Tag: podcast notes

Podcast notes – How the internet happened – Chris Dixon (a16z) and Brian McCullough (author)

Host: Chris Dixon, a16z partner
Guest: Brian McCullough, author and podcaster

Just published the book “How the Internet Happened, From Netscape to the iPhone” (Amazon)
covers Netscape (1993-ish) to announcement of first iPhone (~2007)
2007-today is the smartphone era

Technology infiltrated every facet of our lives

Bad idea cards – “internet grocery delivery”, “pet foods” – almost every bad idea later became a huge company

Dot com bust was like the meteor hit, the dinosaurs died, but then it all came roaring back

In early 2000s, general sentiment was that internet was cool, useful, but you couldn’t really make money – until the Google IPO, which shocked everyone how profitable they were

In early days, there was a centralized version of the internet called the “Information Superhighway” being pushed by large companies like Disney, Microsoft, etc
The decentralized / distributed network was the underdog
The centralized version / participants thought they had more time, but they lost. What’s the lesson?
“Just good enough technology IS good enough”
Need to excite enough people, reach critical mass
Lots of them were developers who could build
HTML was simple enough, lowered barriers to entry – launch of Mosaic browser
Bill Gates had the vision, but bet on the wrong horse (the centralized version)

eBay – they were one of the most influential early products, even though they aren’t as massive today
1. trained normies to trust strangers online
2. power of self organizing masses to build reputation and relationships
Omidyar didn’t want to settle the disputes between users, so built a reputation and ratings system to let users self organize
“Our business model is whatever our users are doing on our platform”

Napster – today media world is unlimited selection + instant gratification – Napster built that in 1999, but picked fight with wrong industry (music industry literally had mob ties)
turns out key value prop was the convenience, not the price
can’t convince an industry at height of its success to change

Google’s business model was 2 miracles
1. The search engine
2. Overture’s ad model (which Google acquired)
As advertiser, you pay LESS per click the better (more relevant) your ad!
Users actually PREFER having ads
Before that it was all banner ads
Larry & Sergey stuck to principles, were betting that a biz model would come
Initially tried to sell a box for Google Enterprise Search

Turns out on-demand delivery needed smartphones – which came later
Smartphone is perfect for both creation and consumption

We’re in a lull today
No new “wow factor”
Lot of low hanging fruit has been picked by mobile + social
To become the new IG, need to create a qualitatively better experience
Can’t just show up and acquire 1B users

Tech is interplay of infrastructure + applications
iPhone + App Store was infra unlock, which lead to explosion of apps
what’s next infra wave? or are we at end of history?

Founders doing same playbook as 2004
Maybe need new builders to have cultural shift / strategic shift

Is it dangerous because the top companies today have become too big, and just buy the small innovative cos?
Alex Rampell – startups try to find distribution faster than incumbents try to find innovation
Snapchat is great example – invented new media type (vertical short video, ephemeral messaging) – but growth was limited by FB / IG copying
Etsy – Amazon copies them
Tivo – great idea, but Comcast eventually copied it (took 5 years)

PC industry was literally created by hobbyists
Find the spaces where people do it for fun
Most businesses operate on a quarterly or yearly cycle
No one invests in 10 year cycle except maybe academics and hobbyists – which is why often the breakthru innovations comes from these sources

So much of it is just feeling around in dark, fake it til you make it
Even Bezos, Amazon was a test to prove it to himself – once he proved it, then he went all in
Even FB, Zuckerberg thought Wirehog would be bigger, took others to tell him to believe in FB and double down on it

Podcast notes – Sam Bankman Fried (FTX founder) with Tyler Cowen

Guest: SBF – FTX and Alameda Research founder, crypto billionaire
Host: Tyler Cowen

What is his production function?
World is messy, huge power in getting quantitative / numerical when it’s hard to do so

Worked at Jane Street before crypto
Lot of interview questions are game questions
You’re always making probabilistic decisions, focus on the factors that matter and ignore the rest

Trading is grinding to do a good job
Goal is making money
Constantly think of solutions and try them out

Parents are famous Stanford law professors

Utilitarian perspective – turn things into numbers, and decide which number is the biggest, even in a messy system

Crypto today is enormous fraction of discourse in politics and regulation
Understand the nuances, possible directions
200 countries – each one is trying to figure out how to regulate crypto

Thought he was a good manager until he started Alameda
Seems easy when things are going well
What to do when two employees vehemently disagree?
First, think of the object level truth / answer
Find the right answer
Company culture should focus on that right answer, being ruthless about it
Need agreed upon process to make hard decisions

Some sports teams outperform every year
eg, Belichick + Patriots
They’re known for doing the right thing – what play optimizes our winning – it’s not about conventions or what’s popular
In sports, a lot of fruit is low hanging, focus on that

Supporter of effective altruism
Lot more funding for it now than before
Still need more innovation in how to properly spend money
Also need more good people – to start and lead projects and take responsibility for their success
A leader who can get everyone to take leap together, putting flagpole down

Next $million, where do you give it?
Two things
1. Pandemic preparedness (covid response screwed up, haven’t improved for next one, we got lucky all things considered). We just shut everything down. Vaccine was fast by vaccine standards but not by “people are dying” standards. Lobbying Washington for more spending on pandemic preparedness. Funding vaccine capacity / vaccine stockpiles / early detection systems
2. ?

He’s a pure Bentham-ite utilitarian
Tyler: Why spend money on life extension? Easier to grow utils than save them
SBF: Not compelled by life extension research, not necessary for world flourishing

SBF is vegan
No problem with eating meat if you’re net happy
When he switched to vegetarian / vegan, took 6 months to make real progress
Easier to go cold turkey than steadily wean off it
Doesn’t like cognitive load of deciding whether to eat meat

Everything gets weird at infinity when you think about expected values
Infinity matters, but no one has good account of it

Crypto
Can you coherently regulate stablecoins?
All stablecoins backed by dollars, in regulated accounts – solves most of current problems
But lots of gray area, like what’s difference between PayPal and USDC?
Banks can re-hypothecate, but what about stablecoins?
How do you regulate a coin that doesn’t call itself stable, but in reality has a very stable price?
A stablecoin is stable in both directions (asymmetric for consumer)

DeFi
Tyler: where is implicit (hidden) leverage?
In 2008, lots of bespoke OTC swaps that weren’t properly accounted – these exist in crypto too
Everything’s on-chain, but it’s inconsistently tracked
Dai – algo stablecoin, backed by crypto assets, not perfectly stable – but can also be used itself as collateral for other loans / leverage

Do we have rational theory for crypto prices?
Dogecoin – does away with pretense – can’t do DCF – bizarre and wacky but powerful – it’s just supply and demand (memes and anti memes)
Elon’s greatest product is TSLA (the stock, not the car)
Are there other asset classes aside from crypto that have price models that are similarly artificial / unreliable?
Meme stocks show this

Bitcoin’s price comp with gold is useful
Currently trading ~10% of gold
Swiss franc or bitcoin – which has more impact on world? Now the answer is obvious, but it wasn’t 2-3 years ago

What does it take for global scale blockchain?
take NYSE, Nasdaq, Google, Facebook
if billion users, 10 clicks per day, 1M TPS (transactions per second) – need something of that scale
most blockchains can’t support that today
ETH can support 10 – off by 6 orders of magnitude
ETH2 will support thousands of TPS per shard, but the shards don’t talk to each other

Growing up, McDonalds fries were his favorite
hard to find good fries in Asia
Tyler’s favorite fries are in Patagonia (also Belgium)

likes Beyond Burger – huge fraction of all veggie burgers sold, taste a lot better than most veggie burgers

currently in Bahamas – somewhat bullish on it, great place for some types of businesses
investing in schools, health infrastructure
nimble small state, robustly democratic
people are very nice
close to Miami
how would he give away $10M in Bahamas?
Health and hospitals
cash transfers are always a reliable answer

Podcast notes – Kyle Samani (Multicoin) on what’s next for NFTs (w/ Frank Chaparro)

Host Frank Chaparro – The Block
Guest Kyle Samani – Multicoin Capital

Hedge fund founded in 2017
Funded Solana, FTX, Helium

How he survived through 17-18 bear
Founders worked hard, he supports them
Parents were immigrants – taught him persistence & grit

NFTs don’t have pieces of state with relationships with each other (yet)
eg, Bored Apes are individually isolated
Designing relationships between NFTs, and letting them evolve over time

Beeple’s 5000 Days should be 5000 separate NFTs that are related to each other, have games to collect and combine them

Recombining NFTs into social games

Fan clubs – Bieber’s new song, letting first 1000 listen to it early

Where they’re investing?
3 layers to NFT stack:
1. Primitive / infrastructure – eg, Arweave (storage), Render (distributed graphics rendering), Metaplex (Uniswap of NFTs on Solana)
2. Exchanges – Hakku (NFT exchange on Polygon), invested in at least 3 now
3. Buying NFTs directly – invested in Loot, but will be small (less than 1% of assets), hard to do this at scale

NFT exchanges will segment – doesn’t make sense that apes are traded in same way as .eth names as metaverse land, there will be many exchanges, they’ll vertical-ize

How are valuations justified?
Just assume every musician will issue a 10K NFT collection – why can’t that be sustained? Most of them have several Ks of fans and some have much more
People underestimate scale the internet brings, TAMs have gotten way way way bigger

Web3 will be less disruptive to society than web2
Web3 = Permissionless flow of value (web2 = permissionless flow of information)
Who will win? Majority will be net new protocols and businesses (not web2 / traditional industries)

NFTs = let superfans self identify and spend
Patronage models for creativity will evolve

Power law distribution happens everywhere, will also happen in NFTs / web3

Multicoin’s alpha is identifying new theses, what new tech enables

Growth in users, revenues, have really accelerated
Why? They all have smartphones, they all have internet, they’re all comfortable (now) spending money online

New inventions will be made regardless of what happens in global macro

Is there froth in venture?
It does feel frothy, easier to be crypto VC bc time to liquidity is shorter
Absolute $ in crypto VC is still much smaller than trad VC
Valuations won’t come down for high quality teams

Once product market fit established, rate of growth / adoption will be faster than ever – viral and reflexive nature in crypto is extraordinary and still deeply under appreciated

How many investments so far in 2022?
5-10 investments
Deploying capital as fast as ever

Doesn’t know or care bitcoin price, really avoids checking crypto prices

Park City, Utah is now his home base
Loves snowboarding

Public pension funds are buying top layer 1s – that’s the bid – not just btc / eth

Most investors no longer have regulatory risk as the main reason not to invest

Many investors in 2010, 2011 were skeptical of internet / software, now everyone sees that power and transformation. What’s next? A lot are looking at crypto as one of the future’s big platforms

What investments is he looking for?
Metaverse (infrastructure, defi broadly, Graph, Render, Fluid) – prefers those that are working on credibly neutral
Social media – soon something social will break out that will be crypto native

True crypto natives today – closer to 1M than 10M
Large enough to bootstrap meaningful social network
In 24 months, these users will move off Twitter onto something crypto native

Podcast notes – Daniel Gross (Pioneer) on identifying 10x talent (Auren Hoffman’s podcast)

Guest Daniel Gross, runs Pioneer accelerator
Host Auren Hoffman

If you invest in 16 yos – who is underpriced? How to identify talent?
Simplest thing is raw energy – it’s hard to measure, but everyone knows how it feels
PG: Formidability and almost fear

Studies on Professor charisma – can tell after 2 minutes if a professor is charismatic

Every culture has energetic versus non-energetic types

IQ matters, need working memory, reason through complex problems, but there’s a asymptote rather quickly
Warren Buffett: Emotional stability is just as important (if not more)

For founding companies, initial hypothesis is generally wrong – how many things will you try, how quickly will you try them?
Energetic founders have more shots on goal

When you meet someone, would you work for them?

Is the person funny? Humor is underrated. Charismatic leaders are pretty funny
Humor creates bonding
like Peloton coaches telling jokes, building bonds with you through a screen

Don’t hire for lateral moves
True gratitude is powerful, try to lift people up

Ambition is more nurture
Who is that person performing for? Who are they trying to impress? Who are their role models?
Bezos even with all his success, is still competing with Elon

A lot of people perform for Twitter

Can we make people more energetic?
Dark Ages, we moved from alehouses > tea and coffee houses
Real miracle for human productivity

Humans have huge dynamic range, how much will you activate?
Meeting impressive people is a real motivator / energy boost

How to create more optimism in society
Number of native Chinese Nobel Laureates – only six or seven in such a huge nation
Lack of optimism
Very domestically competitive, leads to local optimization over global optimization

Israel has no market risk companies, only execution risk companies
No Snapchat, but they’ll will get semiconductors right
Related to harsh society, existential risks

What’s biggest motivator for founders?
Silicon Valley was not driven by commercial goals initially
A Walt Disney sense of building a cool place
Changed today by 1) crypto (instant liquidity) and 2) growing popularity (Eternal September effect)

As Silicon Valley eats more of the world, tech as a sector doesn’t really exist, it’s just business

Most founders now are just on easier / known paths, eg, SaaS companies

Brain is better at imagining downside over upside
Upside requires real creativity
CNN is a menu of moral panics
Some of it is useful, but only small % you have agency over
Daniel only reads Financial Times and Bloomberg – and you have agency over more of the news items, you can trade on it / react to it

Covid – unvaccinated people – no news item or celebrity endorsement will lead them to get vaccinated now

He likes to ask simple interview questions, like your favorite movies
Tyler Cowen does this
Get honest answers, get same alpha by decoding these responses
Can have a better conversation too
He likes the movie Whiplash – can filter the insecure overachiever types
It’s like a dating problem

Likes to go meta in interviews
Start an interview by talking about how most interviews are boring, maybe we’ll go on a random walk, have a fun 30 minutes together

Auren’s own experience: best hires not really related to best interviews
10x-ers – don’t think he could have predicted it at the interview stage

Prefers raw 23yo, energetic, higher beta
Doesn’t like the extremely polished execs, feels like he’s in a punching match

How do you test for aesthetic in an engineer?
Good writing can be a decent proxy

How to quantify engineering productivity
Often must choose between dirty metric that’s easy to explain, and a better metric that’s more complicated to understand
Dirty metric is usually the right choice

Auren: Successful salesperson – extremely high correlation with working hours
Almost the only metric in sales
In engineers, some of his best ones work <40 hours a week

Daniel’s best engineer left work every day at 3:59pm, but would have seen his productivity in lines of code. Spent 30 minutes planning in the morning, and then just output rest of the day
Code that works the first time is another good predictor of skill, versus it doesn’t work and let’s brute force / debug it

10x-er – what they consider easy work is often what others think is hard work – baseline sense is very different from others
Expand job description, do a lot more than expected
They just have a sense of what’s right, what needs to be done
Conscientiousness overdose

How can companies use leaderboards
Staring at charts together as a team is helpful, especially in remote work world
If you have a fixed beginning and end for reviewing stats – eg, 2 hours every week – creates more engagement
Liveliness also helps – constant up and down ticks eg stock market
Need skin in the game – real risk tied to the metrics

Remote work has shortage of emotion, oxytocin

Lots of reputational short sellers these days – looking to bring down others
eg, Slack emoji riots, cancel culture, reputation raiders

Grew up in Jerusalem, orthodox Judaism
What he learned – outsiders are very beneficial for innovation, talent is universal

Advice to younger self
Only moving at 5% of potential speed – do everything faster – how to get to 100% or even 105%
Benefitted at Apple from coworkers, especially when young, being an apprentice
Finding mentors sooner, increases compounding growth rate

Podcast notes – Neil Gaiman (Sandman, American Gods, Graveyard Book) and Tim Ferriss

Guest: Neil Gaiman
Wrote American Gods, Neverwhere, Sandman, Graveyard Book
Won Hugo and Nebula and many more
Narrates many of his own books
Currently showrunner for Good Omens, a BBC show
Professor @ Bard College

Tim’s chased this interview for a decade

Neil – at 15yo, started a magazine as a way to meet his favorite writers
Interviewed Roger Dean, designer and artist, famous for album covers – but the recorded audio messed up, so he’s always carried spares now

Ian Fleming didn’t enjoy process of writing James Bond books
So he would check into a strange hotel in a strange place for 2 weeks, nothing else to do except write
Ian also gave Roald Dahl some of his best story twists
Neil sometimes does this hotel thing – wrote in a Marriott in World Trade Center, just wanted to finish and get out

Biggest rule he tells himself – you can sit there and you’re allowed to do absolutely nothing, but if you do something, you must write

Has a 3yo son – more fun to play with him than write

Often does first draft in fountain pen – likes to fill the ink, likes the heft, can see progress more clearly
“Emphasizes that no one’s meant to read your first draft”
First draft is you telling story to yourself
Second draft is typing into a computer – making it look like he knew what he was doing all along

Computer expands a story like gas – the stories tend to get longer, but there isn’t a lot more story there (than writing by hand)
Doesn’t want his story to become gaseous and thin

Likes Leuchtturm1917 notebooks for writing

Has a house in Wisconsin

Anything you do can be fixed – but you can’t fix a blank page

What fountain pens he recs
-Go to NY fountain pen hospital – try them out
-Likes Lamy pens
-Signed ~1.5M signatures with a Pilot 823

Most of his early career, he wrote with an electric typewriter
After 10 years, he wanted antiquated rhythms while writing Stardust, so he decided to try hand writing / dip pens. You need to slow up, think ahead, write complete sentences

How to remove performance anxiety / pressure
Neil likes writing things no one’s waiting for
Wrote Coraline after American Gods – no one was expecting a children’s book – editors told him it was unpublishable
Wrote 5 or 6 lines a night, right before bed

Used to write multiple projects at once – if he got stuck on one, would rotate to another – but feels like he’s not as good at doing that anymore, takes too long to switch between projects

When he started (22-27ish), was a late night writer – nothing happened until kids in bed, 9pm until 2am, smoked, drank coffee
Later switched from coffee to tea, and began to fall asleep earlier
Writing novels works best when you can have the same day over and over again – like Groundhog Day
His example routine while staying at a friend’s lake house – wake up, go for a jog, go to a cafe, cup of green tea, sit in a corner and just start writing – and after a few months, had “Ocean at the end of the lane”

Tim’s favorite fiction audiobook is Graveyard Book
Where did that book come from?
25yo (1984 or so), living in Sussex, an old tall house his dad owned, had a 3yo son who loved his tricycle, they’d go across road to a churchyard
Saw how happy his son was riding his trike in that graveyard
Kinda like Jungle Book – kid in the graveyard being raised by dead people
It didn’t quite work – there was a demon, the character was very like his son – felt like the story was too good but his writing wasn’t there yet
He put it off for a decade, but knew it had legs
Over years, just let the story accumulate
After finishing Anansi Boys, decided to tackle it again
This time he didn’t start writing from beginning, but from the middle instead – Headstone (Ch4) – read it to his daughter Maddy, who wanted to know what happens next, so he kept writing, and eventually got it
“there was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife”

Friendship w/ Terry Pratchett
English writer who died in 2015, humorist and satirist, Discworld series, bestselling UK novelist
Met at an Italian restaurant, was a young journalist, Terry was a press officer at the time, “had same kind of mind”
Terry would send his drafts, get feedback on what’s funnier
Neil sent a draft to Terry of a project (Good Omens), Terry wanted to buy it or write it together, was wonderful apprenticeship for Neil
Finally turned into a TV show – Neil is showrunner, making the show was one of Terry’s last wishes
Cast Jon Hamm, David Tennant, Michael Sheen, etc
“giant interwoven panoply of mixed emotions”

What did he learn from Terry?
Willingness to go forward w/o knowing what happens next
George RR Martin divides writers into architects and gardeners – Neil would rather be a gardener, allow for accidents and surprises
Wanted to make Terry laugh
Terry had a form of Alzheimers, made documentaries about Alzheimers, supported assisted suicide / right to die