The Exchanges

Q How do you think about investing in energy, given the capex intense nature of it? You know, we're investing in a company called Fuse Energy. Which I think is incredible. I'm so happy to be, but it, it, it's a CapEx intensive business in terms of like the energy space.

A It is, but I think there's also a lot of innovation happening, and where there's innovation, you can, you can find early teams that are doing science experiments before anyone else is thinking about them. USV a few years ago, uh, invested in a great company called Radiant, which is building small nuclear reactors that literally come off of a factory line. You know, and it's going to be one of the first companies in the world to test, um, in the dome in the United States, um, for, for nuclear energy. And so I think there are a lot of interesting models and ideas happening on the edge of, of innovation. And I think those are the best places to bet as a venture capitalist, because in the earliest days, they're actually not that, um, capital intensive.

AI assessment note: “in the earliest days, they're actually not that, um, capital intensive.”

Q Single best first founder meeting you've ever had, Amoy?

A Bryn Putnam, CEO of Bored. Have you seen Bored? Tabletop gaming console. Just announced, uh, Series A a few weeks ago from, from USV. Um, when I met Bored, when I met Bryn, I was blown away. Uh, force of nature founder. Such clear vision. Such deep domain expertise. So prior to Bored, which is a beautiful Tabletop display. Uh, Bryn was the founder and CEO of Mirror, the, the mirror, uh, workout device, which she sold to Lululemon. She took that domain expertise and said, I know how to build a tabletop gaming console now with the same hardware and the same supply chains, and just crushed it. When I met her, I walked out of that meeting and I thought to myself, I have to invest in this company.

AI assessment note: “Bryn Putnam, CEO of Bored.”

Q How do you think about investing in energy, given the capex intense nature of it? You know, we're investing in a company called Fuse Energy. Which I think is incredible. I'm so happy to be, but it, it, it's a CapEx intensive business in terms of like the energy space.

A It is, but I think there's also a lot of innovation happening, and where there's innovation, you can, you can find early teams that are doing science experiments before anyone else is thinking about them. USV a few years ago, uh, invested in a great company called Radiant, which is building small nuclear reactors that literally come off of a factory line. You know, and it's going to be one of the first companies in the world to test, um, in the dome in the United States, um, for, for nuclear energy. And so I think there are a lot of interesting models and ideas happening on the edge of, of innovation. And I think those are the best places to bet as a venture capitalist, because in the earliest days, they're actually not that, um, capital intensive.

AI assessment note: “in the earliest days, they're actually not that, um, capital intensive.”

Q Single best first founder meeting you've ever had, Amoy?

A Bryn Putnam, CEO of Bored. Have you seen Bored? Tabletop gaming console. Just announced, uh, Series A a few weeks ago from, from USV. Um, when I met Bored, when I met Bryn, I was blown away. Uh, force of nature founder. Such clear vision. Such deep domain expertise. So prior to Bored, which is a beautiful Tabletop display. Uh, Bryn was the founder and CEO of Mirror, the, the mirror, uh, workout device, which she sold to Lululemon. She took that domain expertise and said, I know how to build a tabletop gaming console now with the same hardware and the same supply chains, and just crushed it. When I met her, I walked out of that meeting and I thought to myself, I have to invest in this company.

AI assessment note: “Bryn Putnam, CEO of Bored.”

Q If I were to ask you what are your biggest lessons now, having been in venture, in the same way that you asked Fred, what would you say they are?

A You, you can't project your own ideas on the founder. Sure, you can offer ideas, of course, if the founder wants, but especially as a, as a former operator, you know, you often think, Oh, I know how this business should be built, or I know how this product should work. And I think that can really, really get you into trouble. You know, one of my former partners, uh, Jeremy Liu at Lightspeed, I, I made this mistake a few times and, and he called me up one day and he said, hey, I, I think you're, you're, you're projecting as a former founder. And he's like, in my experience, that's very, very dangerous and very risky. And I think it was a great lesson. Um, the reality is even if you have great ideas and you think you know the answer, even if you're right, by the way, The reality is it's the founder's company, and they may want to build it a completely different way. And not only that, if you project your ideas on a team that you're evaluating, um, you might get it completely wrong, right? You might look at a business and say, I know what this company needs to do. It needs to do A, B, C, D, and then it's going to win. But if you make your bet based on that evaluation and that judgment, and that team doesn't do those four things, you made a bad bet. So don't project. Don't project. You have to really believe in the team and the team's judgment and the team's ability to execute on t…

AI assessment note: “You, you can't project your own ideas on the founder.”

Q know, Mikey who, who said it, but they said that all great social platforms start with a tool that enables creators to create. So for them, it was filters on pictures for, Others, it's, you know, the ability to, you know, medium, it's the ability to write freely and beautiful editors, you name it. Um, do you agree with that idea that the best social platforms start with creator tools?

A I do agree. Um, and I learned this. I mean, not that, you know, anchor ended up being a social platform, but, um, in the early days of anchor, we just gave people a microphone and we sort of cut them off at two minutes. We didn't give them any tools. And we found that people did want to create a lot of people create. I mean, you were, you were part of that early community. Lots of people were creating, but admittedly, uh, the content was not that good. And so it didn't, it didn't drive an audience at all. It was, it was like, you couldn't listen to it, to be honest. And where we really saw gains and started to see the potential for something really big was when we gave people creative tools, when we gave them the superpowers to do things that they couldn't previously do. We gave them effects to change their voices. We gave them sound effects. We gave them music. We gave them lightweight editing tools. And the moment we did that, they sounded like professionals. They sounded really cool and it motivated them to want to create more and it motivated people to want to come and listen. Right. And so if you can do that successfully, you can build a really, really big business. The key is, as we talked about a little while ago, can you build a defensible format that Meta can't just copy with the flip of a switch? Because if they can, Then yeah, you're, you're, you know, you're dead be…

AI assessment note: “I do agree. Um, and I learned this.”

Q Did they miss a trick on social? And just, I mean, fascinated from the discussion we've just had, how would you apply that to Spotify and your lessons from being there for, you know, three or four years?

A Well, we just said that social is in some way commoditized. And so, You know, I think if Spotify were to have done this a couple of years ago, it maybe would have been the wrong bet. I think it would have been the wrong bet. However, if you think about where the future is headed, I think Spotify is in a great position to benefit from the shift to recommendation media, as we've been talking about. Spotify, you know, has been doing ML machine learning based content distribution and discovery for a really long time. They did this very, very successfully with music. They Arguably reinvented how all of us discover and listen to music through machine learning. And now they're doing something really interesting on the podcast side in that they're making it really easy for anyone to create. And we talked about earlier how the best recommendation media platforms need an ocean of content to be able to program. And Spotify is effectively doing that. They bought anchor, which, you know, obviously I'm biased. It's the company that I founded, but, um, Anchor enables many, many millions of people to create podcasts that never would have been able to create podcasts before. And so there's this huge long tail of, of podcasts emerging that didn't exist before. And, you know, they're, they're trying other things like, I don't know if you saw the test that they launched a few months ago, but They …

AI assessment note: “if Spotify were to have done this a couple of years ago, it maybe would have been the wrong bet”

Q Is that not quite an easy feature? You could essentially record every room and have a repository, a library, where you could go into tech, you could go into art, sports, and look at the historical for the last week.

A So there's two things I'll say about that. Technically, yeah, it's kind of easy. On the other hand, you know, I can tell you that when we were a three-person startup, there's only so much you can do in a given day, right? You really have to focus, and they were getting so much traction. And so, and I, I have to imagine that it was hard even just to keep the servers up. So I can empathize with the fact that they have to focus. Secondly, I can also tell you from the anchor days, replays of audio is, is also a tricky place for them to be. Again, I said that the live clubhouse format was unique, and I agree. That's, that's somewhat defensible in terms of uniqueness, but what is not unique is on-demand consumption of Of a long form audio file, which feels and sounds kind of like a podcast. The thing that we saw in the early days of anchor and still saw, you know, up until when I recently left Spotify was listening habits of podcasts are very, very hard to break. If you are an apple podcast listener, you're almost definitely never going to switch away from that. If you were a Spotify listener, you're almost never going to switch away from that. Now you've got this other app clubhouse, which is putting out all of these on-demand asynchronous audio files. Which kind of sound like podcasts. Are you really going to leave Spotify to go listen to this one audio file when Spotify has all th…

AI assessment note: “Technically, yeah, it's kind of easy. On the other hand”

Q know, Mikey who, who said it, but they said that all great social platforms start with a tool that enables creators to create. So for them, it was filters on pictures for, Others, it's, you know, the ability to, you know, medium, it's the ability to write freely and beautiful editors, you name it. Um, do you agree with that idea that the best social platforms start with creator tools?

A I do agree. Um, and I learned this. I mean, not that, you know, anchor ended up being a social platform, but, um, in the early days of anchor, we just gave people a microphone and we sort of cut them off at two minutes. We didn't give them any tools. And we found that people did want to create a lot of people create. I mean, you were, you were part of that early community. Lots of people were creating, but admittedly, uh, the content was not that good. And so it didn't, it didn't drive an audience at all. It was, it was like, you couldn't listen to it, to be honest. And where we really saw gains and started to see the potential for something really big was when we gave people creative tools, when we gave them the superpowers to do things that they couldn't previously do. We gave them effects to change their voices. We gave them sound effects. We gave them music. We gave them lightweight editing tools. And the moment we did that, they sounded like professionals. They sounded really cool and it motivated them to want to create more and it motivated people to want to come and listen. Right. And so if you can do that successfully, you can build a really, really big business. The key is, as we talked about a little while ago, can you build a defensible format that Meta can't just copy with the flip of a switch? Because if they can, Then yeah, you're, you're, you know, you're dead be…

AI assessment note: “I do agree. Um, and I learned this.”

Q Did they miss a trick on social? And just, I mean, fascinated from the discussion we've just had, how would you apply that to Spotify and your lessons from being there for, you know, three or four years?

A Well, we just said that social is in some way commoditized. And so, You know, I think if Spotify were to have done this a couple of years ago, it maybe would have been the wrong bet. I think it would have been the wrong bet. However, if you think about where the future is headed, I think Spotify is in a great position to benefit from the shift to recommendation media, as we've been talking about. Spotify, you know, has been doing ML machine learning based content distribution and discovery for a really long time. They did this very, very successfully with music. They Arguably reinvented how all of us discover and listen to music through machine learning. And now they're doing something really interesting on the podcast side in that they're making it really easy for anyone to create. And we talked about earlier how the best recommendation media platforms need an ocean of content to be able to program. And Spotify is effectively doing that. They bought anchor, which, you know, obviously I'm biased. It's the company that I founded, but, um, Anchor enables many, many millions of people to create podcasts that never would have been able to create podcasts before. And so there's this huge long tail of, of podcasts emerging that didn't exist before. And, you know, they're, they're trying other things like, I don't know if you saw the test that they launched a few months ago, but They …

AI assessment note: “if Spotify were to have done this a couple of years ago, it maybe would have been the wrong bet.”

Q Listen, final one. What's the most recent angel investment, and why did you say yes and get so excited?

A Hmm. Um, I recently invested in a company called Stardust. It's a women's, uh, women's health product, uh, first focused on period tracking, secure, end-to-end encrypted, privacy-centric, um, amazing founder, amazing female founder, mission-driven, and, you know, I think a couple of things. First of all, like I said earlier, I'm just really drawn to really strong mission-driven leaders, um, and people that really know what they want to build. And, and, uh, and so for that reason, I was really drawn to this company, but, you know, I think it matched a theme that, that I see happening, which is, I think encryption is becoming a really important consumer centric feature. Unfortunately, it's happening for somewhat cynical reasons, right? I mean, I think there's a, it's clear that mistrust of institutions is, is only going up. And I think this is going to force people and users to seek much, much more control over their data and their privacy. And I think the founder of Stardust had this insight as well. And, um, and, you know, shortly after I committed, sure enough, she, I mean, she was right. I mean, again, this is, this is not necessarily for a good reason. This is actually for a very, very bad reason. Roe V Wade was overturned shortly after. Um, horrible thing. And, you know, something, uh, that I think is a real, uh, a real travesty here in the United States. And, uh, and almos…

AI assessment note: “I recently invested in a company called Stardust.”

Q I have to ask, why do you think, and you know, you obviously have this unique purview from the Anchor Days, why do you think Clubhouse didn't work out? It's where we reconnected after many years.

A Sure, that's true. It was. So, um, I think that live content is extremely challenging, and I don't, this is not unique to, uh, to audio. I think live in general is, On the internet, I think is kind of a flawed format. Um, if it's just live only live and not, and there's no asynchronous component. Um, I think it just becomes a really challenging math problem, right? You're basically saying, Hey, in order for this thing to get scale and to achieve that, achieve a large amount of value. And I'm talking about this thing being the content. You know, a lot of people need to be available to consume this thing at this exact moment. And really what the internet has showed us is that there's way more value that gets generated in asynchronous content because it can be consumed kind of on somebody's own schedule. Arguably, this is why Spotify has been so massively successful or YouTube, right? It's because you can fit into any calendar and any schedule. Now you don't have to have somebody, uh, be available at any given time. And so I see a lot of criticism on, of Clubhouse online that I don't fundamentally agree with, which is, oh, they didn't focus, focus enough on the community. They didn't, they didn't nurture the community enough. I actually don't think that's the case. I think the format was flawed from the beginning. Um, totally cool of them to try it. And I think that, I think, I th…

AI assessment note: “I think the format was flawed from the beginning.”

Q So tell me, from photo editing to one of the hottest startups in audio and, and South by Southwest, I, yeah, I read that article wherever that was. Uh, so tell me, what's the story to your founding of Anchor?

A Sure. So, Anchor started, um, a little over a year ago, about a year and a half ago, by my co-founder, Nir Zickerman, and, and I, uh, we both shared, uh, a passion and a love for audio and podcasts and music and radio, and, We felt like there was an opportunity to enable people to broadcast their voice much easier than, than they were able to prior. Um, it, it, it struck us as a space that had so much opportunity, but in terms of creation, it's a very, very difficult medium to create for. I mean, you have a podcast, you know, how much work goes into creating a podcast. And we felt, we felt like it could be much, much simpler for people to contribute.

AI assessment note: “Anchor started, um, a little over a year ago... by my co-founder, Nir Zickerman, and, and I”

Q And in terms of kind of the future of audio then, do you believe it will only increase in the future with, um, cars incorporating wifi and then allowing podcasts as an app to be in the cars? Um, I don't know, availability of more data for phone usage. Do you see the, the trend only increasing in the future? And if so, what will drive that increase?

A Absolutely. I, I absolutely see it increasing. I think what will drive it will be some of the things you just mentioned. Data, you know, increase in data, increase in bandwidth, connectivity of cars, absolutely. Um, I also think, you know, improving the technology and voice recognition and voice commands, uh, products like the Amazon Echo, products like Siri, the Apple TV. As our homes and our cars and our offices become, uh, more and more connected to Through voice, through voice controls and voice commands, I think it lowers the friction, uh, to be able to access this stuff and to be able to, to be able to communicate with these applications natively. So I do think it will increase, uh, dramatically as time goes on.

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. I, I absolutely see it increasing. I think what will drive it”

Q Sorry, I'm, I'm, I've got better at interviewing, I think, I hope, maybe I'm more annoying. Um, how could that be better? What would you like to change there?

A I think in general, the, the pitching process could be faster and more, more efficient, and, uh, investors could be more transparent with the reasons they're passing. I think that would help founders improve and actually probably result in a better outcome between the investors and the, and the founders in a future round, right? If a founder knows the real reason why an investor is passing, they can work towards achieving certain goals that might make it a better fit in the next round, right? Another example I would say is, um, I think founders sometimes don't know where they stand with their existing investors. And whether or not investors are going to be excited to, to back the next round or if it's off strategy for them. So I think there should be more, um, discussion and conversation about what the future relationship might look like between a founder and investor. And so I think there are a number of situations like that.

AI assessment note: “pitching process could be faster and more, more efficient, and, uh, investors could be more transparent”

Q So, speaking of being on the extremes and constraints, you know, Lightspeed is a cash-constrained world to be in. It's tough over at Lightspeed, and you made the move to the extremely well-funded USV. I'm obviously joking. We're going from the very large to the very small, constrained USV in comparison. Why did you decide to make that move, dude?

A I decided to go to USV because I am from New York. I've always been in or around New York, and as a builder, when I was building Anchor in New York 10 years ago, I got to meet USV, and I had an incredible, despite them passing, had an incredible experience. Started a very, very long friendship. I ultimately became an LP in the funds, and I just really always appreciated their ability and their willingness To be really opinionated and to be very, very thesis driven, even at times in which the market said it makes, made sense to be very consensus driven. And by the way, there have been times in the market, including recently, where being consensus driven has been extremely valuable and extremely lucrative as a fund. But the way I like to work, the way I like to build, the way I like to bet is, is by being thesis driven. And, and I recognize that Being thesis driven can also be super risky, right? If you bet on a thesis, and you're wrong, you miss, and you fail.

AI assessment note: “I decided to go to USV because I am from New York.”

Q For everyone who doesn't know, what is recursive self-improvement?

A This is, this is, this is self-improving AI, right? This is, this is super intelligent AI that can do its own AI research, right? So once you have it, once you deploy it, it can just continually improve itself on the exponential forever until it plateaus, until it self-limits in some way. And by the way, we don't, we don't know what that self limiting factor may be. It may be that for some reason, these architectures, you know, the transformer architecture, let's say, doesn't scale past a certain point. We don't know if that's going to happen. It could be that, uh, the model needs, uh, some amount of data that it can no longer access, right? There's a limit to the amount of data. It may mean that we can't keep up with the hardware infrastructure build that we need to, to keep, uh, recursively self improving. So, In the, in the past, in the history of new technology adoption, I mean, if you study them, they actually all follow S-curves, right? They have a slow takeoff, then they have what feels like an exponential ramp up, and then they plateau for some reason, like we just discussed. And that's potentially the second future for AI, right? We, we reach some plateau in terms of intelligence, and I think if that happens, then the technology might start to look somewhat more like a commodity, right? If it plateaus, then we're at a point where all the other labs can catch up, and th…

AI assessment note: “This is super intelligent AI that can do its own AI research”

Q Do you think the future of AI is always on? Sam Altman is suggesting so more and more in his kind of verbiage. God, it makes me excited for NVIDIA if the future of AI is always on. Do you agree with that?

A I do think that we're entering a world in which context is increasingly valuable for the labs and also for the application layer, right? And so I think we will see products and businesses increasingly try to push us further and further along the edge to an always on world. I mean, I can remember 10 years ago when I got, you know, an Alexa in my home And thinking to myself, wait a minute, this is, this is always listening for the wake world, for the wake word. And now we've, I think to your point, we've kind of moved past that where, you know, let's say you're in a meeting, uh, you know, you're, you're, you're having a meeting, you're having it, you're in a conference room. I think, you know, more often than not, I'm hearing somebody say, hey, I'm granoling this, right? So I think we are moving more and more towards that world for better or worse.

AI assessment note: “we are moving more and more towards that world for better or worse”

Q What's your biggest parenting advice? I heard that you are an incredible papa. You're also a great investor. What's the biggest parenting advice?

A I feel I was extremely fortunate growing up in that I had parents that were extremely supportive of me and my interests, but who also did not pressure me in any one direction. You know, I, I grew up, um, I'll give you an example. I grew up in a home where, um, baseball, an American sport, I don't think it's very popular here, was a very big deal. Baseball's a very big deal. And I played some baseball growing up. But I didn't continue with it. And, you know, I think there are a lot of homes like that in the United States where, you know, if you're not playing the sport or going to the university or pursuing the career in the thing that the family really cares about, you know, you're a failure or you get pressured into sticking with it. And, you know, my parents, my dad, who, you know, former coach and baseball player, just like, great, what do you want to do next? And I think that that is so important. And it's definitely something that I really try to remember and try to instill in the values of my family with my kids. You know, I really want my kids to do what interests them, but I never want to pressure them to do it. I want to support them. You know, I want to be there for them. I want to drive them to practice. I want to do everything I can to empower them, but I never want to pressure them too much.

AI assessment note: “I really want my kids to do what interests them, but I never want to pressure”

Q on the route one, recursive self-improvement, and it leads to this kind of exponential advancement, is that done by an open AI or an anthropic or a leading model provider today, or is that done by a recursive or one of the many others going after, I was literally for two hours in shortage yesterday with one, Or is that done by an entirely new company focused on recursive itself?

A Yeah. I think it's probably done by one of the labs that already has all these advantages, these vast compute advantages. They already have models that are at the frontier. They have the infrastructure. They have the chip. So I think it's probably done by one of them. That said, there are a bunch of amazing researchers working on incredible new architectures that maybe haven't broken through yet, but maybe they can. Maybe they're building something. That is better than the transformer, right? There are a number of these labs out there. Thinking machines, safe super intelligence from Ilya and Daniel. I think if I were to, to bet, I would, I would say the labs that already have the advantages, but that doesn't mean there isn't a new architecture being worked on in a lab somewhere that could leapfrog all of it.

AI assessment note: “I think it's probably done by one of the labs that already has all these advantages”

Q How do you monetize a routing layer without becoming just a commodity pipe?

A It's a good question. I think a lot of companies right now are thinking about, you know, charging a small margin on top of it. And I think to your point, that might not be a great business model. Um, I put out a piece on X about this a few weeks ago, and a number of people chimed in with some of their ideas. And one interesting idea I heard was this notion of almost a bounty model. At the routing layer where the, where the routing layer gets, um, gets rewarded for choosing the right model, right? So if you choose the most efficient model or the best model for a certain task, That's when they collect a fee, and I thought that was kind of an interesting idea. Haven't necessarily seen it built out yet, but I thought it was a pretty interesting idea.

AI assessment note: “one interesting idea I heard was this notion of almost a bounty model”

Q Do you think the future of AI is always on? Sam Altman is suggesting so more and more in his kind of verbiage. God, it makes me excited for NVIDIA if the future of AI is always on. Do you agree with that?

A I do think that we're entering a world in which context is increasingly valuable for the labs and also for the application layer, right? And so I think we will see products and businesses increasingly try to push us further and further along the edge to an always on world. I mean, I can remember 10 years ago when I got, you know, an Alexa in my home And thinking to myself, wait a minute, this is, this is always listening for the wake world, for the wake word. And now we've, I think to your point, we've kind of moved past that where, you know, let's say you're in a meeting, uh, you know, you're, you're, you're having a meeting, you're having it, you're in a conference room. I think, you know, more often than not, I'm hearing somebody say, hey, I'm granoling this, right? So I think we are moving more and more towards that world for better or worse.

AI assessment note: “push us further and further along the edge to an always on world.”

Q For everyone who doesn't know, what is recursive self-improvement?

A This is, this is, this is self-improving AI, right? This is, this is super intelligent AI that can do its own AI research, right? So once you have it, once you deploy it, it can just continually improve itself on the exponential forever until it plateaus, until it self-limits in some way. And by the way, we don't, we don't know what that self limiting factor may be. It may be that for some reason, these architectures, you know, the transformer architecture, let's say, doesn't scale past a certain point. We don't know if that's going to happen. It could be that, uh, the model needs, uh, some amount of data that it can no longer access, right? There's a limit to the amount of data. It may mean that we can't keep up with the hardware infrastructure build that we need to, to keep, uh, recursively self improving. So, In the, in the past, in the history of new technology adoption, I mean, if you study them, they actually all follow S-curves, right? They have a slow takeoff, then they have what feels like an exponential ramp up, and then they plateau for some reason, like we just discussed. And that's potentially the second future for AI, right? We, we reach some plateau in terms of intelligence, and I think if that happens, then the technology might start to look somewhat more like a commodity, right? If it plateaus, then we're at a point where all the other labs can catch up, and th…

AI assessment note: “This is super intelligent AI that can do its own AI research”

Q Not at all. I find it so much nicer to have like a podcast episode. It really brings stories to life. But tell me, you know, you've had an amazing career so far with Anchor and with Spotify. We could have chosen many funds to go and work at. Why did you choose Lightspeed?

A So I've been angel investing for about three years now. And while I've I've really enjoyed angel investing. It's been a blast. I definitely wanted to kind of take my investing to the next level and join one of the world's best and most storied venture platforms. And, you know, in talking to a lot of them and, you know, partners that I knew at different funds and talking to a number of different funds throughout this process, I really felt like light speed was unique in that we are number one, truly global. And we have been for more than 15 years. You know, the past decade has obviously been, uh, in a big way. Uh, about the U S and the companies coming out of the U S, but I really believe that the future is global. So it was really important to me to join a global platform. Uh, I wanted to join a fund that had really deep domain expertise across a number of different, uh, areas. I'll tell you that when I was building anchor, I always appreciated investors who actually had real world experience and they weren't just check writers. So that was very important to me. I also wanted, um, a fund that was Really strong on partnerships and not egos. Uh, a thing that we did in Anchor was we were really focused on building a culture around a mission, uh, not about individuals. We had this thing, missionaries, not mercenaries. And it was very clear to me that Lightspeed was similar. And the…

AI assessment note: “I really felt like light speed was unique in that we are number one”

Q Listen, final one. What's the most recent angel investment, and why did you say yes and get so excited?

A Hmm. Um, I recently invested in a company called Stardust. It's a women's, uh, women's health product, uh, first focused on period tracking, secure, end-to-end encrypted, privacy-centric, um, amazing founder, amazing female founder, mission-driven, and, you know, I think a couple of things. First of all, like I said earlier, I'm just really drawn to really strong mission-driven leaders, um, and people that really know what they want to build. And, and, uh, and so for that reason, I was really drawn to this company, but, you know, I think it matched a theme that, that I see happening, which is, I think encryption is becoming a really important consumer centric feature. Unfortunately, it's happening for somewhat cynical reasons, right? I mean, I think there's a, it's clear that mistrust of institutions is, is only going up. And I think this is going to force people and users to seek much, much more control over their data and their privacy. And I think the founder of Stardust had this insight as well. And, um, and, you know, shortly after I committed, sure enough, she, I mean, she was right. I mean, again, this is, this is not necessarily for a good reason. This is actually for a very, very bad reason. Roe V Wade was overturned shortly after. Um, horrible thing. And, you know, something, uh, that I think is a real, uh, a real travesty here in the United States. And, uh, and almos…

AI assessment note: “I recently invested in a company called Stardust.”

Q So you mentioned boards there. I've sat on many boards. Um, I've only sat on one that has actually provided any value at all, um, out of about 15. Um, so I think boards can be done better in venture along with most of the actual product What do you think can be done better in venture, having really dog tested it, if that's a word, as a product?

A Yeah, so thinking back to my experience being on the other side, right, as a founder of Anchor, um, one of the things that I think we did really well at Anchor was we built this culture of very direct communication built on mutual respect, um, kind of like a deep understanding of everyone's personal priorities and goals, and I think venture could use a little more of that personally. I think it could use more directness between founders and investors. I think I think if founders had a better understanding about what investors' goals were, it would probably enable investors to be more transparent. Um, I, I didn't like the culture of investors sort of milking relationships with founders when they never had any intention of investing. Um, I, I also never liked how investors were so opaque about, you know, reasons they're passing. My, my sense is like, we're all adults in this industry, yet I find people are so afraid to Hurt each other's feelings that they avoid directness of communication. So I'm really hoping to bring more of that. And, um, you know, I think, I think investors don't often realize that It's really hard for founders, um, when you don't know where you stand. And, you know, having been in that situation many times, I can tell you it creates lots of tension, lots of additional pressure. And so, you know, I want to bring the types of candor and directness, uh, to vent…

AI assessment note: “I think it could use more directness between founders and investors.”

Q was in SF, and this was when Anchor was so hot. This was like the one of Anchor consumer, like very heavily consumer focused pre, you know, the second shift. Um, every VC wanted to talk to you. Everyone loved you. I wanted to ask you, when you have the venture and the tech world praising you in those hype moments, what do you, and what did you tell yourself?

A I think it's important to acknowledge up front that when we found ourselves in that situation that you're talking about, I remember it very, very vividly, um, we had never been in that situation before. I had never, uh, started, it was my first time building a company, first time, you know, um, Building my own product from scratch and launching it to the world. And like you said, there was tons of hype pretty much overnight, like the day we launched it. And so if you've never been in this situation before, it's really easy. To get ahead of your skis and think you've won. Um, you know, we want it to be the social network for audio, right? So there was already a social network for, for photos. That was Instagram, you know, video had YouTube, et cetera. We want it to be, we wanted audio to have anchor. And I will admit in those first few weeks, we had thought we had won because All of the biggest and most respected luminaries in, in tech, people I'd only ever seen on, on Twitter, never met in real life, were telling us that we had won, right? They were telling us that we were the biggest company in the world. And they were, you know, flying across the world to bump into my co-founder and me at random events to try to get us to take their money. And so it's very easy to hear all of these super respected people tell you that you had figured it out. But the reality is, which we didn'…

AI assessment note: “in those first few weeks, we had thought we had won”

Q I have to ask, why do you think, and you know, you obviously have this unique purview from the Anchor Days, why do you think Clubhouse didn't work out? It's where we reconnected after many years.

A Sure, that's true. It was. So, um, I think that live content is extremely challenging, and I don't, this is not unique to, uh, to audio. I think live in general is, On the internet, I think is kind of a flawed format. Um, if it's just live only live and not, and there's no asynchronous component. Um, I think it just becomes a really challenging math problem, right? You're basically saying, Hey, in order for this thing to get scale and to achieve that, achieve a large amount of value. And I'm talking about this thing being the content. You know, a lot of people need to be available to consume this thing at this exact moment. And really what the internet has showed us is that there's way more value that gets generated in asynchronous content because it can be consumed kind of on somebody's own schedule. Arguably, this is why Spotify has been so massively successful or YouTube, right? It's because you can fit into any calendar and any schedule. Now you don't have to have somebody, uh, be available at any given time. And so I see a lot of criticism on, of Clubhouse online that I don't fundamentally agree with, which is, oh, they didn't focus, focus enough on the community. They didn't, they didn't nurture the community enough. I actually don't think that's the case. I think the format was flawed from the beginning. Um, totally cool of them to try it. And I think that, I think, I th…

AI assessment note: “I think the format was flawed from the beginning.”

Q last week, um, snap, uh, actually announced shutting down Zenly, a completely bizarre decision in my mind. Um, Forty million users. Incredible team. No idea what's going on there. Sorry, I know that's a lightspeed company. Forgive me. Um, but my question to you is, why are these incumbents moving away from the social graph when it's served them so well, and it's the core of their very good business?

A Because I think it's, it is not defensible anymore. It's actually very easily commoditized, right? So, um, there, there are a number of reasons here. So it used to be that the way that content got distributed on these platforms was through your social graph, right? You would join, let's just use Facebook as an example. You would join Facebook, you would get a hundred friends and you would post a piece of content and it could instantly distribute that content to those a hundred friends. And arguably that distribution was guaranteed. Gave you a lot of power in terms of distribution and programming. But in reality, it's actually not that efficient a means of content distribution. Just because you can distribute a piece of content to me doesn't mean that it's going to resonate with me. In fact, it might not resonate with me at all. And in fact, it might be problematic. It might be a piece of content that has hate speech in it. Or something that needs to be moderated. And so what these platforms were doing was they were effectively giving away free distribution that, um, that was more or less guaranteed, potentially very expensive for them in terms of, uh, content moderation, and maybe not really that efficient in terms of engagement and, uh, in terms of driving ROI for the business. Well, then TikTok comes along and they say, hey, forget the social graph. This thing is not that eff…

AI assessment note: “Because I think it's, it is not defensible anymore. It's actually very easily commoditized”

Q um, very quickly. And it went terribly wrong. And I blame myself. I relied so heavily on someone else who knew the market so well and just said, Harry, come in with me. This is a great, great opportunity. And I said, Hey man, let's do it. Um, I should have done my own work. Um, what would you say your mistake was and what did you learn from it?

A So I'll give you two. One is almost the exact thing you mentioned. Um, I I'm somebody, you know, having been a founder, I really like to back founders that are super mission driven. You know, they've experienced the problem personally. They want to like be the change they want to see in the world, you know, that whole thing. And, and those are the types of founders. I like to back somebody who I really trust. And I still trust this day. I don't hold this against this person came to me and said, Hey, there's this company. They're starting this. There's they, they, they've modeled this out. You know, these guys have done this before. It's, it's basically what I like to think of as like a spreadsheet startup. Like somebody like figured out the model for a startup and they gave the spreadsheet to a team that, you know, wasn't necessarily passionate about the problem and said, go build this. And, uh, and yeah, it, it was one of my early checks and it, it didn't work out. And, um, like I said, I don't, I don't hold the person, hold it against the person, but that was a mistake I made. Like, I think it taught me that I need to, I think I should stick to the mission oriented founders. And then maybe another sort of like small tactical, annoying, uh, thing, a mistake I made early on was that, I, in the early days of writing checks, I wasted my time and money on reviewing the legal docs.…

AI assessment note: “So I'll give you two. One is almost the exact thing you mentioned.”