Winning at Startups and the Future of Culture

0:00one of my oldest memories is going to the met and uh there's sort of an egypt room there with this giant slit like sloping glass you can look out and there's a cleopatra's needle and there's water in the room and i used to think this was the most amazing room in the world it was just i'd never seen anything like it there was architecture there was historical art and i can visualize it stood with me for forever yeah it's like romantic it's literally i romanticize it in my head i've drawn it like there's pictures from when i was a kid drawing that room um and that always stuck with me

0:34[Music] my man how you doing what's going on oh dude i i'm great i'm a little under the weather and i can give you the context on that uh because it's related but um you look great i like your your hair is looking good you look like you just you're either going with the slickback look or you just took a shower let me guess uh that the reason you're sick is because of the the event that you were at yeah yeah that's right much to my wife's chagrin uh yes i i think that is the i think that is the uh the culprit here for sure

1:11so can you talk a little bit about that um i think i think people kind of want to hear yeah yeah so for people that didn't have context on this or didn't see it on social or wherever um last i don't know it was like a week ago or so now um hosted an in-person meetup with um our friend sam parr you know host of co-host of my first million and um founder of the hustle which which he sold to hubspot um and basically the whole thing came around in like a pretty funny way but like sam was in new york this summer we were hanging out a bunch um

1:46uh you know our wives are friends etc and uh he like texted me one morning and was like yo we should do a meet-up in new york and so i just said yeah cool right like i was just like doing something else i was like alright cool sam yeah and then a few minutes later he's like all right i tweeted it out and i was like what and i look and he's created an eventbrite link that says like sam and sahil meet up it's got my face on it and he's picked a date for it without asking me the date and sent out this whole thing and then literally like

2:16you know it was like three weeks in the future and for the like two and a half weeks leading up to the event i'm getting daily texts from sam just being like yo 600 people of rsvp yo 700 people of rsvp'd and i was like dude do we have a venue like i didn't know what the hell any of the stuff was happening for the event like i literally had zero context on it um so in the end we ended up having this event i think in the in total like 1400 people rsvp'd saying they were gonna come to it um these two guys andrew and tops like

2:50basically volunteered themselves to uh to coordinate the event found this insane venue in lower manhattan um that we kind of got comped and uh hosted this event like a thousand people showed up dude so i don't mean this to come off the wrong way but i love both you and sam but the fact that you guys could just like tweet and twelve 1200 people are going to show up in a room to hang out with you with no agenda blows my mind today's episode is brought to you by a company and product that has literally changed my life and one that i use every single day i started taking

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4:57and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance you won't regret it so first off i think most people probably thought there was going to be some sort of agenda um to sam's credit in the in the uh eventbrite description he was like don't fly in for this event that's too much pressure he was like it will be at least okay but probably not great or something like that and so there wasn't really an agenda um the one thing i will say is like i don't know how many people showed up to hang out with us as much as like to meet us potentially plus get to hang out with each other

5:36like you know i said it when i was speaking at the event we did a little bit of speaking and when i said it at the event but like one of the amazing things about a city like new york is that you can go out on a thursday night to something like that for free basically and there's just like there was a thousand other like young ambitious excited people there that were all there because they wanted to learn and and you know and be around other smart people and that was so cool like the you know i called it intellectual chemistry but like the intellectual chemistry in that

6:05room was really inspiring to me um it also just left me feeling like we need to do more in-person events again um you know even even us like with you know with our podcast recordings like we need to get back to doing more of these in person because it's just so much fun when you get people's vibes in person um and you start coming together in that way and then my final realization which um kind of ties directly to some of the stuff i want to talk about to you around your guide to startups which we can dive into is like the power of community is really hard to

6:39overstate um i i came away from the event saying like man i need to do more um community building on my platform like the fact that i have this newsletter and this twitter is great but there are thousands of people within those communities that want to be interacting with one another um and that i can you know help bring together and facilitate so i need to figure out the right format to do that but there is something really really powerful there i also just want to go do meet ups in like every major city in the world now it's also a testament to people are tired of

7:15being in front of their screens all the time so like they see a tweet about hey there's this in-person event and i follow sahil and i follow sam and they're so excited about just actually rsvp rsvping and going um so the same sort of like energy that we saw like uh around digital products in early 2020 you're kind of seeing with irl type products yeah it's a good point i mean we've seen it with some of these different events right like um art basel where we were filming last year like the excitement to be back in person some of these nft weeks that people have had la tech week you know

7:55happening right now miami tech week like all of these things i do think the energy around in person um is pretty unparalleled right now so i'm excited to start doing more in person hopefully not you know getting sick from it i don't have covid by the way um but uh but did come down with a little head cold here um so pivoting a little bit um i texted you prior to this episode or maybe like a week ago that i wanted to um dive in on a tweet of yours uh which is kind of like a weird backdrop to a to an episode but this is like it's such a

8:32prime uh tweet and thread that i feel like it bears um i mean you could probably write an entire book on this greg someday and so let's do an episode on it we can start with that and if you if you decide to write a book on it i'll i'll hook you up with somebody um but your tweet was it was called my guide to startups um and you know as context everyone knows you um you know probably that's listening to this but you've spent your entire career and life working on bit you know businesses startups ideas etc and so you have um as you said

9:04in the tweet you've lost millions hired hundreds raised millions and sold companies all before the age of 30. um and so this is like your guide it's like your hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy for the startup world so what i was hoping we could do if you're open to it is basically go through this and it's it's sort of like a set of distinct principles and i imagine each one comes with some sort of story or experience you had and insight and so i'm kind of hoping we can like dive into um hopefully all of them but but if not you know some of the most salient ones

9:38for you and and uh and go from there let's do it all right so the first one on the list is something that we've definitely talked about in the past you said venture capital and pr are like drugs drugs can kill you or save your life use accordingly so i thought that that was really interesting because of the juxtaposition of can kill you or save your life so we'd love for you to just like kick off there and tell me what you were thinking around that so i've seen what let's just talk about vc first i've seen what how helpful vc could be and i've also seen it destroy

10:20you know lives and destroy companies um you know the last company i was at wework you know famously is i mean it's the poster poster child for where venture capital could go wrong um you know i joined the company i think i was the thirteen thousandth employee employee in acquisition by the time you know i think it was like four or five months later i remember someone telling me that they were they were already at 17 000 employees so imagine hiring you know a thousand people per month you know it's just so insane it's so insane and i think with vc sometimes comes this growth at all cost mentality

11:09um which sometimes works and sometimes you know the wework story obviously doesn't work yeah i mean there was like a during the raging bull market there was um an assumption that you could like eventually make a business model work um and if you just kept growing you'd eventually figure out how to make the unit economics work i think people have now come down to earth and realized that generally that's not the case it's very hard to like all of a sudden find a unit economic model that works um and so to your point like uh that vc like raise at all costs grow at all costs mentality that existed um i

11:48think led to a lot of bad decision making along the way um what about the pr one so like pr is like is like a drug what did you mean by that so pr like it feels so good when you're on the you know front page of techcrunch you're on cnbc like it feels really good but it's very fleeting so it's a very fleeting feeling and you know for startups the most important metric as you know is just it's product market fit everything is should be around product market fit um and you know it when you have it um the pr could be helpful like vc in a sense

12:28like it's good for like finding new customers or hiring people but uh again it's very fleeting what i had before uh actually i'm remembering what i had before writing this uh that you know vc and pr were drugs i had vc and pr like fast food they taste good while you're eating it but afterwards you're probably not going to feel so good i was feeling i was feeling a little pessimistic on pr and nbc so i removed it and i said you know in some cases pr and vc make sense yeah i like that i mean i i like both of those analogies i do think that the um

13:11the thing with pr and with journalists in particular is like it's great when they want to write the positive story on you like great fundraising round you raised all this money like fast that company um you know the one click checkout company like every journalist techcrunch forbes all of them were like touting this is such an amazing company raised all this money it's like growing like crazy it's amazing and then as soon as the company was going under or like challenged every single one of those publications was like dunking on them with like zero regard for the things they'd written previously and so it's one of those like easy come easy go

13:45right i mean it's the same thing with venture capital pr and vc um so that's a good starting point you're um your second one i think is the most liked one in the entire in the entire thread and uh it said okinawa is an island in japan with the highest life expectancy it's called the land of immortals the secret almost everybody gardens entrepreneurship is a marathon not a sprint be sustainable find your gardening i love this one because it like it it's so um your vibe and like personality around these things so please uh please speak to this one you know what i did about an hour ago

14:24gardened i went and go pick some blueberries from my blueberry tree you know it was four o'clock uh on a wednesday around there 3 30 4 o'clock and i took a break to go outside pick some blueberries eat the blueberries like have a connection with the food like sit look around look at the tree get a little sun on my face i know you talk about that a lot get some vitamin d on your face then come back took a shower that's why my hair is a little wet and here i am and i'm a big proponent like of just you know slow living this is

15:09called slow living where you know it doesn't mean that you're not working hard it just means that you're also taking a little bit of time to connect with nature or connect with yourself and be really creative and you know we had a discussion with delian on the pod uh recently and he talked about you know how irl work you know is sort of you know you're not serious unless you're doing irl work and you know that mean that might mean for a lot of people like you know taking the subway into new york takes you know an hour to get to the place and you're you know there's people

15:48everywhere and you're catching your colds and and coving and stuff like that and you're you know you're eating you're eating food instead of taking a lunch or eating right in front you know while you're typing an email and i think what we're going to learn is that people who live sustainable slow lives are gonna live longer and that's why i put the story uh yeah about this japanese island i mean this is one you this is probably my favorite one in the whole list because this is something that i have like really viscerally wrestled with both sides of as you know you know like i spent the

16:25first seven years of my career in a hardcore finance track where it really was like you know work till you drop 90 100 hour work weeks and like that was you took pride in that now you know it's like delian right like you take pride and that grind and um you know not sleeping and not having balance and but i'm gonna make money and i'm gonna do something hopefully world changing and you know create a bunch of value et cetera um and i i don't i don't know if saw the light is the right answer for it but i definitely have found a a world of a lot more

16:56balance and fulfillment um on the other end of this and you know for me like my gardening is taking a walk with my son or with you know with my wife and son just being outside getting sunlight cold plunge like all of these things that i'm doing um now where i've tried to kind of find and strike a balance i would argue were actually productive for um you know my end goals of creating value and so like i i um i've wrestled with both sides of this exact one and i definitely have found uh you know anecdotally that uh this balance lends itself to uh higher feelings of health both

17:34physically and mentally um i mean my actual health metrics have improved markedly from from my kind of before state to where i am today like all of my blood blood readings etc are better um and mentally i mean my mental health is way way better than it was right because i'm sleeping more and i you know get to spend more time doing things i love and with people i love um so there's really something to this um and i think the point you're making is is a is a well-made one in that it doesn't mean you have to do what we're doing right like it doesn't mean that you have

18:08to have the lifestyle greg has where you know you're really you know moving slowly on things and finding time to death throughout the day and like you know working less and creatively and um or that you're doing what i do and um you know taking five walks a day with your kid like you don't need to do that it might just be that you're in a high crazy you know stress environment but you find that one time a day where you are able to do your quote unquote gardening where you're able to do that one thing that unlocks you and kind of opens you up and so i thought the way you said it was

18:39really important because it just means that you need to find time in your daily life for that version of gardening for you to take that like one step that sort of um allows yourself to unwind and to unlock i mean i'm not a religious person by by any means but like the whole idea of a sabbath you know one day a week you turn off your phone turn off electronics you spend time with friends and family i think there's a reason why that you know comes from thousands of years ago because i think we're we're not meant to be in at the 75th floor you know in midtown

19:18new york for 18 hours a day uh i don't think that's you know a sustainable way to live and i also don't think that if you're in a lot of people listening are like creative people if you want to be your most creative self i just don't believe that you can be that in that lifestyle yeah um that's a great one let's jump to the next one um or another one rather i'm gonna jump around a little bit here in the interest of time um for most people forget harvard or living in sf with the internet you're more powerful than you think you are learn anything you want connect with

19:56anyone you want be anyone you want and do it all hyper efficiently what a time to be alive again something that we've like talked about in passing with different guests on the show curious for like your most recent take on this i mean just yesterday we're in a group chat and a pretty well-known fa fa we're talking about money with a pretty well-known founder i won't name him but um i told him i was like do you want to be 10 times wealthier you want you want me to tell you the secret to being 10 times wealthier because and he's like yeah leave new york city

20:35like leave new york city like it's one of the most expensive places in the world to live and that means everything you know food uh rent uh entertainment everything is more expensive and comparisons comparisons are the most expensive [ __ ] thing in the world excuse my language man where you're like because your friend's doing this thing so then you start doing it and you don't think about it and you're not like you know planning to do that thing but when everyone is doing it or when you're trying to keep up with the joneses as like part of your existence um life gets really really expensive

21:11exactly so that being said like do i believe that new you know we just talked about new york like you had this really amazing event and there was a lot of value there do i do i i see value there i just think that uh there's so much high leverage work that you can do on the internet by building your personal monopoly posting on twitter posting on linkedin creating a blog post creating a podcast and then do what i did which growing up which was i would go to new york city uh with you know for doses of inspiration i call it doses of inspiration so i lived

21:50in a way cheaper city montreal where at the time you know the average apartment was 500 a month and i would drive you know five and a half hours and i'd go to new york city and i'd sleep on a couch and i'd get some inspiration and i drive back and then you know the best part about that is you spread that inspiration to your hometown yeah i mean what you're hitting on is like this powerful point that i mean i think of it as like opportunity playing fields there's that there's that really famous um i don't know if it's a quote or like an adage that um talent is evenly

22:28distributed but opportunity is not and traditionally historically opportunity has really not been evenly distributed and what it required was you going to harvard or are you living in sf are you living in new york in order to have opportunity and what you're hitting on is that that is no longer the case you actually don't have to because of the way the internet and the digital age has proliferated opportunity and it's not to say that opportunity is evenly distributed yet but we're certainly closer and you can certainly be a kid um you know growing up in rural india with access to the to the internet with access to discord servers

23:06with access to online courses online training etc and you can come up the curve and have the same opportunities hopefully in the long term and in the future i do think that actually will be the case it's still not perfect but it's getting there and i think the last thing that you hit on uh is a really cool one which is like visit go to those places and bring your energy back from those things the things you've learned and bring it back and spread it back to where you are it's like um you know like that that used to happen with like uh with plagues right like uh

23:39the plague was spread um uh or sorry the spanish flu was spread after world war one because all the soldiers who had come together and gotten it went all back to their home countries and it spread like the virus spread but the same applies to good things like you can go get energy from these places where you go and come back to your hometown or to where you are and spread that winning um feeling and spread that energy in a positive way um that was a really cool way that you put that i love that um all right a few more from your guide to startups uh and by the way if you have

24:13any like absolute personal favorites that i'm not hitting on please jump in and and let me know um all right i'm gonna hit uh let's see how to negotiate well i love this one listen ninety percent talk ten percent listening equips you with the info that you can use the listener usually wins um this is like interesting contrarian advice to me because i always think when i think of negotiating is like you got to be the like you know the negotiator you got to be talking and constantly uh you know constantly saying things so what's your perspective here and what was this what was this guided by like personal

24:48experience wise i think who told me this was uh at the time i almost regarded him as my my indian uncle ramsharam i don't know if you know rom no um rahm is like an og silicon valley legend okay he um he sold his company i believe to amazon in the in like the mid 90s he was an executive at amazon he was the first dollar into google and uh sat on the board of google from seed up until very recently [Music] and uh yeah just a prolific investor and rom was sat on a board of a company called stumbleupon and in 20 2012 or 2013

25:41i sold a company to stumble upon and i believe i asked him i was like rom like you know i was 20 i don't know 22 23 at the time i was like how could i have gotten a better deal because i remember when they offered me the deal i was like great where do i sign you know like i didn't negotiate at all it's just kind of like this is amazing like this is gonna change my life and uh rahm said if only you just listened more if you you know you came into that meeting and you were just like pitching pitching pitching and we offered you something and you're like

26:17okay and that was it if only you just sat there and let us do the pitching and let us kind of sell you i think you would have gone away higher multiple so since then even though it's sometimes really painful to be in a negotiation and to be silent uh more than you are talking because you're so excited about getting the deal done it's kind of counter-intuitive but it's for me it's been super effective yeah it's like that um epictetus i think that's how you pronounce it the stoic philosopher we have two ears in one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak

27:01um it's sort of like the practical application of that idea um i've always called it the paradox of words like you talk less in order to say more um and in those situations i when you said it when you wrote it i was like oh that's different than what i would have thought and then you think about it more and you're like oh yeah that actually is what a great negotiator does they kind of sit back listen and then when they strike they really strike and they have the really thoughtful perspective and the idea so um it uh it makes a lot of sense i love that one i

27:32think we've got time probably for one more um before we have uh we have tom come on from archive um which one should we hit uh how about this startup life is a life full of rejection no rejection no progress um what was your big rejection what uh what what what kind of cemented that realization for you well so i feel like there's a whole generation of entrepreneurs that watch the social network and was like this is a romantic basically job i like they basically the social network romanticized entrepreneurship for a whole generation of entrepreneurs like our generation and [Music] it's you know i think uh what i don't like about that movie is

28:27it kind of like you see him at harvard there's like a bit of struggle a little bit then all of a sudden he's in san francisco palo alto and like facebook is all of a sudden like big like it you know what scott belski calls the messy middle uh the middle of the startup isn't really there it's just like from small to really big what that doesn't capture is that like literally every day of a startup you're kind of like you check product times in the morning and you're just like i hope a big competitor didn't launch a competing product yeah and every founder is is

29:04has that experience of like oh my god google just launched this oh my god facebook just launched this oh my god they're gonna and then you get like 10 texts from your investors hey have you seen this yeah man of course what do you mean have i seen this like i'm literally crying inside you know yeah um so if you're not okay with adversity i just don't think that startup life is for you and [Music] you know i can tell a lot of stories about how like i've gotten rejected over the years but like i'm constantly getting rejected and it's just about being okay with it

29:45maybe it's from your dating life [Laughter] on that note uh i mean we do have we have a guest joining um for the latter half of this discussion who is a uh serial entrepreneur also a friend of yours who i think you go you go back a long way with and who's building something super super cool at the intersection of like in real life and web 3. um so it relates to a lot of what we talked about you know the through line of this whole conversation so why don't we go ahead and bring uh bring tom in and uh and we can uh jam with him

30:19what's up everybody what's up man hey nice hat i love that i need one now i've got i got my black dad hat i gotta get an archive black dad hat dude when i tell you i've got i've got a lot of dad hats i've also got a lot of logo hats from prior companies i've got i've got walls of uh historical shots on goal [Laughter] well we were just talking actually right before you came on about how uh the ability to like handle rejection is a key trait of successful startup entrepreneurs um any uh any thoughts on that i mean handle rejection is certainly part of it

31:01uh i think you almost have to compartmentalize rejection into just like you know a bad conversation you gotta kind of assume that that's going that way i think it's almost the uh i have this kind of thesis where it's kind of like a boxing thought process where most of the time being a founder is like trying to avoid getting punched in the face it's like you can take a lot of body blows so things like people saying no or rejection or you didn't meet the quarterlies or the app didn't show up like ship on time those are like oh you know it's like oh a kidney oh the lower

31:33back whatever but you're like probably not going to get knocked out by that but you're really trying to avoid the like like that one that really puts you on the map uh so i think that there's something about resilience there and like get back uppedness yeah i like that i like that analogy a lot like i've thought about this in the past how there's sort of two types of people there's like you know you encounter the like glancing blow in life right we're like you almost get knocked the [ __ ] out but you like somehow you know dodge it slightly like it just kind of is a glancing blow and

32:07there's two types of people coming away from that there's the person that is like oh good missed me like i'm good i'm cool and then there's the person who's like why did that happen why did i almost just get knocked out like what did i learn from that what how did i leave myself open to it and you gotta bet on that second person to win in the long run because you just learn so much more from those glancing blow situations if that's the approach you take versus just feeling fortunate for not getting knocked the hell out i mean it's like we're always just going through like

32:35repeats of childhood loops right and like if you never fell you probably never learned to walk efficiently if you never missed a shot you never got it became a better basketball player if you like find me the person who's never had has had just a streamlined like tailwind the entire time they're gonna fall hard whenever actual adversity shows up um i think there's something to be said for you know the advantage of having a tailwind for a while and how that probably sets you up for something but adversity isn't the thing it sets you up for so at some point you will be challenged and i think that's yeah

33:10that's a tough that's a tough yeah to swallow if you've never really been in that circle or never been in that we're in that ring if i'm going to keep the boxing metaphor rolling yeah yeah um oh hey greg thanks so much for joining man last time i saw you you were at my house at dinner um it was a while ago dude that was when you were uh uh what a gentrifying bay shore i mean that's one way to put it that's you know definitely basically here's here's the story style so i i got a house okay people like to go left i like to go

33:46right 100 i'm aware of that um you know i'd like to be alternative for a lot of reasons and i found this incredible house it was amazing it was like it was kind of legendary in san francisco it was in a neighborhood called bay view um which at the time this is 2015 was like no one in technology in our world tom was like spending time there and i kind of made this house like a destination for founders creators musicians artists to come and hang out whenever they wanted and we had some good times there definitely it was a good dinner so i didn't realize until like just

34:38before the episode that you guys had gone way back in the day i've like um you know tom i've been kind of following all of your your recent exploits which i want to get want to get deep into but i had no idea you know of all of your um you know your experience as an entrepreneur and all the different things you've done we have a common friend in nate boshard who was the first one who brought to my attention um what you're building with archive but um i mean you've had like a super long career as a founder um sort of uniquely long it feels like i

35:09mean you've done a bunch of different things had several experiences like i'm like is this shade i can't yeah

35:20no like i mean you've like you just continued to like roll out new ideas new things like what has been kind of the the common thread um through all of this that um you know that's kept you energized clearly masochism and self-flagellation at scale um no uh you know i think i'm i'm like perpetually curious and i think the one thing that's kind of like unique sounds like i'm tooting my own horn or whatever but i really haven't stuck to a genre i like get obsessed with sort of these different sectors so like my degree was audio engineering i started on the music side did like a record label years ago

35:58ended up in like you know doing a content management system for freelance web designers that was like a sas business ended up moving that into mobile you know like literally at the turn of mobile doing about 17 iphone apps then went full like operational logistics i ran 100 000 square foot warehouses with omni you know like physical objects on a grid moving bodies bifurcated workforce hourly employees hard tech problems on scale and logistics and now kind of jumping in with i actually think this is the most bullseye on all of those things so this one actually feels somewhat natural like i can track how the different things

36:34i've done in all those different places kind of aligns with with archive broadly um but yeah you know every time i get this moment where i kind of have this feeling where i could i could tap out at any time like i i've been around long enough that i could go i could probably join a fund i could probably go to a fang and you know get paid and chill like i you know i could i could manage someone's family office like there's a lot of things i could do if i just wanted to like double down on on like knowledge and capital as a way

37:05to you know expand my my time but then something hits someone someone says something in a conversation i'm like oh what if we and i just like i guess i'm doing it again like it and this like i i swear to y'all like i was not gonna do this again you know like you know omni we exited the coinbase right before the pandemic it was two years i'm bouncing around i'm doing a bunch of different things and i was just like huh i kind of get this life i can do this thing and then uh it's like got dragged back in dragged back in and it's like i i don't know i

37:40guess there's some like obsession with with doing it i think i have a chip on my shoulder i think i think any second or third time founders who did okay but didn't like crush didn't get the thing you're always like [Music] well i want to do i don't know i want to get there i want to feel that that other wind so i think those things are all a part of it too you know where you place your egos well i i will say like the thing you are doing now is one of the cooler uh startups that i've seen in recent memory and so i i want to get into it

38:13because it ties to so many things we've talked about on this on this podcast and more broadly around the entire like narrative and discussion around like actual use cases of web three that are interesting you know there's this like whole meme on the internet right like you have your packies and uh uh you know chris dixon's on one end um you know talking about web3 and writing about it and then you have your like i forget what the names of these guys are like zach weinberg um you know has kind of made a brand for himself as the like michael burry of crypto or like uh that

38:45guy leeron shapiro or something like that similarly and um it's like you know it's become this whole thing on twitter like the back and forth and like there's no real use cases etc archive which is what you're building um strikes me as like one of the most interesting use cases that i that i've seen because it combines some of the like super cool aspects of like in real life culture and community with web 3. um and just as context for people who are listening i'm going to have you talk about it but i want to read just really quickly one quote that i found cool from your kind of launch

39:21blog post which said quote museums have historically relied on curators collectors and benefactors to decide which artifacts are important and worthy of display as a result the history available for the public to experience is still largely determined by exclusion and not inclusion with that kind of as a backdrop tom can you just give us the um give us the overview on what archive is today's episode is brought to you by a company and product that has literally changed my life and one that i use every single day i started taking ag-1 in 2011 because i wanted to feel great it's been a staple of my morning routine

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40:44execute daily that has large long-term and compounding benefits the product has over thousand five star reviews and is trusted by a long list of professional athletes and leading health experts i love it they do and i know you will too to make it easy athletic greens is going to give you a free one-year supply of immune supporting vitamin d and five free travel packs with your first purchase all you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com w-i-h again that is athleticgreens.com w-i-h to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance you won't regret it yeah so i think i think the idea is

41:28that we're simply reversing the museum system right and and what does it look like if instead of going to a thing and experience what people are presenting to you you're participating in the experience of what gets presented to the world so you know you remove the confines of the physical walls you don't have to be in this specific space it doesn't have to match exactly where the what the location is you can maximize where objects are placed on a global scale to to to focus on impact um like you know so instead of it saying hey it's impactful because it's within the the confines of this uh

42:02this building you can say no it's impactful because it's out in the place where the artist most wanted it to be or representative body of that so if you're thinking it that way you can kind of change the narrative there and then in terms of the way it operates you're going down up instead of top down so you're saying hey i think thousands of individuals at some level have a deep uh it's called the genius of the commons have a deep seated understanding of many different things and when you put them together they actually can create uh with the same degree at some level of curatorial thought and education around

42:36why things are impactful and what does that look like if you do it how do you unlock the potential of the masses i've always had kind of an obsession with pop music broadly and this idea that you know like someone can sit in a studio for six hours and make something that a billion people listen to in multiple languages and or just resonate and and how there's always been this like well pop music isn't whatever and i'm like well that's kind of insane like you would like to make something that a billion people resonate with and i think we're kind of doing that we're kind of

43:06looking at it from the reverse like could you put something together that because a billion people find it interesting that drives the value and that drives the impact um yeah so that's the that's the overall vision is you know reverse the museum could you could you only because uh sahil brought up um what's his name zach weinberg could you do a zack weinberg take on an archive and can you do a packy mccormick take on archive like how does this succeed like what does this look like if it succeeds beyond your wildest imagination and what does it look like if you know how does it fail

43:47sure uh the the the detract so you want me to do my own detractor yeah i'm just curious on it if you want me to totally if you're doing your own detractor you would say by the way i find this hell i do this for all my projects i'm fine to do it yeah that's that's not the problem um if i was gonna be my own detractor i would probably go down this path of saying uh uh does the world need another museum this is just uh random crypto tech people showing up into a space that they've never been invited to on purpose and they're trying to change something

44:21that has existed for hundreds of years and then they're throwing a crypto layer on it because that sounds cool um and they want to financialize everything so uh the last thing we need is the financialization of museums uh they should be stand-alone democratized things controlled by uh people who are you know spend the time to do the educational research around them i think that's probably one way um that you could go after it and then you might go down a path of like could you do this with a database or something i think you can try to pull that card the could you do this with a

44:53database is the uh could amazon build this of like six years ago it's like anyone will ask you that question and the kind of conversation becomes well could it scale in the same way in different places i think it's probably the zack weinberg take the [ __ ] take is uh you know you open your phone anywhere in the world and it's pokemon go for culture you you you see art on a grid around you that you help participate and curate in the most impactful places at the major in in cities all over the world you now get to participate in increasing the cultural value of those locations as

45:30well as the objects themselves raising them to a position of permanence through decentralized voting and community curation and then you're also opening up a sustainable channel for maintaining provenance maintaining curation and maintaining the actual institution and items ability to exist because the financialization on the back end can support preservation and conservation of those things as well so you get to go faster than any building or any museum that was ever tied before and you get to go bigger wider and touch more people and that is what web 3 is all about put it back in the people and put it back out into the world as

46:08rapidly as possible i think that's probably the packy angle i thought that was really well done for what it's worth i mean i think the um the interesting thing to me i'm i'm sort of the i don't know if skeptic is the right word i'm like the you know observer the web 3 observer of this of this podcast greg is is more of the bull um and i think the interesting thing to me about this in particular is that it falls into the bucket for me of like how do you envision a world where more quote unquote regular people are onboarded into web3 um and is that

46:44possible and if the answer is it's not possible you're gonna have a lot of challenges with web3 because normal people like my parents need to understand it like people who aren't necessarily like techno optimists or or you know technologists and stuff like this um matches that for me where i just think like okay how do you reimagine the museum for the future like forget crypto don't even think about crypto for a minute just say like what does a museum look like if you remove the geographic bars from it if you're like hey i don't need to be in new york city to go to that i grew up

47:14going to the natural history museum so many of my like amazing memories yeah with my parents are like going and just staring at the t-rex there for however long that i did that and now you know i live in the new york area and so i'm fortunate that like we just have we have a young son and i'm so excited to get to take him and do that well if i was born in india um you know in bangalore or something and i didn't have access to that what would i do and if you can envision a world where you can like reimagine what a museum is in the

47:42context of the fact that we now have technology that enables you to experience these things all over the world and wherever they are it's pretty interesting to just like all of a sudden unshackle yourself from something that was uh you know previously a massive constraint and that's like crypto aside just a very noble mission in my in my view i'll tell you two two anecdotes around that one i'm from new jersey grew up going into the city all the time one of my oldest memories is going to the met and uh there's sort of an egypt room there with this giant slit like sloping glass you can look out and

48:18there's a cleopatra's needle and there's water in the room and i used to think this was the most amazing room in the world it was just i had never seen anything like it there was architecture there was historical art and i can visualize it stood with me for forever yeah it's like romantic it's literally i romanticized it in my head i i've drawn it like there's pictures from when i was a kid drawing that room um and that always stuck with me i've also learned uh over time that you know it's kind of odd in some cases that antiquities from other countries and places have been

48:48pulled into uh into institutions not where they're from right that a lot of times that is uh the spoils of war or the spoils of imperialism or all these other things there's a lot of nuance in the way museums actually function at scale a lot of times they're soft power representations of political power certainly a british museum for instance things like that so i think one we can we can start to look at it as we don't we aren't really forced to tell a narrative around a stance that is tied to like a government hegemony or something right so we can say if we curated a piece of art from benin it's

49:23probably going to go back to benin if we curate a frida kahlo let's put it in mexico city or zihuatanejo it doesn't have to be on display in seattle like just because we have it we can think about impact first at the at a global scale which i think one completely changes the the paradigm on that side and then to your statement around uh onboarding of uh just normal everyday you know people who would participate in anything consumers broadly i do think the first decade of crypto has been largely tied to what it's worth like back end tech which was the same thing with the internet you

50:00know you're building out tcp stacks and things like before you could get to aol you had to kind of get everything up and running for that and i would say i think there's two two sectors in that there are people that are that is the way crypto web 3 etc should be it is a purely enabling technology and everything needs to be done on chain completely and that is how it works and then there are people who are more on the side that i am which is i don't think the average person will care at all until it's tied to in person experiences access physical objects things that they can

50:34touch feel do like like involve themselves in and it provides actual reasons for being a part of a community or participating so i'm all in on that side um and i think the other one is always a part of it i'm not i don't disagree with the infrastructure but i'm all in on if we want to get your mom to care or someone randomly in bangalore that discovers they'd like to see that frida kahlo it's probably better to figure out how to participate in a large community that can get them there as opposed to just wishing on a star that they can you know go to the denver contemporary so

51:07so functionally um is the way that it works that you become sort of like a curator or a patron or what i'm curious what the terminology is that you're using but you become one and then effectively you're kind of like part of the community both in terms of voting on artworks where they are you know all of the governance around that pieces that are being acquired where they're being placed how they're being shown etc and then also that you know in the future call it 10 years in the future as this continues to build out i am on a trip with my family in florence italy and i pop open the

51:42archive app or whatever it is experience on my phone and i can see oh there is this piece of you know this old michelangelo work is being displayed at the original place where he created it um here and i can go with my family and say that i was a part of that experience of bringing this and acquiring this piece and it becomes this like much deeper connection that i have with with the with the artwork and with the culture around it i think you sum that up pretty well i think there's two layers on that there is this idea of uh when you tie impact it also can be

52:13just impact could simply be the most people possibly able to see it as opposed to a lot of items that you find or at least we're finding are in private collections or vaults or mountains in switzerland like there's a lot of this stuff is just hidden from the world so there's a world in which we're functionally repatriating it out into the planet so that's just going to private collectors saying hey this is a great way to get this out into the world your name can be a part of it you're forever etched in the blockchain as being the original last provenance owner of the item this is a great way to

52:45you know put that out there uh i think there is a layer where membership yep when you when the capital that raises from membership goes into the pot which we then vote on how the allocation is that's basically just swapping right so you're swapping ether usdc or however that you you know you you joined into a physical offline asset that has its own value tried to offline provenance and appraisals right so you have that side and then i think there is a pretty core part that we can unlock a lot of other value so we think of it almost as we're creating almost like a cultural perks card where every

53:19place one of those objects is we also have somewhat of a bd relationship right so it didn't just show up there if it uh we have a patent for the india computer we'd love that to live at the computer history museum in the bay area if it ends up there most likely we will also negotiate that any archive member gets five percent off at the gift shop for instance there's a lot of other things we can do by every piece of art becomes both a billboard to drive new membership so it's an it's an out of home virality strategy so if you see it and you're not a member scan the qr code

53:49tag the nfc this is how you can join and you could have been a part of the curation of this there's most likely a perk that's attached to the membership already from being in that space and you also get this somewhat ego boosting vanity good service feeling that you helped this happen and established there so when you're sitting there with your mom you can scan it and show your name just like you would uh you know the fisher family is all over the the moma sf you know it suddenly it'll have you know bloom right there as you know one of the people that helped to participate in in

54:20making this happen so i think there's a lot of good that happens on there it's a pretty virtuous circle and those places now get art like they get stuff that they didn't have to raise grant money for for instance and we don't have opex can you abstract all of the crypto complexity away from for people like that that's the thing that i find always holds back um you know my own understanding or like you know my willingness to really buy into the adoption of something is like ah there's just still so much complexity on the surface but like say you know you you say this vision of like a museum of

54:54the future what does it look like a lot of people's eyes light up you say you know here's the experience here's how it's going to be you can be a part of the kind of governance around what we acquire like a lot of people's eyes continue to light up then all of a sudden you say like okay now go send me some e through this wallet address and send it to here and you do this and you know exchange it with a bridge whatever and all of a sudden like you know 90 of the people that were lighting up are like glazed over at that point so how do

55:20you do that like how do you abstract that away is that part of the experience today are you planning to sort of abstract that complexity in the future um can you talk a little bit more about that i do think it's mostly abstracted right because the the reason that you're using it the reason that the the the the nft the crypto of it all on the membership side is for a couple reasons one uh it's it means that you can choose when you want to exit so if you no longer think that this is something that is providing value or community or working it's a it's a

55:50straight up we're gonna leave and i'm not i didn't invest i didn't i didn't lose this capital i can i can find someone else who's who is is excited about the direction so you can legitimately vote with your with your wallet as opposed to you know if you exited the soho house they're not giving you a refund right so you can determine that this is something i want to continue to participate in um uh and then if you're looking at it from a uh why do you do it in this manner period the art world broadly is unbelievably uh obtuse and opaque you can very the people are building very big

56:24businesses simply just trying to data mine what is going on at any time these are the values collections why things are happening in this case we're putting massive transparency on that so again this is abstracted out because all you need to care about is hi i'm sahil and uh i uh you know i'm a member and i voted to be a part of this etc but if someone was going down to look they can literally prove he he did this he voted for this piece he didn't vote for this he's been a member for six months uh here are the other people he knows here's like it's it's taking what's been

56:58going on behind closed doors and putting it permanently on chain uh which i think both increases the likelihood that provenance matters which is extremely important in in in art and collectibles and antiquities and it also maintains a steady database some of the way like the library of congress would for for books around why things are and where they're at and so that that changes the whole it sort of changes the whole reason as opposed to just like i've got my membership card and i can i get to scan things you know that's that's one silent the way the way i think about it is very similar to

57:37basically what tom's doing is making almost an interactive game in a lot of ways yeah and like when i think of like watching a film which is very like you go to the film you went to a movie theater you watch it and you have like thoughts in your head about the film versus passive experience passive experience versus you're playing fortnight and there or roblox and there's like robux that you're earning and there's this whole economy on top of it and there's other people and multiplayer uh what what what tom is doing and i'm curious your thoughts is uh almost fortnight fortnighting you know robloxing the museum space to

58:25make it way more community-owned and uh yeah interactive mean we we truly i mean i use the pokemon go reference a lot but we legitimately do feel like that and we mean that from multiple layers right so if you've ever played pokemon go right you you land in a new place you find out that there's something around you you go and scan it etc we're actually doing that so the act of scanning an item when you go there earns you internal points that increase your your voting weight etc it also functionally maintains the network so there's you have to have a network that shows that the items are where they are

59:06and functionally the same way that a validator would do that for verifying a transaction on blockchain you now have humans all over the world participating in the provability that the items are where they are so you can continue to to have functionally a trust network that is not incentivized negatively to prove that things are existing in the spaces and place they are and for that you get to continue to grow within the community and and reap more benefits so there is a whole sort of gamified museum layer there that allows for more interactivity you're really a part of it what are some of the other um

59:43projects that have gotten you excited tom um like i'm curious you're building something that strikes me is extremely exciting and um you know i think it like it also just bridges a lot of my interest like when i think about culture and i think about the community angle of what you're doing bringing people together and um the gamification of it as greg just pointed out like all of that gets me really excited and i'm going to message you afterwards because i want to figure out how to get involved personally um but like what are some of the other um what are some of the other projects

1:00:11you've seen or people that are building cool exciting things within within web 3 and in this same kind of vein so uh directly art related i think there's there's quite a few people who are just trying to tackle that problem so just this there's 4k there's a particle i think they renamed themselves today so i don't know their new name but uh there's americana there's a lot of folks coming at this just bringing physical assets online so you can start to to tap into that latent value utility shareability i think there will be an interesting kind of ar layer that comes out of that where people start to experience items in a

1:00:50different manner so all of those are pretty exciting kind of anything that's touching those spaces then uh this is not necessarily nft based there's a there's a company called alongside that's doing like cross network giant index funds i'm personally just a big index fund person like i i don't think i'm i don't have the patience to pick a winner like i'm not a day trader but the idea that you can get a on chain full basket of you know let's say at the top 100 cryptos but not not in a weird like literally provably backing a token and an asset seems like kind of a revolution

1:01:27so i'm um i'm super bullish on them um also candidly three of the founders worked at omni so so it's kind of like i'm backing my my former squad at some layer or people from my team or teams that i've been a part of so i find that super exciting um yeah i have one just like sorry this is gonna this might be like a really simple uh functional question but how does the actual um acquisition process work at archive for a new work like i'm on your website which i highly recommend people go to it's a-r-k-i-v-e.net archive.net um and i clicked into the like the eniac is it

1:02:06eniac or eniac yeah it's idiotic patent yes it's so i clicked into the patent yeah and um you know you've kind of like it's very cool like there's storytelling around each thing that you guys are requiring where you're kind of telling the story of the you know the item that's being acquired etc um but how does it actually work when you guys are acquiring one of these like functionally how is it how am i interacting with it if i'm a part of the community sure so we have kind of we have quite a few phases for how this is all rolling out phase one is what

1:02:34you're seeing right now which is we've brought on a pretty intense set of like vetted curatorial individuals that have access in these spaces so rare book collectors fine art collectors people who've worked at the guggenheim the whitney editors for cultured magazine and they kind of come together over what was agreed on early on in the community they voted on one year theme for the first theme and that theme was when technology was a game changer so every item that was proposed to the community in this this run is tied to this overarching curatorial theme right and so the genesis item there was the patent for the first computer this kind

1:03:14of makes sense if you're now building on a global supercomputer what's the genesis there when was the technology game changer the first major mainframe that could actually outbeat outpace humans at scale right and then every item that's come from that has has has been tied to that some different way so the lynn hirschman liesman lee sin photograph called seduction is looking at the intersection of the female form and objectification through the technology of television so it ties it to there the prototype for the mtv moon man was looking at the convergence of music onto television so playing off of tv again into music and then starting to

1:03:50look at sculpture uh and we're about to announce a new uh a new one that's at the intersection of like digital and and film and video and so that is presented in the community votes in phase two the current plan is that every one of these items that were presented in can now be forked by the community so the community can say i think an object that we should acquire because we now have the moon man is uh the the shoes that michael jackson wore the first time he did moonwalk because that was he won a mtv award for that it's tied to music that's an

1:04:28interesting item and you start to build collections now against the items and that's where so you set this sort of you set the intention at the top from people who are kind of focused on the actual overarching theme and then everyone gets to start forking and voting against that and that is budget allocation that's voted on by the community so we say cool that's great everyone comes together um and picks that out so that's kind of where we're moving into phase two is like extension against it just like you would fork a you know a github project you're going to start forking different things and then as they scale the idea

1:04:58is we we build out guilds so we're sort of mimicking the smithsonian where the the the dao operating side is kind of like the smithsonian institute we're creating content we're putting out the magazine we're doing podcasts we're doing we're finding the artists and putting out twitter spaces with them then the community is slowly forming the air and space museum the uh the portrait gallery etc over time the science museum at scale and then eventually you'll be able to choose to just be a member of one of those if you want or delegate your voting towards you know doubling down and growing those collections etc so we have kind of a strategy for

1:05:34rollout it's going to take probably about 36 months to get that in into a scale of something meaningful but that's basically you join items are presented to you that are kind of incredible you vote and then over time you get to choose what to vote on internally based off of those items in a tldr how do you how do you think about earning you know earning versus buying you know i feel like uh what some of the best projects are doing are having just really smart ways to allow anyone to earn tokens so that because obviously some people can't afford can't afford it so i'm curious your

1:06:10perspective on that yeah i think it's also really critical on our side specifically because a lot of the folks that are joining archive you know it's not like it's we you know they made a bunch of money flipping crypto punks like it's it's trad traditional art folks heavy duty collectors uh academics super curious people that just like love sports and memorabilia and watches but it's it's certainly not like everyone here has a lot of money to go buy art and so we're all coming together to buy art right so one of the things we've been thinking about we have an internal system we call archive points

1:06:46which are not tied to any value they're tied to engagement and interactivity so there's a bunch of things that you can do to earn more points through participation and functionally keeping up the engagement of the community broadly and bringing in great people and that can actually earn you a spot in terms of the ability to vote and participate it may not come with all of the perks of the membership these would be like discounts or anything that comes out of the long-term business relationships but it fully can get you a membership into the museum to help pet your say and to have a voice and to

1:07:17participate so that's one way that we're looking at doing that but i think there's a there's a long way to go on that there also be different tiers so we're thinking about there's a founding membership which is mapping similar to patronage at a museum where like this is the people who were there early their their names are on a brick and then over time they'll be slightly lower voting weight memberships that uh come in at lower price points to get more people in oh cool yeah i was going to ask exactly that and very very cool um so where can people you know like me yeah because i'm going

1:07:49to message you otherwise like where can people learn more about this and sort of um and find a way to get involved yeah so i mean archive.net apply right now um there's a kind of a crazy waiting list i think we're over 2000 people right now and we're only letting in like 30 a week um so it's it's a little backed up um but the idea there is we're being we're being like extremely careful about what it looks like to be a founding member and so there's a pretty like there's a full onboarding process there's a y there's a you know it probably takes five minutes to apply not

1:08:24like just an email we're asking some some like questions that we're interested in understanding what you collect or what you care about what you know where where do you where are you passionate those types of things so we can understand who's joining in um and so that's that's basically step one right now over the next six months there'll be about four more cure like curations on that first collection leading with uh most likely a mint uh for a membership in q1 2023 so that's that'll be you know pretty much an easier way to do it but most likely there'll be a white list based upon members already in the discord so you

1:09:00kind of want to apply now probably would be cool my first statement there well i'm super excited about it i mean i um i said it up front but i'm kind of the cautious observer on most of these things but the way it kind of brings together culture community you know my romantic visions of museums that have now you know been extended from my own childhood to my my son's childhood yeah um i'm really excited to just see you know this reimagination of these old institutions and to your point i had never really thought about you know the idea of where things exist and where they sit in the world being so important

1:09:39here and it really is i mean like it's like the history you know is written by the victors thing right like we can sort of um remap that in a lot of ways and like you know kind of tear down some of the walls of like um you know colonialism and imperialism that i think have largely informed where some of these works exist so um i'm super excited about what you're building man i really appreciate you uh you running us through it i'm excited to see it continue to grow and and hopefully be a part of it if i can make it through your 5 000

1:10:08person waiting list here soon we'll work on that [Laughter] um well thank you so much man thank you guys i uh am really really excited for you so thanks thanks again for joining and uh look forward to cons to to uh having you on again soon once the uh once the vision gets further along yeah okay could people if you're listening to this could people watch this on youtube so you can see tom's sweetheart and also subscribe to our youtube also your sweetheart style yeah i got my dude i'm actually gonna i gotta sell a small batch of these intellectually curious dad hats that i got made so

1:10:47um i don't have them you know luckily they're drop ships i don't have like 5 000 of them sitting in my garage but um but i am going to sell a bunch of these i'm going to start giving them away to people that uh that refer enough people to my newsletter too see always an opportunity man always an opportunity tom thank you so much man and where are you based by the way i'm in santa monica oh uh bummer man i was hoping you were still in new york we could get together and go to the museum next time you're out in new york hit me

1:11:16up i would love to uh to go reminisce on on cleopatra and uh natural history museum see later all right brother thank you thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode email us at hi trwih.com leave us a review at apple or spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast until next time we will see you soon [Music]