The Exchanges

Q Wasn't this, uh, this was one of Bill Gurley's like big, um, Distribution innovations when he was an analyst, right? Is he would fax a like newsletter, right?

A Do you know the story on that? It's a great story because there was a guy, yeah, there was a great analyst at Goldman Sachs named Dan Benton, who ended up being a great investor on the, uh, he had a hedge fund, a great investor as well. Dan, super talented guy, probably top ranked guy in his sector, had a really loyal following and decided one day to, to go to the buy side. So he was leaving his job and he had a very popular newsletter that was sent out at a very specific time slot. And so Gurley is this young guy and he's obviously kind of, you know, like also very marketing oriented and very alert. And he realizes, well, this guy's leaving, but everyone's used to getting this fax at, you know, like eight PM on Tuesday or whatever it is. So he's like, I'm going to launch above the crowd and it's going to, it's going to come at the exact same time that Benton's thing used to come.

AI assessment note: “So he's like, I'm going to launch above the crowd”

Q you know, the show is adapting you guys. It's now 70 years that you've run Your family has run Canless Fine Dining, and in one week, two weeks really, since you started planning, you've thrown that out the window, and now you're doing these three different things. Like, can you walk us through, when was the moment you realized that, that this was gonna happen, and you needed to change?

A A couple weeks ago now, my wife and I were in New York City doing something for the James Beard Awards, and, uh, we got the news that Seattle had its first case. And we went back to the hotel and just started talking through, like, you know, this thing's coming. It's here. It's here in Seattle. Um, and what does that mean? What does it mean for our family? What does it mean for Not just our marriage and our own children, but our extended family. I have parents who are in their seventies. Um, and, uh, what does it mean for, for the, for the restaurant family, for the staff? And, um, a couple days later, uh, back at home, we had a meeting as a team, and we just said, um, you guys, let's, let's really think through this a little bit. While we were having that meeting, uh, King County or the governor, I can't even remember who it was, but someone official announced Had this live stream, and kind of came on and said, hey, this is a much bigger deal than we thought. And, you know, it's like, at first, you just kind of have, it's like the sucker punch to the system. You've got the wind taken out of you a little bit, and then, Um, pretty quickly we realized that it would be just as risky to do nothing as it would to do something really radical, and, um, if we were, if we were gonna live into our values, uh, then, you know, every once in a while that really is probably gonna cost you so…

AI assessment note: “A couple weeks ago now, my wife and I were in New York City”

Q Yeah, well, so for anybody of our listeners who are in the Seattle area, probably many who, even many who aren't, you already know a lot about Canless, but Mark, can you give us a little bit of the history? I mean, it's a very, very special place. This isn't just another restaurant. Maybe, can you go back and talk about your grandfather's story and Hawaii and Pearl Harbor?

A Sure, you know, we Yeah, if we're gonna go all the way back, um, I run this restaurant with my brother, Brian, um, and we very much feel like this is the tale of a couple different grandfathers. It's an amalgamation of four generations of Canlases doing restaurants. Um, our great-grandfather cooked for Teddy Roosevelt, um, after his presidency on an African safari. He was picked up at a hotel in Egypt, and Um, invited to come along and be a steward on that whole thing for a year and a half. Um, so really, it starts there. Uh, he and my great grandmother would, um, come to the United States somewhere around 19 oh nine, 1910. They started a restaurant in Stockton, California, um, at that time, and had a bunch of kids. One of them, Peter Canlis, um, started this restaurant, Canlis, in 1950. So, Uh, that was my grandfather. He passed away in the seventies, and my mom and dad ran this, uh, for 30 years. Brian and I have not been doing it since 2003, and in so many ways, we feel like we're just getting the hang of it. So, slow learning. Um, but, you know, more or less a hundred years of trying to cook for people.

AI assessment note: “It's an amalgamation of four generations of Canlases doing restaurants.”

Q And there's always, if not, maybe there's like a couple hours a day where there's someone not there. But when you talk about that 115 people, it's like, Like, two a.m. to bake bread or something?

A Yeah, there are four hours a day we don't use our kitchen. So it's 20, it takes us 20 hours to, to, to open for what is essentially five hours of, of dinnertime service. Uh, so a lot of prep obviously goes into that, and yeah, sure, you're baking bread and, and, and setting things up sometimes take a couple days to bake, but, um, But today we served, you know, about 1200 people through the drive-thru. Uh, we served about, I don't know, somewhere in the range of 300 people for breakfast. Uh, tonight we'll send a couple hundred dinners out for delivery, so it's a much different impact for us, and we're not exactly set up for it, so we're, we're trying to figure that out as we go, but, um, Today was a day of rest for us. It felt so, um, every day this week we've opened a new restaurant concept. Um, we started on Monday with the drive through Tuesday. We added bagels and yesterday we added, added home delivery. So, uh, today we were just sort of refining some of those systems again. Uh, it was kind of nice just to, just to run them and see how we could tweak it.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, there are four hours a day we don't use our kitchen.”

Q Yeah, why? That's, that's the question. And, and did you expect that it would be That fast, given that you were so methodical and working so long to launch it.

A We, we don't always know how fast this will be, but I think we had a pretty good sense that we could sort of iterate and improve our way and sort of held climb from the mountain we were on when we saw the sort of initial traction. But I think the, the contrarian that we did, unlike many others did, was, you know, at the time when we launched, it's, uh, it was sort of viewed that you needed to have a different app for everything, right? Like you had to have a separate podcasting app and podcasting music were very different. And for us, it's just listening. And what we realized is we should use this base of what was then several hundred million people and today's way north of half a billion people and just serve them more stuff. And it turns out that like what we saw all the time, it wasn't like our music listeners weren't listening to podcasts. So why not use this experience and also recommend them great other stuff. And we went from there and then a year ago, We also added audiobooks, because that turned out to be another way to increase people's listening and that they were also spending time doing.

AI assessment note: “We, we don't always know how fast this will be, but I think”

Q but like our goal was to sort of broaden This whole medium. And today there's over a hundred and fifty million people listening to podcast on Spotify. And obviously your show is a huge success. Uh, and something that people kind of attracts people to the medium because it's both pretty broad these days, but also very, very deep. Like w w what do you think contributed to that success?

A Well, you guys entering the industry for sure. Um, but I think you hit on it with like broad, but like when Ben and I started this, we thought, you know, we used to talk about what our TAM was. We were venture capitalists. We're like, what's the TAM for acquired? Not that we even thought about it as a business or a product, but, um, and we're like, I don't know, maybe there's, what, what's the population of students in business schools out there? Maybe that's our TAM. And then we were like, well, I don't know. Maybe it's a little bigger than that. Like maybe, maybe it's, you know, everybody who ever wanted to go to business school or was interested in like, okay, like what, what's that cap out that like a million people, maybe a million, a million felt like RTM and what's happened to us. And, um, I'm curious, I think you guys have probably seen the same thing is that even though we think we're super nerds and we tell these very esoteric stories, They're just great stories. Right. And people of all types want to listen to them.

AI assessment note: “even though we think we're super nerds... They're just great stories.”

Q No pun intended, I promise. Uh, what does learning through suffering mean to you?

A Um, well, I think you learn what matters to you, and what's important, and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. And, I mean, I think that that is sort of, that's the journey, right? I mean, that's the, the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things. But, you know, this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too, right? It's like, I, I feel like, You, you know, when you go to start a company, you, you know, everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be, but values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like your lived behaviors, and you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges. So, yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges.

AI assessment note: “you learn what matters to you... through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges”

Q that he learns more from each turn than the next player does. Do you feel like that encapsulates, like, Meta's product development? But it does kind of feel like the way that you make bets is like, I, uh, well, if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part. That's like, you know, many iterations or multiple at bats, and then the, the...

A Well, great engineering and speed and iteration are actually two different values. They're not necessarily at odds, but I think, like, there are a lot of great engineering Organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good competence around that, but I know there's, there's a certain There's a personality that goes with kind of taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished. And, and look, I'm not saying that our strategy or approach on this is the only one that works. I think in a lot of ways we're like the opposite of Apple, and clearly their stuff has worked really well too, right? But I mean, they take this approach, it's like, we're gonna take a, like, a long time, we're gonna polish it, we're gonna put it out, um, and maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. But for us, I, I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out, um, because you, it's, you know, obviously not, not in the sense that it's like, you know, you want to, You want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback. You obviously want to test things that are reasonable hypotheses. So if it's like so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis. That doesn't work. But I do think a lot of th…

AI assessment note: “you want to really have a culture that values shipping. And, and getting things out”

Q And your conviction of, we have to go to L.A., was that for?

A The equity of the brand, I could see, I could envision the warm weather, and everyone walking around with our cups, and the media, and the celebrities, and just the iconic way. And there was nothing in the market, nothing at all, that even appeared to be in the business that we were in. And anyone who was doing it was not doing it well. We had to go. And even though we maybe were not ready, we just had to do it. And we did. And I think Howard would agree today that that ended up being a, the right decision. And LA The halo on Starbucks from Seattle to Vancouver and Chicago was nothing. When we went to LA, it just exploded because celebrities embraced Starbucks.

AI assessment note: “The equity of the brand, I could see, I could envision the warm weather”

Q Did you go in with Essentially the Starbucks concept?

A Yeah, it was exactly what you see right now. There's no, no different. But they didn't know, the Chinese people hardly knew what coffee was. There was no morning traffic. And in the early days of our partner, we didn't see eye to eye, so we got them out. When Belinda came along, we had a world-class operator who had succeeded in Singapore and Hong Kong. She's a strong person who believed that Seattle, the way we were organized, was not a formula for success. You can't have people in Starbucks in Seattle designing the breakfast menu who have never been to China. Who think we're gonna make any blueberry muffins. And so when she said to me, I will do it. If I'm in control of everything. So I wanted to centralize China. I report to you. It's you and me and John Culver who runs international. Take Seattle out of the equation. We were failing. What choice did I have?

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it was exactly what you see right now. There's no, no different.”

Q You believed that, like, kind of a version of the, was it the Jerry Sanders real men have fabs? Like, you need to do the whole stack. Like, you got to do everything, and that LSI Logic changed you.

A What LSI Logic did was, was, uh, realized that you can express Um, transistors and logical gates and chip functionality in high-level languages. That by raising the level of abstraction in what is now called high-level design, it was coined by Harvey Jones, who's on NVIDIA's board, and I met, met him way back in the early days of Synopsys. But, but during that time, there was this belief that you can express chip design in high-level languages. And by doing so, you could take advantage of optimizing compilers and optimization logic and, and, and tools, um, and, and be a lot more productive. That logic was so sensible to me, and I was 21 years old at the time, and I, I want to pursue that vision. Now, frankly, that, that idea happened in, in, um, uh, machine learning, it happened in, you know, software programming, and I want to see it happen in digital biology so that we can, we can think about, uh, biology in a much higher level language. Uh, probably a large language model, um, would be the, the way to make it, make it representable. That transition was so revolutionary, I thought that was the best thing that ever happened to the industry, and I was, I was really happy to be part of it, and I was at ground zero, and so, so I, I saw one industry, um, change, revolutionize another industry, and if not for LSI Logic doing the work that it did, uh, synopsis shortly after, then wh…

AI assessment note: “That logic was so sensible to me, and I was 21 years old”

Q wild. So we have, we have a model three, uh, and we have a. Uh, Acura TSX sport wagon. Um, you know, which is great. Hauls a lot of stuff. We just leave it on the street and like, I don't care about it. It's fully depreciated. It's fine. But the difference, like these are two different product categories when I drive them. Like, so what's, what's going on here?

A I mean, it's interesting, right? I think the model three is kind of the preview of where cars are going to go in the future. And I think car enthusiasts will be dragged Kicking and screaming into this world. And I'm not just talking about electric. In fact, I'm not talking about electric mostly. Electric is obviously coming, but maybe kind of slowly. What really is coming though, what the Tesla has really pioneered is the technology in cars. I mean, there's so much self-driving capabilities. Well, I'm not allowed to say that. Driver assist capabilities is the politically correct term. There's so much, uh, functionality from the screen. There's so much, et cetera, et cetera. These cars, that's really like the new thing. And so people say, oh, iPhone on wheels is like a disparaging remark. Get used to it. I mean, that's the, that is the future of our lives. And actually, I think it's one of the, for my job, I think it's great because I, I point out all these quirks and features in cars and the more bizarre things cars are getting in them. Like Tesla has the, like a drawing pad and video games. I'm like, bring it on. I can put these in my videos. It's easy.

AI assessment note: “I think the model three is kind of the preview of where cars are going”

Q a long form podcast. So anybody that's still listening appreciates nuance. And so if there's something that you feel is often misunderstood or that you want to say to people that are willing to let a long form argument soak in, what do you think is misunderstood about the company or you or the industry or this time that we're in right now? Really anything you want to talk about?

A And I don't know if it's misunderstood, but, but it's certainly something that that's top of mind for us is that We ultimately, the future of the business as it stands now depends on our building the best platform for earners. And it goes to like the take rate, right? If the take rate goes up too much, then we're taking too much of the service, et cetera. And the fact is that I think Uber was guilty of taking earners for granted because when I first came in and for much of the company, like we were in a state of oversupply, we had too many drivers. It goes to, and instead of gating them, et cetera, We just didn't really invest in the driver experience and the courier experience the way that we should have. And then the way that we organize the company around the earner experience was pretty standard in terms of a B to C business, right? There's a team, you know, there's a team that runs the Uber app. There's a team that runs the Eats app and the team that runs the driver app. And you do all the typical stuff, which is analytics and measurements and A B test, et cetera. In order to optimize throughput in the marketplace, et cetera. But like, as we step back, you know, we don't AB test what the four or one K match should be for employees, right? Like it was equivalent. Some of the experimentation that we were doing on the earner side is like, you know, yeah, should we match a thr…

AI assessment note: “the future of the business as it stands now depends on our building the best platform”

Q What are some of your biggest learnings from being involved with that company?

A It was, um, definitely my favorite board to be on. It was a really interesting time at the New York Times because they were Really becoming a top technical company in terms of being a publisher. Like it's at a pretty extraordinary learning organization, and they wanted me as like the tech person. I was coming from Expedia and, you know, optimization, all that stuff, and their capacity to learn, like super traditional company capacity to learn was pretty awesome. Um, one of the fascinating parts about the company and it's both A superpower or it could be a weakness is total separation of church and state in terms of content and business, right? So like when I asked, well, what's the cost of certain kinds of content and then how much traffic, you know, Can we have the connection between cost of content and traffic? It was like, no, you cannot ask that question because the content is separate. So it's, it's just a fascinating organization and the bet that they made on subscriptions was amazing. Um, it was not obvious because the advertising business was much bigger at the time, but it was an enterprise bet based on a core identity of the company, which is we believe in quality content. And I thought that was one of the most impressive bets because it was totally non-obvious at the time. Like all, every single news organization, et cetera, was advertising, advertising. This is the …

AI assessment note: “the bet that they made on subscriptions was amazing”

Q uh, have recently realized that Acquired is the canonical episode, uh, uh, NVIDIA episode, or TSMC, or Taylor Swift. These are more like conversational audiobooks between David and I than they are podcasts. Yeah. They're four hours long. They drop infrequently. How does that kind of fit into, uh, what you imagine is the job to be done by audio? And is it an audio book? Is it a podcast?

A My view, I guess, is the boundaries are from a format side is definitely being blurred quite a lot and, and for right reasons. But the better way to think about audio books and podcasting is it's, it's really around a business model mostly. So one way to frame it instead would be Podcasting is ad supported audio and audiobooks is paid audio. So for you guys, I mean, I also happen to know you spent so much time and effort on the research of that side. You could imagine that in the future you have the, um, ad supported side of your podcast be certain types of episodes and, and you'd have for your subscribers, um, The unlock where they get access to, um, you know, these kind of deep dives, et cetera. And obviously the subscription thing could be as simple as like, hey, you're part of our other network and it doesn't cost money, or you could pay gate it all the way through. But I think it's more of a business model that's the big format differentiation, because as, as we said, like the quality, the mics we're using relative to an audiobook, there, there's no difference here. You're using like high quality camera equipment. Um, also very similar to more professional style than sort of do it yourself kind of equipment, editing, all these things. It's getting more and more blurry.

AI assessment note: “the better way to think about audio books and podcasting is it's, it's really around a business model”

Q you're looking at the data all the time or other podcasters, I think it's easy to underestimate how seismic of a shift has happened in the podcasting ecosystem since you guys dove in. And I just wanted to sort of acquired style, go to a moment in time and say, how did that happen? And how did you guys decide to become an audio company instead of a music company?

A I like to say that there was probably this genius insight at some point in moment, but that's certainly not in the case of Spotify true. Uh, it is often quite serendipitous. And for a long time, you know, I was kind of fighting the urge on this, but we were oftentimes trying to Not think of ourselves as the users and customers, because once you got through kind of a hundred million users, you're kind of like, well, obviously I shouldn't be the target demo. I need to kind of listen to what the actual users are telling me. And there, there's some part that's true with that, but then, uh, more and more what I've, I've realized, uh, is also that actually internally, we probably have the best sounding board of a quite representative Spotify user and what they might like. And so, uh, one of my favorite topics is how often people game our platform. For instance, in Germany, unbeknownst to us, but one of the, the sort of crazy things that ended up happening was just people started uploading audio books because it turns out that, um, these music labels actually own a bunch of audio book rights. And so as the platform was taking off, they realized what else can we put on this platform that gives us a leg up and creates more revenue for us. And they realized that They have this catalog of audiobooks sitting on there. So I think that was kind of one realization where we kind of realized, h…

AI assessment note: “we kind of realized, hey, this platform, it doesn't seem to matter all that much”

Q In retrospect now, you know, God, how long, 15 years later, Was it almost like a benefit that you had to launch geographically specifically because of the label negotiations, like that you could really saturate Sweden, the UK before moving?

A Oh yeah, for sure. We all believe that these like sort of internet companies that go global day one, that's like the right approach. I, I actually think. 99.9%. This is just untrue and false. The entrepreneurs have to revise. We all, all are benefited from constraining ourselves To finding what our first audience is. And it could be geographically niched. It could be, uh, that it actually is, um, you know, again, a subset of, uh, uh, uh, demographic or, or, or whatever, but, but, but more often than not, it's actually geography helps limiting yourself to a city, to a state, to a country, whatever it might be. And so that was a huge part. I can tell you definitively Spotify would not have been alive today had it not been that we Couldn't launch in the US as our first market, huh? And, and if you ask me at the time, it was like a huge kind of step back to say, well, I can't launch in the most, uh, biggest market in the world. And I'm, I'm running an internet company like, come on.

AI assessment note: “Spotify would not have been alive today had it not been that we Couldn't launch”

Q things that have lots of usage, but don't have, have not attracted a lot of capital or attention or care. Perhaps we could talk about, uh, the opposite of that with Web Three and crypto over the past few years, and specifically Web Three and crypto gaming. You end Gamecraft, to my mind, kind of on a hopeful note about that. Would you agree? How are you feeling about it?

A I do, and I have been incredibly skeptical, right? Um, and I'm primarily skeptical because it's a character flaw of mine that I am part of the original tribe, right? I'm part of that OG gaming tribe, right? Like maybe a slightly younger than the real OGs like Bing and Tripp, but kind of still part of that generation, and so I still am very protective of the video game business because It was this kind of nerd's paradise, like back in that day, and I'm, I'm always resistant to tourism, right? I'm always resistant to people kind of coming in from outside and kind of claiming it as their own, and it's a character flaw because I should be big tent, and I'm just not.

AI assessment note: “I do, and I have been incredibly skeptical, right?”

Q And so for our audience who's not been paying attention to Web three gaming, how is it mechanically different than traditional game business models? Or even let's just say that the current most popular free to play business model of gaming. Uh, what new things does blockchain unlock?

A The good news is not that much, right? No, I honestly believe this, right? I think the best of them adhere very closely to the conventional models, and they use the crypto component really almost to maybe improve or enhance an elder game. So for example, if you've been playing for a while and you're kind of bored with just grinding on the underlying free-to-play progression mechanic, There's another sphere where you could play, right? Where you could, you could take your character and mint it as an NFT. It gives you certain benefits in the, in the underlying game, but it's kind of gives you status that you, in the status competition that you and the other, like very advanced players are engaged in. Because at some point, you know, if you've been playing Warcraft for World of Warcraft for 15 years, you're not running around killing chickens for gold, right? Like you're, you're playing a very different kind of game and you're playing kind of a social game. Right?

AI assessment note: “they use the crypto component really almost to maybe improve or enhance an elder game”

Q Blake, what was your first, uh, gaming experience?

A Uh, my brother's three years older than me, and so he was always in the games, and he loved Nintendo, like, more than anyone, and I was always the meme of just being Player Two, and so, like, like, it was so bad growing up of, like, we would play N-sixty-four, we had an NES, and I think that's really the first console that we had, and I remember just being stuck playing, like, the crappy other character, you know. It was bad, like, we would play Sonic, and I'd be like Tails, you know, and it was like, I just remember hating that experience, and it was, it became really clear that my brother just loved single-player narrative type creative games, and when the Xbox came out, I was like, oh, like, I can finally get something that my brother's not gonna take all, like, all the time with, and I got an Xbox, and, and really, Halo was the thing that, like, changed my life. I was just like, What is this? This is amazing. Uh, and then really, the three 60, when Xbox three 60 came out, and Xbox Live just really took off.

AI assessment note: “we had an NES, and I think that's really the first console that we had”

Q security and compliance has really evolved in these few years that Vanta has been, uh, really pushing the market forward. And it's no longer just about like check the box, playing defense as a company, and especially as a startup. It's actually about playing offense. Given all that and the kind of central role that Vanta is now playing in this space, how do you see security and compliance evolving?

A Really excited about the future, so I think a handful of things we're seeing. This concept of, you know, security and compliance and basically proving the security you have to your buyers has just become table stakes to B to B companies. When raising the seed round for Vanta in 2018, walked around and told all the VCs that were going to sock to all their startups, and many of them very reasonably looked at me perplexed and said, but my startups don't get socked to, so what are you talking about? But now we serve a majority of the current YC batch, so people in YC right now, and again, like, YC is all about just getting revenue, but these reports just help you unlock that, and they do that by, like, opening up new markets, whether it's international or enterprise or healthcare or regulated industries, and I think particularly in the twenty-twenty-two funding environment, so much is about revenue growth from secure, trusted sources, and so I think We're going to see more companies move up market faster than we might have otherwise, and these big companies know that, you know, they're only as secure as their vendors are. If your vendor gets breached, looks like you did. It doesn't matter. It was them. And so there's just, I think we're going to see more and more scrutiny here over time, and that's going to filter down into higher expectations for startups. So having stable custome…

AI assessment note: “we're going to see more and more scrutiny here over time”

Q You didn't give her access to the analytics?

A No, of course not. And I'm like, no, we're not canceling our trip. Things are going great. And so we flew to Paris, ran the credit cards all back up again, of course. And in Paris, I remember I would wake up every morning at four AM, sit in the bathroom and write a daily update. And then my wife would wake up and we sort of like go out for the day and that ended up being true. It just sort of kept increasing. I mentioned there was two big step changes. The Gruber one being the first one in November, I actually ended up reaching a thousand, which is my one year goal. So I hit my one year goal much earlier than I expected. You know, one year, a hundred dollars a year, a 100,000 dollar run rate.

AI assessment note: “No, of course not.”

Q What made you think that? To my mind, at least, there is a very viable and robust alternative history where Stratechery is an advertising business model.

A Well, I think that I would have to have started much earlier. And I think Gruber's model is the right one where I think it's actually underrated that I think he actually kind of invented native advertising because you read every piece of content that he writes. And one of them just happens to basically be an ad and it's the same format, same content as what's there. And I would bet that the rate of consumption to encountering it for his ads are like higher than almost anything else out there. And obviously Facebook does that at scale. And it's all automated, self-serve, and you scroll through, and there's different pieces of content you're interested in, and some of them are ads.

AI assessment note: “Well, I think that I would have to have started much earlier.”

Q All right, second one, rather than going with another big American tech company, I want to go with one that's an acquired fan favorite and one that's very close to home for you, TSMC. Any change to what TSMC is doing now if you became CEO tomorrow?

A Not really. It's a very complicated situation, to say the least, for lots of reasons, not just political but technological. I think probably doing what they're doing. Broadly, it makes sense. Yeah, I don't know. I've heard a ton about them and where they are, and You could talk about maybe some of the pricing stuff. They were pretty slow to raise prices, even in the face of shortages. They've been much more aggressive about that over the last little bit, which seems reasonable to me. It is opening the door for when and if a competitor comes along to undercut them in that regard. I think they're probably blessed by the weakness of their competition, but the long-term risk is obviously number one, just the geopolitical risk. The reality is, is TSMC A core to their model, essential to the model of being so flexible, being so adaptive of incorporating new equipment of accommodating hundreds and hundreds or thousands of customers is all their engineering's in one place. And that. Place is Taiwan and that has geopolitical risk. And from TSMC's perspective, I think that's just a reality. You can't really hedge against that. And so. If anything, yes, they're building these fabs in the US, I think, largely for political reasons. And sure, do that if, you know, the Taiwanese government feels that's what needs to be done to keep the US on board, keep the US happy, build a couple in Japan,…

AI assessment note: “Not really. It's a very complicated situation... Broadly, it makes sense.”

Q Do you have any sort of format of codifying your thinking? Cause like memos serve the purpose of forcing you into clarity of thought in addition to creating an art, a sales artifact. And so how, what things do you do in your partnership to gain clarity of thought?

A I would say the memo. Is a crutch often because yes, it can force you into clarity of thought, but it also allows you to fill in blanks that the entrepreneur themselves are not saying. And it pushes a sort of bias and perspective that maybe the firm has, or maybe you have a sector thesis and it's like, there's a lot of manifestation of ego when you put a memo together. Not having a memo does not replace work and does not replace the calls and does not replace the conversations. And What I find so amazing about our Monday discussions, when you're relaying the calls you have, relaying the notes you took on those calls, you're actually telling Exactly what you've discovered without the overarching bias, without your ego pushing into it. You're not pushing anything into the firm. You're just saying like, this is what I've discovered. We all just heard from the entrepreneur. It either confirms their views and sort of like how they want to rove through this market, or we found some challenges. And so it's that sort of like, And I think you all mentioned it on your podcast, which is that when you talk to benchmark partners, it feels like we don't have some hard stop. We can just keep going. Yeah. And that is the beauty of that Monday meeting, which is that we don't have a next topic to jump to. It's not like we're working through a list. And so we allow ourselves to have that open dis…

AI assessment note: “What I find so amazing about our Monday discussions, when you're relaying the calls”

Q So here's a question then. Should companies be worth less? Because if the future is more uncertain, and it's more likely that things get disrupted, and moats are less permanent than they've ever been, Shouldn't we consider less future years of cash flows?

A Well, like everything, it's a double-edged sword. I mean, on the one hand, you just made the point that without mining the ship, companies are much more potentially disruptable. But on the other hand, that means if you have competitive advantages and you continue to mine those advantages and you use them to enter adjacent markets or launch new products or going after other markets geographically or whatever, There's much more value creation to be had, and I think the ability to leverage your advantages and build more for the companies that are really doing so has probably never been higher. And by the way, with the internet, you can address global markets. We just talked about newspapers where you couldn't address the town next door. One of my favorite writings on investing, it's not actually about investing, but it's this guy, Brian Arthur, and he wrote something called Increasing Returns in the New World of Business. And that was in the mid nineties. And he made the observation that with the new world, with the new distribution models of things like the internet and whatever, the best companies could continue to get bigger and bigger, whereas you were sort of capped out more in the old world. And so you would have diminishing returns to scale over time. And by the way, that couldn't have been more right. You look at markets over the subsequent couple decades, And you have com…

AI assessment note: “Well, like everything, it's a double-edged sword.”

Q Yeah, well, because you teased it of things that are interesting to you and relevant to your district, let's take that thread and extrapolate on it. So how did those things become interesting to you? And let's start all the way with sort of your family story and dating back to Cuba.

A Yeah, so I'm the son of Cuban immigrants. My father immigrated here from Cuba. My mother was born and raised in Cincinnati in her family. And Our sort of path to Ohio is interesting in a sense. My grandparents, my Cuban grandparents were honeymooning and trying to go from basically New York City to Miami. They were driving. The legend is that they ran out of money in Ohio. And so they had to stop for a little bit, figure out how to get home and finish out their trip. And so they made some friends and made a little money and then came back to Cuba. Never thought they'd come back. My grandfather had always wanted to have some sort of an American experience because he always admired the U S particularly our democracy. You know, even pre Castro, it wasn't a beacon of democracy and freedom. It's known primarily for corruption.

AI assessment note: “I'm the son of Cuban immigrants. My father immigrated here from Cuba.”

Q Has there been legislation that came out of the meme stock mania?

A No, you know, I was actually disappointed in that because we did a ton of hearings on it, and the Democrats proposed some things. I don't say this is a partisan comment, by the way, it's just the reality. Republicans do the same junk. So we could have done some things, maybe, in a bipartisan way that I think would have been smart. The main thing we could have done is passed a bill to shorten the settlement time from two days to one day. That would reduce the risk in the system overall and probably would have prevented what Robin Hood ultimately had to do, which was halt trading. But rather than do that, what they ended up doing was they took a whole bunch of things that they had wanted to do for the last decade and they put them into a bill and it passed the house. It'll never go anywhere in the Senate. And so nothing changed. Again, that sounds like a hit on the Democrats. I'm not trying to hit Democrats. I'm sure if and when we retake the House majority, we'll do the same thing. Um, it's just kind of the frustration of Washington.

AI assessment note: “No, you know, I was actually disappointed in that”

Q Well, Anthony, on a closing note, let's bring it back to you personally a little bit. You're not running in the next election, so what, what do you think the future holds for you as you focus on the next chapter of your life?

A It's a good question. Um, uh, admittedly, my primary focus is, is finishing strong. I have a handful of pieces of legislation that I'm, I'm still pushing, uh, that I'm hopeful we can get across the finish line. That's the primary focus, but I am starting to kind of go through my notes again and reread my, My business school notebooks and I go through experiences. I keep notebooks at all times. So it's kind of fun to go through and relive some of those experiences building businesses, but also in business school. And, you know, I, I think I'm, I'm still trying to work through, do I want to be an investor or do I want to be an operator? I've done operating and I enjoy it. I enjoyed the heck out of building our campaign team, which is sort of like a startup in a way. And I enjoy the investment side. And, you know, like for me, what I'm trying to figure out is like who in my life do I admire and what kind of businesses do I, I want to build. You know, like I think of the IGSB model and I, I just think it's fundamentally An incredible model. The success is outrageous. Uh, for those of you who listened to the Altos acquired episode, it's probably most similar to that.

AI assessment note: “I'm still trying to work through, do I want to be an investor or”

Q You know where I'm going with this because it's the last special episode of the season. I am talking to the co-founders of Solana itself, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokul. We are pumped to close out the season here with you guys. There's a quick refresher. Can you tell us what the Solana network was built to accomplish?

A It's a public blockchain. So it was billed as a faster version of Ethereum. And that's kind of very, very high level way to talk about it. But our initial vision, like the slide deck and everything in those super early days said that it's blockchain and NASDAQ speed. And the big dream idea is imagine you have a global computer that doesn't matter where you're at, but this computer perfectly synchronizes all information on it as close to the speed of light as possible. So when news travels around the world, you know, so does the information through this thing, because if you can get to that speed of light update speed, you are as fast as news. You're as fast as the fastest markets. It doesn't really matter if, you know, NASDAQ has like sub nanosecond, whatever trading, because that doesn't trade on news. It's just trading a statistical noise. The other thing about Solana is it's very, very energy efficient. So single Solana transaction is about like two or three Google searches. So if you think of it as using a web service, this is a network that, you know, takes as much energy as a regular web service. In comparison to the proof of work chains, this is like a million times more energy efficient. To me and to Raj, this was really important that that was true.

AI assessment note: “our initial vision... said that it's blockchain and NASDAQ speed.”