Packy McCormick

“And this is really, really relevant to the AI lab discussion because you can tell that even though all of the leaders of the AI lab say, I don't think about the competition. I don't talk about the competition. I'll use general terms. They're all obsessed with …”

“You can see a world where, because it attracts kind of all of the best writers from all of these different places who can build their own businesses, Substack becomes 10 times larger than any of the media organizations that it replaces.”

“The number of two, kind of, nuclear scientists in, in Iran who came over here to, kind of, work on, on our side here, and then just, like, everybody that I met who was, like, you know, working on the machines, like top to bottom, just like an unbelievably cool…”

“For these companies, there's just, like, actually an opportunity to just show off what you're doing, and, like, that in itself is differentiated because it's so hard to do. That like just actually getting the thing done, like kind of creates all of this unbeli…”

“I will take my, if I'm, like, stuck in writing an essay, I'll, like, take the draft, I'll put it in Claude and ask for feedback, and, like, the feedback is bad, and it always, like, tries to move me more towards average, and I ignore it, but, like, I just have…”

“And like anybody who like boils it down to like a market map or like a one sentence thesis on a company, I think is like just a very tough way to invest.”

“I do think, like, and people say this, and it's cheesy, and it's, like, also true, is that the founder really matters, and, like, there's definitely a midwit curve on that that I've written about before, which is, like, You think founders really matter and the…”

“It all comes down to people and like the team that you build and like what you get out of your people in the end. So if you have this like magnetism Or, like, there's almost, like, people have a fear of disappointing you and, like, they really want to, like, d…”

“Cause I do think there's like just so much venture theater. Where, like, you just have to do a bunch of stuff because, like, your boss, you know, your GP expects it, or their LPs expect it. Like, there's just a bunch of, like, shit that you have to produce to,…”

“It's one of the most recent decisions I made. It was, like, over a three-hour coffee. I didn't write a single word. You know, I met the guy and read the deck and loved him and invested.”

“I can see like if this happens and then this happens and then this happens and then that happens and like things go just right here, like this could be a really big company and like it never works. Like you can't like, you know, there's the compounding miracle…”

“A lot of my smaller checks are the ones that have failed already. It's the ones where I'm like, I don't like fully, but like, maybe like if it does, it'd be like really huge and like, it's a pretty cheap price.”

“There's a lot of like deep tech that I think you're taking science risk. And like, I think with vertical integrators, you're taking integration risk where there's like five different kind of like cutting edge-ish, but proven technologies that you're trying to …”

“If you go with this one particular architecture, what you're really doing is selling radiation by building these pulse power generators, and you can use that for Radhart Electronics and nuclear arsenal testing and, like, all these things that can, like, genera…”

“But that, like, early story that, like, nobody wanted to touch it was actually, like, a pretty crowded round at a hundred million dollar valuation.”

“But I think actually the B and then the C, like, once they get to a certain point and do some of those things, and it becomes clear to others that, like, if anybody wins this category, it's going to be this company, then capital, I think, actually becomes, lik…”

“When something becomes commoditized, we're like, it could be answers or intelligence or whatever, like there will be value at the next layer of the stack. And like, that's just how the world works.”

“Like I think there are people like the Lenny's and the packies and folks like that, that have just really, I'm a big fan of Mario Gabrielle and the generalists, like those types of people I think have done an incredible job building a real asset.”

“So basically in our network, we have Paki McCormick, we have Noah Smith and Brian Hobart of a few other kind of pretty big newsletter writers for their specific niches who have a few 100,000 subscribers. And we say, Hey, you don't have a podcast today. Let's c…”

“It's really hard to send an insight rich newsletter once a week. And the people that do it, like Ben Thompson, I like bow down to the fact that that guy can every single day churn out an insight rich piece of Piece of writing is insane to me. Like Paki once a …”

“It's been probably close to a million words in a year and a half at this point.”

“I bought Bitcoin at a hundred, sold it at one 50.”

“We actually, I was the largest consumer of Uber rush messengers in the world for a while.”

“If you're not yourself, it's not like a be true to yourself kind of thing. It's like, you're going to have a miserable experience because all of your interactions are going to be other people wanting to interact with this persona, or if I were writing from a d…”

“The most beautiful part about sub stack is because they've taken such a strong stand for subscriptions and against advertising. No one on their team has ever even reached out to me. And so I paid zero dollars for my main platform because they want to pretend l…”

“I think when the market turns and when we enter a bit of a bear market and in tech and web three, like it will be really easy to throw stones at me. Like I am unabashedly optimistic about all of this and like things are going to turn on. I'm going to like, you…”

“One of the tests that I always run for myself, and I probably actually would have failed this test, is if Theranos had come to me on a sponsored post, you know, however many years ago, chances are, frankly, I would have written something positive on Theranos b…”

“It was ramp. And like they're kind of double unicorn round when they raised at a 1.1 billion dollar valuation and a 1.6 billion dollar valuation in the same transaction.”

“I was an employee, not a founder. At a startup that sold for three million dollars after raising a hundred twenty million dollars.”

“And I have a few pieces kind of coming up, and so I think chances are we're going to just kind of cross a million dollars in 2021.”

“I'm like, you know, a 105 or something on Twitter and 88 in the newsletter.”

“It does scale a lot better to run a venture fund than to show up every week and get a sponsor and then write, write an essay.”

“Fund when I did fund when I did 91 91 investments and not all of them have investment memos.”

“Did you lead a single round? Did you write any term sheets? Were you the biggest check in any one of those 91 investments? Never. And that's all part of the strategy, right?”

“I wrote in both the public and private memo that like I'm doing probably less diligence than most people on a specific company than most people who are investing in a company will.”

“9.99 million dollars.”

“And fund two, were it to exist would potentially be in the 25 to thirty million dollar range.”

“If I get hit by a bus, like not boring is just done. And that's like the extreme example and the example that everybody uses when they talk about one person things, but that means that like every week, if I don't show up and write something, the momentum slows…”

“The advisory there is like, you know, working with some of the companies in their portfolio to think about how they tell their story, writing pieces. Like I wrote with Chris in the economists, like they'll introduce me to companies, you know, that they've inve…”

“I've had that other conversation with funds, too, where it's like, hey, you want to come work and, you know, be a full-time partner at this fund? And no, like, we've talked for the past couple of hours about how much fun I'm having doing this particular thing,…”

“I don't think it's gotten, you know, any easier convincing founders to give me allocation at 50,000 readers or 88,000 readers. Like if they're a reader, then they kind of get it. And if they're not, then You know, they don't on the sponsorship side. It's diffe…”

“I think I don't want to raise money because then I'd have bosses and I don't think I'd get a valuation that I'd be happy to sell part of myself for.”

“As soon as I go in-house somewhere, Like I lose half of my value or, you know, X percent of my value as soon as I go in-house somewhere. And that is kind of one, even though, you know, I do do sponsored posts and all of that, there is like this independent voi…”

“And I want to keep it kind of free and open. I think it grows better. More people can read it. It creates more serendipity. Like there's just a lot of good things that come if I'm, you know, kind of willing to trade off the security of a paid subscription.”

“Yeah, it's wild. I had 500 in April and that many now.”

“Got to number two, and I think in a couple of days that drove 2000 new subscribers.”

“Like I wrote about Stripe and then everybody at Stripe reads the piece where you write about, you know, X, Y, Z company that's big enough that it can have an impact. But small enough that they're not being written about every day. Like, you know, people within…”

“Yeah, 10 grand in January and kind of it scales, scales linearly with the audience is how I'm thinking about it now.”

“I think in January the rates are going to be about 4000 for a Monday and 2500 for a Thursday.”

“Like, you know, the 26,000 person list, the past few posts have gotten 50,000 plus views just the past few Mondays, because they just kind of take off a little bit at this point, which is great.”

“I've been monetizing since Call it late August, early September. So we kind of, it'll be three months of monetization, and I would imagine it somewhere around 50,000 or so, so it's a good run rate.”

“There's about 500 LPs in the syndicate.”

“About a 100,000 each, a little bit more. Now it's 200 and that's two up to 50.”

“Freedom, and, you know, maybe at some point it stagnates, and I, the revenue doesn't keep going up, and the audience size doesn't keep going up, but the fact that I get to do, like, do this on my own schedule, and it's 60, 70 hours a week, it's a ton of work, …”