How to Scale a Profitable Agency with 0 Employees (Using AI Agents)

0:00 My brain kind of exploded a little bit. I was like, Oh, so any business you could flip the sales model on its head. Absolutely. You could basically instead of reaching out saying, Hey, would you like me to maybe do this for you if you pay me and hire me? And versus saying Check this out. I made this for you. Yes. You wanna work with me? That's right. Obviously that's gonna be a better sales fix, but now AI made that scalable. That was not scalable. Exactly right. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to

0:25 I think about Matt Maz you, I think about I think about the word early. So whether it was Investing in companies early. You got you know, you were part of a portfolio that had Uber, had Twitter, had Yeah, tons of hits.

0:42 And You're early at CAA to the internet trend. Yeah. Like you were saying, like the first one to sign kind of like YouTuber talent to a traditional Hollywood agency or get Hollywood talent to put stuff online. Now you're early ish and early uh on the AI train. Like you've been texting me photos of myself and my house, but redesigned using a like AI style agent. So can we talk about this? Well it starts with my wife making fun of me. She's like your entire closet is black and white. You don't buy clothes ever

1:14 Like you default to the same exact things. It's like a laughable thing. So Uh we took a we took a few months and lived in Japan and Korea. And everyone on every corner is the most stylish person you ever seen. They're all put together. I'm like, what is it that they all look like? They're out of a magazine and I look a schlub. And I realized that I've just never taken the time to do it. So I'm like, fine, I'm gonna t I'm gonna try to train this AI model. Oh three, which is spectacular now, and has all the vision modeling.

1:39 I'm gonna try to train it like a Korean color theorist. And that's where I'm gonna start. Have you ever heard of these things? So I've seen on TikTok the idea of color theory. Yeah, they like hold up a bunch of swatches and they're like, This one brings out your skin, and this one c clashes, avoid these. Dude, it's like an allergy test for fashion. That's right. Perfect example. And like people spend like hundreds, thousands of dollars doing it. And if you get a stylist in the US, it's like hundreds or thousands of dollars. It's like if again, it's one of these classic like things rich people do that eventually like AI will open to everybody. Right. I'm like, I'm gonna see if the visual models are good enough. So I run the color theory on myself and my wife. And It tells me okay, you're a

2:14 Soft autumn, which You know, I was gonna say that. I appreciate that. For what it's worth, you're a dark winter, which I think is super super interesting. But for me, it was like here are your here are your primary colors. And then I was like, Okay, great. Well, like what do I need to avoid? And then it gives me a list of like colors that I gotta wear and it tells me how to put them together. And as I dig further and further into it, I'm like, Oh, can you like Give me a capsule collection that I could do. And I'm like Give me brands that I that I like. Here's my here's my measurements on like brands that I wear. Here's how I think about it. And I'm like, my wife and I are doing this and we start like building it for each other. And then we start productizing it for friends.

2:48 And so you sent it to me and you were like you basically sent me a An AI version of me. Yeah. And then it had me dressed up way better than I actually dress up. Yeah. And then it was like, Yeah, you can just like push a button and it'll buy this outfit. That's where we're going to. So like it's not there yet. And this is part of why like people laugh at like the AI rapper, but I actually think like there's a huge moment in time to just be like the rapper. You be the rapper and sell the service, sell the outcome. And like Do the work for somebody before they even ask for it. Like I didn't ask you for selfies. I just found selfies of you. I didn't ask you for like your fashion sense and your color do you want a color theory? I just ran color theory on you. Right. And like I gave you a final output of like Here's a bunch of looks that you're gonna look great in.

3:28 And I got to the end point of what you actually want. So let's put the style thing over here for a second. Because this is golden nugget. To me, number one. This is the one I picked up from you in the last Which is Just k in key insight.

3:41 Which is that AI is not just a product, it can actually be AI can be the the the the go the go to market. So what you're doing is very, very smart. And I think you have a few ideas that are In this bucket. But You're like all right. What if instead of just using AI to to do the job

3:57 I use AI to sell The customer to get the customer on board. And what you're doing is you're basically saying Instead of I I as a customer have to find you decide if I want to try it, sign up, pay you, and then you do the work. What you're doing is you're saying

4:11 Let me just grab pictures of you. Let me grab pictures of your house and then you got my house off Zillow or whatever. And then you were like Hey, here's here's what your house could look like. Wanna use my service. Yeah. And that like do the work up front. Yeah. Seems to be like That's not casual advice. My brain kind of exploded a little bit. I was like, Oh, so any business

4:30 Any business now you can flip the sales model on its head. You could basically instead of reaching out saying, Hey, would you like me to maybe do this for you if you pay me and hire me? And versus saying Check this out. I made this for you. Yes. You want to work with me? Obviously that's gonna be a better sales page, but now AI made that scalable. That was not scalable. Exactly right. Uh, I think you've nailed it. Like that's actually the thing that triggered for me, which is like When I think about like uh new technology unlocks, like I'm I try to think about like

4:56 Did it come with a distribution unlock too? Right. Like I got to start investing at a time when like mobile and social got birth and like both of them came with totally new distribution mechanics. Like the feed, the algorithm, social sharing, the app store were all like These greenfield distribution hacks. Gotcha. So not just apps are new, but App store is also new. That's right. Not just doing a a connected tool, but oh wait, social sharing, which is gonna make this thing. Zinga lets you like share natively as part of the product. Not just a social game, it's a social share. That's right. All of it was baked natively into the product. A I doesn't really come with that, right? AI has like

5:31 This is why the incumbents are moving so fast. It like makes your existing product distribution much better, right? You can add auto suggest, auto correct, you can like put Gemini in every product. You can tell your Gmail to like just respond as if you're me and like do all of these things. And if you're ChatGPT, like you've You were novel enough and early enough and powerful enough that you're now the dominant and default for the for the category. But it didn't come with like new distribution for everybody yet, right? Like there was the G G custom GPTs that was like trying to get there. There's MCP that's like trying to get the, but nothing obvious. But what did change was it let you do the work in advance. The cost of work drops. The cost of work drops so dramatically that instead of selling the promise, you can just sell the finished work. Right. And so you sell the proof instead. I think a lot of people are still stuck in this paradigm of like, you know how there's like all those headshot apps that came around? Like that's kind of a perfect example. It's like

6:23 Let's say nowadays it's like two to three cents to create like a high res headshot, right? Right. Everybody was creating these like Headshot products. And saying, I'll make headshots for you. And you still have to go in and use the tools to make the headshots and upload the thing. But like their photos are out there. Right.

6:40 Like there's probably an addressable market of like called 10 million, super high intent. Like they all need headshots. Right. You know exactly who they're. You can audit LinkedIn and just be like, their headshots are terrible. Like we can make it much better. That's your target market and you could literally just for like A penny. Two pennies, like create a low res version. Right. Of it.

6:58 And sell it direct. Don't ask them, Do you want to set up a whole new headshot? Just do the thing. Give them a new headshot. And then use that as the entry point to a whole other part of the business. Like I'll do the rest of your LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn could be optimized. Right. The the second order service can be the service that you actually end up selling, but you close them You got the opportunity to meet with them and close them on those other things because you gave them the value without ever having to have it. So you could

7:23 Theoretically what you could do is you could basically say, I'm gonna do the color theory part. Proactively and for for essentially free for everybody. And then I might even suggest a couple of looks. Yeah. And then if you actually if I can do it for you every day. Do you want it every day? Yeah. And you want me to keep track of things that are in s in style? Do you want to personalize it over time? Right.

7:43 Like those seem like that's the that's the s up cell, but the kind of the the initial cell It's pretty powerful. And then you string it together with tools like Clay or whatever, which is like mass mass personalized outreach. Yeah. So what okay, so what do you have now as an entrepreneur? Now you have the ability to say, All right, for any given market, let's just take real estate agents as a market. Yeah. Okay, I know who the agents are, I know what their listings are. Yeah. Let's say I had an app that could um with AI could take your photos off your listing and I could stitch it together into a cool like Instagram ready.

8:12 Real. Perfect. All right. Easy. I can then go I can go into a tool like Clay. And I can say that. Real estate agents, California.

8:20 I can get all those, I can put an AI agent that will go scrape all their listings. Yeah. Because that's all publicly available. Get their listings, get their photos. You do the AI wrapper thing, which says stitch these photos into a social video, social optimized video. And then I s literally just email that person, hey Steve. Saw you had that listing on four ten Montgomery Way. Built you a real I built you a real for it. Uh I think it'll be really great. You could share this on your Instagram.

8:45 Um, you know, hope you hope you like it. Let me know if you have any suggested changes. And the guy could be like, wow, this is incredible. Be like, cool. Would you like me to be doing this for all your listings? I think this actually helped you sell. Sign up for this th and like That sales process. is now like what a totally deer does versus what a sales guy does. That's right. Let's do another example because when I heard what you were doing, which we haven't talked about on this yet, but that's okay.

9:07 I texted Ben and I go, Ben, this is a billion dollar secret. Because if you actually learn like a differentiated scalable Sales mechanic. It's like our friends who started doing Google ads back in like Oh five and they're like, dude, I used to buy clicks for a penny. And like, you know, f fa friends who were doing e commerce on Facebook back when it was like, you know, one dollar CPM. Yeah right. Or less than a dollar CPM. It's like those are billion dollar secrets that like there's this arbitrage that can exist right now where

9:32 This new sales model, new distribution model. That's less tap today. Yeah. So what what's a What's an example where you could use this? Enterprise software is like you're you're either helping them make more money, save money, or save time. And it's like Most businesses are

9:47 pretty focused on the first of those, like just help somebody make more money. And so you can kind of go and help almost anybody. generate new business, generate new clients. Right. And so Like the exercise could just be like, Hey, I delivered you new clients. Like, imagine I am the person running sales for company X. You can do this with O three.

10:06 I want to help them generate new business. What are two or three new innovative ways that I could use O three to generate business for this company? Just do that playbook. For every business. It could be like start a listserv that targets all of the potential customers of that client. It could be Create an Instagram account that like highlights that business. Don't even ask permission. Be like

10:28 best HVAC service destin right and like create an Instagram account for that person. I do it at scale. And it like if anybody comes in as DMs be like, hey, I got three new customers potentially for you. Right. I think those kinds of arbitrages like now exist for basically every company. Right. Cause there's gonna be this lag. There's always a lag between like what's possible today and like how long it takes the average person to end up figuring it out. Wha what do you think uh so you you had some ideas that you had sent me. One of the ideas you talked about, uh you gave me a bullet point, which is

10:58 I think it's called the the Mario Mario Kart theory. What's what is the Mario Kart theory, man? Yeah, the Mario Kart theory is uh this is actually like you could have made a lot of money in tech over the last handful of years. Um, or at least in the SaaS. If you just followed this one, if you just follow followed like Everything's better in multiplayer. Like uh like build things that are like multiplayer by default. Like Figma Notion, uh Air table. Slack. Slack. Like take the communication tools or the the enterprise tooling and like make it real time and and uh And cloud based, those things have network effects to them. Those things like instead of Mario Kart's better with friends. Mario Kart's better with friends. And so like

11:33 But like if I look at AI today, it's all siloed. It's almost all like I'm having an individual conversation. Like where's Where's like group chat GPT? Like

11:43 You and I are in a conversation all the time. Like, why isn't GPT in there with us? Yeah. Why isn't it living with us in those social moments? Why do I never see your ex exhaust out of your feed? Like there's a bunch of stuff you'd be fine with sharing. Like There's a bunch of stuff that we'd all get better at. Like Mid Journey was right. Mid Journey like built like it's almost like lost to history of three years ago that mini journey was like on Discord. They w they were social by default. That you had channels where you could see everybody's like outputs. Yeah. And it was like Kind of a magical experience, but almost nothing else went that direction.

12:16 Like It's all Isolated and private and like hidden and like It's a it's like a travesty that like the outputs

12:26 for the free tier of GPT are Private by default. Mid journey's a great example of Bad is better. 'Cause it's like a product design, you're like, Wait, so okay, cool, I download your app, like no.

12:38 You open up Discord, you join our Discord. And in the Discord there's gonna be A thousand channels? You know there's different numbers. Just hop into any one. And there's a flood of absolute random people generating absolute random images. Yeah. But it was actually kind of amazing'cause you go in And suddenly you're inspired. You see like

12:56 So that guy's using this to design t shirts. This person's creating like anime. And then you see that same person change their prompt and make their images better. You're like, Oh, I never thought to add that to my problem. Let me copy paste that. So we were all teaching each other the thing. And this is like You know, this is not the like Chef's kiss.

13:13 product design looks sweet in a mock up like No but it was just like the hacky way to get going, but it actually had this tremendous bet like the The one thing it was great at which is putting you around other people doing the same thing, outweighed all of the downsides of uh you know the the that initial user experience. And they could focus on just making the model better. Didn't have to focus on like

13:33 Front end resources and how to think about it. And like just we know it's not perfect. Right. We'll eventually get to the thing. But that was like model five or six by the time they built the destination site. Right. And it frankly feels like less social to me in a lot of ways. They have the feed there, but I'm not like seeing it the same way that I saw when it was native in Discord. And so I bet there's a bunch of tooling like that. Like the style uh style idea would probably be better as a social environment in Discord. Like you and I are different color types, similar body types. Maybe we should have the similar channel for our like for our area. Because if I saw you actually Like This would actually be kind of magical, right? Like if I went in and um let's just pretend I was also soft autumn and I'm like I'm in with my soft autumn.

14:14 The soft autumn boys. We have our our channel. And I see you actually like proactively doing stuff. Yeah. And you're prompting it. You're like, Oh, I got a wedding coming up. And you prompt it, it gives you a really good recommendation. You actually like take action on it. You upload a photo of you in it. I'm like, damn, that actually worked out actually look good. Now your success kind of like triggers me Inspires me, teaches me how to use the tool.

14:35 And then I go back in and use it. Like that's a fundamentally better experience. A more it's gonna be a more powerful experience than That's right. You doing this on your own, me having to discover this, learn this, remember to use it. And then get the only the benefits are siloed in my experience, right? I redesigned your house like from Zillow photos. I'm like, that's a probably better in a social experience, right? Like I just delivered you the work. Right. Like I used to have to sell you on the idea that I'm a great designer and call call my references. Right.

15:01 Don't do any of that. Here's a here, do you like this room? I can do the rest of your rooms. Right. You have a different budget, you have iterations, I can do it all for you. But should that should live in a social environment. Almost all of these experiences outside of like the health ones and the legal ones are probably good enough that like A free social tier would be like accretive to the value. And like right now we're all like these bonobos, like you ever see the videos of bonobos with like the ants on a stick? Like th they're like they're like the first example of like two tool you spreading. Right. And it's like they put the ants they put the stick in the tree, they get the ants out, and the b another banana's like that looks like an ant lollipop. I like that. Right. And they the go and do the next thing and it's like instead

15:39 We're like cut off from everybody else. And so I'm the only one eating the ant lollipop and nobody else gets it. I feel like that's a really big idea. Like I think you could without Don't need to make a model. You don't even really need to make a new use case. You just have to like

15:54 Design a social experience of the same use case. Social by default is always better. Right. So Is there anyone doing this right now? Like is there any like have you seen any cool social Like I wanna basically take something like Claude, which Claude is so powerful. Claud's kinda losing the race of the individual user thing.

16:14 But I'm just thinking like what would be the Figma type of experience where you You know, what would be the use case? Like is it something like with work? So for example Um, you know, I have a lot of friends. We're all looking at how we can use AI in our yeah in our company. Everybody's kinda. self doing the law the stick in the l in the tree to get the ants where it's like

16:33 Oh, you set up a thing where you connected it to your calendar and it Yeah, the workflows. It researches who you're meeting with and then it sends you the brief through text message and then you have that and Like. Oh, I want that. How did you set that up? And I have to like ask them for tutorial where it's I really should just be able to fork that. Yeah. Right. Like and that's what I think Gumloop and some of these other guys are gonna get towards where like one person makes a great workflow. It's like that problem should now be solved for the rest of us. Yeah. We should just be able to fork that.

16:58 People are doing I mean like Xapier, there's tons of like uh recipes or whatever for like workflows that you can use. The thing that's missing is the social proof. The thing that's missing is like how many people liked it, what are the comments on it like. What are the likes? What are the like the remixes that you're doing? Who's using it? Like if you're using it, that's a big signal for me. Like if I'm doing it and I'm like getting value out of this fashion, right? Like that's probably a good signal for you. Like Those are things that like I think tip people and it's what's missing like these were like lessons of web web two point oh that are kinda like

17:28 Gone. Like we we've almost like collectively forgotten a bunch of these things that were like, Oh, social by default. Like makes a ton of sense. Like all the social apps, all the like a iOS apps went social. It feels like collective for like forgetting. Right. Um and some it does feel like a big market gap. You know,

17:46 One of the th Picked up from you is that you have this like your process is sort of like I Go try to do a thing. Yeah. First hand experience. In doing so, I run into the problems of doing that thing. Maybe it's like styling yourself or whatever it is. Yeah.

18:03 And then and then learn by building. Yeah. And like I it's so funny'cause I thought of you because you started your career with like CAA and you're like This like kind of charming guy from L you live in LA. I just thought it you I was like, this is like Hollywood pretty boy. And like Actually you're more of hacker tinker, yeah, no you focus on the pretty boy parts. But you're actually like a hacker tinkerer type. And I'm curious. I don't know the full story, but like I would bet.

18:29 that that's led to some very good things in your career, even though you're not building the end company. Yeah. But it's the learning by tinkering that led you to the investment, that led you to the opportunity. Can you tell a story that Yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh during Covid, I uh I have a buddy, Brian Wagner, he's like one of the best product guys I've ever met. I like Uh back in the day, uh he was building a company. I was like, that's not the right company, but this is a guy who just like I want to spend time around because like we just love I love jamming with him. I love the way he thought about it. And so we'd always like built different products together. It was like our weekend hang, it was like the thing that we would do. And uh During Covid we got obsessed with this idea of A product called Road Trip, which is like a music listening product that you co listening. And it was like you could talk while listening to music. And it's like it was this experience where like when we got into it, um

19:14 We would be in a room and I don't know if you've experienced this, uh you probably sit on a phone for like five minutes of silence two minutes of silence and it's like, I gotta get off this phone call. It's like the most awkward thing. But if you sit in the si uh in a room with somebody and there's music playing, it takes all of the edge out. And you could last for like hours in a room with a grown man and have like a conversation that dips in and out as long as there's music playing in the background. It's almost like the music creates the substrate that lets you pay attention. And we started building this thing and um You know It ended up not working. We couldn't figure out retention. Turns out live is really friggin' hard. Synchronous is really, really hard. But In the process of building it, we're like, God.

19:49 Firebase just sucks. Firebase sucks. Every like it's like I'm in the Google universe. Like everything is tied to the U universe. Like if somebody at Brian, I remember this moment where he's like, dude, if ever you see a company, I was you know investing early stage of code too. It's like, dude, if you ever see a company that is like And open source Postgres, like fire base alternative, like That's our ticket.

20:11 A week later. By the way, from the outside it just seemed like uh solved problem. Firebase does this. Yeah. It's probably fine, right? If you weren't building, you wouldn't know. I would never have thought I would never have thought. He's like, man, we built so many social products. It's like every time you gotta go through the same thing. It's like you're stuck in this like Firebase universe. And then eventually you try to sit like cycle off of it and it's like a pain in the ass to migrate and you ever do it and They weren't upgrading the product a lot. Now they're actually putting a little bit more attention because it's like their replet competitor. But at the time there was like no Development there. And so uh

20:42 couple of weeks later it's like Y C I'm looking at the list of the Y C companies. I'm just ripping through it. And I'm like Super base. Open source firebase alternative. Right. And I'm like

20:52 Okay, this is just this this feels like a a great moment in time. And I'm talking to I'm talking to one of my partners. He's like, I love this idea. And uh and Ben Tossel, who's like an incredible tinkerer builder investor out there, uh was an angel in the company, made the connection and we ended up leading the seed round at at Co and Did a a series A there as well. And um It's a great company. I love those founders. And I I think it'll be a great uh investment. But I never would have gotten close. I never would have thought about That idea.

21:20 If I hadn't experienced the pain first. And so do you when you're going into them, is it like I'm doing this to learn or I'm doing this'cause I think this is the next big hit and it just turns out that's wrong. And then the learning was like the consolation prize. Like Mentally, how do you approach that? It's Curiosity sometimes. It's because I'm solving a problem. It's because I have an idea that's been sitting on me and nagging at me, and I just gotta build it and get it off my brain. Sometimes it's like I just think this is gonna be a category where that's gonna be huge and I have to like understand it. Like I built a live or a video shopping.

21:49 Product. Okay. Um I got obsessed. So I'd spent a lot of time with the team at Bite Dance. Uh And I one of the I used to spend like a Few hours a month. And we would share notes on like what I saw coming in the US and what they saw coming out of China. And it was just like a really fun jam with like the team at Bite Dance.

22:06 One of those sessions we spent on Like video commerce. And I was just like, you know, it was like four years ago, five years ago and I was like This is gonna be just like such it was such a massive category in China, and nobody had cracked the nut in the US. And you've seen attempts at it. And I was like, it just feels like

22:23 Somebody's like we're all just Close on it. Um, I was like, I'm gonna go build in that space so I can understand why it's not working here and like what's broken here. And so I built like a my my wife is a a Korean expert and knows beauty really well. So we built like a the first shop we built was like around Korean beauty products. And I like went through the whole process. I went and found wholesale. I went and spent hours at like different Korean beauty shops to like get a sense of like what were the products and like what was the full stack of a Korean beauty process. They told me how shitty my skin was uh and like I went through the whole process with them. And built the store on TikTok and like did the fulfillment myself and was like going down. Cause I think that's like that's one, it's fun to learn these things. Two, the only way to do it is get close to the metal of it. And if you just approach it out of curiosity, like it's just a win no matter what. It I it maybe it turns into an interesting business. And at the very least, you've like seen what the pain points there.

23:12 Most VCs don't do this. Do they? I don't know. Everybody's got a different process. I think like My process has always been like I will be better at understanding the pain points.

23:23 I think it'll resonate more with the founders if I can talk like cogently talk about how I've used the product. Like those things matter. And it's like You're you have more authenticity. And it's like I don't know if other V people do this, but it's like my best way of learning. Like I actually know what the product does. I actually use the product. And it like makes me better. Like when I was talking to Amjad.

23:43 From Replet. From Replit, who you did an awesome pod with, by the way. I love that that episode. Uh I love that product. I uh we were lucky enough to lead the series being I was a board member at at Replit. And uh partially because like I love tinkering. It was like a tinkerer's dream that you would never like never have to worry. And I was technical ish. But like never could have built like uh some of the products that I wanted to build. And it's like the idea that Replit would help me get closer to being able to unlock that felt like something that everybody would want. Turns out it was like perfect timing for like the entire AI wave as well. But like the way I got to to spend time with Omjad was like I was just using the product. Like the first meeting I ever did, I built a REPL was like. Free to hang. And as like I learned Python to like

24:21 in a repo that I could like, you know, pick a meeting time and it was like V C courtship, I like it. So what's their story with with Replet and with Omjad because uh He seems like a real force of nature. Like when he came on the podcast we I just really

24:37 Like he just seemed impressive to me. got a shot to build one of these like generational companies and I don't know if Replit will I invest in it. I hope it succeeds. I think it could succeed, but like I just think He was really unique and that product was really unique and the story of how he got there. The origin story is amazing. I mean what just stood out to you from him or that's I mean just that he was always h it wasn't like a new thing for him. He like didn't have access

25:01 to, you know, to the tools of technology knew how powerful they would be and would like find whatever way possible like working in like PC bongs or whatever in like in his hometown and like to like just get access to the computer. It was like the same thing that like, you know, the when when people were like spending time at like the research labs in s you know in Silicon Valley to like get access to their first computers. It felt like he was going through that like hero's journey. Right. Just to get access to computers. As a kid in Jordan. As a kid in Jordan. And then like, you know, uh And then he was obsessed with like spreading it to everybody. So he was like one of the first guys at uh what's it called? Code Academy in like, you know He was it was like the mixture of true believer. Technical enough to build it.

25:40 knew what the pain points were for him and for like everybody else who was coming up, has like real mission to like make a billion like there's gonna be a billion developers. And if he has anything to do with it, he's like gonna get to that endpoint. And then He's almost like a an endurance athlete in the sense that he's willing to wade through like

25:59 bordom. Like there's like it's sexy now because like there's replet agent and like you can build your idea and you can vibe code. And it's like it feels like a wild roller coaster ride right now. But it was like years of Wading through like school, like going to schools, building tools for teachers to teach kids how to code and like the infrastructure needed to full stack it and a religion around the fact that you had to full stack it, you couldn't outsource these things. And it was like All that minutia would like there's a lot of people out there who are like, I'm gonna build the ultimate vibe coding platform. It's like You know this whole moment where we're in it, like where it's like the idea guy's time and like everybody's like, now's the time for the idea guy. It's like the idea guy, like now you get to skip like what was the first six months to validate the thing. But it really just gets you to the the entrance of the maze.

26:45 Right. And it's like now you've got to go through like idea guy. Welcome. Welcome, you ready? Yeah, you up for this? Because the maze sucks. And you're gonna tear apart every idea. It's all that matters is like the number of iterations on the experiment you can run and like ripping that idea you had in half and like telling like the world telling you your idea is garbage and like giving you the feedback that like is brutal and honest from your customers that they hate your idea. And it's like maybe there's a kernel of something from that idea that leads you to the next one. It's like The idea guys time has come and that like we can validate ideas really fast. But it's like I don't know if you've experienced this, but like just because you can build the thing, like and we've moved from like your Apple notes to like reples with the ideas fully.

27:25 The MVP's built doesn't mean that you want to spend the next, you know decade eating glass for that world. I have a lot of friends who are like idea guy, builder, product people who are like, I'm just looking for the person who wants to take this idea over. Right. Like, no, that's actually the job. Yeah. It's like the job is the, you know, going and spending time like courting a dentist to sell them a product. It's the same thing with people who are like, uh Taste is all that matters now. Oh, dude, the taste copers are even more, it's even they're on sale of the idea guys. They're like, No, no, I don't even make the idea. I just judge the idea. I hear another person talk about taste in this market. You know, you ever read the articles of Lee Sadal from a decade ago. Do you know this story, Matt? Oh my God, it's it's an epic story. Lee Sadal is like the Korean master of ghosts.

28:11 Okay. Do you understand this moment that happened a decade ago with Alpha Go. Alpha Go. It's like everybody's like best at Go. Chess Chess is a known thing, but no one will ever get to Alpha Go. And it's like there's more possibilities in AlphaGo than there are atoms in the universe was like the quote. Yeah, this is the quote. It's like at least it all's, you know, that we're safe. And it's like You know, Lisa D all plays Alpha Go, and at some point Alpha Go makes a move and it's like this absurd move that nobody's like, This is a AlphaGo made a mistake. You know, all those possibilities have made a mistake. And it's like seventy eight moves later, the Alpha Go beats the shit out of the human and like he's sitting there looking at the mirror. He retires. It's like a sad story. Like he retires and it's like You know, the quotes are things like I never truly scratch the surface of Go. And it's like, you know, I'm embarrassed and I feel helpless, like the feelings of helplessness. And it's like

28:57 I feel like everyone, you know, is gonna have that moment. And it's like All those people who are talking about VC safe, it's like it's all about taste and psychology. All those people are gonna experience like a taste moment where it's like least it all where they're gonna be least it all and they're gonna have a moment where it's like you're gonna present their taste. And the AI's haste to the end consumer, because ultimately taste is in the eye of the consumer. It's in the eye of the customer. And it's like

29:22 They are the ones that are arbiters of taste. You think you're a taste maker until you put like the burger in front of the person like actually I like this burger more. It's like, but that's a McDonald's burger. You're like Yeah. I like the McDonald's burger. Billions of people like a McDonald's burger more than you're like, you know, Saint Charles for Charles Burger. And it's like I prefer this thing. And so

29:43 You might you know it might not win the award. But it wins the p the choice of the consumer. And so I think all these people who are like Taste. Is our salvation.

29:53 Are gonna get leased at all. It's gonna hurt real it's gonna hurt real bad. They're gonna run into the brick wall of consumer choice on taste. Well, dude, this just happened. Like remember I don't know, rewind five, seven years ago. And it was like self driving cars, what people working on. Yeah. What's gonna happen to the truck drivers? We it was like the truck drivers and the grocery store checkout people was like You know, we're just gonna have to find'em new jobs.

30:17 And then all of a sudden like Dolly and these other tools came out was like oh shit. It's actually us first. It's us first. It's the graphic designers, the copywriters, the like you know the like what were the first things that actually chat GPT and like the modern wave of tools were good at is like Writing. They did like the fake podcast of Joe Rogan talking to Steve Jobs. I was like, Oh, podcaster. All right, that's gone. It's just a matter of time, you know? And and so

30:40 I don't really think there's really any Sort of like safe space. Yeah. But I definitely don't think it's the um Oh, I have I have unique taste'cause you're right, like Whether the AI maybe has better taste or it takes one million shots on goal.

30:54 Yeah. While you take one and it's just gonna play the law like the law of large numbers and get it get it right just by doing so many variations. Like I tried to write a movie script. I was like, Oh, I want to write the opening scene of this idea for this movie I have. Yeah. And so I'm like sit down. I'm like, Oh shoot, like the idea was really great. I told like five people they do like that's incredible. This is great. You should do this. And then I sit down and I actually have to do the work.

31:16 I'm like, Oh my god, this is so hard. How do I what a Where do I start? Yeah. Are they in a cafe, or are they in a bar? Where where do the characters what do they say? And so I go to ChatGPT and I upload a script of the social network. And I upload like all of Aaron uh Sorkins like work. And I'm like, all right. You're kinda like Aaron Storkin.

31:32 But you're also me. And uh you get here's the idea for the movie. Give me a draft. Gives me a draft. Kinda sucks. I'm like Give me another one. Gives me another one instantaneously with no with no uh ego about it. Gives me another one, gives me another one, gives me another one. And it eventually like it got pretty good. At doing that scene and pretty good measure by your p your taste. By my taste as your taste of what you enjoyed, right? But what I'm saying is like even if

31:55 Let's say my taste maybe is right or maybe it's wrong, either way. It did 10 attempts before I could even lift a finger. The volume was there. The volume is gonna win. In a taste game, it does it take a hundred thousand shots on goal. Same thing with like ads, right? Like If you look at like fashion brands that do good with Facebook ads. Go look at their ad library.

32:11 It's not like they have one David Ogilvy sitting in the room and he just comes up with this One beautiful ad. They're running like A thousand ads in a catalogue. Quantitatively testing which one for gets the highest row as and they're doubling down on that. It's so funny because like we've gotten over the idea of taste in all these like really fuzzy areas of like human consumption. And it's like taste on video taste. Like turns out like people preferred the algorithm of bite dance and TikTok to like your following your, you know, programming on television. Like your years of study of what people

32:43 are you know, enjoying got replaced like big by like the algo. Um, you know, yet I can't tell you how many mistakes I watched. Uh the algo is literally the definition of taste. It's your and it's already proven that the algo dominates That's right. You know Whether it's editors inside the company or it's me for myself, it's better than than I'm what I could do for myself even. It's funny, and we make these mistakes all the time. I'm watching I mean, you could argue that Apple lost the entire podcast business based on like Based on their

33:13 their religion around taste. Like Apple throwing that. Apple started the entire podcast movement. Right? Like they owned every podcast got launched. on Apple, right? And they were like, we really on the other side of Apple, they're like, we really need to own the future of entertainment.

33:29 And they're like What is the future of entertainment? It's like. Great shows. It's HBO. It's taste.

33:36 That's tasteful. Creators, tasteful makers, like things that are just like no slop. No slop. But On the other side of the house The n the volume was being made. by people that didn't look like

33:49 The top Hollywood creators. And all of them No no product iteration, no help for monetization, no like featuring of them, no studio production, no tools, no budgets, no like give them that metrics and data back. None of the things that you would do if you had like a million free creators doing things and building awesome audiences that turns out can now sway elections. And all of them start on your platform. And then you fast forward it's like where's the where's the most of that consumption? It's like YouTube.

34:18 And Spotify. You're like they Fumbled and they fumbled because like they didn't think it was tasteful. And they missed it. And it's like YouTube back in the day did the same thing. They actually had

34:27 half a billion dollars for content. They was like the original, right? The originals. It was like a half a billion dollars and they came to all the agencies and say We want your best creators. And we all went and pitched them five million dollar channels and they gave a big budget. And then

34:43 They gave like five million dollars for the native creators like Phil DeFranco and Michelle Fawn got like little touches of like cash here and there, like The only channels left standing were the creators, the native creators. It didn't match the taste profile of like the advertisers that were upstream of all of this shit. But They were the ones creating stuff that people wanted.

35:03 I mean, Sam Altman's got like the initiation point for basically every new business that's getting built, right? And he turns out he ran Y C for a long time. We're not like that far away from him saying like, hey, why not just build like a funding model into A the next GPT and be like somebody's talking about starting a business. I actually like that business. Like, do you think it'll make money? Let's provide them like credits. Let's provide him a little bit of funding to get going. And like

35:25 I don't know, does that change how investment works? Is that Maybe like upstream of all of the taste makers. So what do you think it looks like? Let's say AI just keeps getting better. Yeah.

35:35 There's no there's no uh life raft for t the taste guys or the idea guys or the whatever, like Yeah, he's getting better at all these things. And you're gonna ha you know, so what happens? What happens to us? What what do you do? How do you think about that? I think you just c keep creating things that people want and like you know, use the tools to piece them together. And it's like just get to the final get to the answer faster. Like do customers want this thing and give them co give the customers what they want. That's true North. Like build something people want. Like it's the Y C mantra. It's like

36:03 Build a product people want. And it's like, how fast can you get the product to people that they want? And like, how many times can you iterate on the thing so that eventually you get the thing that people want? And it's like just laser focus on that and cut everything else out of your life and like That's how you build most of these like scaling businesses. Right. And it's To me that's like uh That's never gonna go away. People are always gonna want things, and you can use these tools to provide those things to them. And it's probably a good arb for the for the next long while like we got a long period of time before this stuff filters through the economy.

36:33 Because it's not how fast the technology's moving, it's how fast people adjust. Their reality and their habits. And that's like the friction that actually exists here. Technology is mind boggling. But like my mom learning how to second brain is like. Even you and I learn how to second brain is really hard. Do you uh do you have any other AI sort of theories or frameworks that that are interesting that you've been noodling on? Yeah, I've I've only I've made uh I made three A investments post Code. Um

36:59 uh as an angel. All of them follow the same kind of four framework. Um One of them is to a buddy of ours in the in the travel space. And the other two are founders that I back before. Um, but all of them are basically agent platforms. Um One's called Cognition, which is like the maker of a product called Devon. And the founder, Scott, was a founder that I backed once before. And Scott is like a genius, correct? Actual genius. Among many things. One of the one of the things I was riffing on was like, it's possible that Devin is just Scott in the background answering all the coding questions. Cause he's so good. Um

37:35 And then another product is uh called Augment. It's Harish Abbott. And Harish was a founder of a company that I was on board of called Deliver, which was like Third party logistics for everyone. It was like Amazon Prime for everybody. He worked at Amazon in fulfillment and then built uh Deliver and sold it to Shopify. for a couple billion dollars and like Harish is one of those humans where like If you could imagine what the ultimate like logistics hire would be.

37:58 you would hire Harish. No detail escapes him. He doesn't mind staring into the depths of like a warehouse and figuring out how to optimize. Every minute detail of like product comes in, where does it go? What platform? How do you get optimized? What's the routing down to the minute? Like He's that brain. It's just his it's his gift. It's his dark gift. Um

38:18 And so both of these people, actually all three of these people, have these dark gifts. Um where it's like you could never in your wildest dreams hire Scott. You could never hire Harish to do your logistics. But what you can do now is they've like, they've built these platforms that are agentic. And so it's like, imagine if like the reinforcement training was done by the ultimate employee and that was priced at tokens. What does that actually mean? So like they're building a agent.

38:42 That's gonna be like let's say your logistics. Yeah. But he himself is literally like kind of auditing the like the answers. We've done it at Amazon. We did it deliver. Like I know all the details. Now you've got a company that's an SMB, it's an ecom, and it's like you don't know the knowledge that I have. But I can program it into

39:08 into an agent. So that like all the workflows that you're eventually gonna have to do, this agent can help you with. And it'll give you the the things that would otherwise take you a lot of time, even if you were the best in the world at. It'll do those things automatically for you. And so I think we're moving to this world where like

39:23 the best the best at a task will be able to productize themselves as these agents. And delivered. So You know, when social media came out Yeah. One of the cool things that happen, one of the reasons why there's this word influencer. Is because

39:38 Prior to social. the only people you knew who did a thing were the people around you. You were limited by your geography. Yeah. And the internet The superpower of the internet is that it vaporized geography. So You know, like We when we had a baby we're following these like

39:51 it mom influencer types who are teaching you like how to like get your baby to sleep and like little tips on you know swaddles and diapers and all these little things. Like I'm getting the best Yeah. Mom coaching and dad coaching. Yeah. From Like not just my geography, but like the world. And those people became so the best teachers

40:10 We're not teaching in schools anymore. The best teachers were teaching on Instagram and YouTube and other places like that, and they were getting millions and millions of followers because like the best teacher actually should have a few million students. Yeah. And so the best got rewarded in that way. And so that's what the internet you know, like like last Fifteen years as done.

40:28 And now with agents, it's kind of the same thing. It's like the best employee. You're no longer limited to who you can afford or who's nearby you, who you can hire locally. But actually like no globally, who's the best at travel planning and booking. Who's the best at l logistics uh uh you know workflows, planning and analysis. Who's the best coding engineer. Who's the best who's the best engineer you know, right? It's actually not who's the best engineer is who's the best engineer Period. Yeah. He can program himself in the same way that like

40:53 content creators were able to like make pieces of content that scaled. And you know, I can go to sleep and millions of people can listen to this podcast. And now they're doing that with like A piece of software, a piece of code that's gonna actually like Take their brain and be like, Yo, I got I got that guy's brain here in this piece of Yeah, and do the digital work that they would have done for you. Right.

41:10 And they can now and just like the best teachers have millions of students. The best employees now actually work for millions of companies is what what's gonna end up happening. Yeah. That's amazing. I want to do some stories with you. Yeah.

41:22 Oh, this is a scary. Some pictures. These are scary. We're gonna draw a card, and then I want is there people that you've encountered in your life. I want you to tell me some stories. Or story time? Pick a card, yeah. I'd show the camera. Who'd you get? I got Peter Teal. Peter Teal. Do you have any Peter Teal uh either lessons learned, funny encounters, interesting stories, seeing him in action. What you got on Peter Teal? Uh the only time I've ever encountered Peter Peter Teal was on in the opportunity to invest in Replit. We were both going for the opportunity.

41:50 And I think when you go against somebody like Peter Thiel Um you plan to lose in most cases. Uh and I didn't I didn't end up uh losing the opportunity to invest in Replit. And I think

42:05 Part of it. is like the realization that like Any given Sunday. in in in a lot of games. Like a lot of people count themselves out. But on any given Sunday you have the opportunity to

42:16 To to pull out a W. And um I I love that product. I love it authentically. Like I use it all the time.

42:25 I love the vision of like empowering like a billion people to build the companies that they want to build. And to like I feel this really like the tinkerer's dilemma of like, I'm not an expert, but I wish that I were and I wish I could bring this idea to life. And that software is this like bicycle and I don't I'm like on I'm on a I'm on a tricycle. I'm on like training wheels at best. And like this thing makes you feel like you're on a motorcycle. And it's like, I love that feeling. And if you can tell that feeling to somebody and get them as excited about it as you are and use the product and obsess over the details of it. Like I would send Omjad like Every product thought I had, every like I'd have like I'd have shower thoughts about it. I was like

43:06 You know, whatever and it wasn't like work. It wasn't like, you know, the art of the VC deal. It was like I just genuinely I genuinely loved it. And then I think there was a moment where like Where he was like, I can have a guy who's probably the one of the best at On you know. investors of all time.

43:22 Or I can have Matt. And Matt loves me. And and uh And that was his choice. Um, and so I think that's the I think the lesson is like

43:35 If you if you really do the work and you really love it, like you might not win them all. But any given Sunday you could pull out the dub. Bondo. Who you got? David Bonderman.

43:47 Okay, tell his st who is he and what David Bonnerman interacts with him. David Bonnerman um passed recently. Um David Bonderman uh was the founder of TPG. David Bonderman. Uh was a guy I got to know.

43:59 Um later in life he worked with a a very close friend and mentor of mine, um, named Rick S. And he was during during my sabbatical, one of the things that I did was like, I'm just gonna go and try to spend time with people. Who I've always admired and never really gotten to to meet.

44:15 And David was on the short list. David had ultimately been part of the group that acquired. uh a majority position in CAA. And I gotten my first exposure to him there. And he had just had this like incredible storied career of like How he you know, he ultimately, you know, it was

44:31 huge investor in like the airline industry and you know, uh had owned sports teams and was like a titan of industry and did it his way. And what was his come up, by the way? Cause like you know that's cool stuff you do at the at the top of the mountain? Well he worked for the Bass family and he was like a he like helped build in like the investment strategy for the Bass family in Texas. And ultimately like pivoted that into I think the first investment was like Continental Airlines, where he made his first real Like Buku exit. And ultimately ended up building T P G into like one of the titans of the private equity industry.

45:03 And I got to spend a bunch of time with David, like hours at a time. He was like the kind of guy where like he was late in life, but He still had it. Like he had he'd have these days where he was just like as hot and fired up as anything. And so Some days it would just be like let's just spend time talking about his job and his career and like lessons along the way. And then other times, sorry, how how did you do this? So you're on your sabbatical. You're like, I want to spend time with this but what'd you you call'em up, you're like, Hey, can I just come hang for a couple of days? What do you say? I called Rick Hess and Rick was building a uh a a new strategy uh for investing. I was just helping friends. And he was like

45:34 Um I was spending time. Do you mean You know, doing w I treated like all of my friends and family kind of like Um I was I was still in the portfolio VC mind. I was like, I'm gonna treat'em all like portfolio companies. I'm just gonna go do things for them that matter and help.

45:48 So like I would help friends like start companies. I would like go over and clean out the garage. I would like just I had time for the first time in my twenty years. And like I just wanted to spend time with people that I loved. And I had a list. I wrote a list of all the people and I like would say, Hey, I I have time for the next couple of weeks. Can I help you on something? And so Rick was like, Well, I'm building this thing and I'm partnering with David. He's like, Why don't we Go over and talk to him about it. And one of those trips he was like, Hey, David's really interested in AI. Will you like put together

46:14 Some thoughts. And I was like A hundred percent. And so I got to go and spend like a three hour session with Bondo. And I was just like laying out where I saw AI going. I'm like showing him Mid Journey. I'm showing him like ChatGPT, you know, and and like just walking him through all the new products.

46:30 And uh And he's just silently like kind of like riffing on it and like asking a couple questions here and there. And um And at the end, he's like, So what are you gonna do? I'm like, I don't know, I'm gonna invest in a couple of friends who are smart and and building stuff here. I'm like, What would you do? And he goes I'd buy railroads.

46:47 And I'm like, Okay, this guy's maybe maybe he's just gone crazy. Maybe he's gone crazy. I'm like I didn't understand what he meant. I'm like, I you gotta explain that to me. I don't know what the hell you're you're talking about. He goes Well, there's two ways to play it. One is

47:02 These the world is moving so fast that everything is changing. And it's like if you build software today or you build a product today, it feels like it's moving so fast that it could be obsolete in six months. And so that's shifting sand. You can play towards the bleeding edge, but that's where everyone is gonna be playing'cause it's shiny and it's fun and it's distracting. Or you can buy a railroad. And it's like

47:25 Think about the things that in the times of most change are still gonna be here. And it's like focus on the industries that aren't going anywhere. And it was it was like this moment where you're like, Oh, I'm talking to like a business Yoda. Um, and it was just like a really interesting framework. And it's like I think does apply is like the business that that I've been that I ended up spending a bunch of last year working on is in a really

47:48 old dirty industry that is like gonna be around forever. but applies the these tools to it. And so I kind of like met him in the middle. Which is like I was gonna use the tools that are available today to help an industry that I knew would be stable in the face of all of this change. And so He was just like one of those guys where he could like pull out a

48:05 invest in trains and have it be like one of the most incredible business You know. Piece of advice. All right, we got. Three more.

48:14 I think the thing that I pulled from From Mark was like the idea that like where venture was heading and the institutionalization of venture. And it kind of feels to me like. We're at the almost the apex of that. Like when I joined this industry, like there was all of this tribal knowledge. There was like things that were hidden secrets. What's an example? Well, you could.

48:33 Like how to write a term sheet was like unknown. Like how to do a closing process was unknown. Like how to, you know, the the real mechanics of the industry were unknown. Let alone like the metrics of like what is good, great, bad bad growth metrics or retention or net dollar retention. Like a lot of venture today feels like it's really like institutionalized. It feels like even like further out we're at this point of like the industry where it's like

48:59 The knowledge is all shared. It's all public. People have like Posted. almo as as much institutional knowledge about an industry as possible. We have like documents like the safe that like revolutionized it. Like Y C created a whole process for like how to institutionalize the fundraising, the handshake protocol. Like we protocol the industry. And it's like We're at like the

49:20 furthest ends, maybe not the furthest ends, but we're like the match the mature part of this industry. Like when I got into it, there were like 10 seed funds in market that like, you know, you didn't have to be good, you just had to be alive to like go and find these things. And there wasn't a ton of competition. There weren't like mega funds coming in and doing seed rounds. It's like you met a founder, you like the founder, you went to YC, there were fifty other people in the room. You kind of like said, hey, I like this one, let's do it. And you got to a handshake on a On a note. Mark. I think saw where the world was heading on this. He's like, all these asset classes are maturing.

49:51 And we're going to build like a much bigger platform for it. And I think was inspired by a lot of the CAA mentality early on of like CAH shifted the way that agencies had been done. It went from this like I represent one client with one deal and it's like boutique, but also like strategically like Ovit's had this insight that like

50:10 If I rip an agent away from another agency All their clients come. And it was like, whereas at CAA, one client sat in the middle of 10 agents with each of their own like personalized expertise. And it's like In V C, the same thing kind of existed. You had one eight one one V C, you had this boutique, you're like, I've got this board member, that's my person. And then a drizon comes along and it's like no, you've got all of us.

50:33 And we all come with this like value proposition. And it's like recruiting and marketing and all these services. And it like it was the realization that like VC was a service industry and institutionalizing of that. that like changed the way that a lot of venture was there, like had been had been done. And then everybody rushed to create platforms and teams and like structure because they were just beating people on that. On even if it wasn't like effective. Right. They pushed the edge of that and they owned the brand of that, of like what a platform VC could be. And the other edge you had like benchmark and, you know, founders fund and like people who are like You need me and or founders fun where you're like you don't need anybody. Right. You know. Um So I I think what I took from that was like

51:15 You can look at an uh uh at Any industry, VC included, and like bring a new institutionalization to it. And I think they're still doing it. I think they just acquired Turpentine. Uh and Tornberg and the it's like the realization that like one of those edges that you're competing again is like distribution. Media and you know, if you can bring customers, right? Like what do the startups really care about? It's like

51:37 customers and attention. The scarce resource is attention. And so it's like we're going to build attention into the offering. And it's like That feels again ahead of like the customer first centric like customer centric like response. And it's like most VCs were sell selling things that weren't necessarily like what the customer needed. Right. It was capital. What's that guy's name? Jilly something. He he invests in whiz and like Every security star for this guy. He unbundled the Andresa model. He's like, Cool, we're not gonna help you with uh

52:06 You know, marketing or recruiting like We have a network. of CISOs at the top five hundred companies. You'll get to two million in AR? If you invest with us. Yeah. And then to those guys, he was like, Hey, you're gonna own a piece of this portfolio. Yeah. While you're sitting in your job, you're gonna also be a venture investor.

52:23 a venture partner in our fund. Yeah. And like kind of created a little bribery network that like Actually worked and actually it's like Turns out huge, huge results, like in a way outperforming results by figuring out that platform. Yeah. And I think like those are the like What he's continuing to do is find like what those gaps are, what the c what the customer really wants. Right. And it's like If you could tell me that like, Oh, I want revenue.

52:45 Like I want That's what I really want. And you can deliver that, that's pretty incredible. And part of what the startup founder wanted was like you know, the brand A sixteen to C I want cool. I want cool. I wanna be at the I want Andrea Gadala to be like at our I wanna meet him. Like I want these different things that

53:00 You know. Again, just work backwards from what actually resonates. Most VCs were selling cool, right? They were selling they were selling uh Maybe not cool. They were selling uh The promise of de-risked. Right. Credibility, yeah. The f for the promise of credibility that we that we were something that had been like validated.

53:18 They were selling like if you got a Sequoia investment, like that's like This is a real business. They've they've looked at billion like how many trillions of dollars of market cap are like from those people. We're among that. You said you selt the association with market cap.

53:32 All right, we got two more tests. Terek Cheater. I have to do it. I have one absurd Derek Deuter story. Um That's super funny.

53:42 So one of the things you realize uh at a talent agency and being around like T like. A list stars all the time. Is it like A lot of people go a little b bananas.

53:54 Um There's almost no equivalent, though, for sports stars. 'Cause something embeds in your brain. When you are a little kid.

54:03 That these people are Like larger than life. And so I am a young VC at lowercase and uh Derek Jeter and his partner are starting like a media company.

54:16 sports media company. And they're like, we want to spend time. And like I I saw all of this anything at like media and tech, I was like, I saw for years. And so We like go out for a dinner. We go to this nice restaurant in in Beverly Hills and

54:29 Um We're sitting down as the three of us and up to the table walks a guy. And the guy. But

54:36 Thickest. deepest New York accent that you have ever heard in your entire life. It's like hey guys. And like He sees Jeter and he's like about to talk about the specials and his face melts. It the guy almost like he gets like time is a flat circle and he is lost. And it's like one of those moments where you see him like like reverse age into an eight year old. And he's like, This is like the moment of his life. And so Uh he's going he's like captures him like Mr. Jeta, Mr. Jeta, like I'm I'm a big fan. He's like goes through the whole thing. And at some point we all order the same thing. We order like the special that the guy recommends, that's like truffle pasta. He comes back to the table a little bit later and he's like, you know, it's fresh truffle on top and he gives me a little bit of fresh truffle and he gives the g his manager a little bit of fresh truffle and then he's over at Mr. Jeter and he looks at Mr. Jeter and he's putting the fresh truffle on and it

55:19 And he just f like he his brain freezes, but his hand doesn't. And It It gets to a point. Where it is It is so funny that we just start laughing as it's happening, because it is an ongoing mountain of truffle on this plate. It is

55:36 The whole plate is black. It is a it is it must have been Hundreds, hundreds of dollars of fresh truffle on Mr. Jeter's plate. And he's like, he's just looking at Mr. Jeter and he's like, I think you got it. And it was just one of those moments where you're like It's really funny to watch people in that moment of their life. Um I don't have I don't have like a good lesson from it. At least have like a different level of cool. It's like a it's another thing. It transports you to being a little kid.

56:02 And so You know, I I've ha I've had one of those experiences myself. Um And uh Yeah. This might be the one.

56:11 That is that is uh that is the one. I grew up As a as the most die hard. of die hard Lakers fans. I grew up in LA. Uh I went I I was a uh I went to college uh during during the Shaq Kobe years and the high school in the Shaq Kobe years.

56:28 High school, uh you know, Christmas was like Laker Game uh on TV. Like that's what we did. He's one of those people for me that was like, I got to watch this guy. And then I got to be obnoxious at college, like watching this guy beat the crap out of the Celtics. And it was really fun. Um But as a Again, at at lowercase, I had an opportunity. Um

56:48 There's a brief moment in time where I was uh managing director of a fund called Lowercase Thirteen, which was a uh A Kobe Bryant partnership. And it was like for a split second. How does that happen? Kobe reaches out to you. I had a friend who was advising Kobe. Her name is Betsy Scholnik, and Betsy said, Hey, Matt. Kobe. is I think he'd been injured at the moment. He was like, he's thinking about what comes after basketball. And he's always been obsessed with tech and venture. And he really wants to learn. Will you

57:14 Come down and have dinner. and spend time with with Kobe. and teach them a little bit about venture capital. And This is my Jeter like d like truffle moment. Like I'm like, let's go. I'm ready. Like I'll get do you want me to come now in the car? I'll come right now. And we can do it. And uh she's like great. We'll set up a time in the next couple of weeks you can't come down. So Chris and I go down and have dinner with Kobe and we like sit there and he's like asking questions. And it was like one of these things where

57:39 You can kinda tell some people like Whether they have like um the second gear of curiosity. Like sometimes they ask the surface question and then there's another layer of curiosity where they ask like every relevant follow up question that you could imagine having been in the industry for a long time where you're like, Oh, this person's gone through and like they have real depth of curiosity. They want to know the details. They don't want just the surface answer. They want to be like, but how? This is actually what makes you great at at like podcasts and interviews is like you do the second question. You don't just leave it at the first, you do the follow up. And he did it. for the entire it was like a three hour dinner. By the end he was just like

58:13 This was awesome. Thank you so much. I'd love to find ways to do this again. Will you send me stuff that I can read? And I was like, okay, I'll s I'll send him some stuff that he can read. So I put together like a like the the essential reading list eventually. Every blog post that I ever love. Like I'm going through all the girly posts and the Wiz Wilson posts and like all the all the stuff. And uh thinking that he would like never read it. Two AM.

58:35 I get a text. Like I read that post and it was just like Well. He was like in it. And he would like text and like We'd have these conversations in the middle of the night. I was like, What's this when is this guy sleeping? He must be like going crazy because he was injured. He's like just like texting. And then eventually he goes,

58:51 I really want to go spend some time and meet like we had suggested, like you can come with us. And go to San Francisco and meet a bunch of the startup companies. He's like, I'd love to. Again, thinking like he'll never do it. He's like Let's go. When when when are we going? And so we take him up to San Francisco. And we go to see a couple startups and we spread it out. It's like

59:09 early stage apartment startups and then we go to Twitter. And uh and we do the the tour of Twitter and Twitter just bought Vine and we're like walking around, we're onboarding him to Vine and doing the conversation with Dick and Adam. Uh, DeCoslo and Adam Bain. And he's like, I wanna see the whole place. So we go down to like the engineering floor. And he's walking past one of the like

59:28 the hangrooms for the engineers. And there's a kid in there and he uh there's Papa Shot basketball. And the kid have you ever watched those people who are like savants at Hava Shot. And they can like both hand it. And it's like they go into like whatever the fourth gear of like the the Matrix. They're in it and they're like both handing and like Yeah, they look like the Tesla humanoid robot. Yeah. You're like this guy. Is that to the T. And Cobe looks in and he's like I gotta do it. And he walks up behind a guy and he goes I got next.

59:57 And all the engineers see like Dick and Adam and then they see Kobe and they're like Holy shit, like Jimmy's about to play Kobe. And they rush in. And it's like Vine has just come out. So they're all like taking video of this thing. And like Kobe goes and he's like bang bang bang bang bang and hits like 80. And then like Jimmy goes and it's like Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. He hits like 82 and the room like erupts and it's like the greatest moment in this guy's life. He has never been like it the whole world like it's like no one will ever believe this moment, right? He'd be like, I beat Kobe, I pop a shot. He's that guy. And like you expect every you expect Cobe to be like

1:00:31 Oh, congrats, dude. High five. And I just remember the look on Cobe's face where he was like legitimately pissed. It was like a fake piss, it was like I'm buying one of these things. It's never fucking happened. Yeah, I will destroy you. The next time I see you. I'm never letting that shit happen again. And he like walks out. Deletes his Twitter account. Yeah. Anyway, so the I it was uh pretty incredible like getting to spend the time with him. And then uh Yeah, we he was like, Hey, I really want to build a shop. Um and so For a brief moment we had like a side fund that we were putting together with Kobe and we've made like two investments.

1:01:04 Um it was like one of them was ended up being stripe out of that fund. But he had a he had a business partner who ended up like trying to renegotiate and we don't do those kinds of things. So anyway. Matt. Full of stories. This is amazing. Uh Super fun. Thanks for doing it. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to

1:01:24 I put my law in it like my day song On the road less travel never looking back

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