# The Unlimited Potential of Web3 with Alexis Ohanian | Where It Happens

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n5084IfnxU
Duration: 1 hr 34 min
Language: English
Words: 18073
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/-n5084IfnxU

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[0:00] all right guys we just got done filming a crazy episode with alexis ohanian founder of reddit now the founder of 776 a new venture capital fund that's building very differently i had a blast tell me tell me about it i mean there was just so much to take away from it his storytelling around the reddit experience building that the early days of y combinator and the early days of of uh you know completely changing the game of the incubator ecosystem was really really cool to hear for me the minimum viable community stuff that he talked about was my biggest takeaway and how people that are really building community first

[0:35] organizations um are going to continue to be the ones that win in the long run yeah alexis is an absolute community legend i think you know i remember people telling me like hey stop playing so many video games stop like spending all this time on internet forums and stuff like that and we're realizing now in 2021 2022 that those skills around bringing people together through the internet are the crucial skills for how to build companies of the future community-based companies so i absolutely loved every word he said around community around designing these community-based experiences and uh he's just dropping bombs after bombs yeah it was crazy he's from the future

[1:24] and he drops a bunch of bombs from the future that make this episode an absolute killer so we know you guys are gonna enjoy it let's dive right in i hate banking most banking products suck so when i was starting all these new businesses and going on this new adventure i turned to mercury mercury is banking four founders by founders they make everything so easy and a beautiful elegant design there's free wires virtual and physical debit cards they even have a raising platform where they will connect you with other investors out in the ecosystem have you tried mercury i have and let's be honest when you log into traditional banking

[2:04] websites and apps it's hideous when i go into mercury it's like a walk in the park so i love using it feels fresh and i can't use anything else you should definitely check it out at mercury.com it will completely change the game for your banking experience i guarantee it the saying used to be let your game speak with common stock it's about let your gains speak i love common stock love the platform and have really been enjoying learning from other people on there how does it work it's a platform for verified investment knowledge so people are going and sharing their ideas sharing their trades but it's actually connected to their

[2:44] brokerage account so you can see the results they're generating and see their actual track records over time so you're learning from people not only the best investors the bill ackman's the daniel loebs are on there but also individuals who are actually going and putting their money where their mouth is on these trades and you're learning alongside them and being taken on the journey is it just stocks there's everything now there's gonna be stocks there's crypto we're in this crazy world where there's so many different investment opportunities which just means there's so many opportunities to learn and common stock is creating the platform for you to learn alongside

[3:18] the best and also as i said let your gains speak so to level up your investing game today check out commonstock.com you won't regret it so this is gonna be a lot of fun and this is like a day we've both been looking forward to for a while and the reason is because we've got a community legend on and i've got my community friend and we're gonna have a community legend in alexis ohanian founder of reddit has built a bunch of other online communities and i'm personally just excited because we're going to be able to get in a room with two people that i think really

[3:54] really understand community at a depth that i definitely don't i think a lot of our audience will benefit from yeah and he understands community but he also is like me equally obsessed with web 3. and i'm excited to dive into you know why he's interested in web 3 the relationship between what he's learned building community at reddit and what that you know what is the relationship between web 2 and web3 and and just get into lessons learned yeah it's interesting i mean like so i want you to talk to me a little bit before he comes in to just prime me because i consider myself a little bit of just

[4:35] like uh i don't know what the right like a loonite or whatever you want to call it in terms of understanding what the difference is going to be with web 3 as it relates to community and so help me understand it hopefully help some of the audience hopefully i'm not the only luddite out there just like tell me a little bit more about what that means like why why does web3 matter for community i think what web 3 does is it just supercharges web 2 communities so look at facebook groups like there's over a billion active users on facebook groups think of like um moms in miami think about you know

[5:15] soccer team in uh in brooklyn there's just millions of these groups and i think what's lacking in some of these groups is ownership like the these groups and these leadership groups and community organizers often don't own the group they're uh renting the group from facebook they're renting the group from discord and i think what web 3 unlocks is just a supercharging of web 2 communities we've seen especially through the pandemic how important communities and digital communities are and into you know people's lives and i think what you're gonna see over the next five ten years is when you insert a token if you insert you know a

[6:03] jpeg a video an nft and you allow people to share upside in the group and allow to you know and allow them to vote on where this group could go that's when magic's really gonna happen so go a little deeper on this with me to help me understand so in web 2 a community say it existed on facebook groups wherever it was um in that ecosystem if i'm in this group say i'm in the miami mom's facebook group and i'm a miami mom imagine um and in that ecosystem i am the creator of all the content me and the other 50 moms that are in this

[6:44] miami moms group are the creators of all the content but we're just like work we're we are creating value by creating within this thing we're getting hopefully some value from being a part of this community but the reality is that facebook is capturing most of the value of that from our presence on the platform if facebook shuts us down for whatever reason because we're organizing something they can do that we're not really participating in the value that's being created there so is the whole premise here as you talk about web3 basically that suddenly now we actually own that platform and we have shared ownership and we also have shared skin in the game

[7:21] of wanting to see it expand so now i have an incentive to bring in the most amazing other moms that i know because they're going to create a bunch more value that's going to make the value of this community we're building more impactful yeah so let's talk about the main problems of the miami mom group so the first is if you're the admin and you're the community man if you're the admin you're basically the community manager that's a often very time intensive job that you're often not seeing any financial upside for so when there's ads on the side of that facebook group you're not seeing any

[7:59] money from that that's facebook taking that that's facebook taking that money so i would argue that a lot of the groups on let's say facebook are unsustainable just people doing it for the love of it and which is awesome and not everything needs to be about finances but imagine what the miami moms can do if they you know had a shared bank account that they can throw events for let's say so that's one problem the other problem is if you're a member of the group there's no real easy way to vote on the direction of where the group could go so for example maybe the miami moms group wants to

[8:43] the admin decides to expand it with miami fort lauderdale group sorry the fort lauderdale mom's group and all of a sudden there's 5 000 new moms in this group and it changes the whole dynamics of of what made that group so special in the first place and it was just because the leader of the group had a friend in fort lauderdale and was doing a favor to that to that particular mom if there was a vote that everyone had a say in should we actually merge groups maybe what would have happened is that 97 percent of people didn't actually want that merge to happen so i'm excited about the

[9:24] you know that's what people call governance the governance of it and then the third piece which you mentioned really is the shared ownership if everyone has skin in the game you know that reduces the problem of it's really hard to build a community and there's how do you build a viral community and when you have a token or you have an nft or you have something that makes you an owner turns community members from members to co-owners all of a sudden you do get a lot of vitality so i think that i i mean most of these things i honestly just don't still really get and i stare at them and

[10:09] i'm like okay yeah but not really like facebook's not gonna de-platform so miami mom's group like i don't really get it in a lot of use cases the one piece that i definitely really get as you're talking about it is this idea of like shared ownership in the thing and your incentives your skin in the game to create value for the thing that you're a part of now like i i think that is a really big idea where if twit if you were if you were a member of twitter and you had skin in the game for creating amazing content on twitter because it creates it makes the

[10:42] community more um amazing and it's sort of like owning stock in twitter and suddenly now you're part of this little micro community where you own stock in it effectively and by contributing engaging content to that community you are enhancing the value of your stock that is like where i see some really cool in like a still in like a pie in the sky way for me because i haven't fully transitioned my mind towards it i think that's a really interesting concept where you can take these little micro communities and people suddenly have skin in the game where it's like a public company and i own liquid stock in

[11:16] this little public company and can now actually contribute to its value and have an incentive on a daily basis to contribute value to it growing and expanding over time that's really cool i want to speak to the point which you mentioned which is like you don't really see deep platformization as a problem and i agree with you until it becomes a problem like i've i've had a twitter account that was just a a meme page basically in a particular community that they just twitter just shut down it was just they felt that you know i don't know why they shut it down i think like i retweet we retweeted

[11:53] another meme that they didn't you know like or whatever but the point is like you're still rent at the end of the day you're still renting and there's a difference between renting and owning um that's a good way of putting it renting versus zoning is a great way of putting it and i agree with you like twitter announced today i think as we're recording twitter announced that they're not going to do me like you can't post pictures of someone else's likeness without their consent and it's like that's what memes are which is by the way what twitter is and it's like how are you possibly going

[12:24] to say that it's kind of a crazy thing and communities are built around these memes and ecosystems are built around them and so for a platform to come out and say that i don't think it's going to happen because it seems ludicrous but that's crazy that they can go and say that it's just like restricts free speech and it restricts the ability to express yourself in the way that you want to so i don't know i agree with you i think that like that makes it more clear to me of the idea of renting versus zoning and you're just renting time on this platform and they can do whatever they

[12:50] want if you want to control your destiny you own so we need infrastructure to actually be developed to allow people to do this easily though totally that's the key and that's honestly years ago and it's to be honest years away yeah like it's gonna it's it's gonna roll out over the next few years um like community software that allows you to own this and and also some of the large platforms maybe twitter ends up decentralizing some of what they do um but i still think we're years away so hopefully some of the capital inflows into web3 from this hype cycle that we're going through actually lead to

[13:26] really fundamental things being built on the ground and whether the hype cycle comes down who knows but basically all of the inflows that are coming from this actually build something lasting where people can go and take more ownership over the long run whether it's like one percent of communities now hopefully becomes a much bigger chunk we should get into it with with alexis because he is fundamental i mean he's built but he's also investing in this future meaningfully through 776 and other things he's doing and really creating a lot of the infrastructure that we're talking about that could enable the community-based future that you're talking about i can't wait to dive in

[13:58] with them yeah let's do it yeah i'm gonna be like just sitting in the back with the two community guys here so let's get them in and we'll dive into it perfect we've been friends for a while internet friends is it no more original i mean the funniest background i've heard that story is like one background story tell the photos which i do feel like have you seen that you know yeah the photo yes well we have a picture of the two of us we have a picture there's a picture of me and tim cook who was the one that brought me to this event yeah and you're like in the

[14:31] background in between the two of us and so every time like that's a couple times that's the f that's hilarious because i've posted it a couple of times and everyone's always like i spy alexis yeah because you're right between us tangentially because you worked out at a gym in florida wait eric who was my i was his first client so back in my baseball days when eric first branched out and started his training i was his first client and then they told me like oh this guy alexis big business guy he's like crushing it i was like we should really meet but we never connected and then we ran into each

[15:06] other at this party and that was the like context for me approaching alexis but then we became internet friends and it's like a classic story of the modern era like we've like you know gone back and forth are you meeting me and followers i'm going to get you i'm going to get you i'm going to get you soon jump in like i had like 25 30 000 followers at the time and i talked to him and he was like you're going to pass me pretty soon and i think we're like a year later now i'm getting close i am going to i am going to get him

[15:31] eventually i'm going to step up my twitter picture with you and buffon and alexis in the background alexa's his face is basically like who the hell is this guy wait seriously everyone was like oh we gotta apply the picture i was i was full imposter mode at that party and it was like it was the funniest thing ever um wow seriously the one thing yeah here's the picture it's very good stop it you guys don't really want to see this i was having a good cause she's definitely someone you can't see over there who i'm making is i also love the fact that tim and alexis

[16:13] both have uh name tags at that the same way as us because like big stars are the same as all of us none of the people no but one of the things that i've been always just amazed by you and what i want to talk to you more about is like you have consistently and i don't know how you do it maybe you're from the future you've consistently found ways to not only predict and write about but also actually put skin in the game against things that have become the future and so you mentioned you were a history major yep that's kind of an interesting thing for me because it's like was that

[16:45] a part of it that you feel like history repeats itself and you've been able to use that or what do you think is kind of the genesis of being able to do that uh okay admittedly a lot of it is the right place right time in a lot of really formative moments like even just being in the first batch of y combinator in 2005 that was a fluke like being in uh being at such a pivotal moment in this new wave of software development and then i think i've gotten a lot of reps seeing a lot of stuff being because then becoming a partner y combinator starting

[17:23] a bunch of firms and then just really ruthlessly seeking out people doing dope [ __ ] yeah and and most of the reasons like you found some of these old tweets where i'm talking about you know a whole host of things from from crypto to creatorcon whatever stuff early it's largely just because i'm listening to people smarter than me who i really respect and then trying to parse together where the dots connect and and yeah i do think i i gave the it was virtually unfortunate but i gave the commencement speech at my alma mater uva wahoo this past year and i talked about this a

[18:00] little bit because i do i do look let's be let's be real learning to code uh something i wish i had spent even more time on in in college than i did um there are valuable skills to be learned across stem for real like very very valuable um there is i will argue a very important role that the humanities plays and in history in particular you just gotta have to dig through a ton of content you have to read a lot you have to synthesize a lot of data that is very subjective right even primary sources are subjective every the whole story of history is like the fact that

[18:37] you have to synthesize a bunch of different points of view a bunch of different interpretations and try to arrive at what is the closest thing to truth in a lot of the cases and so uh i think it did prepare me well because it was four years spent having to try to parse together a bunch of different versions of history and uh and turn into a compelling story and then communicate it why combinator you just touched on that and i need to know just because it's changing why combinator at the start early days becoming a partner there what was it like going through that first program remarkably

[19:11] unremarkable the first batch of yc was it was an experiment so i had pitched paul graham at the end of a talk that he gave at harvard um had gone up during senior spring break uh with my co-founder and and after this talk paul and he posted online it's called how to start a startup and it was the perfect talk for us at that time because i had just decided i wasn't going to law school i knew i wanted to start a company convince my roommate to start this thing and after the talk said hey dr graham would love to get uh a cup of coffee with you it'll totally

[19:47] be worth you know the cover of uh cost the cost of this drink to take you out and uh and he said you really and i was like yeah look we came all the way up from virginia and he was shocked even that we had come all the way up from virginia because maybe he didn't think we had trains or planes i don't know but uh but he agreed to it we met him that night i pitched him on this idea was a different totally different startup it's called my mobile menu or for short it would let you order food from your phone without having to wait

[20:13] in line but this was before a smartphone so it was like text-based it was janky's hell he was really excited about it thankfully uh but would later reject us in the meantime he announces y combinator and says hey i think random college kids when given six thousand dollars per founder that's how much it was spending an entire summer just building like writing code talking to customers can one day build billion dollar businesses and that was the premise it happened perfectly because we didn't even have to decide to drop out because it was senior year at uva so we graduated went up to boston i said we had gotten rejected

[20:47] came back the next morning because he called and he was like look we don't like your idea but we like you two so if you change your idea we'll come we'll give you a check and uh and i was like let me think about it uh but i was just playing it cool got off the train called them back said look we'll take it twelve thousand dollars in our bank account later we had our initial funding and that first batch really was paul and jessica uh and then trevor and robert were the other two friends who were founders but not as engaged they were they were

[21:18] pretty engaged those first couple years but it was an experiment it was paul mostly i think just paul's money saying hey i got this wild idea and and then the the key insight they hit on though was forcing us to meet up once a week every tuesday for dinner because now you have this cohort you have this mindset of we're all on this together o5 was a weird time to start a startup no one was doing it so you felt like you finally had some people who can empathize with you and you know back then every week they'd invite a guest speaker to sort of let you hear from inside the

[21:49] room or the room where it happened so see what it is yeah there you go but it was just paul this is the benefit of hindsight as a 21 year old ceo first time i'm just like oh my gosh this is great i'm getting such exposure it was just paul's friends like his lawyer friend talking about how to like a term sheet and basic stuff and then like his finance friend talking about this is what venture capital is but it was so abstract so not tactical so not helpful today right it's like the founders airbnb riffing about their bit no back then was just paul's friends but

[22:22] bringing us together once a week helped because it kept us honest because of the peer pressure of having to talk to like justin and emmett and be like hey what do you work would you work on last week and you know when you have people who are also very motivated and sort of giving you that pressure to to get [ __ ] done it forces you to actually do the work and i mean not everyone ends up doing it but dude it was a [ __ ] show the whole thing and even the demo day i had i pitched for 20 minutes and took questions you know today these startups pitch for

[22:52] like 67 seconds i don't know 60 seconds no questions uh and they figured out how to scale it i think pretty impressively uh but believe me it started out janky as hell and and that's something that i think often gets lost in the myth making but the first few years of yc were very janky it was seen as i think most people were quite dismissive of it and frankly pg and jessica were not that sophisticated when it came to silicon valley vc because they were based in boston they didn't even move to san francisco until maybe a year or two later because they were splitting the batches doing winter

[23:26] in san francisco because the winners of boston were so rough and summer's in boston and then eventually there weren't enough investors coming out if you can believe this there were not enough investors coming out to demo day who missed out on some amazing companies uh so they moved the whole thing to sf and the rest is history what do you think i mean starting a company now is so different dude right it is right like i'm just thinking you know my founder friends even even younger founders just graduated college or in college starting companies versus what it used to be like i hate to sound like the old guy you know we're

[23:58] like remember you're allowed to sound like the old guy you know remember remember the good old days but i think you know i'm curious like from your perspective what what do you think has changed for the better or for the worse i think it's all almost all for the better the 2005 so the initial users of reddit were mostly us with pseudonyms but the initial real humans were a few hundred people that i'd recruited from a forum a php bb forum that i ran in college called eyes wide and it was a place to discuss politics and news and technology and and i ran this forum for fun because i just liked

[24:34] the idea and there's actually old there's an old clip that i dug up of me talking about it and it you can very much hear this sort of ethos of reddit in that discussion or in that video in that little monologue welcoming users to the forum but like those were the initial users just an email blast to say hey come join please and like maybe 10 of them signed up um but that was enough to sort of get things started and then a paul graham essay helped launch this a month later you know today getting those first hundred those first thousand should be table stakes like that

[25:10] if if you can't figure out a way to muscle in that many users there's a deeper problem with what you're trying to solve or how you're communicating it and and i think that's a great thing right product hunt exists twitter exists a social media infrastructure that did not exist in 2005 is now so robust people are so comfortable testing out an app even test flight and and early access is becoming so much more viable um basically you throw that in the sort of ubiquity and fluency that people have now with technology 2005 had to convince people that they would want to spend time posting links on the internet and

[25:47] talking to strangers the average person did not think you could build community at scale online let alone with pseudonyms right online dating was still a weird niche thing of like okay cupid and a couple it's like it's wild to think about so it is a great thing that now people are so much hungrier and more ready it also means uh you can get to market a lot faster and so can your competition so then the war for people's attention now is so much greater and that is where it is now much harder but i'd still take that any day over what it was in 2005 because it means

[26:22] founders can focus more on the stuff that i know you two care about around the community building and a lot less on on let's say even you know product or getting those first initial users a good example this is whether it's no code or just the fact that everyone has just been programming for longer right web modern web development in 2005 was weird like it was a milestone just getting the upvotes and down votes to change the score in real time on reddit because ajax and all this stuff was was new new web technology essentially and so what a 15 year old today can do is

[26:59] already so impressive and then when they're building on top of libraries not to mention no code like you can get that mvp up much easier and so that's why i've been pushing and i pushed it on twitter before this uh interview the minimum viable community is going to become the new standard and you're already seeing it in pfp projects you're already seeing it across crypto um i think you all are clearly building a business around this concept that is the new challenge and and the core reason for that is everyone is overwhelmed with options attention is scarce as a result and one of the best moats for that is

[27:34] community and and i know that because i lived it like read it for five years between i left in 2010 i came back in early you know late 14 as exec chair had almost no investment by continent asked in the product the product didn't improve for half a decade barely stayed online okay there's no business on the planet let alone in tech that should be allowed to do nothing for five years five years and grow every single year that should not be allowed that breaks every rule and the reason it broke those rules is because of community because we got just enough right that there was a self-fulfilling little

[28:15] flywheel of users who just cared about spending time with other random anonymous users on the internet in these communities and it not only kept the site alive it kept growing and thriving and and so as i watch everything that now unfolds under web3 i'm like i've seen that i i know this very well like the thing that drives all the success for this next wave of internet is going to start with community and and that's a big [ __ ] deal big deal well that's like to go back to y combinator and draw a parallel to this y combinator now happens on twitter and in group texts or on

[28:51] telegram like we i mean we originally connected you and i connected all of these things of like people pressuring you in the peer pressure of wanting to build something and move faster we hit a group chat that was all people that were trying to grow our audiences and grow our presence and it was the pressure of it of like okay i need to keep leveling up the content i'm creating continue to build that community that i'm building that's stoked at least for me the fire and also drove me to want to think about okay what am i actually trying to build what's the equity that i'm trying to

[29:17] build in something not just like numbers and continuing to be performative and so i think it's really interesting because you think about like completely taking and completely blowing up this old centralized infrastructure that existed around building businesses yeah and that's what web3 promises is that we all of a sudden have new sets of infrastructure completely decentralized that open up the opportunity playing field for anybody a kid on the streets in india that now because of geo and everything they did is now online and able to grow up at digitally native can go and build something go become an artist go do whatever they want to do build a company

[29:52] in the exact same way that a kid that grew up going to country clubs in greenwich connecticut did yeah and and the the cheat codes of it they're not obliterated but they are getting challenged those institutions are being eroded rapidly and and it's wild to see because it's gonna mean more innovation it's gonna mean i think this feeling of like oh [ __ ] these things keep moving faster and faster it's not gonna go away at all we'll get better tools to manage it and we'll start to care more about the specific communities that we care about so we're actually going to recede i think more

[30:24] into those sort of new tribes those new communities those new bubbles um i have all kinds of thoughts on the impacts that this is going to have on society but uh on the whole being an entrepreneur right now it could not be a better time 16 years doing this thing i'm very happy to be clear to my investors i'm doing 776 the rest of my life don't worry this is it this is this is my startup but uh there's never been a better time to be a startup founder ceo i just remembered i i tweeted about y combinator about a year ago i'm curious your your reaction to hit me

[30:58] i said what would yc look like if it was created today if yc was created today it would be remote first a tokenized community for founder support partnered with creators cohort based courses for learning dao beautiful spaces all over the world to collaborate and actually pg responded too he actually trolled me a little bit what did he say you got to read it you got to read it what did he say and i kind of i kind of chirped him back too but i'm just having fun on the internet he responded it sounds like a dis and in in his defense it was a year ago daos

[31:35] was like no one was talking about dao is a year ago sure living in the future bro yeah i learned from the best uh it sounds like a description of how a big company or government would quote unquote improve yc in the process of attempting to reproduce it interesting and then i wrote nothing screams big government or big company like a tokenized community good point there is there is a lot of tribalism around well i see i'm completely outside this ecosystem totally like a couple of my close friends started this thing hyper which is like yeah you know and i'm just oh you're friends with josh

[32:08] yeah i mean i'm involved i'm an old people i think it's amazing i think it's very cool and i'm also very pro entrepreneurs having more options to do all these things i don't think it has to be one or the other but those guys got a lot of crap from the yc community for starting that thing because it was very explicitly trying to create a yc of the future in a different angle on it and so there is a lot of tribalism around it and there's a lot of defense i'm a i like paul graham on twitter i think he says a lot of interesting things a lot of my

[32:34] frameworks that i've come up with or written about have been pg derived could i get a glass with some uh for some tequila absolutely i'm gonna need some tequila yeah some ice please yeah a little bit the show tech tribalism oh that's i mean it's a real thing look again you're talking to the guy who made reddit like i am i i believe firsthand in all the strengths and all the weaknesses that this entails in short right as a species tribalism kept us alive for a very long time um we only our species only really got to understand it at scale with a one-way lens for the last 50

[33:20] years of mass communication and and and travel and all the things that kind of gave us one view into like building tribe or understanding someone else's perspective ice is in the uh take it neat i think it's in the sink yeah just get some ice here and so they've only understood that one way right and so now we as a species are gonna have to adapt to a situation where we will feel a sense of bond that i would argue is even stronger than we had over the campfire because when we're all hanging out the campfire the next day a couple of us are gonna go hunt someone else is

[33:54] gonna go get some gathering berries i don't know like you're actually not connected 24 7. but now we have a sense of the intimacy of being around the campfire that never ends it is a 24 7 campfire of people who again for hundreds of thousands of years our species was really stuck to basically family and like trusted circles so we had things that bonded us but we didn't all love the same video game or the same movie or the same sports team or all the other modern creations we now have to build tribes but now we can actually curate that tribe around the campfire for exactly how we're feeling

[34:30] if we're thinking if we're feeling rock and roll we can go talk to our metallica fan community or if we want to dive you can go to the plethora of examples that is radical and amazing it also means that uh tribes we wouldn't normally have interacted with or come to terms with are now just as prevalent and accessible as the ones that we love and how we deal with that both the good and the bad of it is what's going to determine thank you how the hell this all turns out wow and so i'm just looking at where thank you i'm looking at how much yc has evolved

[35:06] and i think okay there is a strong tribe there but none of these cheers are none of these are forever and if you even look at the early yc you know again these things i really believe so many companies are are an echo of their founders pg uh very smart guy did not understand the sort of marketing brand storytelling side of business they still obviously were very successful didn't matter but you know i had i mean i'll never forget the the biggest disagreements that i had with pg and i mean i really respect him this was our main investor i'll never forget he wrote uh i had an early draft of even before i

[35:52] had named reddit i had drawn snoo and he said you need to get rid of that bug thing it looks like a joke it makes your company look like a joke get rid of it and i see they don't understand like this is the mascot people are going to be able to sort of imbue their own personalities on snoo we'll be able to customize it in the future snoo will feel like everyone will get to feel like they're a part of this bigger community i remember he was just like get rid of it like put it if you insist on keeping it i still have this i wrote this email

[36:18] my post it seem on my book if you insist on keeping it put it at the bottom of the website so it looks like a joke told me the name reddit was like poison for potential investors um said the name rhett so i came up with redditer because i was like oh these are editors on reddit said it was the dumbest thing he had ever heard like i there were times when even like i i missed my my own co-founder and and the yc batch i just felt like a little alien because i'd be advocating for stuff like this and community building and like no i think people will call themselves

[36:49] redditors one day if we just if we say it we can invent it if we own it and make this a hospitable place they'll feel this sense of identity they'll want to create their own snooze um the first revenue reddit made was merch again that was that was actually the first fight we had had as founders um and i said no we're absolutely doing it and i you know we i ordered like 400 shirts uh that were sitting in the bedroom had to hack together a storefront because there was no shopify there was no stripe so paypal and like a janky check out for sizes got a couple friends to take

[37:21] photos of the photos with the shirts we sold out in 24 hours i hand wrote thank you notes to every single person who bought one of those first edition shirts dragged them down in garbage bags to the post office mailed them out the next day the that was 05 community building and and people even though it was a brand new website no one knew anyone's real name no one they just knew we were a couple of dudes in an apartment they wanted to support they wanted to give us space on their torso to advertise us like that's amazing right that is a gift that is a blessing and i'm talking

[37:57] about this stuff at yc and people look at me like dude you were crazy like why don't you just go back to writing some code and just like calm down you're going to kill the company and so i think the things you're talking about here the ideals of web 3 and the ethos of being bottom up and community-led are just not a part of the ycdna will yc still be successful for the next 10 years yes i think as they expand the sectors and geographies yc i think globally is one of the most no-brainer investments you can make in early stage investing if you just invested in an index fund of all of the

[38:33] non-us all the global companies that get into yc i think you'll do phenomenally well because it is a magnet for top top top talent now in five years maybe sooner with crypto maybe things change right this world is shifting rapidly but now that i hear you describe this idea i really want to i want to do it uh the part that's most interesting that i so for years yc founders hacked together sort of an equity swap not all of them would but they would on their own say okay look let's let's all swap equity in each other's companies so now we have a stake in what we're doing and any time

[39:09] your users are hacking together a solution it's a really good sign that if you just actually provide it they will be really excited and so bringing those token economics to a batch feels feels powerful it feels kind of obvious the state two stanford business school guys they originally did it with pro athletes it was like baseball players you put them into it it's really good como tequila shout out joe joe marchese wait are they a sponsor huh uh de facto sponsor i suppose joe is a close friend that's really good it's so good joe why is that so smooth yeah i'm looking at joe this is just

[39:45] it's amazing it's amazing we'll hook you up with a few bottles um so uh pando they originally did it to pool ownership of future earnings with your fellow cohort for baseball players because minor league like it's such a hit driven thing but the original they tried to expand it into startup founders i think it's a really

[40:02] interesting idea but they're not web 3. it's still very web but it's a very cool way to do it would be a tokenized version of it yeah i would almost i'm you know we're just workshopping this live but i think like i love your your concept of mvc minimal viable community and if we just like if that was the program which is like build an mvc mvc step one step two it's like i also love the idea like if you can sell merch if you can sell out of merch in 24 hours you're on to something um so it's like these kind of like community metrics like that yeah as like

[40:39] kpis and dude here's the thing right so nfts everyone obviously is like very excited to talk about nfts right now three years ago you know starting to invest in companies you mentioned sky weaver about bringing nft gaming and and that felt very obvious as a gamer because like yeah you should own the [ __ ] that you spend money on i i played a lot of everquest in world of warcraft and that all felt very obvious but it wasn't until last year with the profile pics once you know i bought a bunch of crypto punks that looked like my wife is a nice investment um but then around april may whenever

[41:14] the apes started when i bought in it felt like there was something different happening because of the conversation and community around it and then as i started to watch this community play out i realized holy [ __ ] like not only did they pull off the mvc around uh you know art and vibes but these nfts these profile pics are in a way a kind of merch because with with way more upside right so the first 400 or however many people bought those reddit shirts now i still have mine just for you know sense mentality if any of them still have it maybe maybe you could make a few bucks off of it on

[41:52] ebay right but you didn't actually benefit from the upside when you bought that shirt it was entirely community driven and to support the creators but today you buy that shirt that merch when it's an nft that is an asset that actually can appreciate in value you're really getting it's not a security you're not a security but you're getting the upside of the potential growth and so now you're even more incentivized to recruit people to the tribe you're even more incentivized to identify as one of these and so then you play this out and you're like okay we'll wait so yeah 2005 i walked around and my

[42:29] identity was the clothing i wore 2021. um even if you're not in the metaverse you know everyone has been trained now to understand a profile pic and that that was another thing i took for granted so 2005 i deliberately did not have a profile pic in the designs for reddit simply because we had usernames we felt like that was good enough i did want to put snoo in took took a little longer than i would have liked but um it was important not to have people upload photos because facebook at the time was so strident about a real photo real name policy and so it was easy to

[43:02] be the exact opposite just say no [ __ ] it you can have a username whatever you want and don't use a photo but over the next 15 years as everyone was building social networking sites social media sites whatever you call it 99.9 of our attention and product was towards everything other than the profile pic because that was so ubiquitous it was an afterthought you're building a social network of course let people upload an image you can't play xbox or playstation without having a profile like your netflix account has a pro it is such an afterthought to account creation that i realized only after apes started moving that this is it makes

[43:40] sense this is the first place to really take hold for again this minimum viable community idea because yeah your most basic the atomic most basic atomic unit of identity online is your profile picture everyone's grandma has one chosen and and has some opinion about about it and in the same way that a bunch of redditors in o5 were excited to buy some merch people are excited about the potential of these communities based on nothing more than an image and the potential for what it could unlock for them and i i love this idea maybe we're workshopping some live thing that we should actually do because i am such a

[44:17] true believer here and and i can think of you know a few other people who understand this as deeply as y'all do this all this stuff that's the man this stuff has never seemed nothing i've done in tech has seemed as obvious as what is happening right now and that's the part that scares me a little bit yeah because it shouldn't feel this is the [ __ ] we learn about as kids uh and you think of oh there are all these really formative moments right in in history whether it's technology or society and you kind of think it would be nice to be a part of that like i wonder what

[44:52] it had been like to have been there for those times but we're actually i really i really do believe and i wasn't talking this way until like a year and a half ago i really believe we're in the midst of that right now and that's a wild feeling i was flying to new york um a couple a month or two ago and in front of me were these two people wearing board a hoodies and from a distance i saw them kind of come together and just like hug and i was like oh these must be like they must be like brothers and i went to the bathroom and i and i was

[45:26] like oh like i started i was like oh nice hoodie i was like are you guys friends or you guys going to something and they and they were out there like no we we literally i just saw that he was wearing a board a putty yes and i just like gave him a hug we're all going to make it man we're all going to make it that so here's what's special that would not have happened at a reddit meetup okay that that is what you're talking about is a very special encounter and i think the reason ownership matters so much is because what you're talking about now

[45:56] is we are all in this together and the more that you and i believe the more value it actually creates for us like value that we can buy a house with right cash money value and i keep coming back to this as an idea because if we know it works without value assigned like beyond the merch um you know i borrowed from video games to think through like leaderboards on reddit or even the awards the awards i ripped off from goldeneye if you remember at the end of the goldmine matches you'd have these awards and you didn't always know what they were for like most cowardly

[46:31] and but they were they were helpful because even if you lost right there's four people playing only one of you can be the winner but the other three get something to feel good about or maybe feel bad about but start a conversation so i'm like okay we need awards on reddit every day because now the after maybe three months the leaderboards like if you were a top redditor you were posting every day trying to be the top that day that week all time and so eventually you know the first couple people hit a hundred thousand two hundred thousand karma points a new user shows up and says i'm

[47:00] never gonna get to two hundred thousand it's not worth it there's no incentive enter daily awards and these little badges became really special they still these trophies for like best comment of the day or n year club become a status symbol again in a community where it's purely just for the vibes and it feels good and i meet people to this day who don't introduce they don't introduce themselves with their government name they don't use their reddit username they say i'm a 12 year editor i'm a 14 year editor and batch became a status symbol right and it tran it even transfers offline but all of that

[47:36] is not real like there are no real points there's no real ownership and so when some board ape owners see one another in the wild and know that they are in it together and they see another sale that increases the floor price they actually know that the value of the thing that they own has gone up as a result that is powerful dude and it's it's not just axi infinity in the philippines it's not just like oh hey there are a lot of people in the developing world who are making more money playing a game than they would in their jobs like this this is going to affect and radically

[48:12] change every layer of society and i there is not a precedent for it it looks weird to the average person is someone who does not someone watching this who doesn't understand internet communities is going to be like why in the hell would someone if i if i saw a fan the closest parallel is like a fan of your favorite sports team all right and you saw uh i gave up on the washing you saw an angel city fan uh i wouldn't i wouldn't hug them i mean i'm an owner in the team shout out to kristen stafford one of my classmates let's go i mean we could not have done better

[48:46] with the first first pickup um but like i wouldn't even if i saw someone in the wild wearing i mean i would say something to them like thank you for repping the team i wouldn't give them a hug right i wouldn't feel that close i mean that's that's a boundary right but you're seeing this emerge now among these communities because it's it's changing lives and here's what gets wild okay so i go through this thought exercise what would it take someone not okay like i have different economic incentives i'm never gonna why would i sell a crypto punk to look for my wife like i have no economic incentive to

[49:15] ever do that but someone who owns one of these apes and where this is quickly become maybe one of the most valuable assets they own today they don't want to miss out on the community it creates they don't want to miss out on the utility that it's starting to have like access to parties different things like that that's all still like that's sort of loss of version they don't want to lose that but in the not too distant future let's say they want to go buy a house and get a down payment borrow money against that ape they'll be able to do that there's an entire financial

[49:50] services ecosystem that's going to be built as derivatives of the value especially as stability forms i mean there should be an index fund of nfts where i can take an s p 500 of nfts yeah it literally just tracks the floor of the top 500 projects and i can go buy that because i don't have time to go focus on the million different things and understand rarity and all the different stuff but i know i want to participate in this ecosystem this building i should be able to go do that yes and and that will happen we are i backed a company called alt doing this around trading cards and

[50:20] other like physical alternative assets we're already letting people borrow tens of millions of dollars against their collections of trading cards that are vaulted so we have ownership we believe our pricing our valuing is is best in class we know the value of these assets and we can let them borrow money against it now here's what's wild right wealthy spoiler okay and i didn't learn this until pretty recently i i did not learn how to i wish no one knows what you're gonna say no one gave me a book when when i sold reddit i became a multi-millionaire which was earth shattering like it was a revelation right no one gave me a book

[50:57] that was like okay you're rich now here's how rich people do stuff that normal people don't know about yeah they're just talking about those because you know this this was more money than my parents made their entire they were ever going to make their entire working lives and it's not like they could be like all right son let me tell you what to do there was no blueprint right so i mean i learned this [ __ ] as i go and i keep going down the rabbit hole and i'm like man this is this is ridiculous so to answer your question or to actually get to the point

[51:23] i only learned after accumulating some wealth that if you have a portfolio of valuable stocks you can borrow against that portfolio of stocks so that the money you use to live your life can come on especially these days really low interest rates and you never pay taxes and you never pay taxes because you never have to sell so you're incentivized to hotel to hold these assets and it works because people believe in the stock market people believe i mean it's easy to sell and and they believe that it's valued reasonably accurately because the market has so much liquidity okay but that is just a byproduct of the

[51:59] first mover advantage of the stock market having been around for a while and people trusting it my i will argue my my very high caliber serena williams uh trading card collection is very valuable asset gonna appreciate over time um and that collection has value if it were art like traditional art like a bunch of picassos i could probably borrow against it take a little bit more work but i could still do it but you have all of these new assets that have just showed up that are really valuable that have way more incentives to hodl like yeah if i have a picasso i want to keep it up because it's a nice flex when

[52:33] people come over but i don't get any utility from that picasso not like i get from a board eight so here is what no one is prepared for it is inevitable and on the order of of months and lots of years if not months um for all those board ape owners to never have to actually sell so if you're already incentivized to hotel for all the reasons we talked about and now financially you don't have to do it why would you and so if that's gonna happen what happens to the price like the and this is wild because i know stocks don't only go up zoom out and they do but

[53:10] fair fair and now i'm looking at this and i'm going okay we're breaking the models for how these financial systems work and we're on a very and i'm i i want to be a little cautionary here like i still i believe in business cycles as a concept i'm not saying this just breaks the whole game but i'm looking at enough examples of things that really do not apply do not have any precedent yeah dogecoin still has a 30 billion market cap it is literally worth it's a joke cryptocurrency invented on reddit to make fun of bitcoin but it has enough value i think about it as

[53:44] um it's gartner hype cycles right like we've all talked about that we've seen it on twitter it's all over the place like you have these hype cycles but the cool thing about with web 3 and with crypto with it is the hype cycle actually drives the future growth and value of the ecosystem because the hype cycle drives a bunch of greed which pulls a bunch of capital flows into it all the vcs are like you know they took creator economy and like threw it on the ground and now web 3's in every vc's bio i

[54:18] and it's like all this money flows into the space there will be a pullback at some point inevitably because that's how these things go but that money is now being deployed towards building something in the future it's not just like cashing out whatever there are people now that during that darker period that's going to come are going to be building whatever the next wave is and the same people that after the crash in late 2017 early 2018 were still building in the darkness of 2018 those are the people who are now profiting mightily in 2021 and no one wants to talk about that it's not like this

[54:51] overnight success no actually infinity was being built in the dark they were grinding in the dark we have jihao coming in actually super stoked for that right and that's it's such a that is such a perfect example right all of these success stories you're seeing now so rare grinding in the dark for years uh there's another company that i'd back i haven't announced yet uh well that's fine coin tracker okay which is about as unsexy as you could get taxes right yeah i love great but like such an indispensable business and for years just said like okay we're going to build this because we believe long term in the value of

[55:27] this asset class when you all see the announcement about their fundraise they'll be like well played but but well-earned because they grinded for years when no one cared and when we did that seed round i i actually had a couple lps ask like you're really sure it's a good time to be investing in crypto and it's like yeah no it's the best time to be investing because the the serious builders who are building right now are building for the next it's a good transition to talking about 776 actually because that was something i wanted to ask you about which is as a builder and now it applies to you

[55:59] as an investor the idea of variant perception you have a variant perception of what the future looks like you get paid when you're proven right for what that variant perception looks like toby at shopify had a very perception of the future all the e-commerce so he built a product that would exist in our future it kind of seemed crazy at the time 10 years later he seems like an absolute genius because he was and you did that as a builder you were community first with reddit you did everything you did there now you're trying to do the same thing with 776. you're building a different venture capital ecosystem something that

[56:29] is fundamentally different it seems like than what most vcs have been doing can you talk about that what your vision is for it and where you're headed i am glad you think that i still feel like we're a year in so i'm trying to keep perspective here to be like all right look we still haven't done anything yet but the the foundational work was first and foremost taking all the experience i have designing product and marrying that with a deep understanding of community but also broadly you know people and culture and that's something my partner caitlin who we had hired loretta had like 50 people no one wanted to work there and

[57:08] she became our vp people and culture took us to like 600 700 people and the reason for that is ventures somehow all these vcs we all talk about investing in startups disrupting antiquated industries using software that's what we love investing we do that all day long yet most venture capital firms are run devoid of software there there is no one has looked inward and said hey wait shouldn't we be thinking about ourselves as something that needs to get disrupted and as a software builder i can just think okay well let me think of all the things that we do that constitute work as a venture capitalist

[57:50] build software so that we have literally an operating system we call it cerebro because we're really into the x-men that makes the work we do collaboratively as a team but also with our founders way more efficient so like don't ask me hey do you know someone at shopify that is a waste of my time as a human human brain is not good at that query a database is great at that query so instead every founder gets to log in anytime they want to and run that search amount i think of 44 000 contacts right now that's dope and just type in shopify or or type in whoever or type in

[58:22] whatever characters can actually see the not only all the people that we're connected to and the depth of the bios but then with one click get an intro that intro gets routed to the partner at the firm who has the best relationship with that person and that's because after you know in every meeting those notes tag individuals and companies so that data stays forever in cereal no no one human should think like hey uh when was the last time i met with so and so i'll do the intro or some other partners like no no i met with her last week i'll do the intro no it's a

[58:54] waste of time and so when i think of the entire job of venture capital it is a people sort of network driven business and so how do we spend as much time as possible getting our people spending their time doing the things that humans are great at and letting software do everything else and i think it does dovetail into wherever this thing is going because i keep seeing more and more people in rounds that i i mean we're i i love leading rounds i want to be that high conviction investor that i dreamt of as a ceo as a first timer like who just says i'll do the

[59:29] whole round i don't care like i don't i don't want to know who else you're talking to i don't want to know who else is involved i don't give a [ __ ] i make up my own decisions leading this round but in the last three years in particular more and more folks have shown up on cap tables where it's like oh hey i've got you know 50k from blah blah blah 100k from blah blah blah i'm like okay they're real like they do [ __ ] they will actually be valuable whether they have operational expertise or like distribution expertise or ideally both and that framework is where i see this this

[1:00:01] model keep keep going because look the world is a washing capital right now especially as we move into more and more token-based companies and the best founders with the best companies are going to have their pick and so as a venture capitalist i think the onus is now on us to prove why we are exceptional why we're differentiated to be building actually with software and then be prepared for the fact that this is going to be a much more collaborative effort right like i don't even if you look at i don't know some stuff i can't announce yet but the the not only will vcs have to get

[1:00:39] comfortable having other folks on the cap table who are let's say individual investors they'll have to get comfortable with like a bunch of random strangers on the internet who have just bought into the token yeah who are totally synonymous exactly and again i just feel like i feel like bane in batman when he's like uh you merely adopted the darkness batman i was born in it molded by that's pretty good that but that is that is how i feel because i feel like i've been born in this darkness like that this is what this is this is what made reddit work the idea that i mean i i've i've funded

[1:01:16] companies where the founders met on reddit in in dms just going back and forth with one another um that's literally what we're trying to do by the way with what we're building here is like a community where we talk about an idea in here someone in the community might want to go start that and we can go fend that we can go form a dow to go build something with people in the community and go actually execute against it and i think that is so powerful and it's so lacking in what we're currently seeing and what's wild is all of the the precedent for it exists and again i

[1:01:52] i know you're a student of reddit so you know this especially greg but like we have seen versions of this play out before in the internet in the social internet for the last 15 years like my my favorite first example was just in 08 when reddit pull bombed uh greenpeace for mr splashy pants and that was just purely hey let's all troll this thing so that the funny name wins but over time in the last decade we've seen everything from i mean communities trying to pull well successfully pooling money together for philanthropic efforts hundreds of thousands of dollars raised for donors choose just to get stephen colbert's

[1:02:30] attention in like 2010. right we've seen examples of this but they're using they're using off-the-shelf tools they're kind of hacking it together it's it's the perfect example of people finding that way to just make it work because the best tools weren't available and in many ways i think reddit will be looked at as a kind of proof of concept for a lot of the stuff that web3 is just gonna run away with in the next few years we're gonna form a dow to take a twitter board seat we were just whipping before just to make sure to go fix twitter what would you want to do to fix twitter oh so many

[1:03:10] things king of twitter what would you do so many things what would i do to fix twitter um okay let's actually go through it i would um first off like probably bring in a bunch of new product people who would radically hasten the pace of new product testing and delivery so that you could actually drive more signal through the platform because right now like their ad platform sucks because there's no signal being drawn out of the whole thing forget that forget about care about products the stock is gonna be two hundred dollars just drive more direct response if i was a pm at twitter i've spoken to

[1:03:45] kvon about this okay um first of all messaging the messaging product yeah pretty broken it's pretty broken yeah like even if we look at it a lot too yeah in spite of the fact like our entire relationship yeah twitter exactly exactly so like it's true if we think about you know even like the web 3 ecosystem [Music] twitter owns broadcast right so you broadcast out and you try to attract people and you bring them into discord where you have these intimate conversations yeah what if twitter owned that whole stack and used messaging to expand upon that so fixed messaging expand into intimacy yeah is really interesting yeah all

[1:04:27] right it should be where twitter should exist as the central point for all like knowledge creators information creators if you're not a visual creator where like tick tock snap could be your center point twitter should be that you should be able to take everything from massive discovery of like viral content threads things you're doing drive down to more monetizable streams like review super follows ticketed spaces you should be able to take to messaging for more like group chat and intimate messaging i mean it should all exist there and you should be able to do it as a super app and they haven't been able to execute against

[1:05:01] that vision i love i look i agree with the things you're saying i love how unsympathetic you are to their large companies i look at twitter and i still say like wow they actually ship and try new products compared to their peers i agree i mean i went on cnbc last week and literally said that where they were like asking me about this uh walmart uh live stream that they did this past weekend they did like a shopping live stream with jason derulo and it was this big deal and they were like oh it seems kind of stupid and my whole point was at least for the

[1:05:37] first time in 10 years they're doing something they're shipping new product they're trying things they rolled out blue they rolled out some new things and so they're actually showing some willingness to do things it's just the pace of it is still so slow relative to it startup and this is why i [ __ ] love this job because that word or that phrase hopefully has never come out of my mouth which is like well what if twitter does this or what if google does this or whatever because the there is nothing that can compete with a focused relentless team building to solve a specific problem that's not

[1:06:08] being addressed by an incumbent like they're just i would never bet against that and as like as successful as those incumbents have been at a certain point you just get good at like one or maybe two things and then all the bureaucracy all the everything fills up around it's still a great business potentially but the reason this industry is so amazing is that a new entrant can show up with something 10x better and win market share really quickly and that's before crypto that's before the earliest adopters have an economic incentive to bring more people on so if it worked before but man it's going to work now

[1:06:48] yeah this is like the clay christensen model of disruption like you go in and provide the best solution for that niche sub segment and you just use that to go like just penetrate the entire space and if you can build if you can build the community yeah and and that is that is i think the greatest blind spot that exists right now among the incumbents whether it's yc or others that discipline does not exist and it didn't it's not again it's not their fault it's just that skill set has now gotten really really [ __ ] valuable and a lot of the other historical ones um whether it's around product or you

[1:07:25] know sort of traditional growth marketing drivers all that stuff again they're not commoditized entirely but they're sort of table stakes you need to have those skills you need to have that discipline you need to find that expertise uh this i'm telling you this minimum viable community thing is a thing it's a thing i like that you all are thinking this way so i know we're running up against the end of time i need to hit you with not a lightning round but like you live in the future okay what's your he was he it's first of all this history i didn't know your background was in

[1:07:56] history history major history major research but just before you get into that do you still are you still like a history buff uh no just a future buff now i mean i i i mean i love a good documentary but i don't i don't spend nearly enough time reading do you read books most of the things i read yes but most of the things i read are just like non-fiction geared towards i mean it's business a lot of business books the last great book i read uh it was like a few months ago now i've lost all track of time because of web three hot hand oh yeah great one yeah

[1:08:32] but it's fun it's like it's you gotta read there's a little you read sci-fi i should i project hail mary phenomenal if anyone else is so good um sci-fi plays a very important role might i add yeah uh so i actually into the future all right but the um the whole idea of just like my hot take on reading and consumption in general goes back to a lot of things we've been talking about which is like our as content has increased and there's been just like a ubiquity of content attention spans have gone like this and so like what i channeled into honestly when i was building twitter and i was writing

[1:09:06] and trying to build this community was that exact fact people don't have time to go read a 10 000 word article so i'm gonna deliver the like most dilute like just super concentrated value in a very short little that's why i told you and that's why you can skip because if you can do that i think it's really valuable someone in five minutes or two minutes can leave feeling much smarter they didn't have time to go do the long form thing so okay so i should say then when i read read books i'm listening to the audiobook on audible usually at one on one on netflix

[1:09:39] this is the thing people aren't reading books they're using their own audiobooks and they're great the experience is great if they're read by a good person i've heard the new will smith book is awesome and it's read by him and it's supposed to be awesome it's not the same though i do audiobooks too but it's like you know what's the equivalent of it's like i prefer eating in a restaurant and and and like that's fair versus delivery although delivery's so convenient yeah it's there's still god there was just a what the hell was the book that i just ordered on amazon oh it's the 60-19 project okay so i'm doing a little bit

[1:10:10] of history i order every now and then i get a book that's like hardcover because i'm going to make an effort to read this thing because i feel like i want it's a meal i want to enjoy in the restaurant 80 of the books that i read i'm listening to while walking my dog yep what three books would you make mandatory for your daughter to read as she grows up whoa oh someone asked me this recently i didn't know you were going there this is like a great question someone asked me this exact question so i'll give you i'll give you my my three while you're thinking all right

[1:10:41] um uh when breath becomes air has been one of the most impactful books in my life it's about stanford neurosurgeon resident who gets diagnosed with lung cancer terminal lung cancer and he finds out he has a few months to live and how he rationalizes an entire life spent building to the future and then the future is taken away from you and it's true and he's writing this book and he has an unborn daughter it's terribly sad and the woman next to me on the plane as i was reading it had to ask if i was okay because i was like sobbing on a plane reading it but one of the most

[1:11:11] impactful books of my life so that's one man's search for meaning incredible uh frankel uh survived auschwitz wrote the book while there and i don't mean to get like super happy with all this stuff but hugely hugely impactful um i need to think about what the third is maybe something a little more positive that's hard to follow man yeah i think okay um i just like i i always find it interesting like when you think about raising a kid i'm having my first child soon i know but you also have a baby you also you also i mean i appreciate that there's lessons in there i would also

[1:11:46] i don't know i i'm such a positive poly kind of vibe like i'm just like i don't know i feel like something positive but knowing your mortality i personally like memento mori the stoic philosophy of like knowing your death in order to live your life i think personally i find death to be one of the most motivating the like inevitability of death to be one of the most motivating things in my life i it's funny so i i would definitely class myself as a positive person as a high school kid i had a thing because you know high school kids do this stuff on my wall that was

[1:12:20] uh lives remaining zero uh because it's like old school video games before they were easy which they are now like you'd have a limited number of lives and then when you're on your last life i always felt like i played better because i knew like okay it's the last one back against the wall and i had i had that on my wall as an angsty high school kid and it's something it's a thing that i come back to over and over again so i i vibe with the stoicism of it for i mean i have a four-year-old so we're just trying to work on sight words right

[1:12:48] now but uh when i think of books that had a huge huge impact on me um the uh last sort of in the vein of um the breath book which i need to read because i should read it it's short the final speech final uh by randy pouch yeah butchering the name that that is something i actually feel like i should revisit now that we're having this conversation um because along the same lines of like okay what is at the end of the day life well lived what's the what are the things that are going to matter to you yeah when do you get that sentence

[1:13:23] and from 8-1 0-1 is amazing peter peter has a lot of things right in that book and and i think although he didn't i guess it was he didn't write about yourself it was just his lecture um the from a from a business standpoint or a okay from uh i want you to be aware of the world standpoint uh influence by um god it's been around forever it's basically the like the shorthand for how marketers manipulate your mind and and it's a great book that i revisit every few years just to understand and re-remind myself how i'm being like [ __ ] with um because at the end of the day

[1:14:15] like all of these things matter so much it's not just like don't think just dom draper it's it's all the even subtle decisions that are made uh even around your favorite web3 project that are giving you some sense of i need to be a part of this uh that i think drives more of our decision making than most of us would like to emit especially folks who are maybe overeducated would like to admit i love hearing folks who are like i'm not motivated by brands i don't believe in brands i'm like [ __ ] you absolutely are i just saw you pull out your iphone and where you're all birds

[1:14:48] get out of here you're thinking of gucci and versace but no no everyone is making even even the profile pic you chose is you being influenced by branding or or the design of it or the the instagram photo you just posted like we're all all influenced by it um and then gosh okay the other one that comes to mind which is not a book i'd recommend necessarily but like the one that i think about a lot um because i didn't for like 15 16 years of my life is um science of sleep oh so good why we sleep why we sleep thank you matthew uh yeah i took

[1:15:27] his class at stanford actually amazing class i blew my mind too i that that's the other one that during covid i i ended up reflecting on a ton because i think like a lot of people was like doing an inventory of myself and realized like if i'm really thinking about longevity here i'm not not team baby blood so i want to do it the old-fashioned way um turns out sleeping yep actually one of the best ways to do that so eight sleep is a sponsor of this show actually i'm a huge eight sleeper here we go shout out to matteo uh he's been a game changer for

[1:16:03] my sleep as well but yeah why we sleep was amazing he's he has an amazing podcast that he just did with um hubermann on hubermann lab that was phenomenal where he goes deep on that stuff if i were him i would end every podcast with like a soothing uh sort of outro where you can sleep yeah so good well i know we've taken what was the lightning round yeah like oh okay no i actually do want to hit that now you're reminding me i know we're getting up against you and i'm lightning round you might as well be a producer give me your give me yeah

[1:16:36] you can be an investor in it if you want we'll bring you in wow that's after it we're going to pitch you on this afternoon we're going to pick yeah we're going to do tokens we're going to pitch them on and after uh that's going to be off screen um lightning round you live in the future give me one to three things that are your predictions for where we're gonna be in the future well how future you define like five years about five years um i think everyone in five years will participate in a dow they won't know it necessarily i don't think that branding is is whack um but

[1:17:07] they it won't get right user experience triumphs over everything so yeah i think it will be pretty commonplace not maybe not everyone but like for all intents and purposes it'll be a pretty normal thing for people to participate in dao's um five years uh people will in five years agree with the statement that a famous vc asked me like 10 years ago what's something that you believe that the rest of the world where and uh and i told them that people will care more or do care more and will care more about their online identity than their offline one they'll care more about some pseudonym they made up than their

[1:17:44] government name and so i think in five years that will be true uh and then give me a play to earn one oh great one okay in five years no one 90 of people will not play a game unless they are being properly valued for that time and so the idea if you're messing around you're on candy crush right now you're listening to this thing in the background i caught you you should be paying attention kev got caught and and i caught you because in five years you will actually value your time properly and instead of being harvested for advertisements or being fleeced for dollars to buy you know stupid hammers

[1:18:31] you don't actually own you will be playing some on-chain equivalent game that will be just as fun but you'll actually earn value in you will be the harvester yes yeah it says the harvesty yes and you deserve it you deserve it you've been crushing that candy for too long uh for free or you're actually getting charged for it so amazing that's good i mean i feel like those are clips that in five years yeah you could do a nice retrospective and we are we're gonna check the recipes wrong yeah wrong wrong one right but you got paid for it yeah we're gonna check the receipts on

[1:19:05] it in five years i loved it this was awesome thank you so much i'm very very excited to see what's happened down here and i'm just again i'm still like i'm still trying to be cautiously optimistic about this whole thing but guys it's this is this this very much feels like we're on the verge of something that's drastically going to change what everything stuff or what oh no one three man dude i thought he was talking he said he was trying to be cautious about it i thought he was talking i'm trying to be cautious about the fact that like like people usually you're supposed to get the like you're supposed

[1:19:40] to have the comeuppance yeah when you're really feeling you know this time it's different all the other [ __ ] and so i'm trying i'm really trying to be [Music] responsible here but it's hard because i'm watching [ __ ] happen that like feels it feels like i see the matrix right now yeah and the thing that is changing is affecting every major institution we know totally and the fact that it's changing the one that drives like wealth creation is the the game changer because everyone needs to [ __ ] pay their rent at the end of the day and yeah yeah we're we're working with like

[1:20:18] so many major brands like on web three mm-hmm so and everyone is calling wait for for not for this for late check out which is because we have like an agency that and it's it's crazy like everyone is trying to figure it out yeah and but now they're taking it seriously like i would say over the last like 60 to 90 days people have been like nike fortnight you know all the like the big boys are kind of like what you know you know what's our role in this future man i mean some of them just need to hang on and some of them and and some of

[1:20:55] them it's like you know the req like the recommendation is like it's not in your dna yeah i honestly don't think that you can make the leap and in which case it's like okay let's incubate our own let's just incubate our own product oh yeah no that makes a lot of sense i i really we talked about one company in particular at the start i this is this is innovator's dilemma times a hundred because it's such a different way of thinking that i i just don't think incumbents have a chance and it actually the irony is it becomes a liability to have had or to have the uh

[1:21:39] incumbency so like you saw with discord i think jason's a smart dude they're they're the de facto home of real time web 3 conversation yeah and look at the reaction yeah to a minor feature yeah like that's a liability and and and i i think they'll still navigate it okay but like holy [ __ ] like when has there been like if facebook if zuck had done the famous hey only show me mockups that are mobile because this is a mobile first company now and every or you know a loud enough cabal of users were like no desktop is everything we need we don't need mobile web or

[1:22:22] mobile apps um like that would have been a really difficult thing to navigate but thankfully users shouldn't really give a [ __ ] and okay i mean stayed ahead of the curve i don't know what you do as an incumbent if you have this kind of sort of i mean frankly baseless opposition to a thing that's as world-changing as like desktop to mobile and you know you need to make that shift and i don't think every ceo has the courage or conviction or the understanding of community yeah to know how existential the threat is yeah but they're gonna find out six months to a year totally like if

[1:22:55] you're a ceo and you're not spending 20 to 30 percent of your time in a discord server yeah you're not going to make it you're not going to make it you know oh for real yeah like you're not yeah and and the irony is some of the ceos who ostensibly should know this stuff don't yeah and and i yeah like i said i think the good news is man technology the market does not care about your feelings yeah uh people just move towards where they get value and it's gonna happen quick man so yeah i mean we fundamentally believe that podcasting is broken the traditional first off because of kovid the minimum

[1:23:35] viable product of podcasting has come way down because you can just record it on zoom and so everyone went down there and there's a bunch of cool innovation happening riverside's a really cool product are you an investor in that super cool product and like being able to it's so we were talking about this last night so are you all you i hope you're using riverside for we use riverside for all the people oh right you're in person yeah yeah yeah we're in person but for the people like we have gary v tomorrow like we use riverside for all the stuff that's remote but we basically believe that the

[1:24:04] conversations the minimum viable community of it has come so far down and so the opportunity here is give community access to this so that they can feel like they're a real part of the conversation give mike's to more people and open up all of the opportunity that comes with that and so that's what we're trying to build this this reminds me here's a little gem from the time capsule you remember when serial went viral i remember early in you know that community on reddit was like the the epicenter of all the conversation on that podcast whether the podcast wanted to admit it or not like that was what was driving all the

[1:24:41] interest all the extra content like articles were being written about the conversations from within the subreddit and i remember reaching out to the team there saying hey you all should really engage with this community like this whether you know it or not is the most valuable part of your podcast no offense and to say that they were dismissive was an understatement and and i think of the really exceptional sort of breakout podcasts that have existed whether it was sort of a limited run window like a particular season of cereal or whether it's the more mainstay ones like the joe rogans of the world you're talking about community at the

[1:25:20] end of the day that is where all of the value was was it being properly accounted for in most cases not really and i do think i mean look earliest investor in patreon i think they cracked an important part of it but did so at a time when the on-ramp was still fiat right that was just the way to do it in 2014 or whatever patreon launched and so this is an opportunity for sure i think to get that right and it doesn't even have to just be podcasts yeah i guess audio is just a it's a good gateway in gateway it doesn't have to be but the

[1:25:56] whole i mean the whole idea of like right now the revenue of this is our sponsors who we love and they're great and they respond sponsor revenue for the podcast but think about the value that could be created out of a community of 10 000 people who are all motivated around these ideas deeper in the conversation what are they going to go start what are they going to build what are we going to incubate and the fact that we can then create a community and because of web 3 we can create shared value and the value that comes out of that community that's insane and that's

[1:26:24] not hundreds of thousands or like low seven figures of value from maybe having sponsors that's like there could be tens hundreds of millions of dollars of value that come out of this community that is being built around amazing future looking ideas and just replicate that with so like yeah just create pillars to it different verticals right people with audiences yeah bring them to a community space yeah have a media asset which is basically an excuse to a ritual and then create on-chain revenue that is unchanged yeah and nfts for ticketing access to special events and you create a special channel that people have access to where we can share deal flow

[1:27:08] and syndicate things create a fund around it i mean there's like almost endless opportunities and just like what's our run rate on this show uh i mean over a million and a half probably pretty pretty much yeah anything yet if we could just do that in different verticals with an add-on chain yeah it's pretty crazy to think about the the opportunity that exists here but the coolest thing is like we haven't done anything yet and there's a community of 2000 people that are hyped and talking about talking about the things we're talking about because people love these ideas and they want to be a part of the

[1:27:41] discussion so when we release this episode and we're like we talked about a bunch of cool [ __ ] about the future let's go jam on it go deeper on it what are the cool ideas people have what can we be building around this and we can actually go support those people it's a super democratizing and empowering idea yeah and we can even build like eventually like tooling for this like just like you're building tooling for adventure yeah like why wouldn't we build yeah tooling yeah for other creators the barrier to entry is that no one wants to do the hard part of it which is so true we're here in

[1:28:12] miami we have we had to pay for all of the film crew to make it really high quality to build the community and spend the time on it like the messy part of building community is that you actually have to come early days hours i spent building out twitter commenting on things responding to people dms like full-time jobs all of that i mean it's really messy and it's like the um you know it's like the pogram like do things that don't scale early on and um that's the messy part of it and i also just think most of the people that try to do this stuff are not

[1:28:41] community native they're just what they're grounded in you know think boy stuff they're like really smart probably much smarter than we are think boy i like that but it is like the tech think boy thing but they're very smart probably much smarter than we are but we understand community yeah and that's where we're going to ground all of you reddit was built in the comments i mean countless hours i used to play a game where because i got all the contact at reddit emails for the first like five years and i would play this game where because there'd always be [ __ ] emails but just random stuff customer support stuff

[1:29:14] and i would every now and then respond but starting from the top of the inbox just so that someone like the first i know five ten people would get replies that happened within like a minute so that they would feel like superheroes like oh my god i just got a response from reddit.com from the founder like this is amazing just to create that experience even if i was just saying no we're not going to do that feature or maybe one day we'll do that feature or whatever those in the trenches stuff no one wants to do but has to happen that's how you if you're hosting the party you're the

[1:29:49] first one there you're the last one cleaning up like that's the part of the job that's not sexy but mandatory and i can tell you from years and years of doing it the roi the way that compounds is amazing it is amazing well let's talk okay all right let's cook i'm gonna go yeah you gotta go to your next event man thank you so much all right takeaways from the episode with alexis finally by the way got alexis into the room which is crazy because he hasn't left his house and compound in like two and a half years he said to do a live thing so crazy that we were the first

[1:30:23] ones that got to do that with him which is awesome yeah that was incredible what was the one big thing for you the one big takeaway i mean there was a lot i will say but i think i i was happy i got to go through that tweet that i did a year ago about the you know what would yc look like if it was invented today and despite you know his allegiance to yc and how much he loves yc he kind of was like yeah like it makes sense that you know a web 3 version of yc should exist it makes sense that it should be

[1:30:57] remote it makes sense that it should be global so um my big takeaway was you know we were i was on the right track and uh definitely something i'm gonna explore so my big takeaway is gonna be a slightly tongue-in-cheek one um but after we got done he was like hey hit me up i actually want to invest in this and so we're going to have to have a conversation with alexis about potentially investing in the future of community-based podcasts so if you're tuned in and you want to be a part of this we're going to keep building this thing to the moon you're going to love it you are going to

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