:06Yeah, so to move to Canvas, many people thought during that time. It's portable. Why wouldn't you want something permanent? It's like it can be taken and copied. Like there was all these like worries around movie. So a lot of canvas art was actually worth less than things that were actually in a more permanent, you know, on the wood or on the wall. So it was just like this transition that happened and it took a while for people to finally adopt. That's amazing. I just thought that was a hilarious story and like the same things happening here, you know. Oh, man.

1:24:38That's so cool. I just love that like there's something really cool about being able to walk into a gallery or bar or wherever you are. See something on the wall and being like, wow, that artist really connects with me. Oh, it's $700 worth of ETH. Scan a code. It transfers to your wallet. It disappears from the wall. Something else appears there. And now you want it. Like that's freaking cool. Like that is going to happen, you know?

1:25:05Well, okay, thinking here about the future of Mofi, Kevin, you're too much of a tinkerer to just let it be that the final form of Mofi is like I record an MP3 and then I toss it into some podcast players. So like, is there an on-chain version of content, media, something that could make sense for Mofi? That's a good question. That's a very, very sharp...

1:25:32I'm pointed smart question that of course I don't think of it as much for Mofi as I do for something like proof where I think what can we do that is unique and Well, you just have to wait and see I can wait and see I wouldn't built you know, Houdinki for a few years and Houdinki was a kind of a proxy for what proof might eventually become and like you know, we did really in-depth editorial around mechanical time-keeping and watches and that attracted millions of people per month still does. I mean, there's 150 people that work at Hodeinku right now. It's a massive enterprise. Hodeinku has this unbelievable characteristic. I think you guys do or did this best in the entire world of using content to enrich the value of purchasable goods. It is half a content business, half a commerce business, and they are so wonderfully intertwined. More people should take a look at that.

1:26:30Yeah, I mean, Hodinki, they got that blend. And honestly, one of the things that we were really good at been the founder and myself when we sat down and we started planning out e-commerce, we wanted to make sure there was kind of a church and state line between editorial and e-commerce because it's very important to be able to have independent, critical pieces written about watches that you may sell.

1:26:52And so we had to make sure and draw that line in the sand and say and let the brands know that like we can be critical about your watch is still and talk about them like if we don't like the way that something is manufactured or you cut corners on some one of your movements and I mean it gets really geeky for people that aren't into the watch world. Think about like the mechanical insides of the watch.

1:27:14and then think about the most hardcore vintage Porsche collector. They care about every little tiny detail inside of that machine. That is the engine inside of this watch. And so the geeks, and that's why I partially why I'm attracted to it, like some of my favorite watches are not expensive showing off watches. They're watches that would never get any attention at a party in New York, but they're meaningful because of what's inside of them.

1:27:40You know when you go and you pick up an omega that has a 321 movement that was the exact internal engine the exact movement that was taken to the moon like that is awesome. And so like that's the kind of geekiness that got me excited about watches and that's what I want to bring to the NFT world. I want to talk and go deep on with these artists and talk about what drives them and how they created some of the first especially when we're on the programmability of the stuff like it's going to be.

1:28:09really fascinating. Eventually, when I have Dermitrion that created one of the most popular projects out there called Ringers, I want to see code snippets of the Ringers project and put that into the article and show, I mean, that's the geeky level I want to get to. So that's where I'm hoping to take proof. And what's so cool, but well, I don't know if this is how you're thinking about things, but like with watches, it's like this little preview of what it could be.

1:28:31But the thing about watches is, you know, the super rare stuff, you know, it's hard to get my dad's really into watches. Hi, dad, if you're listening, but you can also kind of buy it anywhere, right? Like, you don't have to buy it at Hootinky. Like, you can buy it at Hootinky, you can buy it elsewhere, right? That may not be true, depending on where you go with proof. Like, it's not like a retail environment. Right. Yeah, I mean, the thing is for us with proof, what I think about is, and this is what Hootinky did as well.

1:28:57Don't think of these businesses being built in the next six months to a year. We need to spend the first three years gaining trust, right? Like that's the main thing is like in-depth editorial and content that is worth reading and a brand that you can trust to bring the best artist to you and explain why they're the best and that means above and beyond me I'm gonna be looking to hire editorial folks that are both traditionally and classically trained art critics that are also embracing the NFT world and give us both perspectives. You know, like we need to know why something might be historically important when it comes to the new stuff that's being created on the NFT front. So it's going to be a fun little venture. All right. Well, I found a whole new thing that I'm imagining. I'm going to be very geeky about. So I'm excited to listen in tune in Kevin.

1:29:44Awesome. Well, that's you're the first listener. Thank you so much. Sweet. It hasn't been. It's not out yet. So I might be by the time this podcast is out, but there certainly be a way to proof.exe. Yeah, proof.exe. They'll be a link up there to subscribe to the podcast, even if there isn't an episode out yet. There will be the historic ones that we've done so far. So that'll be the best way to join. And then, of course, modern.finance is for all things crypto. And that's where we go deep on all the crypto stuff.

1:30:12and that's a whole nother can of worms. It's a lot of fun. It's awesome. Probably our biggest segment of the acquired audience is entrepreneurs are aspiring entrepreneurs. Working folks get in touch with you for that or with true. Yeah, it's kind of hard on the true side in that we typically I would say 90% of our deals come from referrals from entrepreneurs that we've already backed. So we have a little over 300 entrepreneurs that are kind of referring in new companies to us.

1:30:37So you kind of use that as a filter because if you just had an open submit form you would just be overwhelmed and it'd be impossible to get through. So if you know a true company that's the easiest way to get a hold of us. I would say outside of that you know my DMs are always open on Twitter. I try to go through them like once a week but sometimes it gets a little crazy.

1:30:58For me specifically, I'm looking at all of the new cryptocurrency blockchain related and NFT related deals. So if it's something outside of that realm, unless it's like health and fitness, which I also am very passionate about or some consumer internet stuff as well, probably not the right partner for you to pitch. But yeah, that's those are probably the best ways, definitely through the network of founders who backed. Love it. Okay, one last little tidbit before we go. He said Twitter had to get on the who to follow list.

1:31:28Suggested follow list that happened at the bar in San Francisco. Yeah, that happened to Ted. So at Ted in, we were down in Ted conference. This was when it was down in SoCal. And it was me, Evan Williams and Chris Saka at a bar having some drinks. And this is when Twitter first started taking off. We were just talking to Evan like, dude, it's crazy man. There's like thousands of people signing up per day. Like it's not, you know, like at that point, I think it was like, you know, he's probably hitting 10,000 plus new users a day. It was like it was clearly working, you know.

1:31:57And soccer's like, hey, do you think you, you know, you think you can add Kevin and I to suggest a user list? And it, because it was like, it was a manual list. And so it was one of those things where you, it was just hard-coded. It was no like algorithm, like, yeah. And so, he looks at us and he's like, all right. And so he pulls out his phone and he literally does it right there on his phone. And he's like, okay, done. We're like, thanks, dude. And I had turned on notifications for any time someone follows me because that's how small it was. And instantly my phone was like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm like, holy crap, dude. This is taken off. And I went and turned off that notifications. And I was just like getting so many followers. And then it was just like, you know, keep growing and growing and growing. And they kept that suggestion. It was kind of the same for a very long time. And then I got this retweet.

1:32:53From this woman, this was like a month or two later and I like looked at the icons like that girl's kind of cute and I like click on her and it was like a foodie Liz and Sarah Cisco into wine into health of fitness No way working on her neuroscience PhD and I was like, oh, who is this and it was my my now wife Daria And it was all because Ev added me to the suggested user list and actually at my wedding I told Ev that like I especially called them out and said thank you for Anzaka for for making that happens because it's how I met my wife. I hope he did something like really nice. Can you get him like a people or something or like a crypto punk? I'll have to see if he's into NFTs. I haven't asked him about that. I haven't seen him as much now that we've had to COVID but

1:33:40There should be a gift. I know I've sent him some nice bottles of wine in the past. So that is so cool. I feel like you got to do more than one. No, it's a good point. It's a good point. You have like one of the best stories at a party behind the statement like, oh, my wife and I met online. Yeah. Definitely. This was before. You know, I'm kind of jealous though of these people that have it. It seems like it's easier these days. Like I didn't have any of the swiping stuff that was like, you know, to date. Like mine was all.

1:34:09Back in my day, it was a 24 by 24 icon on Twitter that we use for dating. You had to upvote your future one. Yeah, exactly. Now the crypto punks make more sense. Yeah, that's true. Love it. All right, Kevin Rose. Thank you so much. Thank you guys. Thanks for having me. This has been a blast. It's always fun to walk through the history of all this stuff and talk about the future. So, so thank you. All right. Likewise. All right, listeners.

1:34:38Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale. Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers. And how fast you can use that signal to guide what you shipped next. This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved. So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences, or just evolving your existing core product, go to Statsig.com slash acquired to get started.

1:35:37Well listeners, thank you for joining us on that journey that was so awesome to get to do this with Kevin as you could tell so much of David and my I don't know adolescents young adulthood was involved in things that Kevin has built so super cool to get to do that with them super super cool. I have one special carve out for the end of this episode It is a company that we at PSL ventures just invested in We led a $5 million round in a company called Trova Trip out of speaking of Portland out of Portland. And I am so pumped about this company. And I just wanted to share a little bit because I think a people should think about going on trips, but B, I think it's an incredibly cool company to work for if anybody's thinking about their next thing, whether you're software engineer or designer or market or whatever. So what Trova Trip does is they enable creators to create custom trips.

1:36:32to over a hundred places around the world and take eight to 16 people from their audience on a group trip together so you're traveling with like-minded people to cool places with a person that you sort of identify with be it a yoga instructor or your favorite disc golfer or someone else that you follow on Instagram or TikTok or anything like that and it's just a really cool upending of the sort of group travel industry and especially now and Travel is actually starting to happen again. So it seems like it's just great timing and great team. Oh, man. This is so cool. We totally need to get an acquired trip going. We could do all the all the Silicon Valley hot. Well, now after this episode, we got to go find that bar on on to visit arrow in San Francisco where apparently everything went down in the Web 2.0 days. But we can go to Stanford, we can go to the old pro in Palo Alto, go to Bucks and Woodside. Oh, man.

1:37:29Actually, David, we almost went to Bucks one time, right? We went to that spot next door. No, we looked in. It was full. We ended up going to that other lunch place next door to the like the bakery, the woodside bakery, whatever it is. Yeah. Oh man. Okay. We got to do it. We got to take you to Bucks. Well, we got to do it just so you and I can get a Bucks. Bucks is a crazy experience. This like diner in woodside, which is right right next to Palo Alto that has like all these crazy like airplanes on the ceilings and stuff and like all the old school like the Don Valentine era.

1:37:59Patrick, I need even a little later too, like all the entrepreneurs and VCs would meet up there for breakfast. It sounds like David's going to be our tour guide. This is great. I am going to love this. Well, listeners, if you are curious to learn more, it's trovatrip.com. Click the link in the show notes or feel free to reach out to me in the Slack or at acquired FM at gmail.com if you're interested in the company in any way. Well, with that, join the Slack acquired.fm slash Slack.

1:38:28become an LP we just dropped probably our nerdiest LP episode ever where we had math McBrady on who has worked in presidential administrations for hedge funds advising on monetary policy to basically walk us through like the history of the Fed and the Fed's role in our economy and the difference between fiscal and monetary policy and what the heck is quantitative easing and for such a hot button Topic right now is great to get like an expert two-hour chunk of information on what are all these concepts and how do they interrelate? Why does everybody like try and interpret Jerome pals every last word and why isn't JP just say what he means? Like there are reasons for this. Oh, so cool. That it was. And also check out modern finance. It's seriously really good. I've listened to almost every episode. Yep. Like we talked about the people episode is so great. We'll link to that in the show notes.

1:39:22Man, what a cool dude. And not what you would, like, just think on this surface. Like, you gotta listen to it. Like, he's awesome. Careful, you'll become an F.T. believer after you do. Which is a good thing. Alright, listeners, we will see you next time. We'll see you next time.