Welcome to Acquired.
Today, we're sitting down with Kevin Rose.
Kevin was one of the pioneers of Web 20 as the founder of Dig and then became one of the Valley's first super angels, investing early in companies like Twitter, Facebook and Square.
Today, he's a partner at True Ventures and host of the Modern Finance Podcast.
Let's chat with him.
All right, did you like that?
Should we put that in?
I've always wanted to do that.
Who got the truth?
Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.
And we are your hosts.
This was so effing cool.
Oh, man.
Kevin is so great.
We had such a blast.
Of course, we went deep.
We covered the screensavers, the real origin story of Digg, the Digg Nation parties at South.
By that Ben you were at back in the day.
Totally.
I wasn't expecting him to... He corrected the record.
All the previous Digg founding stories are wrong.
No, Wikipedia is wrong, apparently.
Well, listeners, this episode basically has two chapters.
We start in Web 2 and we end in Web 3.
And obviously Kevin is super deep on all things crypto blockchain, NFTs and he's doing a really cool thing on the Modern Finance podcast.
And he even ends the show with announcing a new thing that he's doing.
So stay tuned for that.
But I had so much fun.
This episode pattern matching everything Kevin learned from Web 2 to the Web 3 world.
All right, listeners, now is a great time to thank a new friend of the show, Koifin.
And it's funny, they're new, but actually I've been using their product for years.
My research project for every single new acquired episode involves Koifin.
So when they reached out to sponsor the show, I thought, well, this is convenient.
Indeed.
So Coifin is a financial research tool loved by both individual investors and financial advisors.
Individuals use it for stock research, graphing financials and portfolio tracking, and financial advisors use it to build model portfolios and create client proposals.
They have live market data and powerful analytics tools.
So it's kind of like a Bloomberg terminal, except without the huge price tag, right?
Yes, essentially.
It's a web app, and it's totally self-serve.
I've actually not talked to anyone at the company for the first few years that I used it.
So Koifin is a product that the broader market, like all acquired listeners, would use, not just Wall Street investment bankers.
It's where I pull things like growth rate or gross margins or the PE ratio or revenue multiples for every company we study.
And you can compare these things over time with historical graphs or against other companies.
It's often what I use when we're studying private companies too, like Rolex or Mars or Ikea, to look at the comparables, to estimate what these companies would be worth if they were public.
They also have a screener that lets you filter across thousands of stocks, so you can quickly surface investment ideas.
Yep.
So the general idea is, if you're someone who's used to living in data, you should have that at your fingertips as you think about investing.
Exactly.
It's got these great graphs for data visualization wrapped around institutional grade data.
So if you want to understand what assumptions are baked into the stock price today, Coifin is for you.
I was about to say that Acquired listeners have a great offer.
But Koifin's free product is actually already really robust.
Which is what I was using for years.
I know.
I know.
But indeed for Acquired listeners and also for you, Ben.
If you go to koifincom slash acquired and you end up upgrading to paid, you'll get 20 off your first year.
Our thanks to Koyfin.
That's K-O-Y-F-I-N dot com slash acquired, or click the link in the show notes.
All right, two last things.
One, as usual, this is not investment advice from either us or Kevin.
Do your own research.
Come to your own conclusions on making your own investments.
This is for entertainment and informational purposes only, as usual.
Two, join us in the Acquired Slack. acquired.fm slash slack.
We are nearing the 10,000 person mark.
It is a great group, and we'd love to have you.
Now, on to our conversation with the one and only Kevin Rose.
Kevin Rose, so great to be talking with you.
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show.
It's going to be fun.
I think many, many episodes of my teenage years watching Dignation.
Later I feel probably the same way a lot of our listeners do when they run into David Naird and they're like, oh my God, you're like a real human.
I feel very, very similarly talking to you today.
So thank you for all the just massive indulgence of nerdery over the years.
Yeah, there was a bunch of nerd stuff there, a little comedy.
Hopefully I didn't convince you to start drinking at a young age because we were of legal age, but we did consume beers on each episode.
No, no.
I was lucky.
I actually started watching you on screensavers when there was no alcohol involved.
That's right.
So back when I was... Tech TV days.
A middle school tech.
Yeah, tech TV.
Oh, we're going to get into it.
Let's start because this is acquired way back.
So Kevin, I think we have it right.
You grew up in Vegas, but your family's from Wisconsin, which is a state we've talked about recently, with Marc Andreessen growing up there and Beeple on your show.
What was that like?
Yeah.
My earliest memories, I was born in Redding, California, but I don't remember it.
And then I remember living in Oregon for a bit, which is where I am now, in Portland, but we were living in a little town called Salem.
And then when I was in second grade, we moved out to Las Vegas because there was just work there.
That was like a place where my dad could find a job.
And so we moved out there.
I kind of grew up thinking it was normal for 7-Elevens to have slot machines in them.
There was just a A lot of things that Vegas does to you.
And it was one of those things where I got geeky and got into computers and then quickly realized that the action really wasn't in Las Vegas.
If you wanted to be in the hotel industry or work in gaming in some capacity, that was the place to be.
But when I was around 18 or so, I kind of realized well, I should probably think about moving someplace else like Silicon Valley or someplace that had a bigger tech scene.
I'm super curious.
How did you figure that out?
I felt the same way.
I grew up in Pennsylvania, but I had no idea that Silicon Valley existed.
What was the process by which you learned that this was a thing?
Because there was the internet, right?
But it wasn't obvious in the way it is now.
Yeah.
So basically, when you started to get into computers back then you're right, there wasn't like the internet where you could just go and figure all this stuff out.
So I was on bulletin board systems and kind of dial up.
And I remember going into computer stores and buying computer magazines, because that's what we did to stay up with all the latest trends.
You would just buy a magazine that was about computers.
Take it home and read about motherboards, right.
So...
I just basically would hear about these conferences.
And there was one called Comdex, which was the world's largest computer convention.
And it was held in Las Vegas.
And so I was like, oh, I've got to go to this Comdex thing, right?
You're in high school at this point?
Yeah, I was in early high school and I filled out a Comdex application to go because it was free.
The passes were free, but you had to have a business.
So I just made up a fake business name.
I called it Foliage Software.
And then I would apply and I received a badge in the mail.
And I was like, okay, I'm going.
And I talked my parents into driving me down to the convention center.
This was before CES or CES was very much, much smaller back then.
And I would go and just walk the aisles and look at all the different processors and motherboards and video cards and all the crazy.
Every big manufacturer had a block, a display there that you could go and walk up and try out all the new products.
And it was the coolest thing ever.
And this was stuff that hadn't hit the market yet, right?
Hadn't hit the market yet.
It was brand new.
And that's how I realized that all these companies were not based here.
They were based... Most of them were California, Silicon Valley-based.
And But I was the youngest kid on the floor.
I had to kind of dress up.
I put a collared shirt on.
And then it was funny because they noticed a couple of kids started coming and they banned You had to be at least 16 to get in.
And so the next year, I think I was 15.
And I was like, how am I going to prove that I'm 16?
I think if someone asked me, I just told them I was 16.
I had to have my birth date memorized for a year earlier.
And then the next year, they made it so you had to be 18 to get in.
And I was like, crap.
And so they just kept moving the gold line.
Yeah, exactly.
A fake ID to get into a computer convention.
So anyway, that was the early days.
Oh my gosh.
All these Silicon companies that were like all the companies that were exhibiting at Comdex.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
They're all based out in Silicon Valley.
It was really Silicon Valley, but they weren't building fabs anymore.
And so they could just move at such a faster pace.
I remember this and it was like all this new product.
Yeah.
All these chips, all these, you know, PCI plugins for motherboards, they're all hitting the market so fast.
Oh, that was awesome.
It was so exciting when you hear about a new clock speed come out, right?
Like Intel would announce something and you're like, wow, a 66 megahertz processor.
Or, you know, AMD would have out their new chip.
And then you know you have the weird folks that were all like the deck alphas, like a completely different RISC versus CISC based processors.
Yeah yeah, that weren't compatible with windows and they weren't compatible with you're like whoa, wait a second, what's this unix thing?
And it was just.
It was a crazy time, okay.
So before we move on from vegas, obviously you were dyed in the wool computer geek sneaking into cop decks.
That's amazing.
Was there anything like sort of presaging your soon-to-be future career on in front of the camera?
Like, did you do like drama in high school, like what?
No, I think I was like the most shy kind of kid growing up and just didn't have a ton of friends in high school.
And back then.
I don't even know if this holds true today, but back then it was not cool to be into computers.
And so you got made fun of a lot and didn't have a lot of friends.
We were definitely not the popular kids in school and got picked on.
And so it was not in my DNA to be... I didn't apply to work at TechTV to be in front of the camera.
I just wanted to be behind the scenes.
And so I was kind of like setting up all the technical demos.
And if they needed a certain version of Linux installed, I would install that.
And just making sure that things were moving smoothly in that regard.
So it was just by chance that I ended up on camera.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you remember your sort of like break, like the moment where someone was like hey Kevin, you should be on air talent.
Yeah, I mean I had discovered a vulnerability in Windows that was a way to spam people using this kind of internal messaging tool.
And so you could basically just send a message to any IP address, and Windows would display it on the screen.
And while it wasn't necessarily kind of a vulnerability in the sense of the person wasn't getting hacked, it was definitely a way to spam people.
You could just write a little utility that would just go through IP addresses and deliver little notifications to their desktop.
And so I told the host about it and they're like, well, you figured this out.
You should come on and talk about it.
And so they invited me on.
Were Lilliport and Patrick Norton hosting at this point?
Exactly.
So Lilliport had me next to him and I was so nervous.
I was just sweating and just like...
And I went on and I kind of delivered it and explained it.
And the executive producer, Paul Block, was like, hey, I like what you did there.
Like, can you find more weird things to talk about that are not really known?
And I was thinking like well, I know a lot of these like hacking tools and stuff that I mess around with at night.
Like we could talk more about those types of things.
And he was like, yeah, do more of that.
And let's see how you do.
Let's have you come on. once a week and talk about a certain tool.
So you know I look back and kind of cringe at some of that stuff, because it was you could just hear in my voice and the way I presented, especially in the earlier episodes.
I just didn't, it wasn't in my DNA to be on camera.
And actually they sent me to a talent coach that would come in and record you and playback footage with you and make you watch yourself and talk about how you hold your hands.
And like, there's these dedicated coaches that will teach you everything.
I did that once I was at Microsoft and I was going to go speak on behalf of the company to a newspaper and they had me speak with a coach first and she videotaped.
And I think it was like 5k for like two hours.
Like it was this exorbitant corporate markup, and she videotaped me for some of my talking points and then like, made me watch it back while we were sitting there at the table.
And it was the most painful experience.
It helps a ton though.
I mean it's a good, it's a good strategy for sure.
Totally, you were the dark tipper on the show right, that was the horrible nickname they gave me on the show.
Yeah, was that from that first episode?
Did leo just like riff that like where did that come from?
Well, we used to have these things called like windows tips and like it was like a quick check-in.
You're like okay, when you're doing a segment, So everything in TV is broken into blocks.
And so they'll have, like the A block, which is the very beginning of the show, and they break it down into individual segments.
There's a person keeping kind of a timer on making sure, when you're doing live TV, making sure the blocks don't go too long because it impacts other people's segments.
And there's very tight, well-oiled machine that has to run perfectly to pull off a live show.
And so they had these little kickers that they would do.
Like when you finish a block you bump out to a Windows tip or a little you know 30 second, 45 second, one minute long max little tip.
And so they're like OK well, we're going to do Kevin's going to do tips that are about the dark side of the Internet.
Let's call them dark tips.
And then they call me the dark tipper as a joke.
And then it just kind of like was a funny little thing on the on the show.
That's so great.
Screed Savers was live in front of a studio audience, right?
Yeah.
Were they changing over the set while you were doing this on the main segment?
Well, the cool thing is they could have basically Because the number of cameras they had and the locations on the set, you didn't have to do a lot of changing, because there's always two locations to shoot.
And so you would have one off to the side and one primary front location, and then even one over in the nook where we took live calls.
So There wasn't a lot of quick set change unless it was like a guest interview.
And that was typically done between commercial breaks.
We would go off to a commercial.
You have three minutes and change, and then they'd swap out, roll away the main center console and then put in a couple of chairs, get the guests seated, all the mics checked, all that good stuff.
So it's a crazy thing because weird stuff breaks.
A guest microphone goes out and somebody is running in 30 seconds before you come back on TV swapping out mics and like just demos break computers, reboot randomly, like weird stuff would happen, and you just have to kind of roll with it.
So that's the fun dynamic of live television.
David, we're so spoiled with Acquired, like infinite retakes, just audio.
I was literally thinking I'm kind of jealous like that must have been such good trail like this explains like why you're so good because you had to just like roll with it whereas yeah we just we've been doing this for six years but like we have so many luxuries you know well there's something nice about. about just being able to say okay screw it like if i mess up like so be it and we're done then you're done you know what i mean like with my podcast and stuff that i do now it's like i'm always going back and you know i'll listen to an episode that i think is really important i want to make sure the editor got it right and you're like listening to it again you're like okay we can trim a little bit here and you know it's like you just walked out of the studio and you're like okay we're done for the day on to the next day so there was nothing you could do when it goes out You really can obsess for a week until it is out there.
And even after you get any feedback that it was actually good.
You're like I just released something awful.
I have this pit and the feeling in my stomach.
I wish I had spent more time editing, even though I'm sure I just spent way too much cognitive load on this.
Yeah.
And you'll, you never know with your guests, right?
Like you'll have a guest and you're like okay, this is a very important person to have on the show for X, Y or Z.
And then you get them on and you're like so tell me about your background.
And they're like, it was great.
And then they just like, stop talking.
And you're like, oh, come on.
Like I got to pull more out of you.
This has to be entertaining, you know?
So it can be challenging, you know, as someone doing the interviews, to kind of get people to actually open up.
Totally.
Well, because we're having that enormous problem here, I'm going to pry even deeper.
Yeah.
So you did not move to the Bay Area to work at Tech TV.
Was your first job digital marketing for an online furniture retailer?
That's right.
Yeah.
So basically there was a company called Next Office that had hired me to come out and just really track all of their ad campaigns and ad spend.
And so they had a marketing team that was going out and buying banner advertisements.
And people would click on those and eventually lead all the way down to a checkout.
And they wanted to know what the conversion rate was like and where they should be spending their money.
And it wasn't ideal for me, but I knew.
At that point I'm like I'll take any job that gets me to the Bay Area.
What can I do to get me out there?
Because it was the dot-com boom.
I was reading about it in magazines and it was the crazy Web 10 and just insane valuations and parties and just all the madness that you saw with IPOs and I was like I got to get out there.
I got to get out there.
So I just went online and posted something on, I think it was monster.com, the jobs board.
And Mike Mazur, who later became really good friends, reached out to me and was like hey, I think you'd be great for this role.
We had a phone interview and then they flew me out and gave me a job offer and I took it.
Super cool.
Do you recall how many years you were on screensavers before the whole G4?
Seemingly debacle from the outside.
Yeah, it wasn't that long actually, because I think it was two and a half years that I was at Tech TV, which at that time, it was the longest job I'd ever had.
And it was just...
Oh, it was so awesome.
It seemed like it was a special place.
And we just had kind of no idea what we were doing, but also we knew what we wanted to create.
And it was a very creative group of people and the content was good.
And Leo was like a great anchor host.
He was a little bit older than us but kind of brought everything together and had a great executive producer that was hilarious and fun to work for.
And yeah, it was awesome.
But the problem with tech TV is that we weren't as a network really making that much money.
Yeah. it was Indy, right?
It was owned by Paul Allen.
That's right.
So Paul Allen owned it and he was pouring a lot of money into it to keep it alive.
And it was an expensive network to operate.
I mean, we had hundreds of people and eventually they said okay, I can't keep spending more money here.
We need to actually do something and be acquired.
And so G4 based out of LA, uh, came along and said, we're a video game network.
We think this is the future.
We're going to acquire tech TV more or less for the subs.
So they bought tech TV and they also thought there was a very similar audience and they didn't want to lose that because we had some shows a couple of shows screensavers being one of them that were getting decent ratings.
So they're like okay, how can we kind of bring that audience along, merge it with our video game content and, And so that's what happened.
They bought us and they said, OK, by the way, we're going to shut down San Francisco.
We're moving folks to L.A.
And so you know, they gave me an offer to come down and continue to host the show down in Los Angeles.
And so that's what I did.
In retrospect it seems so obviously silly because, especially I mean even now, but at that point the Bay Area was the center of everything that you guys were doing with screensavers.
To move it down to LA.
Because G4 was owned by Comcast, right?
That's right.
Yeah.
Not to mention just the culture clash.
That must have been rough.
They knew it was really rough.
And they knew long term that they wanted to morph the screensavers into another show.
And they weren't going to tell us that.
But they knew that was the plan.
So when I saw that was happening...
That's not what I wanted to be long-term.
I didn't want to be an on-air TV person.
So for me the kind of writing was on the wall that I needed to go do something else and hopefully get back to the Bay Area.
And so it led me to write around when we created Dig.
And then also I created a podcasting network called Revision3.
That was about creating more of that type of content, like more geeky style content, in podcast format.
Does Revision3 predate the term podcast?
Yes.
Yes.
Because we were doing video only and there was no way to do a feed of that.
And so Steve Jobs had announced that there was something called podcast, that they were going to support and build that into iTunes.
And that's when Alex and I said okay, let's get together and do a show called Dignation, because now we have a place to distribute it.
At the risk of being way too far down the rabbit hole of internet nostalgia, I seem to remember an opening jingle from Leo's shows that was like netcasts you love from people you trust.
That's right.
Funny thinking that netcasts almost became the thing.
Yeah, he didn't want to use the word podcast, and I'm not sure why that was.
I think that he wanted to brand it his own thing.
And yeah, I don't think he had quite the momentum.
It was Adam Curry that coined the term podcast.
And I think that Leo was thinking at the time and I believe this is accurate that he was thinking that it shouldn't be just about Apple and about the iPod, because that's what podcasts referenced.
Because Leo was always a big open source advocate and things like that.
Oh, that's so Leo.
That's awesome.
So Leo.
How can we make this more broadly applicable?
Which, yeah, that makes sense.
But once the snowball of the term podcast grabbed hold, there was no going back.
Yeah, it's like here.
I own zero iPods and listen to my podcasts on Spotify.
Who's actively suing Apple?
Right.
It stuck pretty hard.
Yeah, totally.
I always thought a lot of those terms were just hilarious.
Like the iPod, like I, when you used to put I in front of things, it meant like internet.
Yeah.
And so I always used to like to say these things out loud just to hear how ridiculous they were.
Like sometimes I still tell people to send me electronic mail because, like that's what E stood for and anything E you know.
It's like it's so funny, when you like, actually pronounce them out loud.
It's amazing how long these things stick.
Yeah.
All right.
So thesis with revision three though, like there's a very clear, loud part of Twitter today talking about the creator economy, and like beating the drum that this is the next emergent thing.
David and I feel like we've sort of experienced it firsthand.
You've been experiencing it through multiple generations of the web.
Did you have a thesis in starting that about the web and the Internet?
Is this new direct way to reach consumers?
Yeah, absolutely.
When we started revision three, the thinking there was that video was working online.
Like it was starting to take off and people could consume and watch video content.
It was easy to produce on our side.
Like we could have some kind of mid range cameras and gear and editor that we would, just you know, pay part time.
We could churn that out.
And if we got enough people interested and excited, there would be brands that wanted to sponsor it.
And that ended up being true.
And so we had an ad sales team and we had a network of shows.
And Revision3 grew pretty quickly because people were starting to tune in.
And we found that niche audiences were quite large.
And when they would talk to each other and use the internet to share that this type of content was out there.
We didn't have to rely upon these distribution agreements of these big old school television networks to get viewership.
And we could actually measure it in a much more accurate way.
And so that's what kind of started Revision 3.
And yeah, that went on for many years and actually had a great outcome.
It was sold to Discovery Networks for $35 million.
And even though that sounds...
These days at the time, it was a big deal.
Yeah.
And it became Discovery Network's kind of digital arm.
Basically, they were all about traditional media.
And so for them to get into digital.
This gave them a handful of folks that could come and lead that effort on the digital side.
So it was pretty cool.
That's great.
And so at what point did you realize the like flywheel effect of having a media stream with Dignation and other ways that you're reaching people and being the founder of Digg like having this Web 20 property?
Yeah, it's a good question.
When we started Dignation, we thought of it as a way to, because we had a base of people that really loved the dynamic that Alex and I had back when we were hosting the television show together.
So when we started this, we were like okay, here's a great way for us to talk about the stuff we would normally be talking about, which is like the geeky news, our favorite stories.
I also happen to have the website Dig, and so it's a great way to surface the best stuff for us to be chatting about.
And it became this way to engage the community and highlight their names.
I had a top leaderboard back then on Dig.
And as silly as it sounds, people loved seeing their name in lights.
Oh, Kevin and Alex mentioned me on the show.
They mentioned one of the stories that I submitted.
So it just led to more usage of the website.
And yeah, there was this little... flywheel that happened.
And then eventually at some point, Digg became much bigger than Digg Nation.
It was clear that there were so many people listening or watching and reading and consuming Digg.
And Digg Nation still had a pretty niche following of the hardcore original people.
But that was totally fine with us.
We were just having fun doing the show.
Digg was reaching, I think, what did it cap out at?
Like 38 million monthly uniques?
That's right.
Yeah.
Wild.
I mean, at that point, that was an enormous audience to be reaching on the web.
Yeah, it was pretty big.
It was like top 10 web property.
And it's still pretty big.
I would love to have another site that does 38 million unique.
Well, I guess, when I say at that time, like Because Facebook now reaches what?
3 billion monthly active users.
I think, if I have it right, you were out ahead of Facebook and Facebook hadn't really started becoming the juggernaut that it is until the sort of late 2000s.
I think that was started in 2004.
But at one point didn't Mark come visit you when you rolled out the dig button.
That was like letting you upvote articles on their websites.
When they were thinking about the like button that is now sort of famous and everywhere.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
So we had a common investor, Greylock.
And David Z, who was at Greylock, who was on our board and also on the board of Facebook, was like hey, you guys should get together and did an email introduction.
And he's like, this is a company, Facebook.
It's really taking off.
You guys should chat.
And it had already taken off and gotten a ton of press.
And so...
Yeah, Mark hit me up, and he's like hey, let's you know, I'll come to the city because he was down in Palo Alto.
And he's like, I'll come to SF and love to see your offices and let's go grab some food.
And so he came to the office and we chatted about kind of just what voting meant.
You know, for us, it was voting on content was helping us serve as the best stuff.
And it was feeding back into our algorithm that would eventually recommend similar content to people that we had this like suggested stories portions where we had a couple.
It was early kind of AI machine learning type stuff that we were applying to articles.
So if you like this, you might also enjoy these articles.
And so, you know, Mark was really interested in that.
And this is before they had the like button.
Pre-news feed, I think even pre-mini feed.
Yeah, I don't remember what was going on at Facebook.
It was locked down to just colleges and then they started opening it up, and that's when I got an account.
But yeah, he was very curious and yeah, it was nice.
It was like Mark was a nice guy.
We ended up hanging out a handful of times and doing a handful of dinners and he was always just like a very thoughtful and, And even once Facebook took off, it was clear that they were going to be much larger than Dig.
He was always really helpful.
He just said, if you ever need anything, shoot me a text.
Happy to collaborate in different things.
And he invited us into the early Facebook platform stuff.
So we were like an early partner there when they first launched their platform.
And yeah, I mean, I have nothing but good things to say about how we got to know each other.
Okay, there's one question I got to ask because we've seen it.
It's been reported, but I don't think I've ever heard you talk about it.
So supposedly the story goes.
According to the media, you were inspired to start Digg, to make the leap and actually start this after you had lunch with somebody.
Is that true?
Are you talking about Commander Taco?
Oh, no.
The story I heard was you had lunch with Waz.
Oh, no.
It was not Waz.
No.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
So this is from the Business Week story.
We read the story that was the famous cover.
And they reported there that you were inspired to start Dig because you had lunch with Waz and you were like I'm going to go be an entrepreneur.
That's so funny.
There's so many different... That's Sarah Lacey that wrote that story.
That's funny.
Yeah.
This is the problem.
And this is so true with so many of my friends' startups.
Success has a thousand founders, like they say, or they used to say a very like a thousand fathers, or whatever it was.
But that's like not PC.
So there is so many different lore stories or there was... Even Wikipedia is completely wrong.
So when I look at Wikipedia and the founding stuff there, it's completely wrong.
It's just...
Yeah.
So do you want me to just cover the quick little- Actually, yeah.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
What is the non-apocryphal, as you remember it, even if it's a bland, the real, what happened?
Well, this is the truth.
This is exactly how it went down.
And I don't know that I've ever told the full thing, but I'll just do the quick version of it.
So basically what happened is there was a site out there called Delicious that was created by Joshua Schachter.
That was all about social bookmarking.
Yeah.
And he would bookmark things and he would count the number of bookmarks on things.
And this was one of the very first Web2 properties.
And it would surface interesting bookmarks.
But it wasn't news because people didn't typically bookmark news.
They would bookmark things that they wanted to return to later.
And I would see that.
I was like, wow, it's surfacing cool stuff here.
I wonder what this would look like if you applied it to everything.
Okay.
So that was one piece of it.
The other piece of it was that I did have lunch, but it was with Commander Taco, who is the founder of Slashdot.
Slashdot.
Yeah.
And so he came and he was a guest on the show.
And when I had lunch with him... And this was on the screensavers?
Yes, but it was down in LA.
Okay.
And so I had lunch with them.
This was 2004 or early, mid-2004.
I asked him where all those user submissions went, because Slashdot is great in that it promotes, like their favorite stories to the front page and they're all user submitted content, but you can't see any of it.
So I was like gosh, there has to be just so many good submitted stories here that they're just not surfacing.
And I was like, why don't you make it?
I literally told him.
I was like, why don't you make it so we can see all the submissions and then we can like, vote up the best ones?
And he's like, nah, I don't want to do that.
Blah, blah.
That's not the way it works.
And so I was like, okay, well, I'm going to go build this.
Ah, This is like when Vitalik proposed the idea for a distributed world computer to David.
Oh, it was the colored coins and master coin, the Israel Bitcoin 2.0 projects.
He was like, yo, guys, we should just do this all as one like master thing.
And they're like, no, we're not going to do that.
And he's like, OK, cool.
I'm going to go start something new.
Yeah.
I mean, that was basically what had happened here with Slashdot.
As I said, well, I'm just going to go start something new then.
And then I went out and I kind of basically just sketched it out.
Like I sketched out what it would look like, what a dig button would feel like, what an upcoming section would be where submissions would go, like the whole thing.
I found a freelance developer.
I hired that freelance developer to create the first prototype.
His name was Owen.
It says on the website, he was a co-founder.
That's not true.
He was a freelance developer.
But he's the closest thing I had to a co-founder because we were in this together and he built it.
It also says that Jay Adelson was a co-founder.
That is not true.
I hired Jay to be the CEO four or five months later.
It also says that Ron is the co-founder.
Ron was my first technical kind of backend hire a few months later.
So it's like, and I'm not claiming that these guys claim that.
I'm just saying this is the way it was written.
So I don't have any like ill will against any of these people.
But like when people see who the first few people are, they call them all co-founders and all this thing gets written about who did this and that.
And I'm just like, whatever, like it's fine with me.
I don't care that Wikipedia never gets corrected, but that is the origin story.
Oh my god, that's so great.
Well, it gets so twisted.
Because so in the lore out there, like the having a guest on the show, on the screensavers, and then that leading to part of dig is out there.
But it says that you had Jay on the show, and then you brought him in.
But it sounds like no, there was Commander Taco.
No, Jay was on the screensavers.
And I met Jay through going out.
He was one of the co-founders of a company called Equinix, which was a big data center company.
Huge.
Yeah, huge.
And so I went out and met him through that.
And then he... about six months into... Well, he really wanted to do Revision 3.
And he was the first check into Revision 3 to create that content.
And so that was awesome that Jay supported us back in that day.
But he told me to get rid of Digg.
He thought it was a distraction to revision three.
And he was like, oh, you should sell it.
Like, dude, just focus on revision three.
This is our thing.
I put money into this.
Like, we need to focus on this.
And I was like, Jay, you don't understand.
Dig is going to be big.
It's growing.
We can do both.
And so eventually, about three or four months later, Jay was like, oh, I see.
Yeah, it is growing quite a bit.
And I was like, hey, how about I give you some equity?
Would you come on and run this?
I don't know anything about raising from venture capitalists.
I've never done it before. you've clearly been down this path.
You've taken a company public.
You can help out here.
And so we agreed to... I gave him some equity, a few percentage points to the company.
He then built out the right legal folks to work with, brought them on board.
I had formed the company using one of these.
There was no Rocket Lawyer at the time, but it was a Rocket Lawyer-esque type thing.
So the docs were all done wrong.
I didn't have any board meetings or meeting notes.
And it was all jacked up.
So we had to have the docs all redone.
And so Jay was very good at helping kind of correct a lot of my mistakes that I had made early on.
But yeah, he didn't actually come on until like six or seven months later, after there was some real momentum there.
There's a thing that I've referenced and you've referenced here, which is Web 2.0.
What did that mean to you at the time?
I didn't know.
I didn't even know what it was called.
I literally Jason Calacanis came up to me, who had run Weblogs Inc, which was Engadget and a bunch of the other sites.
He tried to buy Dig very early on.
He saw that it was driving traffic to his sites.
And he sat down with me at Sushi in LA.
And this was after Dig was very small.
And he's like, I'll give you a million dollars for this.
And then I was like, okay.
Which is classic lowball.
So J. Cal.
Yeah.
Well, honestly, I was like, okay.
I came from nothing, man.
My parents had $0, as did I. And so I was like, yes, let's do that.
And he sent me... And you've just been making a salary at Tech TV.
Yeah, exactly.
You didn't have equity in that.
No, I had like $10,000 in savings.
And I'd spent a lot of it on building the prototype of Dig.
And my girlfriend was pissed at me for that.
And so basically you know he came in.
But then there was like he sent me a term sheet and it was like you get 200K upfront.
And then if you hit these milestones, you get like another 100K here.
And it was like this really complicated.
I was like, eh, I don't like this.
Like we're growing a lot.
And so ended up saying no and actually raising money instead.
But he said to me during that lunch, he was like, you're like one of the biggest web 2.0 companies.
And like literally, I thought is there a software I need to upgrade on my servers that makes me Web 20?
I was like, there's something I'm not aware of I need to upgrade because I'm not Web 2.0.
I did not do that upgrade.
I had never heard that term before.
Which is so fascinating because to me and maybe it was a couple of years later Dig was the embodiment of Web 20.
It was dynamic content.
It was Ajax.
It was user-submitted content.
It was what became social media.
Oh, dude.
After I found out what it was, I was like, of course I'm Web 2.0.
Yes, of course we are.
I had no idea what it was.
Well, it's this amazing thing that I think the people who are the deepest in a thing that's becoming a thing in the world aren't the people who get to name it, which is the most fascinating thing.
When we were interviewing Vlad from Webflow, he was like oh, I found out two years ago that we were a no-code company.
But like our company is 11 years old.
So good to know about this no-code thing.
And now, of course, they like have embraced it and have the no-code conference and all this stuff.
It's so cool.
I mean, on your show, like you're having all these awesome NFT artists on.
And I feel like that's their story, right?
Like people, like everybody, they're like...
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm just making my art.
It is one of those things that almost everyone, a lot of entrepreneurs that I meet it's a dirty secret.
It's like you go back and you look at these different covers of magazines and this great success.
And no one really has a clue that they're ever going to be as big as they become when you talk to the top companies that are out there.
It's always like...
This should exist.
I'm going to go build it.
But 99% of the time, it's quite shocking that it gets as big as... You don't really plan that.
It was kind of like... I remember when Uber first came out.
I was like, oh, how many people are going to get into other people's strangers' cars?
I guess it'll work for black cars.
It'll work for black cars.
That's what it'll be.
And that was the launch.
The plan was black car service with an app.
Never did the founders ever dream it was going to be applied to a random Toyota Corolla.
That was never imagined that you would feel comfortable.
Well, you, you must've known Garrett from this whole era, right?
Garrett and I were really good friends and he had you know create stumble upon and we didn't see each other as competitive.
So we had always go Garrett and I just like, we're really close in the web 2.0 days.
And we would just go have beers all the time and talk about features and building out some of this stuff.
But then, uh yeah, I later ended up dating his ex-girlfriend and and then we kind of had a little that didn't go over so well.
Yeah.
But we're cool now.
That's why JCal invested in Uber and Angel invested in Uber and you didn't.
That would be a big reason why I didn't invest in Uber.
But we're good now.
It's like the dumb shit you do in your 20s.
It was such a small thing, though.
You got to remember that Web 20 and this whole world it really isn't as big a startup scene as it is today.
And so when we would go meet up at a bar, we'd say okay okay, Fly Bar and Divisadero and SF, let's go hang out.
Let's grab some beers.
It was easy to grab Garrett from stumble upon and, you know, get Josh Hector from delicious to show up to something.
Or you know Ev from Twitter or whatever.
Like we would just all hang, you know?
So it wasn't like we never knew that these projects were going to be that big.
We were just having fun building software.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, let me just insert a midpoint.
So today, tech is like the five biggest companies in the world.
And Kevin, you're describing this era where basically all the people that run a lot of those big companies, or started them or were involved in the founding or were angel investors, are hanging out getting beers.
There's this interesting midpoint that I remember viscerally, where I went to South by Southwest in I.
And you and Alex were doing a live Dignation at Stubbs Barbecue huge sort of like outdoor, like great barbecue but like concert venue.
Yeah, 4,000 people.
It was huge.
And I'm pretty sure after you did the show, the Foo Fighters played.
Was it the Foo Fighters?
No, it was a big band though.
Was it the Foo Fighters?
I wasn't a fan of the Foo Fighters, so maybe it was.
But I remember there was a big band we had play one year that I was just kind of like, I don't know.
I wasn't a huge fan and everyone thought it was a big deal.
And then we had the Walkman play another year, which I was a huge fan of.
And so that was awesome.
I stuck around for that one.
I was like, oh, this is really cool.
But yeah, well, that was the cool thing about South by, right?
Is you had these big bands coming in because they would play music the next week and they'd come into town early and it was easy to book someone.
Like I remember Snoop Dogg was going and doing different South by things because he was going to be out there anyway for the following music week or whatever.
So it was easy to get a big name to come play your little...
That makes sense.
Podcast live show.
Yeah.
It's still definitely accomplished.
This feeling though, of me feeling like as someone who was totally following this all from the outside, because I was in high school and early college in like 05 to 09 and feeling like there's a bunch of insiders and I'm not part of the insiders, but like they're like spitting distance away where, like when I grow up, I want to be like one of them.
That Dignation moment where I was looking around at South by, I was like oh, this is like pretty mainstream.
This has become a part of culture.
Dude, it shocked us all.
Literally, we booked that venue and I'm like, I hope it looks like there's enough people here.
Otherwise, this is going to be a little awkward.
We had no idea that that many people would show up.
And it was crazy because I brought my dad out to that show.
And my dad had really no clue.
I mean, he had seen that we did these live Dignations and I kind of hid it from him because he didn't like me swearing a lot, even though he swore.
So it was just like, I think he'd be cool with it today if he was still around.
Anyway, he saw that show and saw all those people.
And then when we left the venue, all these people were back in the day trying to come up and get my autograph and all that stuff.
And they kind of followed me out to the car that we were getting into, which was just crazy because I was like a geek and to have that kind of treatment was odd.
But my dad saw that and my dad was just blown away.
And he ended up passing away two years later.
I remember just being like...
It was a special moment for me because we didn't have a whole lot growing up and my dad was really proud.
I'm just really glad I had that because I decided to fly him out.
I didn't know whether I should or not, and I was like okay, I should fly my dad out because he should be part of this, and it was just like it was the right call.
Those are very special moments for me for sure.
I bet.
There's an interesting looking backwards moment there where that probably applies universally.
It's almost always the right call.
If you're like, should I do something that overextends myself financially or is an inconvenience or something to have a family member come see something that could be special?
It's almost always the right thing to say yes.
Yeah.
And experiences, I would say, are definitely the number one thing to invest in.
They're the best money spent.
All right, listeners, it's time to talk about another one of our favorite companies, Statsig.
Since you last heard from us about Statsig, they have a very exciting update.
They raised their Series C, valuing them at $1.1 billion.
Yeah, huge milestone.
Congrats to the team.
Timing is interesting because the experimentation space is really heating up.
Yes.
So why do investors value stat seg at over a billion dollars?
It's because experimentation has become a critical part of the product stack for the world's best product teams.
Yep.
This trend started with Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and Netflix and Airbnb.
Those companies faced a problem.
How do you maintain a fast, decentralized product and engineering culture while also scaling up to thousands of employees?
Experimentation systems were a huge part of that answer.
These systems gave everyone at those companies access to a global set of product metrics, from page views to watch, time to performance.
And then every time a team released a new feature or product, they could measure the impact of that feature on those metrics.
So Facebook could set a company-wide goal like increasing time in app and let individual teams go and figure out how to achieve it.
Multiply this across thousands of engineers and PMs, and boom, you get exponential growth.
It's no wonder that experimentation is now seen as essential infrastructure.
Yep today's best product teams like Notion OpenAI, Rippling and Figma are equally reliant on experimentation.
But instead of building it in-house, they just use Statsig.
And they don't just use Statsig for experimentation.
Over the last few years, Statsig has added all the tools that fast product teams need, like feature flags, product analytics, session replays and more.
So if you would like to help your team's engineers and PMs figure out how to build faster and make smarter decisions, go to statsigcom slash acquired or click the link in the show notes.
They have a super generous free tier, a 50000 startup program and affordable enterprise contracts for large companies.
Just tell them that Ben and David sent you.
Well, gosh, I could do this absolutely forever.
I do want to talk about some Web3 stuff.
And I want to make the point and I think we have a little interlude in the middle where I want to talk about before you became MoFi Kevin, but after Dig, there's some interesting chapters in there.
A lot of the things that you're observing about that era... feel similar to what's going on in crypto right now like it's kind of the true believers it's kind of everybody knows each other there seems to be a lot of like real genuine information sharing and just like belief in a common purpose even though everyone kind of interprets the purpose differently does it feel like that to you too It does.
Yeah.
I would say this is the first time since Web 2 where I've felt that type of connection and camaraderie around a new technology that the mainstream has yet to embrace, is starting to embrace but has yet to embrace.
And we're all early and we all see it and we all believe in it.
And it's just a matter of time.
Yeah.
Time creates confidence.
It's interesting you feel like it's the first time since then because you look at, like all these theoretical waves since then that like the media and VCs were sort of calling the next big thing, some of which sort of have been, you know, machine learning is, you know, a reasonable one.
And like, obviously, there was the mobile wave after the sort of social wave thing.
But the mobile way felt like a kind of land grab.
It was very obvious.
You know, the mobile way was something where, when the iPhone came out, everyone's like oh, of course this is going to be huge.
There was no doubt, you know, and it hit consumers hands immediately.
Right.
And so there was none of this.
You have to believe it just it was a given.
Well, it was also just it was an expansion of the existing Web 2.0 market, really, right?
Like Instagram was Flickr, right?
Like WhatsApp was, you know, AIM.
Like it's not the analogies were one to one.
Right.
And then and then the big players were like OK, we'll just make apps.
Like Facebook made a mobile app and like Twitter made a mobile app.
And like that was just an easy kind of transition for them.
And Web3 is very much like Web2.
When Web2 first came out, people were like, I don't know if this is going to be big.
What are these social network things about?
Am I really going to show people what I'm into by voting on things?
Like there was a lot of like, just I don't know that I believe this to be true.
And that's the same thing that's happening in Web3 now.
Like, does this crypto thing real?
Is it really going to scale?
Are these NFTs really collectible?
Is it just people, you know, making up stuff?
And, you know, there's a lot of doubt there.
So that's the kind of excitement because I love...
So there's an excitement that you get when you see something early that you believe to be true, but everyone else disagrees with you.
That's always kind of fun.
And there's so many more entrepreneurs, like we said, like you know NFT artists entrepreneurs, DeFi projects where like, they're building stuff because they're like oh, I'm in this community.
This needs to exist.
Right.
Not like hey, I've got this business plan and there's this obvious.
You know seam, I'm going to go attack.
It's true where I'm a partner over there.
We don't invest in business plans.
We sit down with an entrepreneur.
We listen to their idea.
We want it to be new, novel, exciting.
And if it works, it should be massive.
And that's what we get excited about.
We want to back incredible people building very ambitious things.
Okay, so let's talk about kind of during this transitionary period.
What was your journey like in crypto?
Like, when did you first hear about it?
When did you buy your first Bitcoin?
Like, how did we go from the end of Dig to MoFi?
It's a great question.
I'd have to go back and search Twitter.
I think I first tweeted about Bitcoin in 2012.
Have you ever searched your Gmail to try and figure out?
You can use like the before search operator.
This is kind of a fun thing to do is like open your personal Gmail, search Bitcoin or crypto and figure out what the very first mention of it is in an email exchange.
Oh, that's interesting.
The question is, yeah, I guess I would have had that in... I never even thought to do that.
I mean, can we stop down for a second while I do that real quick?
Yeah, let's do it.
Let's see here.
So the first email I have about Bitcoin is June 12th of 2011.
And it's an angel investor business plan.
Andre from Canada says he likes Dignation and Foundation and wanted to tell me about this idea around Bitcoin.
That is the first time that I actually see it mentioned in my inbox.
And then the first Coinbase transaction I have is from...
Okay.
Yeah.
So I apparently I tweeted out my Coinbase link to get referrals and they were sending me on Tuesday, August 14th of 2012.
I started receiving a 10th of a Bitcoin 0.1.
Oh my God.
Which it says, this is what it says.
Hi, Kevin Rose.
Coinbase just sent you 0.10 BTC worth $1.13 USD using Coinbase.
Hell yeah.
Congratulations, your friend.
And then there's email address has verified their account on Coinbase.
We've credited you 0.1 BTC to your account.
And so I started getting a quarter of a Bitcoin, and then I have just like dozens and dozens of those emails worth 116 if it was a quarter.
So yeah, Bitcoin was pretty cheap back then.
So that means that I had a Coinbase account back in mid-2012.
Okay.
Awesome.
We're going to get back to Coinbase in one sec, but we got to have one little digression.
You mentioned Foundation.
It's Trent Reznor, right?
Is the music in the beginning.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The starting music on Foundation.
Yeah.
That's another little show I did where I interviewed entrepreneurs.
Okay.
How did you get Trent Reznor music?
Well, he released that as a complete open source and he got rid of all the rights.
All the stems, right?
Even the tracks.
So he had one album where he just released the entire thing to be used for any purpose.
And we were doing, I don't know if he had commercial rights.
I don't think he would have said commercial rights in there, but we were non-commercial.
We weren't putting any ads in or anything.
So we used that.
I had a chance to go and visit Trent at his house because we had him on, for we used to do these before they were Ask Me Anythings.
We did these things called Dig Dialogues, where people could vote up their favorite questions for people to ask.
And so we had the community vote up their top questions for Trent Reznor.
And then I went and interviewed Trent and that was a ton of fun.
Oh, that's so awesome.
I love searching old tweets and old emails, as you can tell.
In preparing for this episode.
I think the first time I tweeted about Dig was a link to the Dig dialogue with you and Trent.
Oh, that's awesome.
Yeah, that was so much fun to do that show with him.
His house is crazy.
He's the most rock star, coolest house ever.
It's all dark and leathery and cool looking dogs.
Everything about his house is cool.
He's such a pure artist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's crazy.
I was like we were chatting and we're talking about like all this different stuff, and we were walking out and he's like do you want to see my recording studio?
Like, cause he's got one in his house.
You're like, nah, I gotta go.
Yeah, exactly.
Like in my mind, I'm like, you don't understand.
Like my high school years were all about Nine Inch Nails and like some, that was my favorite music.
And and so I was like that kind of nonchalantly, I was like It's like yeah yeah, you've got time.
I'll check out your recording studio.
And so we like just walk down there and it's exactly what you'd expect.
It's like you walk into this room.
It's all soundproofed and it's like racks of old analog equipment with like wires going between them like a mad scientist, like room to be a fly on the wall in this room.
It's just so cool.
Like he's creating all this music with real analog electric signals running through.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is how all those guys used to do it.
Like Fatboy Slim and like there are a bunch of great documentaries out there about that era now where, like it wasn't, it was digital but it wasn't like like the source was analog.
Right.
Exactly.
I love it.
All right, Kevin, bringing us back.
I found your first three tweets with Bitcoin in it.
In June 2011, you tweeted, testing out Bitcoin.
Can someone send a couple cents to this address?
Thanks.
And then you have a wallet address.
Yeah, that address I lost the keys for.
So you can look up that wallet address.
And I think there's over a Bitcoin in there or something like that.
So there's like, whatever the prices are, lost 50 grand or something.
You and everyone else, man.
Yeah, I'll never recover that.
If you pull up that tweet, please do not send any more Bitcoin in that direction.
Second one, for those asking about Bitcoin, this is also in June.
More info here.
We use coins.com.
Still haven't gotten any coins.
Must be doing something wrong.
I started mining, I think, back then.
Oh.
And then here it is, the big one, 2012.
Playing around with Coinbase, a new startup that hosts your Bitcoin wallet.
Check it.
Yeah.
So that I was um Brian, I had him on foundation Armstrong the founder, and he.
I saw him at demo day, uh at YC and I told him I wanted to invest and I was investing at Google ventures at the time.
And so I was a partner over Google ventures.
I brought that to the Google ventures team.
Uh, I won't call it any partner in particular, but let's just say one partner who I absolutely adore and I'm not going to call them out, but if you hear this, I adore.
You called it tulips.
Yeah.
And basically said that we can't... The fear, and this is a valid fear back then.
So I'm not slamming this person.
You have Google Corporate's money.
What if you invest Google Corporate's money into something that becomes, or is called, a scam later down the road?
That does not look good for Google.
Ooh, this is a great argument against corporate venture, because that is basically what venture capital needs to do in consumer.
Right.
So it's okay.
I ended up investing in Coinbase a little bit later personally.
It all worked out.
But Brian's an awesome human.
We got him some great early exposure through that foundation.
And I just am delighted that we helped get that company off the ground because I know that foundation episode.
He told me later, really recently, maybe three or four months ago.
He told me People still refer to that Foundation episode where he was on as the first time they actually got into crypto.
So we got a lot of people on board into cryptocurrency with that.
And, at the end of the day, that is the thing that gets me excited about doing the Foundation podcast, about doing podcasts around finance.
The reason I don't take sponsors and I don't try to monetize this stuff is that's not what it's about for me at this point in the stage of my career.
It's about getting more people on board and excited about these new and upcoming technologies and hopefully helping them avoid a lot of the crap that's out there.
Because anytime there's money involved, there's people that are trying to scam and take advantage of others.
And I want to... put out content because there's a lot of that other content out there.
There's a lot of people on crypto Twitter not the groups that I run in but if you just go a layer or two deeper you'll see so much shilling and flipping and trying to pump and dump.
And that's the stuff we need to get rid of.
Do you have any hot takes on something that has a large user base, but you feel is pretty scammy?
Well, I would say that it depends on what the goal of the project is.
There's a lot of knockoff projects that happen.
Dogecoin, for example, when it first got started, I had Jackson Palmer, the founder, on my podcast as well on Foundation.
And It was meant to be a cryptocurrency that could be used as a way to more or less give away for good deeds.
So people were using it to kind of tip.
There was all these Dogecoin tipping bots on Reddit.
Vitalik got...
A ton of Doge.
Yeah.
I mean, people were like back in the Reddit days of when Doge first launched.
People were using the tip bots and they would send, you know, a thousand Doge here, like 2000 here.
Oh, that was a great comment.
Here's 50 Doge.
And so that's why the supply was so large is they, he wanted to create this enormous supply.
So it wouldn't be hoarded and it would just be thought of this fun thing to kind of like create this little tipping economy.
And I thought that was a really cool idea and one that was worth playing around with.
Now there is a lot of knockoffs and clones of that, with not the intention of pushing technology forward in any meaningful way, but with just the intention of price appreciation, because they want to jump on, ride it, sell it, make money and rinse and repeat.
And you see that happening over and over.
So those are the projects... that I think are to be avoided.
I certainly believe that Doge did not have that intent.
I know that they didn't have that intention when they launched.
It was not a pump and dump scheme.
It was just like, let's have fun with this and see where it takes us.
And that was the thinking there.
It makes total sense.
I mean, anytime there's a new paradigm or a new opportunity, let's just phrase it as new paradigm.
Everyone's mindset has to shift to become a believer in the new thing.
Look at Web 2.
The easiest thing to do would be to say, no, why would I submit stories that other people could see?
Or even worse.
I mean, I remember my parents Ben, I'm sure you remember this being like don't put your personal information on the internet.
Don't join Facebook. which it turns out may actually be pretty good advice.
I should be more succinct.
Anytime there's a paradigm shift, it requires a leap of faith to become a true believer in the new thing.
And the earliest people that have to do that.
There's the most upside for them, because they get to be early to that thing which could accrue them reputation or actual shares in whatever the new thing is.
But it requires that leap.
And so it's really easy, when you are someone who's looking around and seeing other people become awakened to this new thing, to have some shyster convince you that oh, you should just become awakened to my new thing too.
That looks a lot like the legit awakening that's going on with other people.
That's paying big dividends for them.
Right.
And I get that.
I think that you have to ask your question.
This is happening in the NFT space as well.
You have to ask the question, like, what are the real motivations of this project?
And so I will certainly miss some things that start off as a joke and eventually have real legs to them and evolve into a place where they are innovating in some interesting capacity.
That means multi-billion dollar kind of ideas out of a joke, right.
Like that will happen.
Communities will form and they will evolve and make something that is more than just that initial kind of hype cycle.
That happens.
We see a lot of.
But for me, when I evaluate new cryptocurrency projects, I always look through the lens of one.
Is there a use case here that needs to be solved, that this company is going out and solving?
Is it a credible team behind it?
And is there a discussion of price appreciation?
Is that the main topic?
Because the easiest way to see through a scam is to look, what are people talking about?
Are people talking about the mooning of the coin, the price going up?
Or are they talking about why the underlying technology and what is being built is so important for the future of the world?
And if the conversation is around making money, there's a good chance you're in something that is going to be some type of pump and dump or eventually just has the bottom fall out from underneath it.
So that's how I try to evaluate things.
And it's a part of...
Why I want to start focusing and having more NFT related content is because there's a lot of that happening in the NFT space as well now.
It's like anyone armed with Photoshop can instantly churn out 10000 characters with different glasses and hats and goggles and all that other stuff, right.
And people, they call it aping into something where you just kind of go all in.
People see this and they ape into something.
And a community can be built around that.
And you can have some serious growth there.
But I worry about the long-term durability of these projects.
Is there going to be so many of them that they just seem all like kind of copycats and clones?
And so for me, that means I'm very selective about which investments I place there.
And I do consider them investments.
You're talking about when you personally buy an NFT.
Right, exactly.
An NFT or a cryptocurrency.
But when I personally buy an NFT, I'll say, first and foremost, what's the price point?
The price point is hundreds of dollars, and it's something that you could afford to lose if you had to.
Then I want to love the art.
I bought some Cool Cats a few weeks ago.
It wasn't because I thought Cool Cats were going to be the next CryptoPunks.
I just thought they were cute little characters.
And I like to swap out my avatar from time to time, right?
And they had a great community that was following them.
And they had plans to launch other little Cool Cats related things.
And I'm like, this is a fun little community.
And so that is why I went in and bought a few of them at lower prices.
And I'm okay with losing that money because there's no money to be lost.
I'll always consider them fun little things that I can put in a digital frame or have them up around my house.
And it kind of marks a moment in time of when I thought that was cool, right?
So that's fine.
Now, when it comes to spending like real dollars and like actually making an investment, then I'm looking for more blue chip related stuff.
And so that is in my mind, projects that are not clones but that were actually the first at something like, you know, the first fully on chain generative artwork or, you know, CryptoPunks defining the ERC721 standard and being the first to kind of put that out there.
Those are the projects I look at and saying Those will always historically look back and say those were important for this space if you believe in the NFT space.
And I think they will have long-term collectability and durability from a price standpoint.
So that's how I look at it when I'm buying those things.
It's funny implicit in what you're saying is the very same reason why the founders of some new, groundbreaking consumer thing always have way more upside than any investors or anyone who comes later.
It's because they were true believers in the thing, for the value of the thing, even before it had any notion of being an investment.
That's right.
And that's why oftentimes anybody who's seeing a trend and saying, oh, I got to get in on that.
And they develop their business plan just to use the same parlance that we used earlier.
That's why there's always less opportunity there than for that initial core community where there's a lot of heat.
It also strikes me like, man, the parallels to modern art, right?
Anybody can make a knockoff painting of a Campbell's soup can or Marilyn Monroe, right?
But nobody was doing that before Andy Warhol.
It's just such an obvious analogy here.
Yeah.
I mean, there's things on the NFT side that are first.
There's certainly some of the programmability that you can do on NFTs, and what's coming there is really interesting.
There are going to be new genres of art that are created, which is a very exciting thing.
I mean this idea of generative art, like what's happening with art blocks, and that the user doesn't know what they're going to receive when they make a purchase for the first time.
And that transaction hash is used as part of and fed into the algorithm that actually generates the art.
I mean, that has never really been done before in a way that we could capture it and hold on to it.
I mean, it could have been prototyped and done in a way that could be displayed, you know, a decade ago, but there was no way to like prove ownership.
And so yeah, there's some really cool things that I'm just seeing and I'm excited for the depth that is going to be coming to NFTs, rather than it just being about a place to mint a JPEG or a GIF.
It's going to be, or I guess it's called GIF.
I always get corrected when I say that.
Oh no, it's GIF.
It's Jif.
It's Jif.
It's actually Jif.
We had a whole debate on this.
I know technically, but like... The developers that created it say it's Jif, like the peanut butter.
The community has wrested control of this.
Yeah, it's crazy.
But anyway, yeah.
So there's some really cool new thinking there that I'm excited to hopefully invest in.
Were you into art before NFTs?
Yeah, I have been for quite some time.
Not in a deep way, but it's something that, as someone that has built a bunch of projects, I've always kind of been a usability, a feature and a branding kind of person.
So everything that I've created has always been the names that I've come up with logos, things like that.
I always work very closely with designers on iterating and kind of refining, and So I'm someone that can appreciate it.
And I've always been a big fan of certain artists, but yeah, this is just a whole new level.
These new digital first NFT artists like Xcopy and some of the people that are just doing really bold, fun things, I just get really excited about.
I didn't realize it until now, but you're kind of the perfect person to really understand a lot of the value with NFTs because in a lot of ways you're an artist yourself.
You look at a lot of the products you've built that have always had really strong design sensibility or literally been, you know, in things like watches, or I mean even the more recent apps you've built with fasting and it's called Oak right.
Yes, the meditation app.
Yeah.
It's very clear that you have a strong point of view on how something should look and feel and be as an object to use.
And also you have this great investing lens at True and formerly at Google Ventures, and doing all these incredible angel investments, having been a founder.
And so it really is this fascinating sort of convergence of art and investing and the internet.
That is kind of like this Kevin Rose stew.
Yeah.
So how, I'm curious about that.
How'd you get hooked up with True?
True.
Did you know Ohm from the... I knew Ohm from back in the day.
Yeah.
And he used to cover Dig a lot when he was a writer.
But True had actually backed and invested in my company Milk that I sold to Google Ventures.
Then they went on to back Hodinkee and Xero.
And so they've backed several of my companies.
And so I just met them and just fell in love with the people there.
I mean, they have a fantastic team of very low ego folks.
I love everyone at True.
Yeah.
Anyone that I've worked with, I always walk away feeling like oh, that person has the longest view in the room, to use a Sam Hinckley parlance of caring deeply about relationships above all else.
Yeah.
I mean, that's it exactly.
There are such long-term, long-view kind of investors.
We pride ourselves in trying to take all the pressure off the entrepreneur.
We backed Matt Molenweg from WordPress 15 years ago and we still have a board seat and we still have stock and we're not saying hey, you have to go IPO or you have to sell.
That's not in our DNA.
We want entrepreneurs to...
It's their baby.
It's their company.
They invite us in for the ride.
So it's like who are we to go and try and force outcomes and do all the mean, nasty things you read that other VCs can and have done in the past.
And so I realized that, working with True early on, when I was going to sell to Google, it was going to make a tiny bit of money for the, And the partner I was working with was like Kevin, this is your company.
Do whatever you want, man.
If you want to go sell it, then sell it.
If you think the time is right, like make it happen.
And so it was just that kind of like.
It just makes me as an entrepreneur.
You have so many things that you're trying to juggle on your head and wrestle with.
And just knowing that your investors is not one of them is one of the reasons why I was attracted.
I said, I have to work with this group.
And so, yeah, that's how we got hooked up.
And you initially became a venture partner, right?
And then transitioned into a full-time partner role?
Yeah, I was a venture partner.
So I was still building stuff.
I had built Xero.
And then we decided to bring that.
And Mike Mazur took that over as CEO.
And then we funded it at True.
Wait, Mike Mazur, your first boss?
Mike Mazur, the dude who hired you?
Yeah.
That's awesome.
Yeah, Mike and I just remained friends for a long time.
So I hired him to work for me at Digg.
He first hired me.
Then he left the office company, went and started working in electronic arts.
Was a VP over there, left EA was a VP at AOL for a while.
Left there.
And then I hired him to run marketing and BD at Digg.
Wow.
And then he's the one that got me into fasting because he had a bout with a really serious stage four cancer that he beat back and went into remission.
And in conjunction with chemotherapy, he also implemented fasting.
So he's a big believer.
And so he took it over as CEO.
It's so cool.
Oh, that's awesome.
Okay.
So how did you make that call of sitting in that emotionally of I'm a venture partner, so I'm helping to bring great entrepreneurs to the firm.
It gives me lots of flexibility where I'm not... Were you sitting on boards at that point?
No.
So you have time to sort of tinker and explore and start things and build and do media and transitioning into that full-time partner role to have investing be your day job.
How did you make that call and how has that felt?
Yeah.
Well, I will say I was sitting on boards just not related to True.
So I was on the board of Hodinkee and Harlan Estate and the Tony Hawk Foundation and a few other things.
But it was one of these things where building is a lot of work.
And it is one of those things that you have to kind of go all in and give it your all.
And so, for me, we had just had our first kid, and I was just at this point in my life where I realized that I didn't want to go and do another startup.
So that's kind of the venture role thing is like you're trying to figure it out.
Should I do another startup?
Should they fund me again?
Should I go into this?
And I thought, I want to optimize quality of life a little bit more.
And so I was like, you know what?
I think I'm going to come on.
And if they'd had me, I'd be an investor there.
And they were like, yes, hell yeah, let's make it happen.
And so I joined full-time a couple of years ago and have been doing deals ever since.
That's really cool.
Are you looking at crypto stuff in particular?
Sure.
Yeah, I would say that 95 of my day job is evaluating cryptocurrency or blockchain-related companies, along with NFT-related stuff.
So we've probably deployed, if I had to guess, probably 75 million this year into blockchain-related startups.
Wow.
So it's a decent chunk.
We have a $750-ish million fund.
So it's a big chunk of our fund.
Yeah, 10% of a fund in a particular industry is pretty heavy.
Yeah, I mean it's pretty well diversified in that that spreads across a whole slew of different protocols and coins and DeFi and scaling solutions and NFT projects and a bunch of different things there.
But yeah, we're firm believers in the future of blockchain.
There's no doubt that this technology is going to change everything, especially the financial and collectibles world, and gaming as well.
Now is a great time to thank good friend of the show, ServiceNow.
We have talked to listeners about ServiceNow's amazing origin story and how they've been one of the best performing companies the last decade.
But we've gotten some questions from listeners about what ServiceNow actually does.
So today, we are going to answer that question.
Well, to start, a phrase that has been used often here recently in the press is that ServiceNow is the quote-unquote AI operating system for the enterprise.
But to make that more concrete, ServiceNow started 22 years ago focused simply on automation.
They turned physical paperwork into software workflows, initially for the IT department within enterprises.
That was it.
And over time, they built on this platform going to more powerful and complex tasks.
They were expanding from serving just IT to other departments like HR finance, customer service, field operations and more.
And in the process, over the last two decades, ServiceNow has laid all the tedious groundwork necessary to connect every corner of the enterprise and enable automation to happen.
So when AI arrived, well, AI kind of just by definition is massively sophisticated task automation.
And who had already built the platform and the connective tissue within enterprises to enable that automation.
ServiceNow.
So to answer the question, what does ServiceNow do today?
We mean it when they say they connect and power every department.
IT and HR use it to manage people, devices, software licenses across the company.
Customer service uses ServiceNow for things like detecting payment failures and routing to the right team or process internally to solve it.
Or the supply chain org uses it for capacity planning, integrating with data and plans from other departments to ensure that everybody's on the same page.
No more swivel-chairing between apps to enter the same data multiple times in different places.
And just recently ServiceNow launched AI agents so that anyone working in any job can spin up an AI agent to handle the tedious stuff.
Freeing up humans for bigger picture work.
ServiceNow was named to Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies list last year and Fast Company's Best Workplace for Innovators last year.
And it's because of this vision.
If you want to take advantage of the scale and speed of ServiceNow in every corner of your business, go to servicenowcom slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.
Thanks, ServiceNow.
Okay, so this brings us to, I think the perfect place to start to wrap here is, you know, MoFi.
Obviously.
I mean, I think you've explained throughout the whole thing why you're doing it, this whole conversation.
Where does it go from here?
You know, you could just keep doing what you're doing and it would be great.
It's got magic.
It's wonderful.
But it's also like it's all about crypto and Web3.
And it feels like there's also so much more that what used to be social media can become in Web3 world.
Like how are you thinking about it?
Like you could have a DAO.
You could be doing all sorts of stuff.
Yeah, it's a good question.
And I think that I'm starting to see kind of two individual worlds starting to separate a bit.
So in some sense, you have traditional cryptocurrency scaling solutions and DeFi in one bucket, and then you have all the craziness that's happening with NFTs in another bucket.
So I'm actually going to be launching a new podcast if I don't already have enough podcasts.
That is dedicated to all things NFTs.
So just NFT content.
Awesome.
Yeah, it's going to be called Proof.
So it's proof.xyz is the domain name.
It's a great domain.
Oh, that's awesome.
Thank you.
Yeah, so I'm excited.
Proof is going to be just going really deep on all things NFTs.
And that will cover everything from the art and programmable side of things to the generative side.
To you know tokens that cover Dow's and what Dow's are doing to the gaming world and how NFTs unlock different assets and how people are buying virtual land as NFTs.
We'll just cover it all there.
Yeah.
And then modern finance, the podcast.
Uh, We'll still do an occasional little really important piece on NFTs.
So the people that listen to that won't miss out on the big, deeper peoples of the world.
Or when you have someone really big on that, you want to get out there.
But that will focus more on everything that's happening on DeFi and scaling and new coins and that world.
I just was getting a lot of... There was two camps.
There's people saying, give me more NFT content.
And then there's the other camp being like hey, get back to some of that crypto stuff that we missed.
And I'm like, I can't please everybody.
So I got to break it.
It's funny.
We're getting that unacquired a little bit of like...
Hey, give me more of that.
You know Atari like the classic tech history, or even just you know non crypto stuff.
And people are like, give me more crypto.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's you know what I'm talking about?
It's like, you can't you can't please everybody.
So for me it's just easy to carve out a separate feed and and say listen, the best of the best from Proof, like the big names, will always make it to the main.
Modern Finance Podcast.
But if you want to hear about the new and upcoming artists that hasn't broken out yet, but I think is really cool because they're doing something unique and novel you're going to find it on the Proof Podcast.
So it should be fun.
Okay, so nerd out a little bit.
What's your strategy for launching?
Are you going to do the first couple episodes of Proof in the MoFi feed and then spin it out?
Yeah, most likely what I'm going to do is make an announcement.
I have the CEO of SuperRare, which is one of the big NFT platforms that I just recorded.
I'll announce it at the beginning of that episode, when we drop it on MoFi and then people can go subscribe.
I'll probably backdate and put all of the NFT content that we have in MoFi into the new feed.
So if you come into that feed, people can always jump back in time and say oh, I want to listen to that interview with Snowfro, the founder of Artblocks.
And they'll be able to jump back and hear that, or hear when I interviewed the founder of CryptoPunks, or whatever it may be.
So It'll be pre-populated with probably five or six episodes.
And then I'll start releasing a new NFT episode, hopefully every week to week and a half.
And I would say probably one a month or so of those will make it to the main Modern Finance feed.
And if you subscribe to both, you'll know you're like, oh, I already listened to that one.
I don't need to click it on MoFi.
But then MoFi will be more just like big name people in the crypto industry, both in terms of creators and then people that are analyzing it and where it's going.
And so I want you know, talking through, where DeFi is, how it's evolving and some of the new and interesting projects and more of that.
So yeah, it's going to be a lot of work, but...
This is the stuff I love to do, because I feel like both of these industries are filled with confusion, confusion and a lot of hype and a lot of Back in the.
Remember the ICO world a few years ago.
There were so many scammy projects there.
I will always call out why they're on the show and why I think it's worth covering.
So it won't be everything.
It'll be a subset of what's out there.
I'm so glad you're doing this because I would say I've been a latecomer in almost everything in crypto.
But I guess in some ways, all of us who are currently participating in the ecosystem are early adopters, because there's going to be 10 to 100x more people after us.
But I would say it took me listening to the Beeple episode and... Which is so good, by the way.
Oh, thank you.
Oh, my God.
Beeple, what a character.
I love that guy.
I just want his accent.
I want his manner of speech.
It's so fun.
Oh, my God.
He's the best.
He's hilarious.
I mean, it couldn't have happened to a nicer, crazier dude.
Truly.
But it took me listening to that and several other of your NFT episodes for it to kind of click.
When NFTs first started becoming buzzy, I was definitely one of those people that was like...
Uh, the whole point of digital art is that it's infinitely reproducible.
And like, why would I pay for something?
I can view on Instagram.
I was definitely one of those people.
And I think it took me till hearing people.
First of all, learning about the artists behind the art is actually the value.
Feeling close to those artists and why they're doing what they're doing.
That is the reason to buy it, at least in my opinion.
And sure it's cool and it's fun to look at.
But it was also the realization that he brought up of like people aren't buying NFTs, people finally have a vehicle to value digital artwork.
And digital art has been a thing for 10 15, 20 years kind of in this format, but there's been no incentive to make it, since it's just infinitely replicable and easy to rip off.
And finally, now there's an incentive for artists to make incredibly cool stuff and rare stuff in a way that is totally driving the level of creativity and innovation here, because there is actually now an incentive for it.
Yeah.
There's so many pieces that unpack.
That is a major one.
You nailed it.
But then there's also just imagine... Sadly, you say, I'm a little older than you guys.
You guys are old too.
Oh, yeah.
We know.
There is a younger generation that grew up skinning their characters in games and are so used to purchasing and holding virtual objects and virtual goods.
And it There was a survey that was done that there is a very large subset of gamers that consider – it was like more than 50.
It was something really scary.
They consider their online identity in their games to be more important than their offline in-person identity.
Wow.
And so you have this world... Which actually makes total sense when you think about it.
It makes total sense.
And you have this world of people that have grown up digitally native that say I want to be able to show my friends something cool on my phone that I own.
And when they get older they're going to say or flip it up on my wall and have it as something I can show my wall.
And guess what?
If the house burns down, I don't lose my painting or I don't have to worry.
For me.
I think about when my kids walk by something I don't have to worry about them taking a marker to it.
You know, it's like.
There's just so many beautiful aspects to the portability and how you can showcase your favorite pieces of art and also just how you can unlock the potential.
Like when they're programmable.
What if my art changes over time and the artist bakes in certain things that unlock it the longer I own it?
Like some of that is just so cool.
So there's so many aspects to this ecosystem that what NFTs brings to the table that you can't have with traditional art that I think are going to take another decade or so for people to really wrap their head around.
Do you know that back in the day, so when people moved from when Canvas was created, do you know that there was a huge blowback on it?
No.
Yeah, there's a huge blowback on Canvas because everything was painted on walls or on these like wooden, Yeah frescoes.
Yeah.
So to move to canvas, many people thought during that time, it's portable.
Why wouldn't you want something permanent?
It's like it can be taken and copied.
Like there was all these like worries around moving.
So a lot of canvas art was actually worth less than things that were actually in a more permanent, you know on the wood or on the wall.
So it was just like this transition that happened, and it took a while for people to finally adopt canvas.
That's amazing.
I just thought that was a hilarious story.
And like the same thing's happening here, you know?
Oh man, that's so cool.
I just love that.
Like there's something really cool about being able to walk into a gallery or bar or wherever you are, see something on the wall and being like wow, that artist really connects with me.
Oh, it's $700 worth of ETH.
Scan a code.
It transfers to your wallet.
It disappears from the wall.
Something else appears there.
And now you own it.
Like that's freaking cool.
Like that is going to happen, you know?
Hmm.
Well okay, thinking here about the future of MoFi Kevin, you're too much of a tinkerer to just let it be that the final form of MoFi is like I record an MP3 and then I toss it into some podcast players.
So is there an on-chain version of content, media, something that could make sense for MoFi?
That's a good question.
That's a very, very sharp and pointed, smart question, that of course I think about that type of stuff.
I don't think of it as much for MoFi as I do for something like Proof, where I think what can we do?
That is unique.
And well, you'll just have to wait and see.
I can wait and see.
I went and built Hodinkee for a few years.
And Hodinkee was kind of a proxy for what Proof might eventually become.
And we did really in-depth editorial around mechanical timekeeping and watches.
And that attracted millions of people per month, still does.
I mean, there's 150 people that work at Hodinkee right now.
It's a massive enterprise.
Wow.
Honegi has this unbelievable characteristic.
I think you guys do, or did this best in the entire world of using content to enrich the value of purchasable goods.
It is half a content business, half a commerce business, and they are so wonderfully intertwined.
More people should take a look at that.
Yeah, I mean, Hodinkee, they got that blend.
And honestly, one of the things that we were really good at Ben the founder and myself when we sat down and we started planning out e-commerce, we wanted to make sure there was kind of a church and state line between editorial and e-commerce.
Because it's very important to be able to have independent critical pieces written about watches that you may sell.
And so we had to make sure and draw that line in the sand and let the brands know that we can be critical about your watches still and talk about them.
If we don't like the way that something is manufactured or you cut corners on one of your movements.
And I mean, it gets really geeky for people that aren't into the watch world.
Think about like the mechanical insides of the watch.
And then think about the most hardcore vintage Porsche collector.
They care about every little tiny detail inside of that machine.
That is the engine inside of this watch.
And so the geeks, and that's why partially why I'm attracted to it.
Like some of my favorite watches are not expensive showing off watches or watches that would never get any attention at a party in New York but they're meaningful because of what's inside of them.
You know, when you go and you pick up an Omega that has a 321 movement, that was the exact internal engine, the exact movement that was taken to the moon.
Like that is awesome.
And so that's the kind of geekiness that got me excited about watches.
And that's what I want to bring to the NFT world.
I want to talk and go deep with these artists and talk about what drives them and how they created some of the first, especially when we're on the programmability of this stuff.
It's going to be really fascinating.
Eventually, when I have Dimitri on that, created one of the most popular projects out there called Ringers.
I want to see code snippets of the Ringers project and put that into the article and show.
I mean, that's the geeky level I want to get to.
So that's where I'm hoping to take proof and what's so cool.
But well, i don't know if this is how you're thinking about things but, like with watches, it's like this little preview of what it could be.
But the thing about watches is, you know, the super rare stuff.
You know it's hard to get my dad's really into watches hi dad, if you're listening.
But you can also kind of buy it anywhere, right?
Like you don't have to buy it at houdinki.
Like you can buy it at houdinki, you can buy it elsewhere, right?
That may or may not be true, depending on where you go with proof.
Like it's not like a retail environment, Right?
Yeah.
I don't think of these businesses being built in the next six months to a year.
We need to spend the first three years gaining trust, right?
Like that's the main thing is like in-depth education, editorial and content that is worth reading, and a brand that you can trust to bring the best artists to you and explain why they're the best.
And that means above and beyond me.
I'm going to be looking to hire editorial folks that are both traditionally and classically trained art critics, that are also embracing the NFT world and give us both perspectives.
You know, like we need to know, why something might be historically important when it comes to the new stuff that's being created on the NFT front.
So yeah, It's going to be a fun little venture.
All right.
Well, I found a whole new thing that I'm imagining I'm going to be very geeky about.
So I'm excited to listen and tune in, Kevin.
Awesome.
Well, you're the first listener.
Thank you so much.
It hasn't been, it's not out yet.
So it might be by the time this podcast is out, but there'll certainly be a way to- Proof.xyz?
Yeah, proof.xyz.
There'll be a link up there to subscribe to the podcast.
Even if there isn't an episode out yet, there will be the historic ones that we've done so far.
So that'll be the best way to join.
And then of course, modern.finance is for all things crypto.
And that's where we go deep on all of the crypto stuff.
And that's a whole nother can of worms.
That's a lot of fun.
It's awesome.
Probably our biggest segment of the acquired audience is entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs.
Where can folks get in touch with you for that or with True?
It's kind of hard on the True side, in that we typically I would say 90 of our deals come from referrals from entrepreneurs that we've already backed.
So we have a little over 300 entrepreneurs that are kind of referring in new companies to us.
So you kind of use that as a filter, because if you just had an open submit form you would just be overwhelmed and it'd be impossible to get through.
So if you know a true company, that's the easiest way to get a hold of us.
I would say outside of that, you know, my DMs are always open on Twitter.
I try to go through them like once a week, but sometimes it gets a little crazy.
For me.
Specifically, I'm looking at all the new cryptocurrency, blockchain related and NFT related deals.
Love it.
Okay, one last little tidbit before we go.
You said Twitter.
How'd you get on the... Who to follow list?
Suggested follow list.
That happened at the bar in San Francisco?
Yeah, that happened at TED.
So at TED in... We were down in TED conference.
This was when I was down in SoCal.
And it was me, Evan Williams, and Chris Saka at a bar having some drinks.
And this is when Twitter first started taking off.
We were just talking to Ev.
We're like, dude, this is crazy, man.
There's like thousands of people signing up per day.
Like, it's nuts, you know?
Like...
At that point, I think it was like, you know, he's probably hitting 10,000 plus new users a day.
It was like, it was clearly working, you know?
And Sokka's like Hey, do you think you, you know, you think you could add Kevin to the suggested user list?
And it, cause it was like, um, it was a manual list.
And so it was one of those things where you, it was just hard coded.
It was no like algorithm.
Yeah.
And so Ev's like, he looks at us and he's like, all right.
And so he pulls out his phone and he literally does it right there on his phone.
And he's like, okay, done.
And we're like, thanks, dude.
And I had turned on notifications for anytime someone follows me because that's how small it was.
And instantly my phone was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
I'm like, holy crap, dude. this is taken off.
And I like went and turned off that the notifications.
And I was just like getting so many followers.
And then I was, it was just like, you know, it kept growing and growing and growing.
And they kept that suggested user.
It was kind of the same for a very long time.
And then I got this retweet of From this woman.
This was like a month or two later and I looked at the icons like that girl's kind of cute.
And I click on her.
And it was like a foodie, lives in San Francisco, into wine, into health and fitness.
No way.
Working on her neuroscience PhD.
And I was like, oh, who is this?
And it was my now wife, Daria.
And it was all because Ev added me to the suggested user list.
And actually at my wedding I told Ev that I especially called him out and said thank you and Sokka for making that happen, because it's how I met my wife.
I hope you did something really nice.
Can you get him a Beeple or something or a CryptoPunk?
I'll have to see if he's into NFTs.
I haven't asked him about that.
I haven't seen him as much now that we've had COVID, but there should be a gift.
I know I've sent him some nice bottles of wine in the past, so...
That is so cool.
I feel like you got to do more than one.
No, that's a good point.
It's a good point.
You have one of the best stories at a party behind the statement like oh, my wife and I met online.
Yeah.
Definitely.
This was before.
I'm kind of jealous, though, of these people that have it.
It seems like it's easier these days.
I didn't have any of the swiping stuff that was to date.
Back in my day, it was a 24 by 24 icon on Twitter that we used for dating.
You had to upvote your future wife.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Now the CryptoPunks make more sense.
Yeah, that's true.
Love it.
All right, Kevin Rose, thank you so much.
Thank you guys.
Thanks for having me.
This has been a blast.
It's always fun to walk through the history of all this stuff and talk about the future.
So thank you.
All right.
Likewise.
Well, listeners, thank you for joining us on that journey.
That was so awesome to get to do this with Kevin.
As you could tell so much of David and my I don't know adolescence, young adulthood, was involved in things that Kevin has built.
So super cool to get to do that with him.
Super, super cool.
I have one special carve out for the end of this episode.
It is a company that we at PSL Ventures just invested in.
We led a 5 million round in a company called Trovatrip.
Out of speaking of Portland out, And I am so pumped about this company.
And I just wanted to share a little bit because I think, A people should think about going on trips but, B I think it's an incredibly cool company to work for if anybody's thinking about their next thing, whether you're a software engineer or designer or marketer or whatever.
So what Trovatrip does is they enable creators to create custom trips to over 100 places around the world and take 8 to 16 people from their audience on a group trip together.
So you're traveling with like-minded people to cool places, with a person that you sort of identify with, be it a yoga instructor or your favorite disc golfer or someone else that you follow on Instagram or TikTok or anything like that.
And it's just a really cool upending of the sort of group travel industry and especially now when travel is actually starting to happen again.
So it seems like it's just great timing and great team.
Oh man, this is so cool.
We totally need to get an acquired uh trip going.
We're gonna do all the all the silicon valley hots.
Well now, after this episode, we gotta go find that bar on on divisadero in san francisco where apparently everything went down in uh the web 20 days.
But uh, oh man, we can go to stanford, we can go to the old pro in palo alto, go to bucks and woodside.
Oh man Actually David, you and I, we almost went to Buck's one time, right.
No, we did, right?
Didn't we?
We went to that spot next door.
No, we looked in.
It was full.
We ended up going to that other lunch place next door.
To the bakery.
Yeah.
The Woodside Bakery or whatever it is.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Okay.
We got to do it.
We got to take you to Buck's.
Well, we got to do it just so you and I can go to Buck's.
Buck's is a crazy experience.
It's this diner in Woodside, which is right next to Palo Alto, that has all these crazy airplanes on the ceilings and stuff.
Yeah. all the old school, like the Don Valentine era venture.
And even a little later too, like all the entrepreneurs and VCs would meet up there for breakfast.
It sounds like David's going to be our tour guide.
This is great.
I am going to love this.
Awesome.
Well, listeners, if you are curious to learn more, it's trovatrip.com.
Click the link in the show notes or feel free to reach out to me in the Slack or at acquiredfm at gmailcom if you're interested in the company in any way.
Well, with that, join the Slack, acquired.fm slash Slack. become an LP.
We just dropped probably our nerdiest LP episode ever where we had Matt McBrady on, who has worked in presidential administrations for hedge funds, advising on monetary policy, to basically walk us through the history of the Fed and the Fed's role in our economy and the difference between fiscal and monetary policy and what the heck is quantitative easing.
And for such a hot button topic right now, it was great to get an expert two-hour chunk of information on what are all these concepts and how do they interrelate.
Why does everybody like try and interpret Jerome Powell's every last word?
And why doesn't JP just say what he means?
Like there are reasons for this.
Oh, so cool.
That it was.
And also check out Modern Finance.
It's seriously really good.
I've listened to almost every episode.
Yep.
Like we talked about the Beeple episode is so great.
We'll link to that in the show notes.
Man, what a cool dude.
And not what you would like just think on the surface.
Like you got to listen to it.
Like he's awesome.
Careful, you'll become a NFT believer after you do.
Which is a good thing.
All right, listeners, we will see you next time.
We'll see you next time.
