The Ledger, every show

“I'm of the belief of you have to go to one or the other extreme. You can't kind of put one foot in the water here. So either you give everybody zero and you just say, we are not going to give money. We are not even going to go down that path and people need to…”

“Demographically China is basically doing what the U.S. Did, you know, 50 years ago, right? They've got a much younger population and kind of the way that they're growing.”

“My guess is it's going to be less than the number of people they left off. So actually what we're going to see is a net loss of job opportunities over the lifetime of this crisis.”

“Like average to above average in all three of those buckets today. But there's a lot of room for improvement. And I don't think that we're the best at any of those.”

“My opinion is that it'll probably go, it'll crack 2000, but it won't go past 2500, right? So it'll kind of end up in like a 2020, a hundred dollar gold price point.”

“Most of the investors who talk about being founder-friendly, they're talking about the investment terms, the way they interact with founders et cetera, but they're still making decisions based on closer to a fifty-fifty on the company idea and the founders.”

“From our perspective, we really focus more on ninety-ten, so 90% on the founders, 10% on the idea and market.”

“There's a number of deals that we've invested in, That I'm a hundred percent confident there's not another venture capitalist in the world that knows about it because we were there from day one and we know that the founders never talked to another venture capi…”

“I don't think that proprietary deal flow is, I think it's a misleading term, right? I think that what ends up happening is their serendipity.”

“I believe that Intelligence is quite overrated, and EQ is quite underrated. I think that you can be very successful by having a high EQ, and if you have intelligence as well, then you kind of just double your probability for success, but I think that most peop…”

“There was a three-person team that was assembled. It was a ninety-day special project, and the whole goal was to help those two individuals grow their following on Facebook, which, when I tell people that, they always think it sounds a little almost vain, but …”

“QQQ's been compounding it, call it, 1313 and a half, maybe 14%, depending on what their starting point over the last decade or so. The average venture fund, if you give them all the credit for their paper marks, 17% a year or something, maybe 18%. So if you ju…”

“By optimizing these businesses for cashflow in a way you're getting non-dilutive fundraising on a quarterly basis. It also allows us to play offensive game of you have a balance sheet. That balance sheet can be used to start companies. We could acquire compani…”

“I used to think that the hardest part of investing was buying the right assets, and I'm now fully convinced that the hardest part of investing is selling correctly”

“Google, they just got a little bit more money offered to them early. They would have sold.”

“And he went from owning zero Bitcoin in July of 2020 to today he has more than 210,000 Bitcoin, which is more than one percent of the Bitcoin network.”

“They should be like, 10 x economic opportunities, and then 10 x reputation. It never works the other way. Like, there's no company that there's a 10 x reputation opportunity first, and then there's a 10 x economic opportunity. Like, the economics have to be ca…”

“They have only like a 80 or 85 employees. I believe that they've publicly said that the company's been profitable and they're selling a hardware product plus all of the software.”

“And I think at one point he was the single largest outside shareholder of Amazon and owned like 15%.”

“We issued a million dollar bet to anyone on Wall Street. And we were like, we'll take Bitcoin. You take any other asset, like just pick anything over the next 10 years. If you beat us, like you get a million bucks. If Bitcoin outperforms, we get a million buck…”

“Warren Buffett was the original finance influencer, right? And I, I've joked a million times that if he was today, Buffett in his thirties, he'd have a sub stack, a Twitter account, a podcast. He'd be streaming on TikTok, like doing all this stuff.”

“After the first, I don't know, six months, like, the company works or it doesn't. And if it works, then actually I'm probably doing the company a disservice if I'm, like, still meddling in the day-to-day, like, decision-making and leadership of the business.”

“I think where it's harder is like, Hey, the business is worth like ten million dollars or five million dollars. And you're like, that's like two years of progress. Versus not spending the money up front and like, maybe you get there. That's where I probably le…”

“Sometimes it doesn't matter what the truth is. The public narrative is actually the thing that prevails.”

“It launched in February of 20, 23. By May, we had 20,000 subscribers. Today it has over 260,000 subscribers. So 12 X growth in four or five months.”

“BuzzFeed has over a thousand employees. They do four hundred million dollars in revenue, and the company's worth fifty million dollars in the public market.”

“If you look at many of the people who have been able to do this throughout the decades, usually you have to reach some degree of success and have some degree of security before you really have the ability to do that. You trade off short-term income and revenue…”

“In times of uncertainty, they want dollars. And so what ends up occurring is all of those other assets end up Going to close to a correlation of one. So they all start going down. And we saw that with Bitcoin, gold, you know, treasuries equities, real estate, …”

“And I think the same thing's going to happen here. Unfortunately, Is we're just going to continue to see a widening of that wealth inequality gap because the rich, right? And it's not even the top, it's like the top two percent understand how the game is playe…”

“So you either can be an efficient economy, right? Or I think what you're describing there kind of lower the cost of production as much as you can. And what you give up is that resilience or that durability.”

“In our eyes, it's to try to recreate those situations as, you know, accurately as possible. And so, by hypothetically kind of wargaming that stuff, we get, you know, at least a glimpse as to how will they handle that stuff. And then also, we get a glimpse as t…”

“Academic leadership, the military, and the Army in particular, is probably one of the best institutions in the world to teach that stuff. They've really studied it. They've got a lot of real-world experimentation of what works and what doesn't.”

“The last team I worked on was something called the social good and goodwill team. And that team was tasked with a pretty interesting mandate, which was go do good things in the world using the size, scale, and advantage that Facebook has, but don't worry about…”

“The very first fund that I ever managed was about a three and a half million dollar micro VC fund. Maybe the biggest LP externally was like a hundred K. You're me and a buddy, and we're like, are we good at this? Do we like doing this? Can we do just enough mo…”

“We've created an investment firm where we've created nine businesses, and the goal really is, how do we create businesses in certain sectors where we have a competitive advantage purely through distribution?”

“We put 500,000 dollars down on the balance sheet. And we said, hey, we're going to be partners on this.”

“The stock went from 51 cents, worth a couple hundred million dollar market cap at the time, to today the stock trades somewhere between three dollars and 30 cents and three dollars and 50 cents.”

“The way that we're structured today, we have a C corporation. We raised from a great group of investors, many that people would know. It's a combination of a couple of funds, but also a number of very successful corporate executives.”

“There's over ten billion dollars that have flowed into these assets.”

“And so he was the first public company that wasn't like a crypto miner or something like that to go and say, I'm going to put like 85% of my balance sheet into Bitcoin.”

“Julian was like, hey, this kid, Chase Coleman, who now runs Tiger Global, he's leaving. I'm gonna give him some money. And he sent him down to go talk to Mark and Mark gave like the sixth and seventh million dollar to Chase Coleman to start Tiger Global.”

“He sat with us for an hour and just kept berating me with questions and just trying to actually understand Bitcoin and blockchain technology and all these things.”

“There's a book that I recently read where he was the only investor to outperform the S and P 500 for 10 years straight in the nineties.”

“With Bay Area times, it was just me and him from February until two weeks ago. There was no employees. There was no anything.”

“Barry at times is very quickly going to become bigger than the pomp letter.”

“One example, we've got a business in the employment sector. We've helped over 3000 people get a job in the last two years.”

“We're investing incredibly early. We're talking five million dollar valuation or lower usually.”

“We've got a company that I went for a week to Nigeria with the founder to go do customer research, right, on my own dime.”