Kevin Rose from Web 2.0 to Web3

0:01 Welcome to Acquired. Today we're sitting down with Kevin Rose. Kevin was one of the pioneers of Web 2.0 as the founder of Dig, and then became one of the valley's first super angels, investing early in companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Square. Today he's a partner at True Ventures and host of the Modern Finance Podcast. Let's chat with him.

0:21 Yeah. Alright, did you like that? Should we put that in? I've always wanted to do that. Who got the truth? Is it you, is it you, is it you Who got the truth now?

0:35 Is it you, is it you, is it you Say it straight. Another story Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.

0:51 I'm Ben Gilbert, and I am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures. And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor. Based in San Francisco. And we are your hosts.

1:06 This was so Fing cool. Oh man. Kevin is so great. We had such a blast. Of course we went deep. Covered the screensavers, the real origin story of Dig.

1:17 The Dignation parties at South by the Ben you were at back in the day. Totally. I wasn't expecting him to he like corrected the record. All the previous Dig Founding stories are wrong. Uh no, Wikipedia is wrong, apparently. Listeners, this episode basically has two chapter. We start in web two and we end in web three. And obviously Kevin is super deep on all things crypto, blockchain, NFTs, and he's doing um really cool thing on the Modern Finance podcast, and he even ends the show with announcing a new thing that he's doing. So um stay tuned for that. But I had so much fun this episode pattern matching everything Kevin learned from web two to the web three world. All right listeners.

1:57 Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Lagora. The agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is gonna completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Ligora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? So the founders did exactly what great founders do. operate with obsessive customer focus.

2:32 They embedded inside a massive law firm. For months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Legor's Bet Here is interesting, since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

3:04 And they recently launched Lagora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And Lagora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Lagora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head to head pilot with their top competitor, they win seventy percent of the time. Legora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers. on the platform from twelve hundred legal teams in fifty countries. And crazily, they went from one million to a hundred million in ARR.

3:51 About. Eighteen months. Mm. truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client.

4:06 If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in-house at a company, you can learn more at Lagora.com/slash acquired. And just tell him that Ben and David sent you. Alright, two last things. One, as usual, this is not investment advice from either us or Kevin. Do your own research, come to your own conclusions on making your own investments. This is for entertainment and informational purposes only, as usual.

4:32 Two. Join us in the acquired Slack. Acquired.fm slash slack. We are nearing the 10,000 person mark. It is a great group and uh we'd love to have you. Now Onto our conversation with the one and only

4:45 Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose, so great to be talking with you. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. This is gonna be fun. I think many, many episodes of my teenage years watching Dignation later. I feel like

5:00 Probably the same way a lot of our listeners do when they run into David Nyard and they're like, Oh my God, you're like a real human. I I feel very, very similarly talking to you today. So thank you for all the just massive indulgence of Nerdery over the years. Yeah. There was a bunch of uh nerd stuff there, a little comedy. Hopefully I didn't convince you to start drinking at a young age because we were of legal age, but we did consume beers on on each episode. No no. I was lucky I actually started

5:26 Watching you on screensavers when there was no alcohol involved. So back when I was Tech T V Days. Yeah, tech T V Oh, we're gonna get into it. Let's start. Because this is acquired way back. So Kevin I think

5:40 We have it right. You grew up in Vegas But your family's from Wisconsin, which is a state we've talked about recently with Mark Andreessen growing up there and Beeple on your show. What was that like? Yeah, you know, I uh the my f earliest memories I was born in Reading, California, but I don't remember it. And then I remember living in Oregon for a bit, which is where I am now in Portland. But we were living in a a little town called Salem.

6:05 And then when I was in second grade, we moved out to Las Vegas because there was just work there. That was like a place where my dad could find a job. And so We moved out there. I kinda grew up thinking it was normal for you know, seven elevens to have slot machines in them. Like there was just a a lot of things that Vegas does to you. And You know, it was one of those things where I got geeky and got into computers and then quickly that the action, you know, really wasn't in Las Vegas. If you wanted to be in the hotel industry or working gaming in some capacity, that was the place to be, but

6:41 when I was around eighteen or so, I kinda realized well, I should probably think about moving someplace else like Silicon Valley or, you know, someplace that had a bigger tech scene. I'm super curious. How did you figure that out? I felt the same way. I grew up in Pennsylvania. But I had no idea that Silicon Valley existed. Like what was the process by which you like learn that this was a thing?'Cause like there was no you know, there's the internet, right, but like it wasn't

7:06 Obvious in the way it is now. Yeah. So basically when you started to get into computers back then, you you're right, there wasn't like the internet where you could just go and figure all this stuff out. So I was on bullet and board systems and kinda dial up And I remember going into computer stores and buying computer magazines because that's what we did to the stay up with all the latest trends, you would just buy a magazine that was about computers. Take it home and read about motherboards, right? So I just basically would hear about these conferences and there was one called Comdex, which was the world's largest computer convention.

7:39 And it was held in Las Vegas. And so I was like, Oh, I gotta go to this Comdex thing, right? You're in high school at this point? Yeah, I was in early high school and I filled out a Comdex application to go'cause it was free, the passes were free. But you had to have a business. So I just made up a fake business name. I called it Foliage Software

7:59 And then I would apply and I received a badge in the mail. And I was like, Okay, I'm going. And I talked my parents into driving me down to the convention center. This was before CES, or CES was very much, much smaller back then. And I would go and just walk the aisles and look at all the different processors and motherboards and video cards and All of the crazy every big manufacturer had a kind of a a block, a display there that you could go and walk up and try out all the new products. And it was like the coolest thing. And this was stuff that hadn't hit the market yet, right? Hadn't hit the market yet. It was brand new.

8:32 And that's how I realized that all these companies were not based here. They were based, you know, most of them were kind of California Silicon Valley based. But I was the youngest kid on the floor. Like I had to kinda dress up, I put a like a collared shirt on. And then it was funny because they noticed a couple of kids started coming And they banned you had to be at least sixteen to get in. And so the next year, I think I was fifteen, and I was like, Oh, how am I gonna prove that I'm sixteen?

8:56 I think if someone asked me, I just told them I was sixteen I had to have my birth date memorized for a year earlier. And then the next year They made it so you had to be eighteen to get in. And I was like, crap. And so they just kept moving the gold line. Yeah, exactly. A fake idea to get into a computer convention. So Anyway, that was the early days. Oh my gosh.

9:14 All these Silicon companies that were like all the companies that were Exhibiting it Comdex and Oh yeah. Yeah, they're all based out in Silicon Valley. It was really Silicon Valley, but they weren't building fabs anymore and so they could just move at such a faster pace. I'm I I remember this. And it was like all this new product. All these chips, all these, you know

9:33 PCI plugins from motherboards they're all hitting the market so fast. Oh, that was awesome. It was so exciting when you hear about a new clock speed come out, right? Like Intel would announce something and you're like, wow, a sixty six megahertz processor or you know, AMD would have out their new chip and then You know, you have the weird folks that were all like the deck alphas, like a completely different Risk versus Cisque based processors and that weren't compatible with Windows and they weren't compatible with other it's you're like, Whoa, wait a second, what's this Unix thing? And it was just it was a crazy time. Okay, so before we move on. From Vegas.

10:07 Died in the wall, computer geek. Sneaking into Cob Decks, that's amazing. Was there anything like Sort of presaging your soon to be future career on uh in front of the camera. Like did you do like drama in high school? Like what

10:21 No, I think I was like the most shy kind of kid growing up and just didn't have a ton of friends in high school and Back then, I don't even know if this holds true today, but back then it was not cool to be into computers. And so you got made fun of a lot and didn't have a lot of friends. We were definitely not the popular kids in school and got picked on and so

10:42 it was not in my DNA to be I didn't apply to work at Tech TV to be in front of the camera. I just wanted to be behind the scenes. And so I was like kind of like setting up all the technical demos and if they needed a certain you know version of Linux installed, I would install that and just like you know, making sure that things were moving smoothly, uh, in that regard. So it was just by chance that that I I w ended up on camera. Yeah, do you remember your sort of like break like the moment where someone was like, Hey, Kevin, you should be on air talent. Yeah, I mean I had discovered a vulnerability in Windows that was a way to spam people using this kind of uh internal messaging tool. And so you could basically just send a message to any IP address.

11:24 And windows were displayed on the screen. And while it wasn't necessarily kind of a vulnerability in the sense of the person wasn't getting hacked, it was definitely a way to spam people. You could just write a little utility that would just go through IP addresses and deliver, you know, little notifications to their desktop. And so I told the hosts about it and they're like, Oh, well you figured this out. You should come on and talk about it. And so they invited me on With Lealaport and Patrick Norton hosting at this point. Exactly. So Leport had me uh next to him and I was so nervous. I was just sweating and just like And I went on and I kinda delivered it and explained it and the executive producer, Paul Block, was like Hey, I like what you did there. Like, can you find more weird things to talk about that are not really known? And then I was thinking, like, well, I know a lot of these like hacking tools and stuff that I

12:08 mess around with at night, like we could talk more about those types of things. And he was like, Yeah, do more of that and let's see how you do. And let's have you come on Once a week and talk about a certain tool. So You know, I look back and kinda cringe at some of that stuff because I it was You could just hear in my voice and the way I presented uh, especially in the earlier episodes, I just didn't um It wasn't in my DNA to be on camera. And actually they sent me to

12:32 a talent coach that would come in and record you and play back footage with you and make you watch yourself and talk about how you hold your hands and like there's these dedicated coaches that that will teach you everything. I did that once I was at Microsoft and I was gonna go speak on behalf of the company to a newspaper and they had me speak with a coach first and she videotaped And I think it was like five K for like two hours. Like it was this exorbitant corporate markup.

12:59 And uh she videotaped me for some of my talking points and then like made me watch it back while we were sitting there at the table. And it was the most painful experience. It helps a ton though. I mean it's a good it's a good strategy for sure. Totally. You were the dark tipper on the show, right? That was the horrible nickname they gave me on the show. Yeah. Was that from that first episode? Did Leo just like riff that? Like where did that come from? Well, we used to have these things called like Windows Tips and like it was like a quick check in. You're like, okay, when you're doing a segment So everything in uh in TV is broken into blocks. And so they'll have like the A block, which is the very beginning of the show, and then they break it down into individual segments. There's a person keeping

13:39 kind of a timer on making sure when you're doing live TV, making sure the blocks don't go too long because it impacts other people's segments and there's it's very tight, well oiled machine that has to run perfectly to pull off a live show. And so w they had these little kickers that they would do, like it when you finish a block you bump out to a Windows tip or a little, you know, thirty second, forty five second, one minute long max. Little tip.

14:02 They're like, Okay, well we're gonna do Kevin's gonna do tips that are about the dark side of the internet. Let's call'em dark tips, and then they call me the dark tipper as a joke, and then it just kind of like was a a funny little thing on the on the show. That's so great. Screen savers was live in front of a studio audience, right? Yeah. Were they like changing over the set while you were doing this on the on the main segment? Well, the cool thing is they they could have basically'cause the number of cameras they had and the locations on the set. You didn't have to do a lot of changing because there's always two locations to shoot. And so you would have like one off to the side and one the primary like front location, and then even one of over in the nook where we took live calls. So There wasn't a lot of quick set change unless it was like a guest interview, and that was typically done between commercial breaks.

14:46 We would go off to a commercial, you know, you have three minutes and change and then They'd swap out roll away the main center console and then, you know, put in a couple of chairs get the guests seated, all the mics checked, all that good stuff. So It's a crazy thing'cause weird stuff breaks, you know, like A guest microphone goes out and somebody's running in. thirty seconds before you come back on TV swapping out mics and like just demos break, computers reboot randomly, like w weird stuff would happen and you just have to kinda roll with it. So that's the fun

15:14 Dynamic of live television. David, we're so spoiled with acquired. Like infinite retakes, just audio. I was literally thinking I'm kinda jealous. Like that must have been such good Trail like this explains like why you're so good,'cause you had to just like roll with it. Whereas yeah, we just

15:31 We've been doing this for six years, but like We have so many luxuries, you know. Well, there's something nice about just being able to say, Okay, screw it, like if I mess up Like so be it. And we're done. Then you're done. You know what I mean? Like with my podcasts and stuff that I do now, it's like I'm always going back and you know, I'll listen to an episode that I think is really important. I want to make sure the editor got it right, and you're like listening to it again, you're like, Okay, we can trim a little bit here and the you know, it's like You just walked out of the studio and you're like, Okay, we're done for the day, on to the next day. So there was nothing you could do when it goes out.

16:01 You really can obsess for like a week, like until it is out there and even after Like you get any feedback that it was actually good. You're like I just released something awful. Like this is just I have this pit in the feeling of my stomach. I wish I had spent more time editing, even though I'm sure I just spent way too much cognitive load on this. Yeah. And you will you never know with your guest, right? Like you'll have a guess and you're like, Okay, this is a very

16:25 important person to have on the show for X, Y, or Z. And then you get them on and you're like, So tell me about your background. And they're like, it was great. And then they just like stop talking and you're like oh you you come on, like I yeah I gotta pull more out of you. This has to be entertaining. You know, so it can be challenging, you know, is it someone doing the interviews to kinda get people to actually open up. Totally. Well, because we're having that enormous problem here, I'm gonna pry even deeper. Yeah. So you did not move to the Bay Area. to work at tech TV. You were was your first job

16:54 Digital marketing for like an online furniture. retailer? That's right. Yeah. So basically there was a company called Next Office that had hired me to come out and just really track all of their ad campaigns and ad spend. And so they had a marketing team that was going out and buying Banner advertisements. And people would click on those and eventually lead all the way down to a checkout and they wanted to know what their conversion rate was like and where they should be should be spending their money. And it wasn't ideal for me, but I knew at that point, I'm like, I'll take any job that gets me to the Bay Area.

17:29 Like what can I do to get me out there?'Cause it was the dot com boom. You know, I was reading about in magazines and It was of crazy web one point oh and just like insane valuations and parties and like Just all the madness that you saw IPOs and I was like, I gotta get out there, I gotta get out there. You know, so I just uh I went online and posted something on I think like it was monster.com, like the jobs board And you know, uh Mike Maser, who later became really good friends, uh reached out to me and was like, Hey

17:59 I think he'd be great for this role. We had a phone interview and then they flew me out and gave me a job offer and I took it. Super cool. Do you recall how many years you were on screensavers Before The whole G four.

18:13 Seemingly debacle from the outside. Yeah, it wasn't that long actually because I think it was two and a half years. That I was at tech T V Which At that time, you know, it was the longest job I'd ever had and it was just

18:27 Oh, it was so awesome. It seemed like it was A special place. A really special place. The majority of people were in their twenties that kind of like were around the set and hanging out and we would all just party with each other afterwards and go out and we were all really close. We were just like a family. We and it's still even today when I see those people. it felt like a very special time in our lives. And we just had no kind of no idea what we were doing, but also we knew what we wanted to create and it was a very creative group of people and

18:57 The content was good and Leo was like a great anchor host. He was a little bit older than us, but kinda brought everything together and had a g great executive producer that was hilarious and fun to work for and it yeah, it was It was awesome and but the problem with tech TV is that we weren't as a network really making that much money. It was indie, right? It was owned by Paul Allen. That's right. So Paul Allen owned it and he was pouring a lot of money into it to keep it alive.

19:23 And it was an expensive network to operate. I mean we had hundreds of people And eventually they said, Okay, I can't keep spending more money here. We need to actually do something and and be acquired. And so G four based out of LA came along and said, We're a video game network. We think this is the future. We're going to acquire tech TV more or less for the subs. So they they bought tech TV and they also thought it was a very similar audience and they didn't want to lose that because we had some shows, a couple of shows

19:51 Screen savers being one of them. that we're getting decent ratings. So they're like, okay, how can we kind of bring that audience along Merge it with our video game content. And so that's what happened. They bought us and they said, Okay, by the way, we're gonna shut down San Francisco, we're moving folks to LA. And so, you know, they gave me an offer to come down and continue to host the show. Down in Los Angeles. And so that's what I did.

20:13 In retrospect it seems so. Obviously silly. 'Cause especially I mean even now, but at that point. The Bay Area was the center of Everything that you guys were doing with screensavers.

20:26 To move it down to LA, like 'Cause G four was owned by Comcast, right? That's right. Yeah, not to mention just the culture. Clash. That must have been rough. They knew it was really rough, and and they knew long term that they wanted to morph the screensavers into another show.

20:41 And they weren't going to tell us that, but they knew that was the plan. So When I saw that was happening That's not what I wanted to be long term. I didn't want to be an on air T V person. So For me I the kinda writing was on the wall that I needed to go do something else and, you know, hopefully get back to the Bay Area.

20:58 And so It led me to right around when we created Dig, and then also I created a podcasting network called Revision Three that was about creating that more of that type of content, like more geeky style content in podcast format. Does revision three predate the term podcast? Yes. Yes, because we were doing video only and there was no way to do a feed of that.

21:23 And so Steve Jobs had announced that there was something called podcasts that they were gonna support. and build that into iTunes. And that's when Alex and I said, Okay, let's get together and do a show called Dignation because now we have a a place to distribute it. At the risk of like being way too far down the rabbit hole of internet nostalgia.

21:43 I seem to remember an opening jingle from Leo's shows that was like net casts. You love from people you trust. That's right. funny thinking that like net casts almost became the thing.

21:56 Yeah, he didn't want to use the word podcast, and I'm not sure why that was. I think that he wanted to brand it His own thing. And Yeah, then I I don't think he had quite the momentum. It was who was it, Adam Curry that coined the term Podcasts.

22:13 And I think that Leo was thinking at the time And I I I believe this is accurate, that he was thinking that it shouldn't be just about Apple. And about the iPod,'cause that's what podcasts kind of like, you know, referenced Because Leo was always a big open source advocate and things like that. Oh, that's so Leo. So Leo. Like how can we make this more broadly applicable, which Yeah, that makes sense, but once the kind of uh snowball of the term podcast

22:40 grabbed hold there was no going back. Yeah, it's like here I own zero iPods. and listen to my podcasts on Spotify. Who's actively suing Apple. Right. It it stuck pretty hard. Yeah, totally. I always thought a lot of those terms was just hilarious. Like

22:56 The iPod, like I, when you used to put I in front of things, it meant like internet. Yeah. And so I always used to like to say these things out loud just to hear how ridiculous they were. Like sometimes I still tell people to send me electronic mail. 'Cause like that's what E stood for in anything E, you know? It's like it's so funny when you like actually pronounce them out loud. It's amazing how long these things stick. Yeah.

23:19 All right. So Thesis with revision three though, like There's a a very clear loud part of Twitter today talking about the creator economy and like beating the drum that this is the next emergent thing. David and I feel like we've

23:33 sort of experienced it firsthand. You've been experiencing it through multiple generations of the web. Did you have a thesis in starting that about the web and the internet is this new direct way to reach consumers. Yeah, absolutely. When we started revision three

23:50 The thinking there was that video was working online. Like it was starting to take off and people could consume and watch video content. It was easy to produce on our side. Like we could have some kind of mid range cameras and gear. an editor that we would just, you know, pay part time. we could churn that out. And if we got enough people interested and excited, there would be brands that wanted to sponsor it. And that ended up being true. And so we had

24:17 you know, an ad sales team and We had a network of shows and, you know, revision three Group. pretty quickly because people were starting to tune in and they we found that niche audiences were quite large. And when they would talk to each other, And use the internet to kind of share

24:35 that this type of content was out there We didn't have to rely upon these distribution agreements of these big old school television networks to get viewership. And we could actually measure it in a much more accurate way. And so that's what kind of started revision three and Yeah, that went on for many years and actually w had a great outcome. It was sold to Discovery Networks for thirty five million and and even though that sounds

24:57 Small these days at the time it was a big deal. Yeah. And um it became Discovery Network's kind of digital arm. Basically they were all about, you know, traditional media. And so for them to get into digital, this gave them a handful of folks that could come and lead that effort on the digital side. So it was pretty cool. That's great. And so at what point did you realize the like flywhect of having a media stream with dignation and other ways that you're reaching people. And being

25:25 the founder of Dig, like having this web two dot oh property. Yeah, it's a good question. When We started Dignation We thought of it as a way to'cause we had a base of people that really loved the dynamic that Alex and I had back when we were hosting the television show together.

25:44 So when we started this, we were like, Okay, here's a great way for us to talk about the stuff we would normally be talking about, which is like the geeky news, our favorite stories. I also happen to have the website dig and so it's a great way to surface the best stuff for us to be chatting about. And it became this kind of like way to engage the community.

26:04 And Highlight their names. I had a top leaderboard back then on Dig and as silly as it sounds like it was it was really people love seeing their name in lights, like Oh, Kevin and Alex mentioned me on the show. Like that's they mentioned one of the stories that I submitted. So it just led to more usage of the website and yeah, they're right, there was this little kind of like

26:23 flywhe that happened. And then eventually at some point Dig became much bigger than Dignation. Like it was like clear that there were so many people listening or watching and reading and consuming Dig. And Dignation still had a pretty niche following of the hardcore original people. But that was totally fine with us. We were just having fun doing the show. Dig was reaching, I think what did it cap out at like thirty eight million monthly uniques?

26:46 That's right. Yeah. Wild. I mean at that point, that was an enormous audience to be reaching on the web. Yeah. It was pretty big. It was like top ten web property and

26:58 It's still pretty big. I would love to have another site that does thirty eight million unique. Well I guess like when when I say at that time, like Because Facebook now reaches what three billion monthly active users. I think if I have it right. you were out ahead of Facebook and Facebook hadn't really started becoming the juggernaut that it is until the sort of

27:18 late two thousands. Uh I I think that was started in two thousand and four. But at one point didn't Mark come visit you when you rolled out? the dig button that was like letting you upvote articles on their websites when they were thinking about the like button that is now sort of famous and everywhere. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So we had a common investor, Greylock, and David Zee, who was at Greylock, who's on our board And also on the board of Facebook.

27:42 was like, Hey, you guys should get together and did an email introduction and he's like, uh this is company Facebook. It's like really Taking off. You guys should chat. And Dig was had already kind of it had taken off and gotten a ton of press and so Yeah, Mark hit me up and he's like, Hey, let's you know, g I'll come to the city'cause he was down in Palo Alto and he's like, I'll come up to S F and love to see your offices and let's go grab some food and so He came to the office and we chatted about

28:08 kind of just what voting meant, you know, for us, it was voting on content was helping us service the best stuff and it in it was feeding back into our algorithm that would eventually similar content to people. that we had this like a suggested stories portions where we had a couple It was early kind of AI machine learning type stuff that we were applying to articles. So if if you like this, you might also enjoy these articles. And so, you know, Mark was really interested in that, and this is before they had the like button. Pre news feed, I think even pre mini feed.

28:41 Yeah, I d I don't remember what was going on at Facebook. It was locked down to just colleges and then they started opening it up and that's when I got an account. But yeah, he was very curious and Yeah, it was nice. It was like Mark was uh a nice guy, like We ended up hanging out a handful of times and doing a handful of dinners and he was always just like a very thought and And even once um Facebook took off to the it was clear that they were gonna be much larger than Dig

29:08 Yeah, he was always really helpful. He was he he just said, If you ever, you know, need anything, like shoot me a text, like happy to collaborate in different things and you know, he invited us into the early Facebook platform stuff. So we were like an early partner there when they first launched their platform and Yeah, I mean I have nothing but good things to say about how we got to know each other. Okay, there's one question I gotta ask. We've seen it. It's been reported.

29:33 But I I don't think I've ever heard you talk about it. So Supposedly the story goes According to The media.

29:41 You were inspired to start dig to like make the leap and actually start this after you had lunch with somebody. Is that true? Are you talking about Commander Taco? Oh no. Uh the story I heard was you had lunch with Waz. Oh no. It was not Was. No. Oh, interesting. Okay, so this is from

29:59 The business week story. Like we went we read the story that was the the famous cover. And they reported there that you were inspired to start dig'cause you had lunch with Waz and you were like uh I'm gonna go be an entrepreneur. That's so funny. There's so many different That's Sarah Lacey that wrote that story. That's funny. Yeah. This is the problem, like and this is so true with so many of my friends' startups. Like success has a thousand founders, like they say, or they used to say a very like a thousand fathers or whatever it was, but that's like not PC. So

30:28 There is so many different lore stories or there was even Wikipedia is completely wrong. So when I look at Wikipedia and the founding stuff there, it's completely wrong. It's just amazing.

30:40 Yeah. So Do you want me to just like cover the Actually, yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. What is the like non-apocryphal as you remember it, even if it's like a bland The real What happened? Well, this is the truth. This is exactly how it went down. And

30:55 I I don't know that I've ever Show the full thing, but I'll I'll just do the quick version of it. So Basically what happened is There was a site out there called Delicious. That was created by Joshua Shachter that was all about social bookmarking.

31:09 And he would bookmark things and he would count the number of bookmarks on things. And this was one of the very first web two properties. And it would surface Interesting bookmarks. But it wasn't news because people didn't typically bookmark news. They would bookmark things that they wanted to return to later and I would see that I was like, wow, it's it's servicing cool stuff here.

31:33 I wonder what would this would look like if you applied it to everything. Okay. So that was one piece of it. The other piece of it was that I did have lunch, but it was with uh Commander Taco, who is the founder of Slash Doc. Slash Doc. Yeah. Yeah. And so he came and he was a guest on the show, and when I had lunch with him And this was on the screen savers? Uh, yes, but it was down in LA. Okay.

31:54 And so I had lunch with them, this was two thousand four or early mid two thousand four. I asked him where all those user submissions went because Slashdot is great in that it promotes like their favorite stories to the front page and they're all user submitted content, but you can't see any of it. So I was like, gosh, there has to be just so many good submitted stories here that they're just not surfacing. And I was like, Why don't you make it? I literally told him I was like, Why don't you make it so we could see all the submissions And then we can like vote up the best ones.

32:21 And he's like, No, I don't want to do that, blah blah. It's not the way it works. And so I was like, Okay, well I'm gonna go build this. David, who Oh, it was the colored coins and Mastercoin, uh the Israel Bitcoin Two dot O project. He was like, You guys, we should just do this all as one like master thing. And they're like, Nah, we're not gonna do that. And he's like, Okay, cool, I'm gonna go start something new. Yeah, I mean that was basically what had happened here with Slashdot is I said uh Well, I'm just gonna go start something new then. And

32:51 Then I went out and I kind of basically just sketched it out. Like I sketched out what it would look like, what a dig button would feel like what an upcoming section would be. um where submissions would go, like the whole thing. I found a freelance developer. I hired that freelance developer to create the first prototype. His name was Owen.

33:09 It says on the website he was a co founder. That's not true. He was a freelance developer and but you know, he's the closest thing I had to a co founder because we were in this together and he built it. It also says that Jay Adelson was a co founder. That is not true. I hired Jay to be the CEO like four or five months later. It also says that Ron is the co founder. Ron was my first technical kind of backend hire a few months later. So it's like and I'm not claiming that these guys claim that. I'm just saying this is the way it was written. So I I don't have any like ill will against any of these people. But like when people see who the first few people are, they call them all co founders and all this thing gets written about

33:48 Who did this and that, and I'm just like whatever, like it's fine with me. I don't care that Wikipedia never gets corrected, but that is the origin story. Oh my God. That's so great. Well, it it gets so twisted'cause uh So in the lore out there, like The having a guest on the show on the screensavers and then that leading to part of Dig.

34:06 Is out there, but it says that you had Jay on the show and then you brought him in, but it Sounds like no, there was Commander Taco. No, Jay was on um the screensavers and I met Jay through going out. He um was one of the co founders of a a company called Equinix, which was a big data center company. And so yeah, huge. And so I I went out and met him

34:26 through that and then he You know, about six months into well, he really wanted to do revision three, and he was the first check into revision three to create that content. And so That was awesome that Jay supported us back in the day. But he told me To

34:43 Get rid of Dig. He what he thought it was a distraction to revision three. And he was like, Oh, you should sell it. Like, do just focus on revision three. This is our thing. I put money into this. Like we need to focus on this. And I was like, Jay, you don't understand. Dig is going to be big, it's growing, we can do both. And so eventually About three or four months later Jay was like, Oh, I see. Yeah, it is growing quite a bit. And I was like, Hey How about I give you some equity? Would you come on and run this? I I don't know anything about raising from venture capitalists. I've never done it before.

35:15 You've clearly been down this path. You've taken a company public. You can help out here. And so we agreed to I gave him some equity, a few percentage points to the company. He then built out the right legal folks to work with, brought them on board. You know, I had formed the company

35:31 using like one of these like it it was there was no rocket lawyer at the time, but it was like a rocket lawyer esque type like thing. So the docs were all done wrong. I didn't have any like m board meetings or meeting notes and like it was all jacked up. So we had to have the docs all redone and And so Jay was very good at helping kind of correct a lot of my mistakes that I had made early on. But yeah, he didn't actually come on until like six or seven months later after there was r some real momentum there.

35:57 There's a thing that I've referenced and you've referenced here, which is web two point oh. What did that mean to you at the time? I didn't know. I didn't even know what it was called. Like I literally Jason Calicanus came up to me. who had run WebBlogs Inc., which was in Gadget and a bunch of the other sites. He tried to buy Dig very early on. He saw that it was driving traffic to his sites, and he sat down with me at Sushi and In LA.

36:20 And this was after Dig started to have it was very small and he's like I'll give you a million dollars for this. And then I was like classic lowball. Like So J Cow. Yeah, well honestly I was like okay You know, I came from nothing, man. Like my parents had zero dollars, as did I And so I was like, Yes, let's do that. And he sent me you've just been making a salary at Tech Digital. You didn't have equity in that. No, I had like ten thousand dollars in savings and I'd spent a lot of it on building the prototype of Dig, and my girlfriend was pissed at me for that.

36:49 And so basically You know, he came in, but then there was like he sent me a term sheet and it was like you get Two hundred K up front, and then if you hit these milestones, you get like another hundred K here, and it was like this really complicated. I was like, uh, I don't like this. Like we're growing a lot. And so ended up saying no and actually raising money instead. But he said to me during that lunch, he was like, You're like one of the biggest web two point oh companies. And like literally I thought

37:16 Is there a software I need to upgrade on my servers that makes me web two point oh? I was like, there's something I'm not aware of I need to upgrade because I'm not Web Two Po. I did not do that upgrade. Like I had never heard that term before. Which is so fascinating because to me And maybe it was a couple of years later. Dig was the embodiment of web two point oh. It was dynamic content, it was Ajax, it was user submitted content, it was what became social media. Oh dude, after I found out what it was, I was like, Of course I'm Web Two point oh. Yes. Yes. Yes, of course we are. I had no idea this stuff. No idea what it was Well it's this amazing thing that like I think the people who are the deepest

37:54 in a thing that's becoming a thing in the world. aren't the people who get to name it, which is the most fascinating thing. Like when we were interviewing Vlad from Webflow, he was like, Oh, I found out like two years ago that we were a no-code company. But like Our company's eleven years old, so Good to know about this no code thing. And now, of course, they like have embraced it and have the no code conference and all this stuff.

38:16 It's so cool. I mean, on your show, like you're having all these awesome N F T artists on. And I feel like that's their story, right? Like that like people like everybody that like Yeah, I don't know. Like I'm just making my art. Yeah, it it is one of those things that almost everyone a lot of entrepreneurs that I meet It's that's a dirty secret. It's like you go back and you look at these different covers of magazines and then it's great success and like No one really has a clue.

38:42 that they're ever gonna be as big as they become when you talk to the top companies that are out there. It's always like This should exist. I'm gonna go build it. But it's 99% of the time it's quite shocking that it gets as big as like you don't really plan that. It was kinda like I remember when the Uber first came out. It's like, uh, how many people are gonna get into other people's stranger's cars? Oh, I I guess it'll work for black cars. It'll work for black cars. That's that's what it'll be. And that and that was the launch. The plan was like black car service, like with an app. Like Never did the founders ever dream it was gonna be applied to

39:13 a random Toyota Corolla, you know, like it just that wasn't never imagined that you would feel comfortable. Well are you You must have known Garrett from this whole era, right? Garrett and I were really good friends and he had you know create stumble upon and we didn't see each other as competitive really, so We had always go Garren and I just like We're really close in the in the web two point oh days and we would just go have beers all the time and talk about features and and building out some of this stuff.

39:38 But then uh yeah, I later ended up dating his ex girlfriend and and then we kinda added a little that didn't go over so well. But we're we're cool now. So that's why you J Cal invested in Uber and Angel invest in Uber and you didn't. That would be a big reason why I didn't invest in Uber. But we're we're good now. It's like the dumb dumb shit you do in your twenties, you know. It's like it was it was such a small thing, though. Like you gotta remember that web two point oh And you know, this whole world It really isn't as big a startup scene as it is today. And so when we would go meet up at a bar, we'd say, Okay, okay, fly a bar into Visitaro and and SF.

40:17 Let's go hang out. Let's grab some beers. It was easy to grab Garrett from Stumble Upon and you know get Josh Echter from Delicious to show up to something, or, you know, Ev from Twitter or whatever, like we would just all hang, you know? So it wasn't like We never knew that these projects were gonna be that big. We were just having fun building software. Meanwhile, let me just insert a midpoint. So

40:39 Today. Tech is like the five biggest companies in the world. And Kevin, you're describing this era where like Basically all the people that run a lot of those big companies

40:49 Or started them, or were involved in the founding, or we're angel investors are like hanging out, getting beers. There's this interesting midpoint that I remember viscerally. Where I went to South by South West and I wanna say twenty eleven. And you and Alex were doing a live dignation at Stubbs Barbecue. Huge sort of like outdoor Like great barbecue, but like

41:11 Concert venue. And four thousand people. It was huge, and I'm pretty sure After you did the show, the Foo Fighters played. Was it the Foo Fighters? No, it w it was a big ban though.

41:23 I can was it the Foo Fighters? I don't know. I wasn't a fan of the Foo Fighters so maybe it was, but I remember there was a big band we had play one year that I was just kind of like I don't know I wasn't a huge fan and everyone was thought it was a big deal. And then we have the Walkman play another year.

41:40 Which I was a huge fan of. And so that was awesome. I stuck around for that one. I was like, Oh, this is really cool. But yeah, that well, that was the cool thing about South By, right? Is you have these big bands coming in because they would play music the next week And they'd come into town early and it was easy to book someone Like I remember Snoop Dogg was going and doing different South by things because he was gonna be out there anyway for the following music week or whatever. So It was easy to get a big name to come play your little podcast live show. Yeah. It still definitely accomplished this feeling, though, of me feeling like as someone who was totally following this all the from the outside'cause I was in high school and early college

42:17 In like O five to O nine and feeling like There's a bunch of insiders, and I'm not part of the insiders, but like They're like spinning distance away. Where like when I grow up, I want to be like one of them. That dignation moment where I was looking around at South by I was like Oh, this is like pretty mainstream.

42:36 This has become a part of culture. Dude, it shocked us all. Literally, we booked that venue and I'm like, I hope it looks like there's enough people here. Otherwise, this is gonna be a little awkward. We had no idea. that that many people would show up. And it was crazy because I brought my dad out to that show.

42:54 And my dad had really no clue. I mean, he had seen that we did these live dignations and And I kinda hid it from him because He didn't like me swear a lot, even though he swore, so it was just like what like you know, I think he'd be cool with it today if he was still around, but Anyway, he saw that show and saw the all those people And then when we left the venue

43:17 You know, all these people were back in the day trying to come up and get my autograph and all that stuff and like they kinda follow me out to the car that we were getting into. Which was just crazy'cause I was like a geek and it to have that kind of treatment was odd. But my dad saw that and he my dad was just Blown away. And he ended up passing away two years later. I remember just being like

43:37 You know, it was a special moment for me because we didn't have a whole lot growing up. And my dad was really proud. I'm just really glad I had that. I'm I'cause I didn't I didn't I decided to fly him out. I didn't know whether I should or not. And I and I was like, Okay, I should fly my dad out'cause he should be part of this and and it was just like it was the right call. Those are very special moments for me for sure. I bet. There's an interesting like

44:02 looking backwards moment there where that probably applies universally. It's almost always the right call. If you're like Should I do something that overextends myself financially or is you know, an inconvenience or something to have a family member come see something that could be special.

44:19 It's almost always the right thing to say yes. Yeah. And experiences, I would say, are are definitely like the number one thing to invest in. Like the the best money spent. All right, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done.

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46:12 And just tell'em. That Ben and David sent you. Well Gosh, I could do this absolutely forever. I do wanna talk about some web three stuff.

46:23 And I I wanna make the point and and I think we have a little interlude in in the middle where I wanna talk about before you became Mofi Kevin, but after Dig. There's some interesting chapters in there. A lot of the things that you're observing about that era. feel similar to what's going on in crypto right now. Like it's kind of the true believers. It's kind of everybody knows each other.

46:46 There seems to be a lot of like Real genuine information sharing and just like belief in a common purpose, even though everyone kind of interprets the purpose differently. Does it feel like that to you too? It does, yeah. I would say this is the first time since web two where I've felt

47:04 that type of connection and camaraderie around a new technology that the mainstream has yet to embrace. is starting to embrace but has yet to embrace And we're all early and we all see it and we all believe in it. And it's just a matter of time.

47:21 Yeah. Time creates confidence. It's interesting you feel like it's the first time since then. Cause you look at like all these theoretical waves since then that like the media and VCs were sort of calling the next big thing, some of which sort of have been, you know, machine learning.

47:38 is it you know a reasonable one. And like obviously there was the mobile wave after the sort of social wave. But the mobile wave felt like a a kind of land grab. It was very obvious. You know, the mobile way was something where when the iPhone came out, everyone's like, Oh, of of course this is gonna be huge. There was no doubt, you know, and it hit consumers' hands immediately, right? And so There was none of this you have to believe. It just

48:01 It was a given. Well it was also just it was an expansion of the existing web two dot oh market, really, right? Like Instagram was Flickr, right? Like WhatsApp was, you know, aim. Like it's not uh the analogies were one to one. Right, and then and then the big players were like, Okay, we'll just make apps, like Facebook made a mobile app and like Twitter made a mobile app and like that was just an easy kind of transition for them.

48:25 And and web three is very much like web two. When web two first came out, people were like, I don't know if this is gonna be big. What are these social network things about? Am I really gonna show people what I'm into by voting on things? Like there was a lot of like Just I I don't know that I believe this to be true. And w that's the same thing that's happening in web three now. Like does this crypto thing real? Is it really gonna scale? Are these NFTs really collectible? Is it just people you know, making up stuff and you know, there's a lot of doubt there. So I that's that's the kind of excitement'cause I love There's An excitement that you get when you see something early that you believe to be true, but everyone else disagrees with you. That's always kinda fun. And there's so many more entrepreneurs, like we said, like you know, NFT artists, entrepreneurs.

49:06 De Fi projects where like They're building stuff'cause they're like Oh. I'm in this community, this needs to exist. Right. Not like Hey, I've got this business plan, and there's this obvious, you know, seam I'm gonna go attack. It's true, where I'm a partner over there. We don't invest in business plans. We sit down with an entrepreneur, we listen to their their idea. We want it to be new, novel, exciting, and

49:27 If it works, it should be massive. And that's what we get excited about. We want to m em back incredible people building very ambitious things. Okay, so let's Talk about

49:39 Transitionary period. What was your journey like in crypto? Like when did you first hear about it? When did you buy your first Bitcoin? Like how did we go from The end of Dig to Mowfi. It's a great question. I'd have to go back and search Twitter. I think I first tweeted about Bitcoin in twenty twelve.

49:57 Have you ever searched your Gmail to try and figure out You can use like the before. search operator. This is kind of a fun thing to do, is like open your personal Gmail, search Bitcoin or crypto and figure out what the very first mention of it is in an email exchange.

50:14 Oh, that's interesting. The question is, yeah, I guess I would have had that in I had never even thought to do that. I mean, can we stop down for a second while I do that real quick? Yeah. Let's do it. Let's see here. So the first email I have about Bitcoin is June twelfth of twenty eleven.

50:30 And it's an angel investor business plan. Andre from Canada. says he likes Signation and Foundation and wanted to tell me about this idea around Bitcoin. That is the first Time that I actually see

50:46 It mentioned in my inbox. And then the first Coinbase transaction I have. Is From

50:57 Okay, yeah, so I apparently I tweeted out my Coinbase link to get referrals. And they were sending me on Tuesday August fourteenth of twenty twelve. I started receiving A tenth of a bitcoin, point one bitcoin. Oh my God.

51:15 Which it says this is what it says. Hi Kevin Rose, Coinbase just sent you point one zero BTC worth one dollar and thirteen USD. Using Coinbase. Hell yeah. Congratulations to your friend. And then there's the email address has verified their account on Coinbase. We've credited you point one BTC to your account. And so I was started getting a quarter of a bitcoin and then I have just like Dozens and dozens of those emails.

51:39 worth a dollar sixteen if it was a quarter. So Yeah. Bitcoin was pretty cheap back then. And that so that means that I had a a Coinbase account. back in mid twenty twelve. Okay. Awesome.

51:51 We're gonna get back to Coinbase in one sec, but we we gotta have one little digression. You mentioned foundation. It's Trent Razner, right? Is the music in the beginning. Yeah. Yeah, the Starting Music Hun Foundation. Yeah. That's another another little show I I did where I interviewed entrepreneurs. Okay, how did you get Trent Resner music? Well, he released that as a complete open source and he he got rid of all the rights. All the stems, right? Even the tracks. So the he had one album where he just released the entire thing to be used for any purpose. And we were doing

52:20 I don't know if he had commercial right. I don't think he would have said commercial rights in there, but we were non commercial. We weren't putting any ads in or anything, so We use that. I had a chance to go and and visit Trent at his house'cause we had him on for uh we used to do these before they were Ask Me Anything's we did these things uh called Dig Dialogue where people could vote up their favorite questions for people to ask. And so We had the community vote up their top questions for Trent Reznor and then I went and interviewed Trent and and that was uh that was a ton of fun.

52:47 Oh. That's so awesome. I like love searching old tweets and old emails, as you can tell. in preparing for this episode, I I think the first time I tweeted about Dig was a link to the dig dialogue with you and and Trent. Oh, that's awesome.

53:01 Yeah, that was a that was uh so much fun to do that show with him. His house is crazy. He's like the most rock star, coolest house ever. Like it's all dark and like leathery and cool looking dogs. Everything about his house is cool. He's such a pure artist. Yeah. Yeah, yes, well this crazy is like we were chatting and we're talking about like all this different stuff and we're we were walking out And he's like, Do you wanna see my recording studio? Like he's'cause he's got one in his house. You're like, nah, I gotta go. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like in my mind, I'm like, You don't understand. Like my high school years were all about nine snails and like some that was some of my favorite music and

53:37 And so I was like kinda nonchalantly, I was like I'm just like Yeah, yeah, you've got time, I'll check the recording studio. And so we like just walk down there and it's exactly what you expect. It's like you walk into this room, it's all soundproofed. And it's like racks of old analog equipment with like wires going between them, like a mad scientist like room. To be a fly in the wall in this room. It's just so cool. Like he's creating all this music with real analog electric signals running through. Yeah.

54:09 Yeah. Which is how all those guys used to do it. Like Fat Boy Slim and like there are a bunch of great documentaries out there at that era now, where like it wasn't It was digital, but it wasn't like like the source was analog. Right. Exactly. I love it.

54:23 All right, Kevin, bringing us back, I found your first three tweets with Bitcoin in it. In June twenty eleven, you tweeted Testing out Bitcoin. Can someone send a couple cents to this address? Thanks. And then you have uh A wallet address. Yeah, that address I lost the keys for. So you can look up that wallet address and I think there's over a bitcoin in there or something like that. So there's like

54:44 Whatever the prices are. Lost fifty critiques or something. You and everyone else, man. Yeah. I'll never recover that. If you pull up that tweet, please do not send any more Bitcoin in that direction. Second one for those asking about Bitcoin, this is also in June.

54:58 Uh more info here. We use coins.com. Still haven't got any coins. Must be doing something wrong. I was started mining, I think, back then. Oh. And then here it is, the big one, twenty twelve. Playing around with Coinbase, a new startup that hosts your Bitcoin wallet. Check it. Yeah, so that I was um Brian, I had him on foundation, Armstrong, the founder, And he I saw him at demo day uh at Y C and I told him I wanted to invest and I was uh investing at Google Ventures at the time.

55:29 And so I was a partner over Google Ventures. I brought that to the Google Ventures team. Uh I won't call it any partner in particular. Well let's just say one partner who I absolutely adore and I'm not gonna call them out, but if you hear this, I adore you. called it tulips and basically said that, you know, we can't

55:49 Yeah the the fear, and and this is a valid fear back then. And so I'm not slamming this person. You have Google corporate's money. What if you invest Google corporate's money into something that becomes or is called a scam later down the road? That does not look good for Google. Oh, this is like a great argument against corporate venture, because like that is basically what venture capital needs to do in consumer. Right. So

56:14 It's okay. I ended up investing in in Coinbase a little bit later personally, s that's it all worked out, but Brian's a awesome human. We got him some great early exposure through that foundation and I just am delighted that we helped get that company off the ground. Cause I know that foundation episode, he told me later, really recently, like maybe like three or four months ago, he told me People still refer to that foundation episode. where he was on as like the first time they actually got into crypto. So we got a lot of people on board and into cryptocurrency with that.

56:43 And on at the end of the day. That is the thing that gets me excited about doing the foundation podcasts, about doing podcasts around finance. The reason I don't take sponsors and I don't try to like monetize this stuff is like that's not what it's about for me at this point in the stage of my career. It's about getting more people on board and then excited about these new and upcoming technologies and h hopefully helping them avoid a lot of the crap that's out there. Cause with where any time there's money involved, There's people that are trying to scam and take advantage of others. And I wanna

57:12 put out content because there's a lot of that other content out there. You know, there's a lot of people on crypto twitter, not the the groups that I run in, but if you just go a layer or two deeper You'll see so much shilling and flipping and trying to like Pump and dump and like that's the stuff we need to get rid of. Do you have any hot takes?

57:31 On something that has a large user base, but you feel is pretty scammy. Well I would say that It depends on what the goal of the project is. Like there's a lot of knockoff projects that happen. Like

57:46 Dogecoin, for example, when it first got started, uh, I had Jackson Palmer, the founder, on my podcast as well and foundation. And It was meant to be A cryptocurrency that could be used as a way to More or less give away for good deeds. So people were using it to kinda tip.

58:05 There was all these Dogecoin tipping bots in Reddit. Vitalic uh A ton of Doge. Yeah, I mean people were like back in the Reddit days of when Doge first launched, people were using the tip bots and they would send You know, a thousand douge here, like two thousand here. Oh, that was a great comment. Here's five fifty douge. And so that's why the supply was so large, is they he wanted to create this enormous supply

58:26 So it wouldn't be hoarded. And it would just be thought of this fun thing to kind of like create this little tipping economy. And I thought that was a r a really cool idea and one that was worth playing around with. Now There is a lot of knock offs and clones of that.

58:45 with not the intention of pushing technology forward in any meaningful way. But with just the intention of price appreciation because They want to jump on Ride it. sell it, make money, and rinse and repeat. And you see that happening over and over. So those are the projects

59:02 that I think are to be avoided. You know, I d certainly believe that Doge did not have that intent. Uh I know that it they didn't have that intention when they launched. It was not a pump and dump scheme. It was just like Let's have fun with this and see where it takes us. And that was the thinking there. It makes total sense. I mean any time there's a new paradigm or a new opportunity Let's just phrase it as new paradigm.

59:23 Everyone's mindset has to shift. To become a believer in the new thing. look at web two. The easiest thing to do would be to say like No

59:34 Why would I submit stories that other people could see or even worse, I mean, I remember my parents, Ben, I'm sure you remember this being like Don't put your personal information on the internet. Like don't join Facebook. Which it turns out may actually be pretty good advice.

59:49 I should be more succinct. Anytime there's a paradigm. It requires a leap of faith to become a true believer in the new thing. And the earliest people that have to do that, there's the most upside for them because they get to be early to that thing, which could accrue them reputation or actual, you know, shares in whatever the new thing is, but it requires that leap. And so it's really easy. when you you are someone who's looking around and seeing other people become awakened to this new thing. to have some shister convince you

1:00:19 That Oh, you should just become awakened to my new thing too, that looks a lot like the legit awakening that's going on with other people that's paying big dividends for them. Right. And and I get that. I think that you have to ask your question, this is happening in the NFT spaces as well. you have to ask the question, like, what are the real motivations of this project? And so I will certainly miss some things that start off as a joke and eventually have real legs to them and evolve

1:00:49 into a place where they are innovating in some interesting capacity. that means multi-billion dollar kind of ideas out of a joke, right? Like that will happen. Communities will form And they will evolve and and make something that is is more than just that initial kind of uh hype cycle that happens or we see a lot of. But for me, when I evaluate new cryptocurrency projects,

1:01:13 I always look through the lens of One, is there a use case here that needs to be solved? that this company is going out and solving. Is it a credible team behind it? And is there discussion of price appreciation?

1:01:26 Is that the main topic? Because the the easiest way to see through a scam is to look what are people talking about? Are people talking about The mooning of the coin, the price going up. Or are they talking about why the underlying technology and what is being built is so important for the future of the world? And the if the conversation is around making money, there's a good chance you're in something that is gonna be some type of pum a dump or eventually just has the bottom fall out from underneath it. So

1:01:53 You know, that's how I try to evaluate things. And and it's a part of why I want to start focusing and having more NFT related content is because there's a lot of that happening in the NFT spaces as well now. Is like anyone armed with Photoshop Can instantly churn out ten thousand characters with different glasses and hats and goggles and all that other stuff, right?

1:02:13 And people they call it aping into something where you just like kinda go all in. people see this and they ape into something and You know, a community can be built around that and you can have some serious growth there, but I worry about the long term durability of these projects. Like is there gonna be so many of them that they just seem all like kind of copycats and clones.

1:02:38 And so for me that means I'm very selective. about which investments I place there. And I do consider them investments. You're talking about when you personally buy an N F T. Right, exactly. An NFT or or a cryptocurrency. But when I personally buy an NFT I'll say first and foremost

1:02:54 Well what's the price point? The price point is hundreds of dollars and it's something that, you know, you could afford to lose if you had to. Then I I wanna love the art. You know, I bought some cool cats like uh a few weeks ago. It wasn't because I thought were gonna be the next crypto punk. I just thought they were cute little characters and I like to swap out my avatar from time to time, right? And they had a great community that was following them and they had plans to launch other little cool cats related things. And I'm like, this is a fun little community. And so That is why I went in and bought a few of them.

1:03:24 at lower prices. And I'm okay with losing that money because there's no money to be lost. I'll always consider them fun little things that I can put in a digital frame or have them up around my house. And it it kind of marks a moment in time of when I thought that was cool. Right. So that's fine. Now when it comes to spending like real dollars and like actually making an investment, then I'm looking for more blue chip related stuff. And so that is in my mind projects that are not clones, but that were actually the first at something. Like, you know, the first fully on-chain generative artwork or, you know, crypto punks defining the ERC seven twenty one standard and being the first to kind of put that out there. I those are the projects I look at and saying Those will always historically look back and say those were important for this space if you believe in the NFT space. And I think they will have long term collectibility and and durability from a price standpoint. So that's how I I look at it when I'm buying those things.

1:04:21 It's funny. Implicit in what you're saying is the very same reason why the founders of some new groundbreaking consumer thing always have way more upside than any investors or anyone who comes later, it's because they were true believers in the thing for the value of the thing even before it had any notion of being an investment. That's right. And that's why Oftentimes

1:04:46 Anybody who's seeing a trend and saying, Oh, I gotta get in on that, and they develop their business plan just to use the same parlance that we used earlier. That's why there's always less opportunity there than for that like initial core. Sort of like community where there's a lot of heat. Right.

1:05:02 It also strikes me like men. The parallels to Modern art, right? Like you know, anybody can make a knockoff painting of a Campbell soup can or Marilyn Monroe, right? But nobody was doing that before in Warhol. It's just like such an obvious analogy here.

1:05:17 Yeah, I mean there's things on the NFT side that are are first, you know. There's certainly some of the programmability that you can do on NFTs and what's coming there is really interesting. there are gonna be new genres of art that are created, which is a very exciting thing. I mean This idea of generative art, like what's happening with art blocks and that the user doesn't know what they're going to receive when they make a purchase for the first time and that you know, that transaction hash is used as part of uh and fed into the algorithm that actually generates the art.

1:05:47 I mean that has never really been done before in a way that we could capture it and hold on to it. I mean it could have been prototyped and and done in a way that could be displayed, you know, a decade ago, but there was no way to like prove ownership and so Yeah, there's some really cool things that I I'm just seeing and I'm I'm excited for the depth that is going to be coming to NFTs. Rather than it just being about a place to mint a JPEG or a GIF, it's going to be

1:06:11 Or I guess it's called Gif. I always get corrected when I say that. Oh no, it's Gif. It's actually JIF. We had a whole debate on this. I I know technically, but like the developers that created it say it's JIF like the peanut butter. The community has wrestted control of this. Yeah. It it's crazy. But anyway, yeah, so there's some really cool, you know, new thinking there that I'm I'm excited to hopefully Invest in. Were you into art?

1:06:37 Before N F Ts? Yeah, I have been for quite some time. Not not in a deep way, but it's something that As someone that has built a bunch of projects I've always kind of been

1:06:49 a usability, a feature, and a a branding kind of person. So you know Everything that I've created n is always been the names that I've come up with, logos, things like that. Always work very closely with designers on iterating and kind of refining and So I'm someone that can appreciate it. And you know, I've I've always been a big fan of certain artists, but Yeah, this is just like a whole whole new level. These new digital first NFT artists like X Copy and some of the people that are just doing really

1:07:18 Bold fun things I I just get really excited about. I didn't realize it until Now but you're kind of the perfect person to really understand a lot of the value with NFTs because in a lot of ways you're an artist yourself. You look at a lot of the products you've built that have always had really strong design sensibility or literally been, you know, in things like watches. Or

1:07:39 I mean even the the more recent apps you've built with fasting and it's called Oak, right? Yes. Oak the meditation app. Yeah. It's very clear that You have a strong point of view on how something should look and feel and be as an object to use.

1:07:55 And also you have this great investing lens at True and formerly at Google Ventures and doing all these incredible angel investments, having been a founder. And so it really is this fascinating sort of convergence of art and investing and the internet that is kind of like this like Kevin Rose stew. I I like that stew. It's a good stupid. That's a great way to describe it. Yeah, th those are all the things that I care about. And for me, that's what makes doing these types of podcasts like just a lot of fun. That's why I want to produce more of this type of content is yeah, I love chatting with these artists and these founders and these creatives that are doing

1:08:29 new and exciting things and bringing that awareness to other people. So how I'm curious about how did you get hooked up with true? Did you know Ohm from the I knew Ohm from back in the day, yeah, and um He used to cover Dig a lot when he was a writer. But

1:08:43 True has actually backed and invested in my company Milk that I sold to Google Ventures. Then they went on to back. Hodinky and Zero and so they've they've backed several of my companies. And so I just met them in just Fell in love with the people there. I mean they they have a fantastic team of very low ego. Anyone that I worked with, I'm always I always walk away feeling like

1:09:07 Oh, that person has the longest view in the room to use a Sam Hinky parlance of uh Caring deeply about relationships above all else. I mean that's it exactly. There are such long term, long view kind of investors. We pride ourselves on in trying to take as all the pressure off the entrepreneur. You know, like we backed Matt Mulweg.

1:09:27 From WordPress fifteen years ago. And we still have a board seat and we still have stock and we're not saying, Hey, you have to go IPO or you have to sell like That's not in our DNA. We we want entrepreneurs to It's their baby. It's their company. We're just they invite us in. For the ride. So it's like who are we to go and try and force outcomes and do all the mean, nasty things you read that other VCs can and have done in the past. And so

1:09:51 I realized that working with true early on, you know, when I was going to sell to Google, it was gonna make a tiny bit of money for the investors, but not world changing money. And the partner I was working with was like, Kevin. This is your company. Do whatever you want, man. If you want to go sell it, then then sell it. If you think the time is right, like

1:10:08 Make it happen. And so It was just that kind of like It just makes me as an entrepreneur, you have so many things that you're trying to juggle on your head and wrestle with. And just knowing that your investors is not one of them is is one of the reasons why I was attracted. I I said I have to work with this group and so Yeah, that's how we got hooked up.

1:10:25 And you initially became a venture partner, right? And then transitioned into a full time Partner role. Yeah, I was a venture partner, so I was still building stuff. You know, I had built zero and then we decided to bring that and Mike Mazer took that over as CEO and then we funded it true. Wait, Mike Maser, your first boss? Mike Maser, yeah. The dude who hired you?

1:10:44 Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Mike and I have just remained friends for a long time. So I hired him to work for me at Dig. He he first hired me Then he um left the office uh company, went and started working in electronic arts, uh was a VP over there, uh, left EA was a VP at AOL for a while, left there, and then I hired him to run marketing and B D at Dig. Wow. And then eventually he's the one that got me into fasting.

1:11:12 Because he had he had uh about with uh really serious stage four cancer that he beat back and went into remission. uh and in conjunction with um chemotherapy also uh implemented fasting. So He's a big believer and so he took it over as um CEO. It's so cool. Oh, that's awesome. Okay, so

1:11:30 How did you make that call of you know, sitting in that emotionally of I'm a venture partner, so I'm helping to bring great entrepreneurs to the firm. It gives me lots of flexibility where I'm not Were you sitting on boards at that point? No.

1:11:43 So you're y you have time to sort of tinker and explore and start things and build and do media. And transitioning into that. you know, full time partner role to have investing be your day job. How did you make that call and how is that felt? Yeah. Well, I will say I I was sitting on boards just not related to true. So I was on the board of Hodinki and Harlan Estate and the Tony Hawk Found and a few other things, but like I was just it was w one of these things where

1:12:09 Building is a lot of work and it just it is one of those things that you have to kind of go all in and give it your all. And so for me We had just had our first kid and I was just at this point in my life where I realized that I didn't want to go and do another startup. So that's kind of the venture role thing is like you're trying to figure it out.

1:12:33 Like, should I do another start up? Should should they fund me again? Should I go into this and And I thought, you know, I want I want to optimize quality of life a little bit more. And so I was like, you know what, I think I'm going to come on and and if they'd had me, I'd be an investor there. And they were like, Yes, hell yeah, let's make it happen. And so I I joined uh full time a couple of years ago and have been doing Deals ever since.

1:12:54 That's really cool. Are you looking at Crypto stuff in particular. Yeah, I would say that Ninety five percent of my day job is evaluating cryptocurrency or blockchain related companies.

1:13:07 along with NFT related stuff. So, you know, we've probably deployed I had to guess probably seventy five million this year into blockchain related startups. Wow. And so it's it's it's a decent chunk. We have a seven hundred and fifty ish million dollar fund, so it's a big chunk of our fund. Yeah, ten percent of a fund in a particular industry is pretty heavy. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty well diversified in that that spreads across a whole slew of different protocols and coins and DeFi and scaling solutions and

1:13:36 you know, N F T projects and like a a bunch of different things there. So But yeah, we're we're firm believers in the future of blockchain. There's no doubt that this technology is gonna change everything, especially the financial and collectibles world. And gaming as well. All right listeners.

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1:15:39 Okay, so this brings us to I think the perfect place to start to wrap here is um Yeah, Mopi. Obvio I mean I think you've explained throughout the whole thing why you're doing it, this whole conversation. Where does it go from here?

1:15:51 You know, you could just keep doing what you're doing. And it would be great. It's got magic. It's wonderful. But it's also like it's all about crypto and web three. And It feels like there's also so much more that

1:16:03 what used to be social media can become in you know, web three world. Like how how are you thinking about it? Like you could have a Dow, you could B. Doing all sorts of stuff. Yeah, it's a good question. And I think that

1:16:16 I'm starting to see kind of two individual worlds starting to separate a bit. So In some sense you have traditional cryptocurrency scaling solutions and DeFi in one bucket, and then you have all the craziness that's happening with NFTs in another bucket. So I'm actually going to be launching a new podcast.

1:16:38 If I don't already have enough podcasts. That is dedicated to all things NFTs. So just NFT content. Awesome. Yeah, it's gonna be called proof. So it's proof.xyz. Uh is the domain name. Oh, that's awesome. Thank you. Um, yeah, so I'm excited. Proof is gonna be just going really deep on all things NFTs, and that will cover You know, everything from

1:17:01 the art and programmable side of things, to the generative side, to you know, tokens that cover Dows and what DAOs are doing to the gaming world and how NFTs unlock different assets and how people are buying virtual land as NFTs. We'll we'll just cover it all there. Yeah. And then Modern Finance the podcast. We'll still do on occasional little really important piece on NFT. So like the you won't miss the people that listen to that won't miss out on the the big deeper like people of the world or when you have someone really big on that you want to get out there.

1:17:33 But that will focus more on on everything that's happening on DeFi and scaling and new coins and and that that world. So I just was getting a lot of There were two camps there's people saying Give me more NFT content. And then there's the other camp being like Hey, get back to some of that crypto that we miss. And I'm like, I can't please everybody, so I gotta I gotta break it. It's funny. We're getting that unacquired a little bit of like

1:17:54 Hey, give me more of that uh you know, uh Atari like the classic tech history. Or even just redo. Non crypto stuff and people are like give me more crypto stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So it's you you know what I'm talking about. It's like you can't please everybody. So for me it's just easy to to carve out a separate feed and And say, listen, the best of the best from proof, like the big names will always make it to the main modern finance podcast, but If you want to hear about the new and upcoming artist that hasn't broken out yet, but I think is really cool because they're doing something unique and novel, you're gonna find it on the Proof Podcast. So it should be fun.

1:18:25 Okay, so like nerd out a little bit. What's your strategy for launching? Are you gonna have like Do the first couple of episodes of proof in the Mofi feed and then spin it out. Yeah, most likely what I'm gonna do is make an announcement. I have the CEO of Super Rare. which is one of the big NFT platforms that I just recorded.

1:18:43 I'll announce it at the beginning of that episode when we drop it on MoFi and then people can go subscribe. I'll probably backdate and put all of the mo the um NFT content that we have in MoFi into the new feed. So if you come into that feed, people can always jump back in time and say, Oh, I want to listen to that interview with Snowflow the founder of Art Blocks and the building to jump back and hear that or h hear when I interviewed the founder of CryptoPunk, or whatever it may be. So It'll be pre populated with probably five or six episodes. And then I'll start releasing a new NFT episode hopefully every week to week and a half.

1:19:17 And I would say probably one a month or so of those will make it to the main modern finance feed. And if you subscribe to both, you'll know you're like, Oh, I already listened to that one. I don't need to Clicking on Mofi. But then Mofi will be more just like

1:19:30 big name people uh in the crypto industry, both in terms of creators and then People that are analyzing it and where it's going. And so I want, you know, talking through where DeFi is about how it's evolving and some of the new and interesting projects and And more of that. So yeah, it's gonna be a lot of work, but This is the stuff I love to do'cause I I feel like Both of these industries are are filled with confusion.

1:19:51 Confusion and a lot of hype and a lot of you know, back in the member the ICO uh world a few years ago, there were so many scammy projects there and it's like I hope that people can come in and know to trust me that I would not wanna promote something that that is a scam or that is just there for the hype, but actually, you know, I while I'll always call out why why they're they're on the show and why I think it's worth covering, you know. So it won't be everything. It'll be a subset of what's out there. I'm so glad you're doing this because I would say I've been a latecomer in almost everything in crypto. But I guess in some ways all of us who are currently participating in the ecosystem are

1:20:27 early adopters because there's gonna be ten to a hundred X more people after us. But I would say it took me listening to the Beeple episode and which is so good, by the way. Everything I've listened to. Oh my God. Beeple. What a character. I love that character. I just want his accent. Like I want his like uh manner of speech. It's so fun. Oh my God, he's the best. He's hilarious. I mean y you couldn't It couldn't have happened to a nicer, crazier dude. Truly. But it took me listening to that and several other of your NFT episodes for it to kinda click.

1:20:59 When NFTs first started becoming buzzy I was definitely one of those people that was like Uh the whole point of digital art is that it's infinitely reproducible. And like, why would I pay for something? I can view on Insta I I was definitely one of those people. And I think it took me till hearing people first of all Learning about the artists behind the art.

1:21:18 is actually the value. feeling close to those artists and why they're doing what they're doing, that is the reason to buy it, at least in my opinion. And sure it's cool and it's fun to look at, but it it was also the realization that he brought up of like, People aren't buying NFTs. People finally have a vehicle to value digital artwork. And like digital art has been a thing for like 10, 15, 20 years, kind of in this format, but there's been no incentive to make it since it's just infinitely replicable and easy to rip off.

1:21:51 And finally, now there's like an incentive for artists to make incredibly cool stuff and rare stuff. in a way that is totally driving the level of creativity and innovation here because there is actually now an incentive for it. Yeah, there's so many pieces that uh unpack. That is a major one. You nailed it.

1:22:10 But then there's also just imagine We're y sadly, you know, I you say I'm a little older than you guys. You guys are old too. Oh yo yeah, we're there there is a younger generation that grew up skinning their characters and games and are so used to purchasing and holding virtual objects and virtual goods. And it There was a a survey that was done that there is a very large subset of gamers that consider It was like more than fifty percent. It was something really scary. They consider their online identity in their games to be m more important than their offline, like in person identity. Wow. And so

1:22:47 You have this world Which actually makes total sense, like when you think about it. It it makes total sense. And you have this world of people that have grown up digitally native that say I want to be able to show my friends something cool on my phone that I own. And and when they get older, they're gonna say, Or flip it up on my wall and have it as something I can show my wall. And guess what? If the house burns down, I don't lose my my painting or and I don't have to worry for me, I think about when my kids walk by something, I don't have to worry about them taking a marker to it. You know, it's like There's just so many beautiful

1:23:20 aspects to the portability and how you can showcase your favorite pieces of art. And also just how you can unlock the potential. Like when they're programmable. What if my art changes over time and the artist bakes in certain things that unlock it the longer I own it? Like some of that is just so cool. So There's so many aspects to

1:23:41 this ecosystem that what NFTs brings to the table that you can't have with traditional art. that I think are gonna take another decade or for or so for people to really wrap their head around. Do you know that back in the day, so when people moved From when Canvas was created. Do you know that there's a huge blowback on it? No. Yeah, there's a huge blowback on Canvas because everything was painted on walls or on these like wooden um Yeah, frescoes. Yeah. So to move to Canvas

1:24:08 Many people thought during that time It's portable, why wouldn't you want something permanent? it's like it can be taken and copied. Like there was all these like worries around movie. So a lot of canvas art was actually worth less than things that were actually in a more permanent you know, on the wood or on the on the wall. So it was just like this transition that happened and it took a while for people to finally adopt candidates. Amazing. I just thought that was a hilarious story. And like the same thing's happening here, you know? Oh bad.

1:24:37 That's so cool. I just love that like there's something really cool about being able to walk into a gallery Or bar or wherever you are. see something on the wall and being like, wow, that artist really connects with me. Oh, it's seven hundred dollars worth of ETH? Scan a code.

1:24:54 It transfers to your wallet, it disappears from the wall, something else appears there, and now you own it. Like that's freaking cool. Like that is gonna happen, you know? Well, okay, thinking here about the future of Mofi, Kevin, you're too much of a tinkerer to just let it be that the final form of Mofi is like I record an MP three and then I toss it into some podcast players.

1:25:17 So like Is there an on-chain version of Content. Media Something that could make sense for Mo Fi.

1:25:27 Good question. That's a very, very sharp uh and pointed smart question that I of course I think about that type of stuff. That's it I don't think of it as much for Mofi as I do for something like Proof. Where I think

1:25:41 What can we do That is unique. And Well, you'll just have to wait and see. I can wait and see. I went and built, you know, Hodinki for a few years and and Hodinki was a a kind of a prox for

1:25:53 what proof might eventually become. And like we you know, we did really in depth. editorial around mechanical time keeping and watches and That

1:26:04 attracted millions of people per month. Still does. I mean it's uh there's a hundred and fifty people that work at Hodinki right now. It's a massive enterprise. Hodinki has this unbelievable characteristic. I think You guys Do or did this. best in the entire world of using content to enrich the value of purchasable goods.

1:26:22 It is half a content business, half a commerce business. And they are so wonderfully intertwined. More people should take a look at that. Yeah, I mean Hodinki, they got that blend. And honestly, one of the things that we were really good at, Ben the founder, and myself, when we sat down and we started planning out e commerce, we wanted to make sure there was kind of a church and state line between editorial and e commerce because it's very important

1:26:47 to be able to have independent critical pieces written about watches that you may sell. And so we had to make sure and draw that line in the sand and say and let the brands know that like we can be critical about your watches still and and talk about them like if we don't like the way that something is manufactured or you cut corners on some one of your movements and I mean it gets really geeky for people that aren't into the watch world. Think about like the mechanical insides of the watch.

1:27:14 And then think about the most hardcore vintage Porsche collector. They care about every little tiny detail inside of that machine. That is the engine inside of this watch. And so the geeks And that's why partially why I'm attracted to it. Like Some of my favorite watches are not expensive.

1:27:32 showing off watches are watches that you would never get any attention at a party in New York, but they're meaningful because of what's inside of them. You know when you go and you pick up an Omega that has a three twenty one movement. That was the exact internal engine, the exact movement that was taken to the moon. Whoa like that is awesome. And so like that's the kind of geekiness that got me excited about watches.

1:27:57 And that's what I want to bring to the NFT world. I wanna talk and go deep on with these artists and talk about what drives them And it how they created some of the first, especially when we're on the programmability of the stuff. Like it's gonna be really fascinating. Eventually when I have Demetrion that created one of the most popular projects out there called Ringers. I wanna see code snippets of the Ringers project and put that into the article and show

1:28:19 I mean that's the geeky level I wanna get to. So that's where I'm hoping to take proof. And what's so cool but well, I don't know if this is how you're thinking about things, but like With watches. It's like this little preview of what it could be. But the thing about watches is, you know, n the super rare stuff, you know, it's hard to get my dad's really into watches. Hi dad, if you're listening. But you can also kinda buy it anywhere, right? Like you don't have to buy it at Hudinky. Like you can buy it at Hudinky, you can buy it elsewhere.

1:28:44 Right. That may or may not be true, depending on where you go with Proof. Like it's not like a retail environment. Right. Yeah, I mean the thing is for us with proof, what I think about is

1:28:55 And this is what Hodinki did as well. I don't think of these businesses being built in the next six months to a year. We need to spend the first three years gaining trust. Right. Like that's the main thing is like in depth editorial and content that is is worth reading and a brand that you can trust to bring the best artist to you. And explain why they're the best. And that means b above and beyond me. I'm gonna be looking to hire

1:29:18 editorial folks that are both traditionally and classically trained art critics That are also embracing the NFT world. And give us both perspectives. You know, like we need to know um why something might be historically important when it comes to the new stuff that's being created on the NFT front. So

1:29:34 It's gonna be a fun little adventure. Alright, well I've found a whole new thing that I'm imagining I'm gonna be very geeky about. So uh I'm excited to listen and tune in, Kevin. Awesome. Well, that's you're the first listener. Thank you so much. Sweet. It hasn't it hasn't been it's not out yet. So or it might be by the time this podcast is out, but there's certainly be a way to proof dot XYZ? Yeah, proof.xyz. There'll be a link up there to subscribe to the podcast, even if there isn't an episode out yet. There will be the the historic ones that we've done so far. So That'll be the the best way to to join. And then of course modern dot finance is For all things crypto. And that's where we go deep on all of the crypto stuff and

1:30:11 And that that's a whole nother can of worms that's a lot of fun. That's awesome. Probably our biggest segment of the acquired audiences Entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs.

1:30:21 Where can folks get in touch with you for that or or with true. We typically I would say ninety percent of our deals come from referrals from entrepreneurs that we've already backed. So we have a little over three hundred entrepreneurs that are kind of referring in new companies to us. So we you kind of use that as a filter'cause if you just had an open submit form, you would just you would be overwhelmed and it'd be impossible to get through. So if you know a true company, that's the easiest way to get a hold of us.

1:30:49 I would say outside of that, you know, my DMs are always open on Twitter. I try to go through them like once a week, but sometimes it gets a little crazy. For me specifically, I'm looking at all the new cryptocurrency blockchain related and NFT related deals. So if it's something outside of that realm, unless it's like health and fitness. Which I also am very passionate about, or some consumer internet stuff as well. I'm probably not the right partner for you to all to pitch, but

1:31:15 Yeah, that that's those are probably the best ways, definitely through the network of uh founders who backed. Love it. Okay, one last little tidbit before we go. He said Twitter. Had to get on uh

1:31:25 The um Who to follow list? suggested follow list that happened at the bar in San Francisco. Yeah, that happened at Ted. So at Ted in we were down in Ted conference. This was when it was down in SoCal And it was me, Evan Williams, uh, and Chris Saka at a bar having some drinks. And this is when Twitter first started taking off. We were just talking to Ever like, dude, this is crazy, man. There's like thousands of people signing up per day. Like it's nuts, you know? Like at that point I think it was like, you know, he's probably hitting ten thousand plus new users a day. It was like it was clearly working, you know?

1:31:57 And Saka's like Hey, do you do you think you you know you think you can add Kevin and I to the suggested user list? And it'cause it was like um It was a manual list. And so it was one of those things where you it was just hard coded. It was no like algorithm like doing it. Yeah.

1:32:12 And so Ev's like he look looks at us and he's like All right. And so he pulls out his phone and he literally does it right there on his phone. And he's like, Okay, done. And we're like, Thanks, dude. And like I had turned on notifications for any time someone follows me because that's how small it was And instantly my phone was like boom boom boom boom boom I'm like holy crap dude

1:32:34 This is taken off and I like went and turned off that the notifications And I was just like getting so many followers and Then It was it was just like, you know, it kept growing and growing and growing and th they kept that suggested user was kinda the same for a very long time.

1:32:49 And then I got this retweet. From this woman This was like a month or two later and I like looked at the icon I was like, That girl's kinda cute and I like click on her and And it was like

1:33:01 Foodie lives in San Francisco, into wine, into health and fitness. No way. Working on her neuroscience PhD. And I was like, Oh, who is this? And it was my my now wife, Daria And it was all because Ev added me to the suggested user list. And actually at my wedding, I told Eve that like I specially called him out and said thank you for and Saka for for making that happen because it's how how I met my wife. I hope he did something like really nice. Can you get him like a Beeble or something or like a Crypto Punk? I'll have to see if he's into NFTs. I haven't ask him about that.

1:33:37 I haven't seen him as much now that that we've had Covid, but uh Uh, there should be a gift. I know I've sent him some nice bottles of wine in the past, so That is so cool. I feel like you gotta do more than one. No, that's a good point. It's a good point. You have like one of the best stories at a party behind the statement like oh my wife and I met online. Yeah.

1:33:58 Definitely this was before I you know, I'm kinda jealous though of these people that have it it seems like it's easier these days. Like I didn't have any of the swiping stuff that was like, you know, to date. Like mine was all Back in my day it was a twenty four by twenty four icon on Twitter that we use for dating. You had to upvote your future one. Yeah, exactly. Uh Now the crypto punks make more sense. Yeah. It's true. Uh love it. All right, Kevin Rose.

1:34:24 Thank you so much. Thank you guys. Thanks for having me. This has been a blast. It's always fun to walk through the history of all this stuff and and talk about the future. So so thank you. All right. Likewise. All right listeners.

1:34:38 Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI powered experiences at scale. Yeah. In the crazy speed of today's AI world. Shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly.

1:35:04 The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next. This is where StatsIG comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed. to how users actually behaved. So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. Well, listeners, thank you for joining us on that journey. That was so awesome to get to do this with Kevin, as you could tell. So much of David and my uh

1:35:46 I don't know, adolescence, young adulthood was involved in things that Kevin has built. So super cool to get to do that with him. Super, super cool. I have one special carve out for the end of this episode. It is a company that we at PSL Ventures just invested in. We led a five million dollar round in a company called Trova Trip out of Speaking of Portland. Yeah.

1:36:09 And I am so Pumped about this company. And I just wanted to share a little bit because I think A people should think about going on trips. But B, I think it's an incredibly cool company to work for if anybody's thinking about their next thing, whether you're software engineer or designer or marketer or whatever.

1:36:26 So what Troba Trip does is they enable creators to create custom trips to over a hundred places around the world. And take eight to sixteen people from their audience. on a group trip together.

1:36:41 So you're traveling with like minded people to cool places with a person that you sort of identify with, be it a yoga instructor or your favorite disc golfer or someone else that you follow on Instagram or TikTok or anything like that. And it's just a really cool upending of the sort of group travel industry and especially now when travel is actually starting to happen again. So it seems like uh it's it's just great timing and great team. Oh man, this is so cool. We totally need to get an acquired uh trip code. We've got to do all the all the Silicon Valley hot. Well now after this episode we gotta go find that bar on on De Visitero in San Francisco where apparently everything went down in uh

1:37:19 The web two dot oh days, but uh Oh man, we can go to Stanford, we can go to the old pro in Palo Alto, go to Bucks and Woodside. Oh man. Actually, David, you and I We almost went to Bucks one time, right? We went to that spot next door. No, we looked in, it was full, we ended up going to that other lunch place next door. To the like the bakery. Yeah. The woodside bakery or whatever it is. Yeah. Oh man. Okay, we got to do it. We gotta take you to Bucks. Well, we gotta do it just so you and I can go to Bucks.

1:37:45 Bucks is a crazy experience. This like diner in Woodside, uh which is right right next to Palo Alto. That has like all these crazy like airplanes on the ceilings and stuff and like all the old school like the Don Valentine era. Venture, and even a little later too, like All the entrepreneurs and VCs would meet up there for breakfast.

1:38:04 It sounds like David's gonna be our tour guy. This is great. I am gonna love David. Awesome. Well, listeners, if you are curious to learn more, it's Trovatrip.com, click the link in the show notes or feel free to reach out to me in the Slack. or at acquired fm at gmail.com if uh you're interested in the company in any way. Well with that Join the Slack, acquire dot Fm slash Slack.

1:38:27 Become an LP. We just dropped Probably our nerdiest LP episode ever. where we had Matt McBrady on who uh has worked in presidential administrations for hedge funds advising on uh monetary policy

1:38:43 to basically walk us through like the history of the Fed and the Fed's role in our economy and the difference between fiscal monetary policy and what the heck is quantitative easing, and for such a hot button uh topic right now is great to get like an expert two hour chunk of information on what are all these concepts and how do they interrelate. Why does everybody like Try and interpret Jerome Powell's every last word and why doesn't JP just say what he means like there are reasons for this. Oh so cool.

1:39:12 Thought it was. And also check out Modern Finance. It's seriously really good. I've listened to almost every episode. Yep. Like we talked about, the Beeple episode is so great. We'll link to that in the show notes. Man, what a cool dude. And not what you would like just think on the surface. Like he's y you gotta listen to it. Like he's awesome. Careful, you'll become a uh an FT believer after you do. Which is a good thing. Alright, listeners, we will see you next time. We'll see you next time.

1:39:39 Who got the truth? Is it you, is it you, is it you who we got Oh.

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