Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365]

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/fc0c5af9241c85c3

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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.
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My guest today is Dave Fontenet.
Founder of H F Zero.
Born out of Dave's experiences in monasteries across the world, HF Zero is a 12-week residency for repeat founders to supercharge their next venture.
For three months, ten teams of engineers relocate to H of Zero's house in San Francisco.
During the residency, everything is taken care of, so their sole focus is on building.
It's one of the most interesting incubators I've come across, and we discuss the model and its monastic origins in detail.
Please enjoy this conversation with Dave Fontenet.

What was the pathway to the monster?
In retrospect it's much clearer.
It was
My first major heartbreak.
In the moment I didn't know that this was the reason why.
But looking back, I couldn't handle it.
I have pretty severe ADD.
And so I was on A D medication.
And I gleamed.
being on the medication for things not working out.
And so I stopped taking the the A D D meds.
But then I couldn't read, so I needed to build natural concentration.
So
Started meditating.
In the beginning it was really hard. I'd meditate.
for fifteen minutes so I could read for fifteen minutes.
And then it became so much more than that.
Can you tell me about the first day there?
Well the first retreat I did was a Gwenka Vapasna retreat.
It just felt so spacious.
To just be able to sit.

Infinite time.
I think there's something about
Feeling a sense of a

That's really powerful.
Even though it's ten days, it's a finite amount of time, but if if you haven't done a ten day before, stepping into your first day of a ten day
You're like, wow, this is an expanse of time.
It's more time than I can.
Even imagine.
The ten day is really powerful and they figured this out thousands of years ago.
The important thing is that you have enough time to have a breakdown.
And a breakthrough in ten days.
That's the cycle. The distribution almost almost everyone has within ten days of just sitting and meditating with yourself, not writing, not talking, not reading, just being with yourself.
Pretty much everyone has a breakdown.
And enough space for a breakthrough.
Challenge the seven days.
Is there some distribution of people like myself who on day seven have their breakdown. The retreat has your breakthrough yet.
Whereas ten days pretty much everyone that I talk to has done a ten day and has stuck it out has both a breakdown and a breakthrough.
So what was the longest stretch that you spent in any one
Place.
I did a retreat.
in this beautiful rice valley in northern Thailand and it's called Prao.
For six weeks.
At that point in life, I was spent a couple of years where my main focus in life was meditation.
I went on a lot of it's like two years of just
seeking out different meditation masters and learning different techniques and
Just the capstone like end of that period of my life. And
We did three hours of yoga every day that was super intense and we meditated and I wrote a ton on this retreat.
If you think about the way that these things, which have been around forever
Are operated.
I'd love to go into as much detail as possible because I know it's very relevant for everything you're building now and we'll we'll talk about the rest of our conversation.
just to go through the details in as granular a level as you're able
of what they do so well to allow for a different kind of experience.
the back of house of the monastery or whatever. The things that have been figured out over
Centuries.
What stands out to you m as most important?
The biggest one thing is this. It's that you don't have to worry about time at all.
Your relationship with time shifts.
Drastically because
I don't need to be keeping track of time.
There's a gong that rings.
That lets me know.
It's time to eat.
And besides that
I'm pretty much meditating.
So there's some beauty to being in a state of life.
Where
There's not really a space between the thing.
The core thing that you're doing, there's just the thing.
It's just the breath. It's just the meditation.
And so
It's less about the specific thing.
Things that they're
adding to the experience and all about what they're subtracting.
It's that you don't notice
All the other things of life.
Maybe you notice your body's aching, you're sitting for a while. But at least within their control, they've subtracted every single thing. Just so relaxing. Your nervous system just relaxes into it of just
Knowing that
There's
relatively infinite time to just do the thing.
Whatever that
means for you.
In the context of the monastery it's meditation. In the context of HF Zero, it's writing code.
When I started coding
I was a freshman at Michigan, to my first coding class.
I decided to take accelerated intro to programming.
Even though I'd never coded before.
Because at the orientation they said
Accelerated insurance programming is for if you have four plus years coding experience or you're just really passionate about programming. And I was like,

Well, I'm passionate about programming. I'd never coded before.
But I'm in this class and it's so hard.
the other kids in the class were incredible programmers already and I never I thought we were gonna type zeros and ones.
And I just remember there were a few key moments in that class where there was a problem I didn't know how to solve.
And I just went into the basement of the Eeks building and I was like, I brought a bunch of mountain deer with me.
I was like, I'm just not gonna leave until I figure this out.
And in that expanse where time
ceases to exist and you're just solving the hard problem that you need to solve and there's nothing else.
So much magic happened there.
And the the monastery's similar.
And that you don't have to be whacking your head at a problem, but you can just let it unravel.
Because you have
Seemingly I call it relatively infinite.
Time.
HSR is similar my vision from early on the hackathons. I was coding in that basement and I was just like, Oh my God, I just want more space like this.
And I started to envision a world where
People could just build.
And not have to worry about anything else.
And I almost imagine being able to throw a pokey ball.
that created this bubble and you could just jump in this bubble.
And just float in it and be like plugged into the matrix writing code.
That's actually my vision is just to be able to fully suspend yourself.
into the matrix and right could so I started thinking
How do I create more space for myself to do this?
Now's when
I went to my first hackathon.
I never really built anything before.
And I was just like wow.
A whole weekend where you can just build.
And then I got hooked.
And the key with the hackathon isn't
just that space, it's similar to the monastery. It's all the things you're not doing.
You're actually not going out on a Friday and Saturday night. That you're not
Trying to meet up with friends. That you're not
Doing this. You're not going grocery shopping. You're not worried about food.
You're not
A bunch of things.
You just
Fully focused.
on building
And hackathons give you that for a weekend and I got
really into hackathons, ended up throwing the largest hackathon in the world. Helped a bunch of universities start and scale.
They're hackathons. But really the vision I've constantly been
looking forward to is
this world where you could just build and not have to worry about anything else, not just for a weekend, but as a way of life.
Yeah, hackathons gave that to you for a weekend with HF Zero, it's really my next foray into
How do we expand that out?
Right now it's twelve weeks. But really in the future, how do we
Create a institution that just
takes care of the most creative people in the world that takes care of the builders and just allows them to build.
What are the secrets?
About
removing complexity and distraction.
that excite you most having been there,'cause almost everybody listening, myself included.
have never been in a three month distraction free
building oriented zone. So this is a very unusual state of being
That you've created and now you can give us dispatches from it.
What do you think would be the most surprising or interesting things about
what that unlocks having no distraction, having no complexity.
Just having the single thing.
You're
Relationship with what's possible shifts.
The thing that you're not sure if it can even be built.
all of a sudden becomes possible and you're like you're sitting there and you're like, Wait, actually, you know what, if I have
Twelve weeks undistracted. Five two weeks.
I'm a stocke.
I can build anything. The way I put it is that
You can meditate anywhere.
You meditate in your room. You really don't need anything. You can meditate anywhere, but for some reason
When you go on a retreat
You end up going ten hundred X deeper. I would even argue a hundred X deeper. Like you go to depths that you didn't know.
Were possible.
That's the big unlock.
And I think similarly in HF Zero
We mainly work with repeat founders. A lot of these founders have done really legit stuff in the past. Five of the founders who
joined the program in the last year.
multi billion dollar companies before this.
They built.
Really impressive stuff.
And then they come into H F Zero.
Um
At the end they're just like
Wow.
That was the most productive twelve weeks of my life as a engineer and
Expanded.
What I thought was possible.
a lot of these repeat founders will come in and
They're building
The hardest technical.
thing of their life, the hardest business of their life.
And it really is at the edge.
A lot of these founders, they already took a big swing before and now they want to take the biggest swing of their life. They wanna birth their life's work.
A lot of them are building companies that
Not just from a technical standpoint, but
Really are at the edge of like a scale of ambition.
Yeah. They're taking the biggest swing of their life.
And when they come in they're not sure.
If it'll work.
And then when they're walking out
There's a personal shift that happens deeper inside.
That
You see manifested in the startup.
To us, our view is that startups are outer manifestation of someone's inner world.
But the biggest thing that happens during H F Zero and the biggest thing that happens during a meditation retreat
Isn't
The realization that you have during the meditation retreat. People build incredible things in twelve weeks. People say they build like
make two years of progress in twelve weeks, but it's not even what you build there. It's the shift that happens.
And you knowing what's possible.
And knowing what you're capable of. You already knew you were a very capable person.
But now you've unlocked another order of magnitude of that, and that plays out for the rest of your life. It's like a personal frontier.
Yes.
Let's talk for a while about the category of residencies. So I think HF Zero
The thing you've created, I want you to describe it.
You start by describing just what it is, now the details of the thing itself.
And then
If it's the first of this new category of thing, residencies for building companies, I wanna talk about
How big you think that can get, how you want to proliferate that concept.
That's different from a YC or an accelerator, some of these terms that have been around for a while now in company building. So maybe just start with literally what is HF Zero.
the mechanics of the thing and then we'll talk about the category.
HF Zero is essentially a twelve week residency.
What we mean by residency is you live there.
You actually live there.
And
Pretty much everything in your life.
Is taken care of so you can just build.
So this vision I have of a world where people can just build and not have to worry about anything else.
Hackathons give that to you for a weekend, HF Zero gives that to you for twelve weeks. It's hard to
Get a business off the ground in a weekend. In twelve weeks.
We've seen crazy stuff.
We have a team in the current batch that
launched her app a few weeks before the batch started.
And then just started hitting so much velocity during the batch. They number fourteen on the app started doing like seven mil
Annualized Raven. It's like
nuts the results that we're seeing in those twelve weeks. And the reason is that we essentially
Audit your time.
as a founder and we figure out every single thing that you're spending time on that isn't building product.
Or selling product.
And we aim to subtract that from your life.
So you can just build.
And so
The reason this is so powerful, especially for repeat founders, is that as a repeat founder
You've had a lot of success.
You're probably angel investing, you're advising.
You're getting invited to speak at conferences, you're maybe writing your first book.
You have a thriving social life.
Most of these repeat founders are either like married, they have a husband, a wife, or a fiance. They're living with their partner prior to the program.
You got a lot of stuff going for you that's awesome.
But you know.
That that wasn't the recipe.
That got your first company off the ground.
And so the way that a lot of founders view HF Zero is that it's this button.
That you can press.
That just

Subtracts.
Everything from your life so you can drop back into that zone you were in when you were building your first company, and even deeper than that.
You can drop into the zone of your life.
To build your next thing. People will ask us, they'll be like, Oh, are the startups that join P Seed or C
And I'm like honestly like stage it doesn't really matter. If you just
stop everything that you're doing in your life for twelve weeks and you have someone else take care of everything.
The amount you can get done is insane.
And it's interesting, I mean, a lot of the things that we take care of individually are very mundane.
We just figure out everything that you're
We only work with ten teams at a time, so it's customized to each team. We just figure out what's actually taking up their time and
We try to subtract that from their life.
And so it's not like any individual thing I mention like food or like laundry or like cleaning your room.
Oh yeah, you could hire someone for that. You could hire someone for that. You could hire someone for that. You could hire someone for for that.
But the real power is in aggregate, it's like a hundred little things.
And when you constantly have someone
looking out for you, watching out for you and just subtracting these things. Getting these things out of the way
in a monastery, most of the stuff that they're doing you don't notice.
Because they're doing a good job.
Before it even distracts you.
before it even gets in your way, before it even takes up your time to on it unblocking those things.
What's your favorite small example of an unblocking?
The small examples are a bit obvious, like food.
It sounds so mundane.
But having rotating chefs that cook incredible food that's super healthy to your dietary preferences and a gong goes off at twelve thirty and a gong goes off at six, and you just don't need to worry about time and you just hear this in the back of your awareness as you're writing code. It's like even the touch of having the gong.
You're just coding, you're in the zone. It's not like some alarm that just completely throws you off. It's just something that enters the back of your presence.
And you're maybe writing code, you're in full flow and you just have a little light ping in the back of your head that's like uh
Healthy nutritious food.
That's delicious. That's upstairs and at the right stopping point. I should go and grab some.
The actual amount of mental space that is saved up
By that flow.
Is massive.
I always tell the founders at the beginning of the batch, I'm like the only thing that makes me angry
I don't really get angry, but the only thing that makes me angry is if you knock someone out of their zone.
'Cause when you are really in your zone.
As an engineer.
You're writing code.
Getting out of the way and letting it flow and so much of the brilliance of engineering happens this way.
And so being able to essentially hack this continual flow state.
It's like for most folks
Maybe they got
A couple hours of flow state a day.
Maybe.
I think a lot of folks never really reach full flow in their normal life.
Whereas in HF Zero you can have uninterrupted flow state for weeks.
really the big unblockings are actually when you're holding yourself back.
One of the powers of the residency
is the surface area that we have with the founders. If you were just in your own apartment, we were trying to unblo things that are taking up your time, it would be really challenging.
'Cause really what we're doing is we're watching how you're spending your time and then helping identify
Where we can win back your time.
Um
One of the other things that we notice is where you're blocking yourself.
Well, we say HF0 is we don't really give advice to HF Zero. You're asking why it's different than accelerators, incubators, other things, why this residency thing is different. The residency thing isn't about advice. It's not about helping you fundraise. All the founders who our bars so high were the most selective startup program right now.
And so the founders who get into HF Zero, they're the folks who would be mentors at
incubators or accelerators and stuff. They don't need advice.
They don't need help fundraising. Everyone wants to give them money.
But
What can be really powerful is if we're able to show them a mirror.
That gives them a really clear picture of what's actually going on for them.
Where they're getting in their own way.
And often we'll find that the
Biggest distraction.
Isn't
Some
crazy distracting thing like partying or going out or your social life or this and that.
It's actually the second most important thing that you could be doing in your business.
or the third most important thing you could be doing your business.
And what we'll find is we're able to see so clearly because we're just

We're able to see that wow.
And we can just bring it up in our check in with the founders.
Hey.
It seems like you might be avoiding
the one biggest challenge of your business.
The one hardest thing.
It's not that you're not being productive. You're doing number two most important thing, you're doing number three, and you're spending all your time doing those things.
And we might not necessarily know.
For sure what number one is.
We can usually tell when they're
blocking themselves or running away from that number one thing and being able to reflect that
To them.
and create the space where they can
figure that out. That's the biggest unblocking.
that people get. And that's the layer that we're able to
work with people at the residency, that's beyond the mundane. That's beyond the list of a hundred little things that take up your time that we subtract out. It's this deeper unblocking.
Can you walk me through a daily cadence? You mentioned check in, you mentioned
couple of times for food. Obviously my assumption is that the vast majority of the time they're just working and sleeping. Walk me through maybe from your perspective, since you're not sitting there and coding the day in the life for you or for your team.
Yeah, yeah. So maybe I can walk you through the week.
That probably gives a better shape to the batch.
So
Every Monday we have what we call demo dinner. It's the only mandatory thing in the batch because our whole thesis is around subtraction.
rather than addition. A lot of other programs, especially for first time founders and stuff, they're like, How do we add in this programming, this content, this workshops, this and that?
Our is all about subtraction. So the only thing that you have to do during HF Cero is show up to demo dinner every Monday. Each team has two minutes.
To show what they built.
Or what they sold.
No presentation.
No fanfare, no show.
It's just
This is product that we built over the last week.
Or these are numbers, usually they just screen share their stripe dashboard and maybe you tell the story of what
impacted those numbers and stuff. And so it's really just actually just showing your real shit.
That's Monday demo dinners.
We'll often have a guest speaker who's the founder of a a multi billion dollar company who we think
has particular expertise that's relevant to the batch. So Guillermo Rausch from Bruce was
was our speaker last week.
Eric and Kareem, the founders of Rample, come tomorrow.
So that's Monday.
Tuesday we have check ins with each team. And this is really
where we're able to hold up the mirror.
And say hey
fill us in on what's going on. What are your biggest challenges? And we don't necessarily give you advice or solve your challenges for you.
We do two things.
One is we ask questions and reflect back to you what we're seeing.
This is what I mentioned earlier, where we can see sometimes when there's a blind spot.
And just ask you, hey, do you think there might be something you're missing here? Is this actually the most important thing? Stuff like this. The second thing that we do during those check-ins is we introduce you to experts.
one on one based on whatever challenges you're facing.
This is one of the the keys to our approaches. We only work with ten teams, so we can actually introduce each team to the exact expert.
That's the best person in the world we know at each challenge that they're facing. So those are the two things we focus on for check ins. There's like fifteen minutes usually.
On Tuesdays.
Wednesdays we encourage the founders to grab one other founder and go out to dinner with them.
For the most part, as this arc of the week, the things that I'm mentioning each day are pretty light.
Demo dinner is probably the heaviest thing.
Then the check in's fifteen minutes. It's up to you. You don't have to go to dinner, but a lot of the founders really going deep with each other because they're such talented people in the batch. I feel so grateful to be able to spend the amount of time that I get to spend with the founders who join HF Zero because
These folks are so brilliant, man. They would never hire me.
I feel like
I somehow hacked life to be able to spend as much time as I get to with
Such brilliant people.
Then Thursdays we'll have
These what we call concrete workshops.
They're twelve minute workshops. All of them are designed to save you more than twelve minutes within the first week.
from that workshop.
So I share a lot of my
secrets and stuff of how I organized my life and how I
An example of this is we help you set up text expanders. They're very concrete. So by the end of them you'll have
The twenty things that you've message the most to people.
You have them set up as Text expanners on your phone and on your laptop. That's an example. So it's very concrete.
Life hacks.
That immediately
win you back more time than that.
And then Fridays we have a community dinner.
Community engineers really powerful. This is an insight that we realize that's
Probably different than monasteries don't necessarily do.
But pretty much we realized that the mental cost
of your friends asking you to hang out.
Even if saying no is pretty high.
having to say no over and over again.
Some people are good at it.
For most people it's a challenge. A really good friend wants to hang out.
It's tough to say no. So what we've done
Is we create a party full every week.
That's seven and nine PM on Friday. And any person who hits you up about hanging out
You have a text expander set up.
And you just send them a party full.
So instead of having to say no, you just come for dinner Friday. Come for dinner Friday. Come for dinner Friday. Come for dinner Friday. Seven to nine PM on Friday. We don't allow any alcohol or substances in the house to send a twelve week monastic retreat.
We have an Elixir bar with healthy drinks, smoothies, cacao, stuff like this.
And it's a whole vibe at the house.
And we don't invite the folks who come on Fridays. It's the founders and the batch. So the only way to get an invite is for a founder in the batch to invite you. And it's really cool because
the people they end up inviting for the most part, they're just actually saying no to hanging out with people. The people they actually end up inviting, I mean it ends up being some of the most interesting researchers in AI
A lot of other a lot of these founders are repeat unicorn founders and stuff.
And
Maybe thirty, forty people are there, but it's such an eclectic, interesting crew,'cause these are the people that
These founders who are in the zone of their life.
are choosing that they want to spend time with.
with their a little bit of social time that they're carving out. So that's from seven to nine PM. At nine PM we kick everyone out and we get back to work.
Saturday and Sunday?
Saturday and Sunday people are in the zone. There is a big emphasis on talking to customers.
during Hero and company building in general.
So Saturdays and Sundays often end up being the most
Continual flow state for coding.
'Cause Monday morning you're meeting with customers who are expecting a whole new product that you've built for them for exactly what they need.
So Saturdays and Sundays, the house is
Usually really quiet.
And that's where people feel like the most uninterrupted time to just build.
Why? Twelve weeks not, twenty four weeks not, thirty six weeks not.
Three years.
Why not even call it three months?
The reason for this is funny. So most of the founders
Are living with their partner prior to the program.
The average age of founders in H of Cero is twenty eight to thirty five.
And twelve weeks is the longest we can convince the partners to be on board with it for.
Even if we say three months.
The partner's like, Whoa whoa whoa, three months?
But twelve weeks.
Palatable somehow. It's palatable. And really, a lot of the founders who do HF0 and some of the founders have kids.
four the founders in our current batch already have kids, but most of the founders are in this demographic of their repeat founder.
Had a lot of success in the past.
But they know they need to take the biggest swing of their life before they have kids.
And often their partner, their husband, their wife, their fiance, Hey, when are we gonna have a family?
And so actually the partners end up really liking the idea of the program'cause they're like, Oh, if they can get their company off the ground faster.
Then we can have a family sooner.
If it could be longer, it should be longer.
And in fact, after probably half the founders after each H F Zero batch try to recreate H F Zero.
In their lives after that.
When you're first signing up for it, I think twelve weeks is already a long time to be
In the monastic flow state.
So it is powerful that it has a ending, but actually like once people hit week three, week four, week five and they're in flow.
A lot of folks wish they could just have that for
Life. Almost like.
Do they see their significant others or kids during the time?
Yeah, for sure.
My co founder Emily really helps a lot of the founders navigate this and stuff.
But it's really about being intentional.
it's setting up that date night that you have time carved out where you're fully present in the same way that you're fully present during the program with your company with code.
Bringing that same level of presence to your partner when you are with them, because you're not gonna have as much time.
for them during the program. But I'd say most founders
If their partner doesn't live in San Francisco, they'll visit
The partner will visit or they'll visit every other week.
And then if they live in San Francisco, usually we'll encourage them to set up a date night once a week.
How do you choose people? This question is probably more important than ever as it becomes more well known, as more people want to do it.
There's ten slots as far as I know.
You feel like that's the right size.
So
If you've got thousands of people that want those ten slots.
Talk me through that process and what you've learned about running an efficient selection process.
I'm sure the eleventh is a very impressive someone you wish you could have.
Honestly, this last
application process, there were forty teams that we thought it was crazy for us not to back.
There's just so many incredible teams that want to do this residency.
that want a residency right now. And there's not really any other
Residencies. There's some stuff that's popping up.
There's Neo for younger founders, there's the residency.
that Nick is running. But right now we have about twenty five hundred teams who apply to each batch.
And we only accept ten.
Twenty four hundred.
Plus teams that want

join uh residency.
There's just not capacity. And so it's really challenging.
My co founder Evan lead our admissions.
And he actually uses LLMs sift through the applications and get what he's looking for. We're people driven.
firm. We're not a thesis driven firm. We back the most brilliant engineers.
As early as possible.
That's been my thesis from day one when I started investing.
And so that's really what we look for is
This brilliance.
The word brilliant has this connotation of a light shining that other things are attracted to.
And so
Really my
Belief is that the only real defensible moat
is having the best engineering team in the world.
And so we really look for founders who are gonna be able to attract
even smarter engineers than themself.
that's the brilliance that we look for. And it's reflected in their writing. It's reflected in the way they communicate. It's reflected in the
way they write code. It's reflected in the way their product feels.
In terms of more specific things, the three things that we look for in founders that we think are the winning formulas.
Crit?
Storytelling ability and product sense.
And our heuristic for product sense is how quickly can the founding team
Ship.
End to end consumer grade product.
I think actually most engineers can't. Doesn't matter how much time you give them.
I'd venture to say ninety percent of fang engineers.
Can't ship end to end consumer grade product.
And it's not that they're bad engineers. It's that
the skills required to contribute to a large system.
And the skills required to ship end to end product as a small team or just disjoint.
They don't teach us in school.
And so we really look for the top engineers in terms of this what we call product sense.
a lot of the teams that get into H F zero, I mean
People ask, Oh, do you back teams before they have product or before they have idea? The people who end up getting into HF Zero, even between applying and getting the interview, if they haven't built something, they probably don't build fast enough to get into HF Zero. Most of the teams in HF Zero
A lot of teams
Especially bigger teams plan in terms of quarters.
Some startups plan in terms of months, some startups plan in terms of two week sprints. The teams like an HF Zero
They plan in terms of days. In two days they can ship end to end
product or land and feature and then changes.
And so we're able to evaluate this better than anyone else because of our experience with hackathons. Well
Usually a whole business can't be built.
In a hackathon.
No one
knows better than us what can actually be built in twenty four to forty eight hours. And actually for the top engineers with incredible product sense.
So much can be built in twenty, four to forty eight hours, especially when you're in continual flow state. So essentially we look for
The most brilliant engineers who are already
The most productive engineers in the world.
Because
Our product HF Zero.
Amplifies their productivity the most.
You're already one of the most productive, let's call ten X engineers.
In the world, H of Zero makes you a hundred X engineer.
Given the number of these folks that you've met
both with H of Zero and the hackathons just in your life.
Are there favorite questions that you have to ask this type of person that you feel are the highest signal questions?
The best questions are when
You give the founder space to tap into their aliveness.
Or their felt sense of what they're building.
Because that's the type of thing that you can't really prepare an answer for. And you can just feel it.
The founder's eyes will light up.
They're not talking from a oh I memorized this before. They're not talking from the this is the story I've told over and over again. They're actually talking from somewhere much deeper than that.
They're talking from felt sense of the thing.
You know where I learned this from is I met Vitalik.
It was crashing on our couch at Mission Control. Mission Control is this house I lived in in San Francisco when I first dropped out and moved out there. That was in some ways some of the inspiration for
Hero'cause so many.
incredible founders came out of this one small house.
And Vitalik was crouching on our couch and I remember thinking, he was telling us about all the things we don't need government for anymore. Same stuff he's saying today, by the way.
But at that moment I was like, I'm not sure if this guy is crazy.
Or if he's visionary.
And at that moment when he was
Trying to convince us to buy Ethereum early on. I thought it was crazy.
Whoops.
Ha ha.
I realized in retrospect reviewing that experience the difference between crazy and visionary.
is consistency.
When someone is visionary, they're not necessarily always right about their vision, but they're speaking from a felt sense of something. They're able to feel into something. They're seeing something that doesn't yet exist in the world.
They're actually able to see something.
They actually are visionary.
Then
When they talk about it.
They might not have the perfect words.
But you can tell that
They're talking about the same thing because they can see it.
And maybe they're talking about it from different angles. Maybe they're talking about it from different perspectives.
But there's this felt sense, there's this place that they're talking about it from that isn't scripted.
That is alive in a way.
It's live because as they're talking about it, they're seeing it.
Often
I'll notice that the founder's eyes are off into the distance.
looking to the side of me, not directly at me, because they're looking at
the future. They're looking at this vision that they have. They're feeling into this felt sense. And so
My favorite questions are the questions that can get in touch with that felt sense.
Some part of that can be vision.
Another part of it can be motivation.
What?
at a deep level
is motivating that founder.
How would you encourage people listening to try to tap into the answers to this category of questions for themselves? How can someone explore the inner thing that can be made outer? I liked how you put that earlier. I think everyone wants a vehicle for self expression.
And creative expression.
In their lives somehow.
For lots of people that's a company, for lots of people that could be a journal.
Could take a lot of forms.
How would you encourage people to try to
Get on that track.
For themselves.
Yeah, meditate.
Yeah, the answer is pretty clear. And this means different things for different people.
But creating space to meditate. For some people that means running.
For some people that means swimming in the bay.
For some people that means sitting on a cushion and breathing.
But figuring out what it is for you that like really gets you in touch with yourself.
when it's not yourself on your phone or on your laptop connected to the world, connected to something deeper inside, what actually pushes you to keep going when you're running and you're tired.
And you almost have nothing left to give, but then you keep going. What's right?
There.
For some people it's lifting weights and actually
one of the previous HF zero founders, Diego
Rodriguez from Kriya.
A I he came by the house the other day and he was talking to some of the
The founders in the current batch and
He was talking about how when he was in H F Cero they would go work out every day. In H F zero we
really have an emphasis on exercise as part of what makes you
Most productive.
And he said he would hit his limit and then he'd stop.
And then his co founder, Victor.
Told him one day, he's like hey
That moment when you hit your limit.
That's actually when the work out starts.
When you can find
What's there?
That allows you to keep going.
When you hit your limit.
And so
It's that when you're sitting in meditation and you have a distraction, it almost pulls you out, but you like bring it back again.
When you're running.
You keep running even when you feel like you hit your limit.
What is there?
that motivates you. So that would be my recommendation is to actually just get in touch with
the thing that motivates you. If you can actually be on the edge of your curiosity.
There's authenticity there that can't be replicated any other way.
What are the unrealized aspects of your
Vision for all this.
Right now only ten teams get to go through this and I love working with ten teams. So I don't necessarily want to scale up what we're doing, but I think actually
There's just a missing institution in the world, man. Right now a third of people in the US
Get to go to college now.
get to go to this institution where they get to spend two to four years of their life being curious about
Whatever they want to be curious about. Not everyone takes advantage of them this way. How is there not an institution for people who are in the prime of their career
Where people can just build.
And not have to worry about anything else.
And the fact that we don't have an institution that creates that space for people.
Curts me inside.
And that's why I feel so motivated to be building H of Zero is that
Really this question of how do we as a society
Take care of our most creative people.
Right now we
Don't
We maybe give them money in some industries and attack
And music and film. We have the money.
But
We don't actually take care of them as a human being. And the analogy I'll give is
What we're doing today in Venture
is the equivalent of taking the top Olympic athletes in the world and just giving them money and saying, See you at the Olympics.
Maybe we make some introductions, but no, what do you do with Olympic athlete? You'll figure out every single thing in their life that you can make better.
You get them the best coach in the world. You get them the best dietitian in the world. You put them around
the best peers in the world. You put them around other Olympic athletes.
In fifty years there's no way.
Venture.
Looks like what we're doing today.
The equivalent of we're giving Olympic athletes money and telling them ski There's no way.
In fifty years, people are going to be dropping into these residencies. They're gonna be dropping an institution that actually just takes care of
pretty much everything in your life so you can just build.
Um
So much potential will be unlocked.
Talk me through what you've learned about the economic model.
behind all this. What is your economic model and
How do you think it
remains to be tweaked to be even better.
Are you paying for their whole stay? What do they pay? What do you pay? How much do you own?
They don't pay anything.
So our model is that we take three percent.
of each startup.
And then we invest five hundred K uncapped.
And that's it.
That's it. Simple.
We did a ton of research on this and we wanted to make it really easy for founders to just be able to understand the deal.
So it's three percent.
Five hundred can capped that converts at the price of your next round.
Why those numbers? I'm just so curious about why not five percent, why not
A million dollars at uh twenty cap, or do you think there's magic behind that or do you think it'll be
play toyed with and experimented by lots that try this.
It's not necessarily magic, but it's intentional.
So there's a few goals that we had. One, we didn't want to set a valuation for your company.
So a lot of the founders that we're backing are ridiculously strong founders. I mean, Alex Atala, the founder and CTO of OpenC, started his next startup with us. Andrew D'Souza, the founder of Clearbank, started his next startup with us. David Vorick, the founder of Seocoin.
started their next startup with us. These are all
repeat unicorn founders. We have a founder who we just accepted our first team for the next batch.
Who IPO'd.
His last startup.
Something about setting a valuation for them early on just doesn't feel right. So we really try to engineer it where we don't set a valuation at all.
That was one of the goals because
Honestly, like some of these founders
One, they don't even need a raise in the beginning. They're not looking for venture capital. They're not looking at other programs. They just want to do HF0 because
The only thing they care about is their time.
And we're the only product built from the ground up to win them back time.
So often we're like
Especially for these top repeat founders where they're only investor or they're raising around up ridiculous terms and
So it's easier for us to not
set of valuation. So that's
One side of it. The other side is that
We actually want to give you enough cash where even if you don't
do other venture and roughly half of our teams already raised around before they did the batch and then other half were the only venture money that they're taking, maybe the only venture capital they'll ever take. We want to give you enough money where
you actually can leverage capital
to win back time during the batch too.
Five hundred K is more than enough to do that, to bring on someone else if you need to bring on someone else.
To pretty much anything that's taking up your time be able to actually
bring on third parties or pay third parties to win back that time.
So that's another part of it. And then on the LP end.
We've actually done a bunch of modelling.

Essentially I asked L Ps like what's the best deal that
That I can give founders that you feel good about.
And then I worked backwards from there. I think most
funds try to ask founders what the best deal the founders are willing to give them is.
Whereas my approach is actually to LPs, hey
What do you need to see and then
trying to give the founders the best deal I can give them because
My goal.
I've done a lot of inner work on understanding what drives me and
I'm not really driven by money.
I wanna work with the best founders in the world. So our ideal is structured so that it works for these top
Repeat founders.
Oh
wouldn't necessarily consider a program that's taking seven percent.
But at three percent for the exact product that they're looking for that no one else is really offering.
Time back.
In their life.
It's just a no brainer right now.
And is it safe to assume that basically if I think of you as a fund
the vast or all of your fund expenses are
Actually the house, the services, the people, the team
That is your expenses.
We spent a ton on Sch Founder.
Doing what we do with how well we take care of the founders, there's pretty much no other way to do it other than this residency fund model. So to your question, that is another key part of the only way you can justify the amount of expense that we spend per founder.
is if you're getting equity upside in their business and really our fund is structured around
ten billion dollar plus outcomes. We're really looking for the founders who are taking the biggest swing.
of their life. Like maybe their last company was worth two billion.
Now they're taking a swing that could be a generational company, could be a hundred billion dollar company, could be the next NVIDIA.
that's really what we're looking for, people taking that big of swings.
I know you're going to meet another person who could be a candidate to run another residency. So
Not only do you back founders, maybe you're also gonna be backing or at least helping. You helped a lot of people at the hackathons. This is flavor of that, it seems.
What do you think you'll be looking for in the people that might set one of these things up?
What are the attributes of somebody that could do
What you do well.
Man, that's a good question. I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes founders good founders. I have probably twenty friends who have started unicorns and stuff.
I don't have as much training data on other people who have started
residencies successfully,'cause actually outside of our residency, I don't know another one that I really look up to yet.
But our hope is to
Actually inspire
a whole wave of residencies and
Internally we started
bringing our attention more to this idea of essentially backing
other residencies and helping them get off the ground because we realized how hard it is.
The first year and a half of HF0, we lived
In the house.
And if we didn't, it wouldn't have worked. And this is where like people, oh, what if big fun copies y'all I actually I would love more people to start residencies and I would love to help you.
'Cause I actually I don't worry about competition at all. There's so many little things that you need to get right.
to make these work and even have
adults, especially with strong personalities or founders living together in harmony.
All of this to say really you'd need to find more folks like my co founder, Emily.
She's really the secret sauce to the residency.
What does she do? Say more about her. I don't know if there's other Emily's in the world. She's one of one.
She has such
An insanely high level of empathy.
She's able to see the founders.
way beyond their company, really see them as a human being. Really see
She can see when you're afraid.
Doesn't matter how composed or you have it, she just sees through it.
And so she doesn't do check ins with the founders on their business. She does check ins with the founders on
them as a human being.
And we essentially make adjustments to the batch. Every batch, we make adjustments that are specific to the human beings in that batch.
It's funny.
Two batches ago, we rewrote
the value's a new way to fit
that batch better.
Then this batch we're swinging it the other way.
World nudging things.
the previous batch people weren't hanging out enough. They were just so in the zone working that they like almost afraid to talk to each other, knock each other out of the zone.
Whereas then in this batch people are have so much chemistry between them that they almost
Like each other too much.
To hang out.
Every batch is different. Pretty much every batch, to be totally honest with you. Half through, just about every batch, it would break.
If it wasn't for Emily.
She has a one on one with every founder individually.

Her one on ones with the founders.
And uh
giving her the insight to know
Just the right way to nudge the culture of the batch.

The people in the batch need.
And before this, she's the best living community builder I know.
Anywhere she goes, any city she goes in the world, not just for work for H F Zero, any city she goes
She went to Portugal a year and a half ago. Next thing you know, there's a sixteen person house in Portugal. She goes to Croatia sailing. Next thing you know, forty eight friends are sailing for a week together.
Anywhere she goes. I mean a lot of our friends say that anywhere Emily is is home.
I don't know how you find more Emily's'cause I don't know if they exist.
I probably know more engineers than just about anyone else in North America.
That pairing someone who deeply understands hackers.
Combined with someone who deeply understands
living communities and people living together.
I think it's not just finding one person, it's actually finding
That type of yin and yang.
Who's the best position to
For some reason what popped to mind was if tomorrow there was the Stanford residency.
And it was
Some building.
That John Door builds a Stanford.
And some amazing person wants to go sponsor this thing.
I would imagine you'd get twenty five hundred applicants to go be a Stanford resident.
So what I'm trying to think through is what are the existing institutions that could I guess this didn't really happen with accelerators or incubators, so it'd be
a leap to think it'll happen here. But why
don't the existing institutions that are hubs of the kind of talent
That you're after.
It just seems like such a simple, smart model to try.
We're after different talent in that. We mainly work with founders who are twenty eight to thirty five who are E P founders who are much more experienced than college students, but there's gonna be a residency like this at every college.
For sure.
Hundred percent. There was already something like this at Waterloo, it's called Velocity.
It's not quite the same anymore, but it was like Dworm that you lived in if you wanted to build stuff. Good name.
Inevitably there will be a residency at most major engineering universities where you can take a semester off and just build.
The key though is that they actually do the residency fund model.
Because you don't wanna be in a residency if you're not with other people who are as driven as you.
PG talks about this all the time. The problem with coworking spaces and a lot of accelerators and incubators try to do Y C, but with a co working space. The reason that doesn't work is that if you're not insanely selective,
You're gonna have two things. One, nascent ideas get shot down before they fully bloom because most ideas
Seem shitty.
In the beginning.
Even if they end up being really Airbnb probably for a lot of people where they're like what?
The second thing though is you need to be around people who are as driven and as curious as you. So this is why the residency fund model is so key is that it forces the organizer to know
Actually there's accountability.
If you don't get incredible teams, you don't get to keep doing this thing that you love.
That is so motivating for me.
Way more motivating than any potential financial return.
is knowing that I love doing this so much.
And that if I don't find the best teams
That end up making this sustainable.
Then I don't get to keep doing it.
So that would be the key. But yeah, Waterloo, Stanford, MIT, Michigan, all these universities are gonna have residencies like this.
My hunch
Is that
You have to start with the right side of the bell curve. That's why we've started with the best founders in the world.
There's pretty much no other program that's really been able to crack going
To the right of the bell curve from Y C.
And we really spent a lot of time being intentional and like you don't want to compete with Y C.
Y C is so good at what they do.
I'm not gonna compete with Y C on giving advice. They have so much data. They give incredible advice.
Gary, Michael Sib
Those folks are fucking awesome.
What they do.
And if you try to go head to head with them, you have no chance.
So what we did is we spent a bunch of time thinking about
What demographic isn't being served.
right now by YC, and then we built towards that demographic. That's how we came up with our deal. That's how we came up with the programming, that's how we came up with the messaging, that's how we pick the founders and stuff. So most of the founders doing HF0 aren't considering
Any other program.
And the key is that
Any residency that wants to start needs to be thinking in the same way.
You try to go head to head with even with HF Zero.
with Y C
You're gonna end up getting the founders that don't get into those programs.
So the real key is how can you engineer your program to be an incredible fit.
for the specific demographic that you're targeting. Who's your audience? So for us that's repeat founders and first time founders with breakout traction.
One of the things we love doing when studying a company is studying all the failures that are adjacent to the business.
Is there anything there?
Any
program that takes in talent, does something with them and graduates them.
That you saw that failed that you think is instructive?
I try not to look at what other people have tried because
Honestly, even if you did a lot of things right with residencies, if you didn't have Emily.
You wouldn't have been successful executing it.
I'm much more on the Peter T Line on the learning from failure.
is popular to talk about.
But at least in the context of doing new things.
Does not teach you everything.
I'd say the biggest thing that we learned is just looking at all the programs other than Y C.
Is that every program that tried to go head to head with Y C lost.
'Cause they got the founders that.
Y C didn't accept.
And so that was probably the biggest learning. And so we just engineered a program that
one after a different demographic.
Then why see it? But I try not to learn too much. Um and really I think there's a power in
We don't even spend that much time thinking about Y C.
We really try to think from first principles just around what our our customer wants, what the founders
want what they need. And we know that if we can stay in touch with that.
We'll constantly be a step ahead of everyone else because we're so close to our customer.
Pretty much live with our customer.
Or twelve weeks. So that's the key.
How do you decide?
what investors you want to cultivate as the preferred
people that fund the companies coming out of HF Zero.
This one's really hard.
I'm trying to figure this one out.
I think for us
Every for every founder, it's about them finding the right
fit partner for them. And so really we've been thinking a lot about
The thing that founders waste the most time on within six months of HF0 is if they do a fundraise.
That is the thing that they waste the most time on. I want to save them as much time as possible and
Our whole thing is about taking care of you as a human. It's about being human driven. And so how do we create
an efficient process where you actually get to know
Investment partners as humans.
And this is why our demo day's so special right now is that we only have
Roughly ten teams demo.
Two minutes per team of twenty minutes.
The rest of the time.
As a GP, you can just go talk to the founders that you want to get to know, get to know them as human beings. And each team sets up an experiential version of their startup. So you can actually experience
Their startup and not only do you get to see their startup, you get to see their personality. And we only have forty four seats at our demo day. We only allow each firm to send one GP, no junior partners, no associates. So we really
Have been trying to create
A space where the founders can just get to know
these GPs as humans, because who am I to pick which GPs they should work with? They should work with the GP that
believes in their vision that they really resonate with. And that's gonna be able to help them in the ways that they need.
That they need help.
Many of the best what turned out to be the biggest outcomes were often unpopular
categories or even low status categories when they were started. Airbnb is a good example that everyone always cites. How much do you see
the things being worked on inside of HF Zero as reflective of prevailing trends, whether it's crypto at a certain time or AI at a certain time, versus just some wacky thing that you wouldn't expect that
Back to that point about self expression is just for whatever reason the thing inside that person.
So we're industry agnostic.
And we back the most brilliant engineers as early as possible.
That's our thesis.
And I always tell our team to stay nonreligious. Doesn't matter if crypto's up, crypto's down, AI's up, AI's down, just how do we stay nonreligious about it all and just keep backing the most brilliant engineers as early as possible. That said, the most brilliant engineers constantly are trying out
the latest technology to give them an edge.
And so our view of AI is that
AI is a tool.
Not an industry.
And it's a tool that's generally useful across just about every industry.
And the founders who don't find ways to leverage it will get disrupted by the founders who do.
So people like AI residency and I'm like, We look for AI hackers. We look for hackers who are messing with these tools because if you're not
You will get beat by founders who do.
But it's
Less important to us whether they're in
quote unquote AI company. I really don't buy this idea of AI company so much unless you're building a foundation model.
Who's your customer? That's what type of company you are.
And so I think more than ever right now.
It is crucial
for founders to be steeped in first principles of working backwards from their customer. Right now I'm seeing more rampant than ever.
Technology in search of a problem. Hammers in search of nails.
And so we really look for the founders who
Understand their customer.
And are incredible at building stuff.
Really if we're thinking about the doesn't stop the key is
Are they talking to their customer? How well do they understand their customer? Are they building backwards from their customer? I don't care what tools they use.
I don't care if they use React on the front end or
Angular. I don't care.
I care about do they actually understand their customer, are they building something that solves their
Problem.
For those of us that don't have the reps with engineers that you do.
What would you say to help?
the lay person understand
Engineers better.
I'm still working on this definition, but I'm zeroing in on it.
My definition of hacker is essentially an artist.
Who's not attached to any medium of expression.
It's essentially an unshackled artist.
And this is important.
To understand that hackers are artists.
I think a lot of people view engineers
And because we use the word engineer, they don't view it in the space of creative expression, but you better believe it's creative expression.
the element of being an artist that I think people neglect with hackers
is understanding that it's really about expression.
I realized this when I was running the hackathons.
I started thinking about how do we end the hackathons in the right way.
We end up coming up with this whole expo format that pretty much all the hackathons switch to.
But the key insight here is that
There's something about being seen in what you're building.
That's actually really important.
Fun to build. A lot of hackers like love writing code and stuff.
But
There's something about being seen in the right way by someone who actually understands.
Yeah.
Not just understands your work, but understands you.
When they see what you've built.
And this is the part that I think most people don't understand.
And I think even most hackers don't understand about themselves.
That I think.
Is the first principle.
That's led me to success building hackathons that people love going to
Say a bit more about the period of your life that was just hackathons all the time.
Two days instead of twelve weeks.
Any lessons that you've learned during that period that are distinct from what you've observed in the residence?
So when we started M Hacks at the end of the
M Hack's the hackathon I started at Michigan. It was the largest hackathon in the world and it was the first hackathon I ever threw.
At the end of it I gave a speech that was like, Hey, look, there's no good reason the largest hackathon in the world is here at Michigan.
It's a good school, but it's not the best.
The only reason this isn't happening at your school is that you haven't started it yet.
So if you want to start the hackathon at your school or you want to scale it up.
Yeah.
Here's my Facebook link, bitly slash hell yeah, any number of L's I just ran a script.
Hit me up and I'll come to your school and I'll help you get it started.
And students from twenty eight of the thirty five schools hit me up.
So I dropped out two weeks later and just started traveling to these different universities, helping them get their hackathons off the ground or helping them scale them up if they already had one.
I really started zeroing in on figuring out
What is the lightest touch way?
I can increase the chance that that school ends up having a mega hackathon.
What I do is I go to a lot of the universities way before they threw the hackathon. I tell them, Hey, call a meeting with your whole hackathon team.
And then I would really talk about
Why we were doing it.
I talk about why do we want to build this big hackathon.
I remember this is actually from my meditation teacher from Dalai Dharma.
This guy from his retreat, he would always say, We run the risk of no transformation.
that your hackathon could go smoothly, but actually the risk is that people come

The same person.
And so the real opportunity there.
is the transformation. This is what I mentioned earlier.
So I tell the teams I'm like, Hey, if y'all throw this hackathon
Not everyone.
But some percent of the people it might even be.
Pretty high. Might even be like forty percent of the people are gonna have their entire life changed.
They're gonna walk in the door.
of that weekend and walk out the door.
A different person.
And then what I would do.
is I would say everyone.
The one thing you need to know about organizing a hackathon is that everyone has to help with fundraising. So everyone pull out your laptop and let's all send at least one email to someone that we know.
to try to get them to donate five hundred dollars to the hackathon because I knew if
They got one yes email, then the hackathon would happen.
So I'd really start with why and then think about the one concrete thing.
I could get that would set things into motion. And so that's what I'm trying to figure out with residencies right now.
So if you're listening to this, you're thinking about starting a residency that
One thing I'd say is just start it. Don't ask us for permission, just do it.
And then two.
I need to figure out what the
lightest mechanic I can do on my end.
that actually takes the people who are thinking about starting them or who are starting them and trying to get them going.
Sets them fully in emotion.
It seems like the technology that's proliferating today
is gonna collapse.
the distance between imagination and reality.
And that engineering
is gonna be a fuzzier concept that
You mentioned hackers are just
Self expressing.
The
barrier to entry there is if you didn't take the C S class like you did or whatever, you don't have that kind of brain, it's hard to do.
lag between the code on the left and the outcome on the right, it's hard to do. What do you think that means for the future of this stuff that in five years' time or two years time
You may not need to be technical at all to do a lot of the same
things. Do you think that you will always edge towards what is more technical?
What it means to be technical is just gonna shift.
You will be technical if you're building stuff.
But the key is what I mentioned earlier is that felt sense.
The key is way less about your exact coding skills. It's way more about you seeing something that's possible that doesn't exist yet.
And you being in the felt sense of that vision, actually seeing something. For me, it's the world where people can just build stuff.
The world where people can just build shit and not have to worry about anything else, where they can just suspend themselves in the matrix, suspend themselves in that bubble and just build.
Whatever that vision is for you.
What's gonna happen is that
If you actually do have that vision.
You're gonna be able to build it much faster.
you're gonna be able to build it much easier. The barrier for that's gonna be lower.
The other thing is that as more people are able to build stuff
You actually start seeing more possibilities.
As you know what is possible.
You start envisioning more possibilities.
To me the technical, non technical thing is actually more about more of an identity.
Maybe resourceful is the right word.
I actually think
When we were running the hackathons early on.
I would be taking a bus to a hackathon if someone didn't show up for the bus. Sometimes I'd say, Hey, hold the bus.
And I would go to the center of whatever campus we were on and just convince
random freshmen to jump on the bus and come to the hackathon. And I wouldn't look for the freshmen who had done a C S class. I would look for the freshmen who have ideas.
That's like hey, do you have any app ideas? Hey, do you have any app ideas? Hey do you have any app ideas? Maybe the third or fourth person would be like Oh yeah, actually I have this app idea.
And hey, you can build that this weekend. Oh, but I've never coded before and I'm like, Do you have a laptop with you?
Yeah. So even the barrier ten years ago with hackathons.
Wasn't that high. If you actually gave yourself two days
We subtract everything else from your life, you could actually build something.
So I think a lot of people who identify as non technical
end up opting out of taking those two days, but even someone who
Previously identified as non technical.
could come to a hackathon and build something. And so what I would really tell people is
Hackathons
aren't just for hackers, hackathons turn normal people.
into hackers.
And that's that shift. It's about agency.
It's like an internal shift that happens.
And I remember ten years ago I tell people, Hey, when they built Facebook, it was really hard to build an app like that. Now if you wanted to build a basic app like what Facebook was
You could do that in your first weekend building stuff.
That barrier is just gonna continue going down.
But it's still gonna be about the shift in agency.
The most important thing is having a vision, having an idea of something that you want to build.
But then you're gonna be able to manifest that much quicker.
But the real key is that shift where you actually believe that you can do it.
Is there anything else about
Everything you've built, want to build
believe about the world, believe should be different in the world that we haven't talked about.
When I think about venture today, I'm just like how are we not taking care of our founders as human beings?
Way we're doing venture today is we're taking the top Olympic athletes and just giving them money.
Telling them see you at the Olympics and there's just such an opportunity.
to actually take care of founders as human beings. And I just want to see more of that.
We bring in a doctor of physical therapy the first day of the batch who works with you to
put your monitor at the right height, your keyboard at the right height, set up your body for if you are gonna code for fourteen hours straight, how should you sit?
What exercises should you do when you take breaks and stuff?
This should be table stakes, man.
Coding for extended periods of time is actually pretty rough on your body.
Especially as you get older and early stage investors should take care of their founders.
at a w way higher degree. And I think it's inevitable. I think as
right now what we're doing is working so well.
And it's working so well on that it's attracting the top founders in the world, but it's also working so well in that they're
making progress faster than ever before.
I just hope that as people see that.
As people witness that, they're gonna realize
those other twenty four hundred teams, a lot of them are really strong.
What
Something like this. And they're not
Being met.
There's a ton of demand for a product like this residency.
Or just a product that takes care of you as a human being so you can
Just build.
Not worry about anything else.
I would just love to see
Venture find more ways of offering that.
I think what you're doing is so cool and different and interesting.
I would predict that this is something that's gonna get tried a lot and a lot will be learned about what makes a great one of these, what makes a bad one.
And I'm really excited just watch it. I ask everyone that I interview the same traditional closing question. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
I have a close mentor who's
Passing away soon. And
The kindest thing she ever did for me is
Believe in me.
Even when I didn't believe in myself.
So we started H F Zero February fifteenth, twenty twenty, in New York.
Two weeks in I had to shut it down'cause of Covid.
But I knew we were on to something.
And so I heard there was no covet in Taiwan and I flew there.
I spent six months learning Mandarin.
I was like, I gotta keep this thing alive.
But by the time my manner was getting good enough, and I was six months in there, I'd lost
faith that it could be pulled off'cause I kept asking people to help me and I couldn't figure it out.
And then I met her.
And she was pretty much like, Why are you here?
And I told her oh I came here to keep this

And
She just believed in me at that moment where
I could have let this whole
Dream this whole vision fade.
And next thing I know I was giving a speech.
In Manor and in front of a bunch of
People in politics in Taiwan they
helped me get the visas and then I was able to fly everyone out to Taiwan around the first full batch there during Covid.
That's what came to mind when you asked the kind of thing that someone's done for me.
Dave, thanks so much for your time.
Thank you my man.
Um
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