Welcome back everyone. I am Cass PNC.
I'm joined as usual by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett
Tomlin. How are you today?
I'm doing well. How are you, Cass?
I'm doing, I'm doing good. I'm hoping my Internet stays OK
today because we have a very special guest, Travis Kimmel,
CEO of a startup we've had him on previously, one of our
favorite guests. How are you, Travis?
I'm doing great, how y'all? Doing awesome.
We're we're here to discuss venture capital with you, which
is a topic that we bring up pretty regularly with a lot of
animus usually. To me, the arc is sort of like,
you know, there was like a lot of things like just sort of
capitalism generally there. There is this original intent
around it that that's really good.
Like I'm a, you know, I'm a capitalist myself, like, and I
believe in it. And yet you look at the way that
it is that it has been playing out lately and there are still,
there are a lot there. It's complex because there are a
lot of people doing that sort of, you know, healthy
capitalism. And then there's a lot of like
weird regulatory capture stuff that goes on as well.
So I think, you know, certainly open to talk about history.
You may know more about it than I have.
I mean, I've said read a few books on it, but I think that
the we're at this weird place with venture capital where it
is, it has sort of escaped containment.
So for a while, you know, we had this like it was very much a
Silicon Valley thing. And I think some of the best
venture capital is still there. And, and in New York, it's on
the coast. And I, I think that the way that
venture has escaped containment is really strange because now
they all have media companies, right.
So like, if we think, I mean, we could sort of just get into it
here. Yeah.
If you think about like, if we think about like venture
capital, the effect of having a large megaphone around a certain
aesthetic that works really well.
What is that aesthetic, that aesthetic?
It is growth companies. Growth companies are a little
weird and you have to be a little, a little broken to try
to go make one safe from experience, because it's like
it's really hard and there's a lot of risk and there's a lot of
risk on the entrepreneur side, more so than on the venture side
because they're building like a proper portfolio.
And So what you, one of the things you want to look for in,
in funding these companies is zealots.
So you, it's a little bit of a zealot culture, right?
So it's to my mind, there's this strange thing where like a
Messiah culture inside of a little company that's doing
something incredibly hard is like kind of fine because it
gets you through the really hard times where you're not sure
you're going to make it. But then the distribution of
Messiah culture generally into Gen. pop is like, don't know if
we want that. Well, I like this is interesting
to me because this this brings up to me when I get into the
history of Silicon Valley and venture capital, because in my,
in my opinion, venture capital started in Silicon Valley.
So Fairchild Semiconductors is known as the initial venture.
Like as we know venture capital today, like that was when it
happened. For anyone that doesn't know,
they like really got integrated chips started and chose to use
silicon and they were known as the traitorous 8.
They left Shockley and form their own company.
So there is a little bit of a few things that I think about
that's still being involved in Silicon Valley and venture
capital today, which are a bunch of people screwing over someone
to start their own thing. And also what you're talking
about, which was a zealotry, but a zealotry in relation to
wanting to innovate in the fastest way possible
passionately. And I don't think that that is
the goal in venture capital anymore.
I it's in there, it may not be, you know, the, the single goal
or even the median goal, but it's still round.
And I think there's a couple, there's a couple things I'd say
on that. One, that pattern of like
innovation at all costs works really well on software.
It's one of the reasons I like staying in like software because
software is a little, it's a little easier to like innovate
at all costs when the downside of screwing up is like the site
goes down and people don't have the SAS product you're selling
them. That's not really, there's
nothing really like violent about that.
You know, it's sort of there's like a little bit of a broken
promise and you got to make that up to the customer and you got
to try to prevent that. But you can move very quickly
and be like kind of safe a lot of times with software products.
And then when that same ethos gets translated into other
domains as venture expands outward.
So like Theranos is a great example that everybody sort of
loves to talk about here, like move quickly and break things
when you're dealing with medtech.
It's just not clear that that's a lean startup type of problem.
And I think you, you know, any time we try to take this into
another industry where now we're dealing with like, you know, I
think you see a lot of the the drama around Tesla here, right?
Like, OK, let's just ship something before it's ready and
then keep iterating on it. Like, cool, that's great.
Unless it's the thing driving my car and then like I kind of want
to be a late adopter there. See, I, I started laughing there
when you brought up Tesla because you were talking about
how this move fast and break things type of model kind of
works in software, but it doesn't work as you head into
other domains. And I was going to talk about
how software is eating everything, as they like to say
in the example I was just about to bring up was autonomous
vehicles being distributed perhaps before their time.
And then you jumped right to there.
Yeah. And I think, you know, you saw
you see this in the packaging of other products as well.
I get, I may get this example a little wrong, but it's
directional. Right before the latest Boeing
thing, there was some other Boeing thing where they had like
they were selling these planes and they had like different
tiers, almost like SAS pricing. So you got like the basic model
and then you got the mid tier model and you could sort of buy
whatever. What are autopilot control
system? And like it turns out you kind
of needed the mid tier one if you didn't want the plane to
stall out and fall out of the sky.
And I'm just not sure we wouldn't apply these lessons.
They come from this sort of like blast scaling ethos around
software where where I think it's safe to do that if you're
if you're mindful of the externalities and and they're
not there's no actual damage other than like the app being
unavailable. But as soon as this stuff starts
to get distributed as like the way the business is done by
people with these large megaphones, that's where you run
into some real issues. And I think that's a really
interesting angle that we actually talked about a little
bit on here way back in one of our very first episodes, like
episode eight or nine or something.
We were talking about when Coinbase was launching their
media business and compared it to some of Andreessen,
Andreessen Horowitz's efforts in the media landscape with kind of
that same conclusion that entrepreneurial success requires
an unusual type of person in an unusual type of circumstances.
The type of success that is created there generally is not
going to replicate broadly or across other circumstances or
other types of people. But there was a tendency to use
these stories to make it seem in these media projects like it did
generalize more than it did. And then there was a second
thing that you'd see these media companies sometimes do, which
would be to take kind of successful examples or ones that
didn't seem like they were likely to actually lead to the
same kind of massive entrepreneurial success, but
match it up against previous successes on its way there to
like they wanted things that were.
Not made the case. Yeah, yeah.
That the media out effort they were doing was like part of
their making the case that these other firms were like the big
successes, yeah. I mean, it might be useful to
talk through like, OK, so you know, just laying the ground
with here. What is venture capital today?
In my mind, you're, you know, you get a pool of money, which
is often, you know, like pension money or whatever these like a
large LP's, you pull this stuff together and then you go fund a
cohort of companies. And if you're investing early
on, so like, let's just say the company is from inception.
I mean, most of those are going to fail just like outright.
And so the model requires you to think about each of these bets
almost the way you would a, a portfolio of options.
Like they've got to have asymmetric upside.
That position has to be able to be at a 203040 X.
So you're only investing in stuff with, with really big TAN.
This is why there's this obsession with market size.
Like if you're, if you're going to invest in something with a
small TAN, that portfolio, you're kind of wasting a bet.
You know, out of 10 bets, maybe two to three of those return
like a double or a 111 of those. It makes your whole makes the
whole thing makes all the rest of the 10 and seven of them just
like go to 0, some little like acquire thing that really scopes
how VCs think about what companies are investable.
And then I think if you take down one more step there into
the into the operator side of it, you also want a business
that is capable of being a growth business.
And and that means it has to be structured such that the gross
margins are super fat. So you're talking like 80 plus
percent gross margin. So like the beauty of software
basically is in this growth model where if I have, if I
stand up a web application and I want to sell to add a customer,
it costs almost nothing. Like there's a little bit of
server cost there, but but it's, it's, you know, it's more or
less free. And so that's what defines these
growth companies is you can then take all of this capital you
have and use it on sales and marketing and further R&D and
you really just try to like grow as fast and as aggressively as
possible. Now the, the failure pattern
around venture is when you get a, a business that is sort of,
you know, I guess I mean, you all I'll use cooking the books
because you all appreciate it. But the way that you categorize
the P&L, I mean, there's actually just a lot of
discretion in there. So sometimes what you'll see in
the world where I'm from, which is like SAS software is that the
you'll have stuff that should be rolled into COGS, which is cost
of goods sold And it's not. And so like let's say you evolve
this really you have a software product, but like nobody really
knows how to use it. And so you see you stand up a
CSM department, just customer success and they handle like
renewals and then they help onboard people.
And if you, if you unpack what the customer success team is
doing, you see that it's basically just like services.
Well, now you're running a business that's a little bit
more like McKinsey or, you know, something like a consultancy,
then you are a, a software business.
So that's the pattern in B2B SAS.
But I think if you, if you generalize that out and you look
at like, you know, these people who are doing manufacturing or
whatever, are they really like, can we really think of them as a
tech company? Do these comparisons that
you're, that you alluded to here, like do they really track
and are you going to get the kind of gross margins out of
there that allow for this really rapid growth and a lot of
control over the business is destiny.
And, and just to be to be clear and like net out what control
over destiny means is euphemism. You know, that means that most
of your costs are labor. And if the economy turns and
your growth falls off, you have this, the lever you have is to
cut labor. So it's like, it's kind of a,
it's a fairly brutal model to really scale very rapidly.
And you see this in in tech and it it contributes to the sort of
short average tenure of tech staffers.
Like, there's just not a lot of mutual loyalty there in the way
that there might be in a. Manufacturing business.
So to me, a lot of the things you're discussing right now are
like even as they are are quite tenuous for, for venture
capital. And the reason I say that is
because of things like cryptocurrency.
Now I don't mean this in a positive way.
I, I want to be clear, like I'm not saying, oh, cryptocurrency
is coming along and defeating venture capital and it's good.
I'm saying this is a conversation I've had with a lot
of people. There's this new VC class like
A16Z, Anderson Horowitz or I'm trying to a lot of the PayPal
mafia guys, these types who are all into they love
cryptocurrency, but they love cryptocurrency not because it's
innovative and changing things. It's because their vesting
periods are shorter. It's because they can sell and
dump on retail faster. It's because they don't have to
wait for it to IPO. It's because like the the
reasons that they love it are for the greediest reasons.
And I genuinely think that this is something that is going to
help self destruct part of venture capital.
It could. I mean, my, there's sort of a, I
think we have to consider what role we want these various
agents to play, right? Like, like for, from my
perspective of venture capitalist, their job, their
mandate is to like take that money and get a return.
And you know, it's a big return. And so if you create a, a sort
of societal set of incentives where you can get liquidity in,
in sort of a shadow public market very quickly, in some
sense, it makes sense to me. The venture has gravitated
toward that. Like it is just sort of a, you
know, it's, it's, it's like water flowing downhill.
And I don't know when I, when I, when I rant about crypto, it's
less about those specific players because I look at
venture capitalists and I say this lovingly, like they're
sharks, You know, they're very, you will get when you go in
there as an entrepreneur, you'll get the brutal feedback.
And, and part of your job is to like, take that feedback to be
able to receive it because it's often very direct and just sort
of like intake it and, and, and react to that and like change
your business so that it so that it is a little bit more
aggressive. And so the the idea that you
have this set of fairly aggressive upside oriented
investors who very quickly noticed that they could, you
know, get liquidity faster and de risk their entire investment.
In some sense that's their mandate and in some sense
they're playing with like pension money.
I agree that I don't think we want to see more and more of
that in the world, but that is probably a regulatory framework
problem. Right.
I mean, yeah, maybe I got so part of this for me, it gets
back to exactly the beginning of our discussion where I was
saying back in the early days of venture capital, innovation was
was put more maybe it wasn't completely the only prior.
I think money is always the number one priority.
But I do think that innovation was bigger priority back in the
1960s, seventies and early 80s maybe.
But like by the 80s, nineties, you have a complete
transformation to like, OK, so money is the the only priority.
And now we're at late game, you know, like not only is money the
only priority, but like the fastest way possible at the
highest returns imaginable. And like, it almost feels like a
Ponzi scheme. Like it doesn't.
In fact, this is something, this is something our for what it's
worth, our discussion with Mark Cuban did not go well.
Let me say that it did not go the way we wanted it to.
However, one of the things he said, I asked him if it's AI was
like, is this a Ponzi? Is the investments, this kind of
thing, this venture capital, all these seed rounds, etcetera.
Is this a pond? It sounds like a Ponzi scheme
and he's like it is. So I would take issue with that.
I would take issue with that in that the portfolio should be
constructed in such a manner that it's not right.
So so if you're investing in companies and like a bunch of
them go to zero, there are things in there that are Ponzi
scheme like, but it should be de risked by having a proper
portfolio. Now, when you when you think
about crypto, I mean, if we circle this back to crypto and
think about let's address the root cause of why we might not
want this type of structure around, right?
Like let's look back at like Wildcat banking.
And also we tried this before. It's not like this stuff is new.
So, so I think the fear is not so much for, for me at least
it's not so much that people are behaving badly, like some
percentage of people always behave badly, but it's more that
the we're creating structures that seem to be unstable in a
way that we might not like later.
So if we take a bunch of capital and we funnel it into a, a sort
of negative sum game, which I would argue that most crypto is,
I think we would agree on that. What'll happen over time is that
the capital coming in from these LP's, you know, initially it'll
be awesome because like the, you know, initially these, these
initial rounds, like you get a bunch of returns or whatever,
but eventually that stuff is unstable and it falls over.
And, and if it falls over, you destroy a bunch of capital in
that, that capital will no longer come from these LP's to
fund ongoing innovation. And if I were, you know, sort of
like talking my book here as an entrepreneur, that's what
worries me about tech. I think tech and the venture
ecosystem are sort of like they're one unit like that
capital ecosystem is a is a thing that self sustains.
You get these founders who have an exit.
When I'm a second time founder, I've done some seed investments
and that capital sort of goes back in to fund future
innovation. But when we when we shift to a
psychology, we're like it. It's just about the gains and
it's very risky sort of Val money transfer stuff like it's
not really a creative overtime. That's super problematic because
what will eventually happen if if we're right about this stuff
and that it it ends up being a negative sum game is there will
be this big rinse and a lot of that money that they could have
been sustainably accretive to the economy by investing in tech
in super risky ventures, most of which fail, but which we found a
way to bundle together and make like a pretty good uncorrelated
return. That's beautiful.
Like I think venture capital is, is beautiful done right.
It's just it's one of the big growth engines of the American
economy. I've been preparing today to
piss Cass off by doing a defense of venture capital that went in
kind of that same direction, which is that most venture
capital investments go poorly. I think most venture funds
return sub S&P 500 with like the few outliners carrying like the
bulk of that market forward. And like even in the funds that
return outsize returns, that's driven by like a small portion
of companies inside of those. And if you assume that having a
reasonable portion of new companies trying new things is a
societal good, then coming up with a, a socially acceptable
way for high capital former entrepreneurs to gamble on which
things might do well helps you get more of that type of thing
in the world. However, that that works by
putting capital at risk by having a chance of not having
the return. And some of the problem Cass and
I've had with the cryptocurrency investments that he was alluding
to before, is that like by finding a way to exploit a group
outside of the rich capital class?
Like if A16Z actually, let's not say A16Z, let's say a
hypothetical firm in California is able to get a 90% discount on
a token they know is going to go on sale in two months or
whatever, and then they immediately dump it on retail.
The issue with that compared to like regular VC in my mind, is
that they're not really at risk. The entire risk has shifted from
the people who can bear the risk, the moneyed interest, to
the retail people buying the token.
And it's like that level of move makes complete sense for their
incentives, right? These venture capitalists want
to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible.
But like you're kind of talking about there, it corrodes
whatever societal role we believe venture capital or this
form of investing can play. That makes, it makes sense to me
why Cass thinks that that would self destruct venture capital.
However, I I don't know that capitalists finding ways to make
money for themselves quicker generally results in those
capitalists destructing. Yes, I guess my to react to what
you said there, I sort of agree that the structure is
problematic and part of part of the reason it's problematic is,
is again like tech and venture to share a culture.
Like it's a it's a it's a unified capital ecosystem.
It's a unified culture. It's hacker culture, right.
And like we get in trouble for this stuff all the time.
It's just sort of, you know, we're like, we're like Napster
kids, you know, we're like. Making jokes about you wouldn't
download a car and we all laugh like I'd download a car if I
could. It's that there's this ethos
about it's a little anti establishment.
It's very like hacker culture is still alive and well.
And now think about what happens when you take hacker culture
into the realm of like investments and VC.
They're going to find the exploits, entrepreneurs or
people who go out and they find the exploits.
And you know, we got to like shore those things up.
And I think venture capitalists are going to find the exploits
in a in a regulatory environment and it is in we should expect
them to it's almost like a, a function they they perform.
And then I think we should follow on and decide whether or
not that's something we want to keep doing like.
If you if you patch this exploit.
I think so. I think like this is where I'm
like, come on, devs and the devs are basically people in virus
who don't know what the hell is happening.
And so we have a real problem here where the where the the the
devs are way out of sync. What's happening?
To my mind, it's AI look at it and I think it's just like it's
a fairly simple fix. We just need to look at these
things which are like public markets as defined by, you know,
public investors are able to invest in them without a bunch
of accreditation stuff and then regulate them like public
markets. And what we see is the is
already the pre emptive narrative pressure to say, well,
no, it's the accreditation that's wrong.
And I and I think that is very toxic.
Like to my mind, the accreditation is it's pretty
good if you're going to invest in a hyper risky venture, I, I
think you want to validate that the person making that decision
can lose that money because AVC fund will invest in 200 deals or
something. And if you're an Angel investor
and you're not doing it professionally, you just start
doing it as a punt. I mean, I have like 3 or 4 Angel
investments, right? It is not a portfolio.
It's not even rational. I fully recognize that.
But they're, they're sort of, you know, I, I, I like the
entrepreneur, I like the idea. I think you go somewhere and
it's like it's a level of capital that's acceptable.
So I think the attention that exists now is you've got this,
you've got tech culture, which is doing its thing, It's finding
the exploits and and society writ large doesn't quite know
how to handle that. And we see that in a lot of
arenas right now. The only thing I'm I'm taking
issue with here is this goes back to the very beginning
again, or the historical significance of venture capital,
where I don't think I've expressed this yet during this
podcast. But to me, the beauty of early
venture capital was that it was not it was not everyone fighting
each other, which I do think is like, this is a huge part of
venture capital now where like I'm trying to like, yeah, you're
not going to yeah, if you're investing in Samsung, you're not
going to be investing in Apple at the same time.
Maybe you are, I don't know. But like the idea is you want
one to succeed and the other to fail.
Like it is 0 sum, if if not negative sum.
And I don't think that that was necessarily the case early on
because what you had was every, you had government, academia and
private capital working together to innovate.
And I like you could argue it's because we were at war.
You could argue it, it like whatever the reasoning is, I
don't know, but it to me that was the reason that it worked so
well that maybe I don't, I guess I haven't checked the data, but
I, I would assume that there was probably less return and less
risk also. But also like, yeah, you had
people straight out of college at Stanford getting jobs.
You had them working for Lockheed, you had them working
for, you know, government contractors.
You had, but also Fairchild, you had them working for a bunch of
different people. You had a bunch of options.
Everyone was is working together and now everyone is not working
together and everyone is pushing for someone else's failure.
And again, this is like, I don't know how sustainable these
trends are. Well, if you think about so
there's this thing in software called Conway's Law.
It is this observation that a product, the will will begin to
mirror the org structure that created it.
It's fascinating stuff. I think there's something sort
of analogous here, which is that if you you know, the good old
days of venture capital that we're being nostalgic about,
nostalgia always has an element of like rose colored glasses.
But let's roll with it. You know, the venture capital we
want where it's a little more, it's more a little more
cooperation. I think part of that is that if
you got, if you have an ecosystem that is pursuing huge
high Tam stuff, there is just kind of room for everybody.
Like what you're basically betting on, you're trying to
ride this wave of disruption. You know, you're about
disruption a lot. Disruption is sort of like when,
you know, I don't know, personal computing was great, sort of the
cloud was is a good disruptive example, right?
So you have all of this, you have these legacy providers who
are doing software installs and a cloud provider comes along as
like, man, I can make way better software and I can build it on
multi tenant architecture and I can get it to people, you know,
a day after they buy instead of after a month long install.
And so all of the people who are creating these cloud companies,
they don't really feel like they're maybe they're
competitors in strict sense, but there's enough room for
everybody to play. Now, if you are the the more you
get into properly killing an an idea that already exists to just
sort of replace it with something that that's not really
a creative to the customer and doesn't really lower the overall
unit economics. Tech should be deflationary,
right? We should make everything
cheaper. But the more you get into
something where you're doing this sort of is it is it, you
know, these models like Uber or Lyft where it's like, is that
really tech or is it just sort of Labor regulation arbitrage?
I don't think we know yet. You know, I think those things
would get a little bit, they get a little bit stranger.
And I think that the IT changes the competitive dynamic because
it's no longer a bunch of people building the future, which is
this huge open field that we can all go snag a piece of.
And now it's like, no, we actually have to like, you know,
get rid of the taxi union in New York to grow.
That's just like, that's a little weird.
I guess it's interesting to me like what you're what you're
talking about here because a friend of mine, I was talking to
a friend of mine about this topic just 'cause I was trying
to prepare myself for this discussion.
And one of the things my friend said to me that gave me pause
was that for instance, in China, like they want to push EVs, they
want to have WeChat where like on, on WeChat, right?
They do everything on WeChat. It's every single thing is done
on WeChat. And we have nothing like that
here in America. And the way they got WeChat,
whether we like it or not here in America, like I'm not
suggesting we do need a WeChat. Maybe we don't.
But the reason they have that and the reason they have such
insane EV production right now and solar production and all
this stuff is because the government has told them this is
what we are going to pursue. We're going to work with you on
this. We're going to support you on
it. We're going to subsidize it.
Let's do this and then they do it.
And that gave me pause because I was like, damn, maybe that is a
good point in that that is more of what I want to see when I
talk about venture capital. Maybe it is that I do kind of
want to see venture capital sponsored companies and stuff
trying to land government contracts with the innovation
that they're building and getting support from the
government like they used to, which is things like, you know,
you brought up Theranos earlier. I mean, that's a terrible
example because they they did try to get government
sponsorships and subsidies and stuff.
But I like, it would be great to see the government push this
tech and this innovation and instead of fighting it.
But I think that they're fighting it for good reason.
Like the the there is no cooperation from anyone anymore,
you know? Yeah.
I mean, you know, First off, I'd note that people that, you know,
there are companies out there that are getting large
government grants and they're in the public, you know, Tesla got
a ton of grants. I think that there is there is
government money flowing toward a bunch of these initiatives.
There's government might flow into it's, you know, rooftop
solar. There is there is a fair bit of
that. What tends to the problem there
is that it it changes the competitive dynamic in that part
of what you have to get good at the front, you have to get good
at competing on is sort of like politicking.
And so there's a there's an open question for me about whether we
want to to do it that way or not.
Like I'm going to I'm going to convert you from central
planning to like Adam Smith capitalism here in this in this
episode. I think that there are, there
are pros and cons that you can call out to each of these
approaches. At the end of the day,
Americans, we, we sort of seem to prefer that our
centralization comes in the form of corporatism, which I find
hilarious that we don't even really see that.
You know, that can also be problematic.
You get these Titanic companies that like, let's take health
insurance. I love picking up health
insurance. You get these huge companies,
they get they, they get very established and then they create
a sort of regulatory wave that means that the incumbents always
win because it's just impossible to get through those hurdles
when you're small. And to me, that is, that is how
we experience the downside of central planning equivalence,
right? Like that is sort of us not
doing a great job at capitalism in some sense.
And I, I generally find those structures to be distasteful
because of their downstream externalities.
But of course, I'm an American. I'm sort of wired to think of it
that way. And so when I, when I think
about like, yeah, China has WeChat, but you know, is that
what I want here? Is that what I like?
Do I want the initiative to be driven in that way?
And is that better? Now, the downside of the way we
do it is that it's sort of what we're complaining about here.
Great Americans also do not like proactive regulation.
We just don't like that. We would prefer that the
regulatory motion be a little bit more like, let the thing get
big, let it fall over. And then you come by and sweep
up and it puts people in jail and, and, you know, after the
fact, you, you come in and you do a little bit of mop up so
that people know that we don't do that anymore.
And there is a story about why, because this big thing fellow I,
I kind of favor that, frankly, you know, we've, we've all been
sort of inundated with a culture that reinforces that.
Like we have these the mythology around like precog and precogs
and and thought crime. That's very American.
It's woven pretty deeply into our understanding of how the
economy works. And it's hard for me to break
out of that conceptually because I think that the, the, the
externalities of top down dictates can just be really bad
and make a lot of people feel a loss of an agency.
And that is I I just value that more I guess at the end of the
day. One thing I keep kind of
thinking about him coming back to during this conversation
station is like you talked about how a certain portion of venture
capital investments are kind of a regulation dodge at this
point. And like we can look at
something like a Uber, Airbnb or the like, or kind of classic
examples of certain types of regulation dodges billed as tech
companies. And you talked about how like
the venture capital firms having their own megaphones in the form
of these media companies or sympathetic individuals who
collaborate with these venture capital firms to help them like
promote their messages and stuff, kind of amplify some of
the negative effects of the type of person venture capital tends
to attract. And I think the other kind of
wrinkle that makes this even more complicated is the the goal
of many venture capitalists and venture capital firms to also
influence the regulations. They're trying to like take
advantage of dodging, right is like that we said the dev should
come in and patch these exploits they're taking advantage of and
things like that. But there is a lot of the
capital being invested from these firms that make their
money from the dodge trying to ensure that those things don't
get patched or that they continue to have these
exploitable spaces. And so then when you end up with
like the moneyed interest, like making the investment, promoting
the investment through their own megaphones and then investing so
much of their own money, like both directly from the venture
capital firms and then having like their portfolio firms also
do lobbying as well to like influence the regulation of
those investments. And in those firms, I think you
end up in a place where like each of those things
exponentiates the potential like power and influence of the like
venture capitalist and increases the risk of deleterious societal
consequences when the venture capitalists like, make mistakes,
as they occasionally do. And like that dynamic is hard
for me to solve in my head. Yeah, I think, you know, for,
for me, I, I just sort of bite the bullet, which is that I
think regulatory capture is bad. Like even if my industry is the
one doing it, I just think it's sort of bad.
Like we, we should, you know, we should not do it because what
happens is you, you know, First off it's anti capitalist.
Like it's just anti capitalist and I like capitalism.
I think that what you want is these little like the, the good
version of regulation would allow sort of little startups to
come along and challenge stuff and like do things a little
differently, which you see in maybe an example of that.
You see it in like, you know, some, some labor law stuff.
Like nobody really looks at you and tell you're 50 people and
it's just because they don't want you to have to comply as a
small company with a bunch of like nickel dime regulatory
stuff like me. They're not going to hunt you to
see whether you're allocating overtime properly or there's a
bunch of weird little stuff in there.
And then you get to 50 people. They're like, OK, now you're
like unemployed and you got to play by the rules.
I think that's a fairly healthy structure.
I think the the challenge is that any time in in a society,
you get a concentration of power that bands together and just
throws its weight around. It doesn't really tend to work
for the whole. And this is, this is the thing
that Americans don't like about central planning in our
mythology. And I think we're, we're
curiously myopic about that when it comes to the private sector.
I'm a huge fan of the private sector, but I would like to see,
you know, dozens of little companies all competing, not
sort of this, these large conglomerates that band together
and like act almost like a, a corporate version of a, of a
union. And, and when you take the, the
already powerful corporation and then you aggregate that into a
ball or all of these companies are sort of forming this, this
economic phalanx. I'm just not sure that's good
for us. Yeah, I think that it's more,
it's more this it's for me, it starts conceptually with this
idea of how do we feel about concentration of power over
time. And I and for me, the answer
there is like the reason I like capitalism is it's sort of not
that it's in favor of smaller, you know, localism and all that.
So that variant of capitalism and then the second layer is
like, how honest do we want to be about that in, in light of
our other values and, and how should we go about enforcing
that? And this is where it gets really
challenging because the government is a large
concentration of power and it is positioned against this
increasingly self aggregating private sector concentration.
And I just don't know that we have an answer for that as a
society yet. Personally, I, I like the idea
that the private sector should be this much more distributed
high agency environment. Like it's similar to why I mean,
you just did a great episode on community banking.
It's similar to why I like the idea of having a lot of
community banks because you know, I can go down the street
here and, and talk to my local bank and they can underwrite me
for a house because I've lived through my whole life.
They kind of know me, They know the house, they know the
neighborhood that you're just never going to be able to
underwrite with that level of finesse through Zillow.
Yeah, I mean, I think a large part of what you you're talking
about not liking, Jen, feel free to stop me if I'm wrong, but a
large part of what you're discussing not liking about
venture capital is this regulatory arbitrage, regulatory
capture. But I would, I've been thinking
about regulatory capture and arbitrage like a lot lately.
And it's really interesting to me because obviously this does
not just affect tech or even finance for that matter, right?
Like, oh, sure, there's regulatory capture at the SEC
and, and, and the CFTC or whatever.
But like, let's talk about the FAA and the NTSB and let's,
let's go into all of these regulators who are so the CFPB,
like these, these regulators don't have or they do have a
concentration of power. They do not utilize that power
to help the retail consumer and one of the only regulators, I
guess I don't know. I don't know if this I I think
this is the right term. One of the only regulators that
I can think of that hasn't suffered from arbitrage or
capture, and this is not a big one, is like the DMV where where
like everyone can agree that you need rules and regulations to be
allowed to go onto the, the road with a, with like a two ton
metallic thing that's going 60 miles an hour.
Like you need to be able to be certified for that.
We all agree on it and the rules of getting your driver's
license. We all accept that.
And no one's trying to like drastically change it.
Nobody wants to be like, actually I would like to
privatize the DMV. Like nobody is talking about
that stuff, right? This is a regulator that we all
can agree on is doing a good job.
Why can't we do that for other regulators?
Well, we should we should get a little more detailed nuance here
about what we mean by regulatory captures.
So if we, if we take at face value by theory here that
Americans like regulation in arrears, meaning we like the
thing to fall over and then we, the regulars come in, they're
like, all right, and nobody do this.
Again, I don't think we want proactive action on the part of
regulators. And in fact, I think that is one
of the signs that regulatory capture is sort of creeping in
is this proactive thing. And second, I think we want, if
we're going with that structure where things get to a certain
size, they fall over. I, I think it is when things get
to a certain size and we don't let them fall over that, that we
run into the moral hazard stuff. So let's take it outside of tech
again and look at, you know, more the mortgage crisis that
happened in OA. We're like, OK, so we've got
this country, we're like, oh, you know, everybody wants
affordable housing. Houses start to become more
affordable. And we're like, whoa, OK, we
don't want that. We don't, we want them to be
more affordable, like conceptually, but we don't want
them to be cheaper because everybody's so levered up that
that would actually ruin the mortgage industry.
And So what you have is you have a bunch of you have a bunch of
like underwriters and bankers who are holding this debt on
their books and stuff who when the system gets so big that it
starts to collapse in on itself, approach the regulators to save
them. And they make very compelling
arguments, right? They're like, oh, well, you
know, the average, this is what will happen to the average
household. Their people are storing their
savings in their homes. And like those arguments are
they're good arguments, but it's very challenging for us to both
have a society that does this regulation in arrears thing and
also dive in and not let these large incumbents fall when it's
time for that to happen. You know, like I think we we got
to pick a path there. And my path is.
My, my preferred path is the, the creative destruction thing.
Just because I, you know, I'm going to commit to the bit on
being a capitalist here. I think it works pretty well.
And I think a lot of the problems that we're running into
the people ascribe to failures of capitalism are, are really
actually more of this thing where we're not allowing
capitalism to do to, to do it's sort of organic motion enough.
I mean, it's, it's, it's amazing to me that you'll see our
politicians going on to, you know, go on Twitter and they're
like, oh, we got to build more houses to make it more
affordable. I'm like, well, how about we
stop making the decision that a housing, housing is an
investment is something that we're going to support as a
society. Like that seems weird because
what that's going to do is attract a ton of investment
money in housing and run the price of housing out.
I hear I hear your criticisms here, but I also look at it and
go like, what isn't the end game for capitalism?
Like essentially the tokenization of error, like
everything should be constantly going up in value and making
everyone money Isn't like like I, I know that's not that isn't
what capitalism means, but I but I do I like, I'm just saying
that the the concept is to always like the let the free
market speak. And if you're going to let the
free market speak, the best thing you can try to do is find
little things to make the market in your like advantage you.
Now, I I understand that you shouldn't be able to make the
market advantage you in a purely capitalistic society, but like,
that is we don't live in a utopia.
You cannot have a purely capitalistic society and
therefore there are gonna be market inefficiencies and
there's gonna be like you're saying people want rules and
regulations behind them, but then not always.
And like we, we see a Ponzi scheme and like you don't want
the proliferation of Ponzi schemes and the free market to
decide which Ponzi scheme gets to live or die like we we don't
want. Ponzi, I think I'm going to I'm
going to come off very pedantic in this whole thing, but
whatever, it's kind of no. So let's let's talk about the
free market thing for a second. There is this sort of toxic
hyper libertarian variant of that, which is basically, I
think just the Hobbesian state of nature, right?
Like, I don't know, whatever. So I, I think we, I think we
have to reject that and say that what is the market?
What is the free market? The free market is the economic
activity that happens within the boundaries of the rule of law
that we have constructed and continue to evolve.
And I'm a believer in that. I'm a believer in the rule of
law and the boundaries that we have set forth.
The free market is the, is the action of all those little
agents within that system, within that game that we've set
up, which has well defined rules.
And we, we largely want them within those defined rules that
are defined in advance, right? We have the laws written and all
that stuff. We want them to be able to move
very freely. Now, occasionally what will
happen is someone will find a hole in the game like, you know,
like you're playing, like imagine you're playing Monopoly
and somebody finds like an infinite money glitch within the
rules. And, and what do you do?
You're like, OK, well, we can either stop playing this game
because it's not fun when people play like that, it's super lame,
or we can just like patch the rules and we, we end up patching
the rules a lot. That's basically what the
justice system does. So I think the, I, I think the,
the, the challenge around these conversations about like free
market absolutism. Free market absolutism would
say, well, that infinite money glitch was part of the rules
when I started playing. And so therefore, I don't think
I should get in trouble for it. And you see this, this is trying
to back into crypto. You see this a lot in crypto,
right? Like code is law and all this
other stuff. I was sort of following the
constraints of the system. And it's like, yeah, that's
fine. But one of the overlays on the
system as defined rigidly by law is also don't hurt people.
And like, you should kind of know that too.
And there is a level at which you can be held accountable for
knowingly hurting people. And then we, we come back and
we, we define the rules of, of the game after people get hurt
such that that's a little bit more explicit, just as a
courtesy to our future selves and for posterity.
And for me, that is when you read Adam Smith, like he talks
about some of this stuff like that is the free market.
The founding fathers had this idea about, you know, an
evolving structure of, of how society works.
It wasn't this this sort of, you know, they sat down at the IT
was at the Green Dragon. What was the name of the tag you
guys from the name of the Tavern anyway, there's some Tavern.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They sit down and like we solved
it, you know, after 8 pints or whatever, they're all in their
20s. They're like, we did it.
We created the perfect society. They have the self-awareness to
literally not do that and talk about other not doing that.
And and so I think we just sort of have to reject the rhetoric
of, of, of the free market absolutists who, who will say
things like we should let the free market to its then and, and
be like, that's not the free market is man, like the free
market is. It's a set of rules that we have
defined to the best of our ability to create a society that
incentivizes people to like, you know, innovate and all this
other stuff. And occasionally people will
figure out a way to break those rules.
And then we got to patch it. And that is also part of the
free market. So having said all that, Travis,
why do you think that most of the public venture capitalists
that we end up hearing from are such reprehensible people?
So first of all, I don't, I just think, I just think there's a
lot of loud voices out there that are, they're sort of
advocating ideas that are not in keeping with that, that more
nuanced free market is like, you know, I read Peter Thiel 0 to
one. It's a, it's an interesting
take. Like there's some value to be
derived from it, especially if you're in business.
I think ultimately I, I reject the idea that monopolies are the
goal for reasons we've already talked about.
And I sort of reject that entire line of thinking like what I
want is to be, I think they're the right way to approach
ventures like be fast and be first and have that define your
destiny to just sort of like a constant competition.
If you want to be on market first, you want to have a six
month lead on your fast followers and you just want to
push, push, push. And that speed is what the
money's for when people invest in you.
It's not to like ladder pull and try to like snipe people who are
coming, who are nipping at your heels and just like don't
believe in any of that. And so when I, when I hear
people advocating for those types of beliefs, as you're well
aware on Twitter and more recently on threads, I just kind
of they got to speak out and say like, that's not, that's not the
fine. That's not the society we want.
I think there are RVCS that do a good job of that, You know, I
mean, you know, Logan Bartlett did a great job.
He saw the crypto stuff coming. He's like, yeah, I don't really
know. He's like discussing stuff on
the merits. My direct experience with a lot
of VCs is a little more early stage.
So it's not these Titans who are running a $5 billion fund as
much as it is the the like up close and personal VCs who are
doing like seed investing in Series A series.
Like, I know that there was, it was mostly a joke what Bennett
was saying, but I do want to, I do want to actually say that.
Like I hear, I hear your, I hear your response to that, Travis.
And I'm like, that makes sense. Of course, Like there's
thousands of venture capitalists like we're we're talking about.
At least. At there's there's thousands for
sure, like across the globe, there are thousands and
thousands of of venture capitalists, no doubt about it.
But like the idea, I think there's validity to what Bennett
is saying. Like the loudest ones are the
biggest, worst motherfuckers ever.
All all of them. You know, like almost all of
them, the ones who were hyper, hyper loud, the all in crew A16Z
folks and their partners. And like those are the ones who
were front facing venture capital.
They're the ones who were defining how venture capital is
perceived publicly by the regulators, by Congress, who
you're talking about. Like we don't want these people
deciding like they're 85. They shouldn't be talking about
tech. They don't know what the fuck
they're talking about. I agree.
And yet, like when you have the worst people causing like bank
runs and shit, like, how do you counter that?
You know, like, how do you change the public perception of
what venture capital is? And and you know, like that is
why, that's why I have such animus for venture capital.
It is because of those guys. Well, it's because, see, you're
a capitalist, you're against the concentration of power and it's
deleterious side effects. I, I really do like to me, I, I
try to fit this stuff into some, you know, some way I can think
about things that is coherent across the chaos that is
happening in society. And I think it's just, you know,
American culture at least tends to be happier when there's like
more opportunity. We like that.
And the more you get these, these entrenched power bases,
the more challenging it is for us to find those little pockets.
I don't, I don't think it's limited to venture.
I think your critiques are, I think your critiques are fair.
I mean, I'm, I'm here to sort of advocate for the, the venture
capitals that I've met who are like not doing that, who are
still funding our industry and funding innovation.
And I'm like an astonish ally of theirs, despite being brought up
by my father to never trust a banker.
Working, working with good venture has sort of brought me
around on that. Like I think there are
financiers out there that help help run everything, help run
my, you know, my life wouldn't be the same because you have to
fund these start-ups. Every software service is this
like capital hole that you then have to like climb out of.
We just wouldn't have the cool stuff we have without venture
without the venture model. Now, I think in addition to
that, we need to look at a bunch of stuff like politics, term
limits. It's people who just get into a
chair and sit there until they're sit there for 50 years
right in legislation. You know, I'm like, I don't know
about that, that maybe we should mix it up a little more.
And you know, one of the things that's really fascinating on the
on the venture front is the more there's been a bunch of studies
around sizing of funds. Venture is healthier for itself
when you stay within a certain fun band that is like sub a bit.
So when you raise a fund that is, I mean, I haven't looked at
the numbers in a few years, so I don't want to throw something
out there. But when you the the optimal
venture fund is actually smaller, call it half a billion
or something, and then you go allocate that stuff, those funds
outperform by a lot. And so I think that the, the,
the way to counter this is a combination of just like
bringing awareness, the fact that these monster funds, their
incentives change so that they're more about the care, the
2% carry they get than the 20% upside.
And that's a little weird. And like maybe as an LP, you
should think about not putting your money in that and instead
spreading it around to a bunch of smaller funds.
And I think that the, the cure for a lot of the stuff we're
facing is this return to like the original idea of behind
localism. The original idea behind
localism is not like going out of that shop over there and buy
their food and they're getting it all from Cisco.
You know, like the hope is that they're also buying locally.
And what you really want to do is spread the economic activity
across the country so that it's more robust.
And I think you also want to do that in venture.
I think what you want to see is LP's allocating to these smaller
funds that are more profitable, that don't have an incentive to
go build it. Monster megaphones so they can
just cream 2% off of, you know, multi billion dollar funds and
stuff. To me that's the solution.
It's so funny because again, that goes right back to this
where it's like I know I'm essentially taking the, I don't
know, anti capitalist stance or something like I am not, I am
not anti capitalist. I don't like I don't I as much
as I I have animus for the loudest venture capitalists.
I don't hate the idea of venture capital.
And when I go back to the early parts of venture capital, it it
is local. It's localism.
It's what you're talking about, right?
Like you're, we're, we have Fairchild Semiconductors in
Mountain View, CA, working with students at Stanford and
Berkeley who are getting general, like general contracts,
like getting contracts from the government through Lockheed
Martin or whoever, right. And academia is working with
private CAB. They're all working together to
do something. And that is, that is localism.
That is like they're all building something Better
Together. And they're.
Yeah, they're keeping it in their in their club, so to
speak. But the club is large and it
gives us things like DARPA and ARPA and the Internet, and
that's what I like. I don't know, you know, again,
going back to what you're saying, is Lyft and Uber a huge
leap in innovation like DARPA and ARPA?
Like, no, it isn't Like, I think it's easy to say no to that.
And if that's most of the innovation, sorry, go ahead,
Bennett. I I just want to interject
though, and cast and go like, and how much of that would like,
which direction is the arrow of causation running here, right?
Because didn't like the Department of Defense initially
creating DARPA kind of create the like set of contracts that
the initial group of kind of the Bunker Hill companies were
competing for and stuff like that.
And so like, it was like the direction wasn't like venture
capital funded these things. These things then created DARPA,
which and then the Internet. It was that the DARPA project
was created, which set up these contracts, which then companies
wanted to compete for, for companies to compete for those
they needed funding to get like projects off the ground.
Things started things like that. And so like the arrow there went
from like the the Department of Defense creating this government
contracting project, basically this collection of kind of
ambiguous and large dollar amount government contracts is
essentially kind of what it was led to then the rest of the
stuff coming afterwards. I mean, I think I and I, I think
that's like, I do think that's not as uncommon as we might
think it is, right? Like I do think here's a simple
one that it doesn't have the same large scale effects that
the Internet does. But like drones, obviously that
was a military contract from the very beginning, but now that has
been utilized by people to do all kinds of things.
And some of it is great. Some of it is like, oh, you can
scan the land and figure out like the proper place to put
certain things or like there is actual great use cases for
something like drones. Also, they're murdering people.
So like, I like it's, you know, I, I get it.
I guess that's kind of my worry. I worry that if you set that up
as like the desirable version of venture capital, then the thing
meant to inherit it is Andrell and Palantir, right?
Is like the modern Silicon Valley funded companies which
are competing for government contracts from the Department of
Defense, right? Yeah, I think that, you know, my
my with this topic and a lot of times they just circle back to
this idea that what we what we want is a less incumbent centric
economy. Like that's the fix.
The fix is not so much just to to, you know, steer away from
capitalism. Like I actually just think
that's absurd and, you know, continue to fight anybody on the
Internet who suggests, but I, I and I and I don't know that we
and I don't know that we want to even put this albatross around
ventures neck, but we'd still want to call out the the sort of
like pro pro oligarch, whatever's these like neo
oligarchs who just think like it's like, you know, let's take
all the power. I think that it's important to
push back again as soon as a societal duty there.
And and I think part of this ties back into another one by,
you know, pet topics. It's just sort of like the way
that we conduct everything from monetary policy to to to
legislation, like it just needs to be a little less incumbent
centric. And what that means is we have
to be OK with incumbents taking losses.
But I do wanna push back on that just I guess on 2 levels.
So one, I know I personally am all for having term limits and
stuff like that, but when it comes to people who are pro free
market, they say why would you take away someone's ability to
vote for whoever they want? Like if I want to vote for the
same guy to be senator for 2 1/2 decades, that is my right.
That's my God-given right or whatever.
So I want to put that out there. But I also want to say this,
that when it comes to business or finance or whatever, I don't
actually have a huge issue with the concept of incumbency,
right? Like the best example I can do
for this is actually a restaurant.
Because for me, I, when I worked in restaurants, what I hated
about it was I, I would go to these small restaurants that
were well known or popular bakeries and they would be
starting out, they'd be in their first year or two or three of,
of getting going. And they're like, we got to
grow. We got to grow.
We got to open up a second, third, fourth restaurant.
And I'm like, why stop? Stop, You're already making
money. You have enough employees.
Stop, you're good. And in places like Paris or
Oslo, when I went and visited them years ago, you have one
patisserie or you know, bakery that's been around for 350
years. There aren't 12 of them.
There's one and that is like, I am fine with that.
That's great. You have culture, you have
history, you have one bakery that's had all this time there,
fine. But I don't want one Amazon for
150 years. You know that.
That is where incumbency gets to be when it gets into oligarchy
is the problem. It's not incumbency itself that
is the issue, I guess is what I'm saying.
It's incumbency around power, you know, and they can always
play us into that. Yeah.
I mean, in, in an ideal world, we we run a society where like,
we try a lot of different stuff. And, and then over time and like
you're only going to, you know, people only have so many ideas.
Like people get into their like 30s and 40s, they get kind of
typecast. So and then we've got, you know,
and then we just let them sit in that chair until the end of
time. Like we know we're going to get
out of them. And so, you know, this, this
idea of I have a right to vote for who I want.
I'm not even sure that that is I mean, to me, it's, it's almost a
pure straw man when people say stuff like that because, you
know, you look at the the presidential candidates we've
got now and like, how did those get to be the candidates?
Like what? Like I'll tell you, I'll tell
you who I want running stuff is, you know, it's not them.
Like let's just get some, let's just, let's get somebody in
there who's like fresh, but it just has some fresh ideas.
Let's put up to like, I, I just think it's a myth, this idea
that we get to select whoever we want.
So stuff like that, I think we just reject it.
Part of my issue with even like the presidential, like the two
party system is a problem for me just 'cause I'm like, it's
almost, it's like a fallacy that's been concocted against
ourselves that we are convinced is absolute, even though very
explicitly you can always vote for whoever you want actually,
right? You always can.
Like anyone over the age of 35,
you can vote for them to be president technically, right.
But like we've decided that that means there's two people that
you can vote for. Well, three you can vote or the
brain worm. You can vote for a brain worm or
two individuals. But yeah, like I do.
But I do think that it it, it's unfortunate because it's a self
perpetuating system. Like, oh, well then there's two
parties and therefore there's always two parties and there's
nothing we can do about it. I like, I don't know.
I think the two party system can can even, it can work well.
You know, I would point the finger here more and we're
getting off on a tangent and I love tangents.
I would point the finger here more at like when you think
about in aggregate from a societal perspective, who are
the power and money incumbents And like they're the boomers.
You know, I got nothing against boomers generally.
I like to sort of talk shit about them.
This is fun. But they those are the people
who are sitting in all of these shares and they're making a
bunch of decisions that are very like pro incumbent, right?
Like, we can't let the housing prices fall.
We can't. And then you look around and
you're like, what's now what's the problem?
Well, millennials and below are like, how many live where many
live? And then the boomers turn around
like, well, you can't live at home.
Like, so there's we're preventing this sort of turn
churn in the economy around housing.
That happens when people get rinsed because they make bad
decisions. And now that we have the the the
up and comers who like can't really get a toehold in the
economy because the the entirety of the legislative body is
dominated by socio political economic, however you want to
frame it, incumbents like and they've just got this lie.
I think it's a real it's a real demographic challenge in in some
ways, which I think will eventually clear here.
But when we, as we look across the effects and like diagnose
society, I'm I'm very wary of, I'm, I'm very aware of like the
anything that ends with like, ergo, we must return to free
market absolutism or ergo, you know, capitalism doesn't work.
I'm like, I don't really think so.
I think what we got to do is sort of just like clear out the
Deadwood. And it's been a very long time
since we did that. Any libertarian who's like
telling you Adam Smith didn't go far enough is probably not being
particularly serious, and you can probably ignore them.
Oh, they probably haven't read Adam Smith.
I mean, like, you can go, my favorite thing is just go pull
quotes from Adam Smith and be like, OK, talk to me about this
one. You know, reasonable boundaries
are on around the game of the economy like that.
It's just like there's not, you can't find an intellectual
tradition that was arguing against that.
You can misrepresent 1. I don't know, I've got some iron
ran books behind me if you want them.
Everybody in them six. Times wasn't enough, huh,
Bennett? Well, I mean, I'll probably read
them again at some kind of my life if I'm.
Being Why do you hate yourself so much?
What's wrong with you? I find lots of twisted things
deeply fascinating. You don't need to read Ann Rand
again. So yeah.
Do you have, do you have anything else you want to you
want to throw out there Bennett or Travis?
I guess my, my, my parting words here would be like with it, you
know, as we, as we take back to the rough streets of the
Internet here, when our tweeting or whatever we're doing, like I,
I think there is this, there's sort of this dual mandate, much
like the Fed. And the dual mandate is
basically like when you see this stuff that it feels kind of
corrosive, you know, you got to go after it.
But I think the, the other side of that is it's just important
to avoid condemning the, the superstructure that that actor
lives within. Like, you know, there are, there
are, I mean, there are startup entrepreneurs out there
misbehaving, you know, and, and I'm a startup entrepreneur and
I'm like, OK, well, I think we got to talk about this
misbehavior because it's, you know, we kind of got to police
our own here a little bit. But it doesn't really mean that
like startup entrepreneurship is a, is a, is a bad thing.
And I think if anything, we're getting, we have the, the
extremism of sort of social media echo chambers has the
tendency to lead us down these little, these little sort of
mind tunnels where we end up concluding like that entire
institution needs to go. And I, I guess my call to action
is like, let's stop doing that. Let's keep talking about the the
stuff that we don't want and how we need to like, you know, keep
improving the rules of the game so that it works for everybody.
But condemning these like an entire school of thought, even
libertarianism. At the end of the day, there's
some good stuff in there. You know, It's, yeah, human.
Labs, though human labs, we can condemn that institution.
Why? That guy became the main
character pretty quick. All right, Well, awesome.
Yeah, I think that's a good nuance note to go out on.
And yeah, I if anyone wants to follow Travis, I guess he's
spending more time on threads these days.
So are you at Colorado, Trav there as well?
Yes, at Colorado, Travis, I finally got my handle over
there, my first time on Zuck platform.
It's pretty good. I think there's a little bit of
a little bit of a different group over there.
I am still on Twitter like when I leave.