The Exchanges

Q You built a company, 1.4 billion. That's, you know, that's a win. That's a grand slam, but then something happened. What happened and how did that work out in your favor?

A Yeah. So the company was an international company. It's a Chinese company and 2016, uh, the elections happened and, you know, politics kind of changed a little bit. And I think in that process, like it started looking like, man, this is like not going to go through, like, they're not going to be able to get approval in the U S for a foreign entity to kind of buy this thing. And, uh, so that happened. And then there's some time, you know, in every contract when a sale happens, there's like all these triggers, right? Like, Hey, Got to complete by so and so date. If it doesn't happen, then, you know, whatever the contract might end. And I think in that time, I mean, I wasn't at Apple and I was working with you, but you know, every time I talked to somebody there, they were like, dude, we're still crushing it. We're growing and it's still kind of scaling up. And so it looked like the deal was not going to happen. The company had like multiplied in value during that time. And so now there's like all this leverage on the company side to be like, well, we don't actually need this sale, right? Like we're a lot bigger than what that value was. And I think they turned it into an investment instead. With like non-voting or, you know, some, some kind of distinction there. And we ended up getting some liquidity then, which was fantastic. It was like over a billion dollars, like felt great. …

AI assessment note: “it started looking like, man, this is like not going to go through”

Q So what are, what are other things besides magical toys that you saw somebody built, interesting things you're seeing built in the hardware robotics side?

A Yeah. So we have, uh, AJ who's building the, you know, Neurosity. He built that first version, which I think I've showed you before, which is a brain computer interface. Now he has a second version, um, that's really tiny. It's like the size of AirPods. You could put it right here, special purpose. So really like the ability to prototype, develop the thing. Get like hundreds or thousands of units out there, improve the design, and doing that without a giant team allows them to kind of continue. We've seen like a variety of things kind of come out on that front. I think the second area that's happening is, you know, the consumer hardware, and then there's like this robotics, drones, and kind of this other world where we have so much physical equipment in the world, forklifts and Lawn mowers and cars and like, you know, all these things that we do, um, that requires either a person, like, you know, with drones, we invested in this company, Lucid Drones, which, you know, they built a power washing drone, could go up in buildings, could power wash the, you know, the glass instead of people hanging from the side. Uh, there's another company that, uh.

AI assessment note: “AJ who's building the, you know, Neurosity... brain computer interface”

Q Was there anything that just drove you crazy about it?

A Was there anything like, you know, we're going to do a whole nother pot on it basically. I feel like the first week or month of like, Yo, let's do a bunch of stuff. And they're like, slow down. Like, why? I want to do more. Like, I want to do more things. And this resistance feeling of like, ah, we already thought about this, or we tried this. Like, no, let's just go do stuff. And I never enjoyed that. And I think startups and small teams just, because you have so much to do, that's the kind of mentality. And so I talked to probably like, 75 to a hundred founders before starting Founders Inc. And I really wanted to learn. It's like, I knew a bunch of people. I used to interact with them, even at like Bebo and Monkey Inferno. I'd have them come by and like, just talk, whatever. Um, and I really enjoyed that. That was like fun. I just started angel investing a lot, which was like cool. I thought I wanted to do that, but it wasn't fun. It was like, meet great, talented people, get excited about them, and then you're like a monthly update away. Like, give them the check, and then that's it.

AI assessment note: “And this resistance feeling of like, ah, we already thought about this”

Q So that's the general, like, that's a good, I think, general overview, because most people don't really understand what, what, what is even the point of this? How does this work? Uh, let's go specific. Are you doing anything cool with DeFi? Do you have any good trades going? Are you making money doing this? Are you, are you actually doing anything in the DeFi space right now?

A I think, uh, Uniswap is probably one of the, my favorite companies in this space. And I think we've talked about this a little bit, but what Uniswap did, and I'll give you kind of the simple version of it is usually when you wanted to trade two assets, you had to create a marketplace. So let's say I have one Sean coin and I want to sell it. I need Sam to show up and buy that Sean coin. Right. And if there aren't two sides and they don't agree on the price, this trade won't happen. And what Uniswap did, and I think there were some others before it, but Uniswap has become the biggest player in this space is they created a one sided trading market where, you know, a buyer or seller can show up and they're trading against what's called a liquidity pool. The investors come in and put in both sides of the trade marketplace. So like one Ethereum and 3000 dollars would create like, let's say a liquidity pool. Then Sean, you can just show up and say, I want to sell. And you're going to sell against this pool. Uh, you don't need another side. The pool is always the other side. And they've created a simple algorithm. They call it like, you know, AMM and automated market maker where, you know, they want to keep the price close. And depending on how much liquidity there is and how much you're willing to sell, it's going to slip away from that amount. And that's where the price movements wil…

AI assessment note: “I think, uh, Uniswap is probably one of the, my favorite companies”

Q four AM, you would have built the prototype and you're basically nocturnal. You, you get all your shit done. You like, You used to tell me you used to get, during the day you would just burn up your energy so you could focus at night and actually write code. So what are you doing with AI, and how is that, what is that actually in your company right now?

A Yeah, and so I'll kind of tell you how I'm thinking about AI agents, right, and what it means to me. So AI agents are using LLMs or AI systems, right, like the OpenAI systems or Claude, but then giving it reasoning loops. So imagine that When you go to a human, you give them something to do. Like, hey, I want to go grow our company. I want to do a marketing campaign. They take that, they plan it, they come up with the steps to plan. Then they go one by one on the task and like solve them. They release some of them. And so these AI agent systems are exactly like that. The first thing it does, it goes, what do I need to do based on your request? And it'll kind of come up with a plan.

AI assessment note: “I'll kind of tell you how I'm thinking about AI agents”