The Exchanges

Q Was it true? What was the Chinese using it? What, what was that mean? Like there, I think I read there, like the accusation was that they were, uh, like Straight men, they were blackmailing straight men who are on Grindr.

A I think it's hypothetically true that if you have the servers located in China, and you're the Chinese government, and you wanted to watch, it's sort of like, if you know the answer to the question, you can use Grindr backwards. So if you know that you have users in the White House who are gay and using the app, well then you can figure out who those users are, and you can track where they are, and you can Say, oh, the president's about to leave the White House because people on his forward team who happen to use the app are using it, and they're doing it. Well, with the Ukraine war, we heard that soldiers on both sides were using the app to meet each other sort of between battles. And, you know, people have talked about, uh, Olympians being outed in the village, and so work was done at Grindr to help avoid these sort of extreme cases. And so I think there is possibility for abuse, and there are certainly people Who are closeted or not well discussed in politics, in the military, and in high positions, who, yeah, hypothetically, if the Chinese government wanted to, and they had access to the information, they could exploit that information and potentially use it to blackmail, you know, our politicians

AI assessment note: “I think it's hypothetically true that if you have the servers located in China”

Q I'm more like, if I'm a guy, what would I be looking up? What would, who would I be calling and what kind of deal would I be trying to do? What business would you not go try to buy or what business would you try to buy?

A A few ways you can source. So one is you use your own network. There's lots of businesses out there that are profitable, and for whatever reason, they, they, oftentimes the founders or the owners either want to retire or they want to finally cash out of their business, or they're exhausted, or, you know, the co-founders want to break apart a little bit or something. So there's that. It could be, we talk to our venture capitalist friends and say, in your portfolio, you must have companies that are successful, But not venture businesses anymore. They're not gonna go public. They're not gonna break out. They're growing at 10 or 20% a year right now. All of them have it. And some of these brands are, like, amazing brands. And so Grindr's a home run because it's a dominant market player, you know, healthy business, profitable, et cetera. Usually these are like, it's not such and such, it's the second or third player in that space. And they have challenges. They're having trouble recruiting talent, you know, at the same level they were earlier. This AI thing's going to be tough, so there's some challenges coming to the business, but the founder's motivated. I think he'll work with you or she'll work with you or the founding team. We generally are looking for deals where the founding team wants to stick around. Or at least part of them. When we did JibJab, Greg left, but his CFO becam…

AI assessment note: “A few ways you can source. So one is you use your own network.”

Q And what about this, uh, agency AI thing?

A I had been working with a number of entrepreneurs. We were trying to figure out how to do some businesses that involved AI, and I just kept saying, but how does this work if we can't talk to the old internet? Like, if we can't talk to TripAdvisor, and we can't talk to Ticketmaster, and we can't talk to Uh, nba.com. Like, if you can't do any of these things, how exactly does the world transform where I have an agent that helps me plan my weekend or my trip to New York City and all these things, and so there were all these companies starting that were building agents inside websites where you would, and I don't like this theory that there'll be a A million LLMs out there. Every time I go to a website, I have to talk to an agent, and it's just sort of replacing clicking on buttons with talking to an agent. I assume that the world will instead end up with a smaller number of agents that act on behalf of consumers going out and doing work. That changes fundamentally the internet. It just means that if you have a website today that sells tickets or bicycles or whatever it is, it won't be so much the customers type in specialized.com or trek.com or Whatever the bicycle company is, and then go there and do it that traditional way. They'll talk to an agent. They'll say, Hey, I need a bike. I want a mountain bike. I'm doing all these things that I want you to do an evaluation of these th…

AI assessment note: “I assume that the world will instead end up with a smaller number of agents”

Q But did you walk the walk when, when Bitcoin, when you first heard about Bitcoin?

A No, yes and no. I have a good story on how I screwed up on the Bitcoin one. But, um, the last one, by the way, was, uh, the government. Is that the customers have anxiety and they have frustration with government and government services and things like that. And I'm not a libertarian. But I can see still that there's angst and anxiety and, and frustration, and so social networks add sort of gas to that fire. Now, it's not always good. Just because the consumer's angry doesn't mean that we end up with like a, a delightful solution at the end. It can be a, a worse solution, but the abuse of control at the top and typically monopolies or oligarchy type businesses or industries, Causes angry customers, and those are the most ripe for disruption. They're often hard to disrupt, but the power of the internet was, and what James recognized many people with currency was, what the internet has done for, A, in the most easy to disrupt industries, will eventually happen. When you network voices together, and they can multiply, that will eventually lead to disruption in these bigger, harder to crack spaces. And so, we're seeing now, the internet's been around now for 25 years, And all the manifestations of it, and all those things that come together, it's slowly ticking away and sort of disrupting these industries that we thought couldn't be disrupted, and currencies and governments are clo…

AI assessment note: “No, yes and no. I have a good story on how I screwed up”

Q In the doc you guys sent over before the episode, um, you talked about, like, the opportunity in health, that you see, kind of, like, certain health trends, or where, where, you know, as an entrepreneur, you know, your spidey sense would start tingling. What, you know, can you describe what, what you're seeing, and what you think the opportunity is?

A This, I think, for Rick and for For me, what those areas of disruption coming from crypto and AI, that's really our investment thesis on venture, almost like. So for private equity, those represent high disruption points, which can transform a space, they can disrupt a space, they can take, you know, big players and make them weak players and vice versa. So there are plays in private equity for these, but there's a lot of unknown in those that make private equity more dangerous for the next couple years. Because businesses that have been very stable for a very long time have become Potentially unstable from disruption. On the investment side, that's the perfect time to invest, right? Even though people are saying there's a bubble right now, if you just take a macro level of the next decade, will there be more disruption, more wealth generated over the next decade, regardless of like, if individual prices for companies are overvalued in the short term or the long run? It's kind of like, was Amazon overpriced in 2000? Sure. But was it overpriced by the next 20 years? No, it was underpriced by the next 20 years. So as an investor, AI does some things really well, and it does things well when there's a lot of documentation, and there's a lot of documentation in legal, engineering, and in medical, and so those spaces are high value, tons of money being spent in those spaces, and the…

AI assessment note: “there's a lot of documentation in legal, engineering, and in medical”