In this episode of the Judgment Call Episode Greg Raiz and I talk about:

• How to manage the different timelines and motivations of angel investors, VCs and entrepreneurs?
• How Greg got started with his popular Youtube channel.
• How the ‘core value’ of entrepreneurship in the USA has changed over time?
• What roles does a platform play for entrepreneurship?
• Is capital less important than attention these days?
• How does risk assessment work for venture investors? And what is Greg’s golden rule before asking for money?
• How will the singularity impact our lives?
• Is the ‘Big stagnation’ real?
• and much more!

You can watch the podcast on Youtube in 4k resolution.

Greg Raiz is the founder of Raizlabs a mobile and web application design and development.

Greg started angel investing in Boston in 2017 and has invested in over a dozen companies to date. His interests are in companies that are improving lives through technology and design. Companies that have a clear vision, mission, team and plan are most interesting.

You may reach Greg via LinkedIn.

 

Welcome to the Judgment Call Podcast, a podcast where I bring together some of the most curious minds on the planet, risk takers, adventurers, travelers, investors, entrepreneurs, and simply mindbogglers. To find all episodes of this show, simply go to Spotify, iTunes, or YouTube, or go to our website, judgmentcallpodcast.com. If you like this show, please consider leaving a review on iTunes or subscribe to us on YouTube. This episode of the Judgment Call Podcast is sponsored by Mighty Travels Premium. Full disclosure, this is my business. We do at Mighty Travels Premium is to find the airfare deals that you really want. Thousands of subscribers have saved up to 95% in the airfare. Those include $150 round trip tickets to Hawaii for many cities in the US, or $600 life led tickets in business class from the US to Asia, or $100 business class life led tickets from Africa round trip all the way to Asia. In case you didn’t know, about half the world is open for business again and accepts travelers. Most of those countries are in South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. To try out Mighty Travels Premium, go to mightytravels.com slash mtp, or if that’s too many letters for you, simply go to mtp, the number four, and the letter u.com to sign up for your 30 day free trial. I’m here today with Greg Rice, and Greg is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and these days also a YouTuber. Greg is the founder of RaceLabs, a mobile and web application design and development company that he sold in 2017. Since then, Greg has been an angel investor out of Boston and has invested in over a dozen companies on his own. He’s especially interested in companies that are improving lives through technology and design. That’s going to be interesting to hear more about that. Welcome to the Jotron call podcast. Greg, how are you? I’m great. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Hey, absolutely. We are very happy you made this happen. I’ve realized, going through your background, you’re really bootstrapped, and it looks like and correct me if that is wrong, your own company that you built for almost 20 years, right? You stuck with RaceLabs for the whole long slog. Yeah. It was a fantastic journey. I started the business around 2002, 2003, after I left Microsoft, I had been working on operating systems in Redmond, Washington, and I decided to start my own business. It was really an evolution, explored a bunch of different technologies and shareware and photography and other things. We were doing a lot of interesting consulting and happened to be in the right place at the right time when Apple introduced the iPhone, and that really led to a big boom for us. Like I said, started in 2002, 2003, and then grew that and sold the business in 2017. That’s pretty amazing. There aren’t a lot of founders that really have the patience to stick to their own venture for that long. Most are looking for an exit, either because they are bored or they are trying to jump on the next wave hitting the beach, so to speak, right? Did you ever felt the urge to exit that company earlier and to do something different or you never had that? Yeah. For me, it’s really about having fun and building something that I enjoy. Especially for the first 10 years of the business, every day was an adventure and we were learning new things and building new software. I personally have never really chased the money. I was chasing kind of, how do I have a big impact? How do I have a good team? How do I build the right culture? How do I have an impact through the work that we’re doing? Because we were doing that, it didn’t feel like, oh, I need to jump ship or do something different. We certainly had opportunities to exit earlier, but for me, the timing wasn’t right and it wasn’t the right opportunity and we had a lot of continued growth through what we were doing at that point. I heard this, maybe it’s a theory, maybe it’s a saying now that Robbykond told me that he was saying there isn’t just compound interest in financial investments, there’s also compound interest in personal relationships. As you just said, the people you work with and the structures you build as long as they’re flexible enough, they can bring in compound interest, which really is only visible after a certain time period, five to 10 years, and it’s really looks different than regular interest. The thing is that the Silicon Valley culture is you should do something, fail really quick and then after three years, it’s time to exit. That’s the typical venture, maybe 10 years, and a really successful venture, but most ventures, that seems to be the timeframe. How do you think of that as an angel investor now, where you probably also invest in some Silicon Valley startups? Yeah, I mean, I’m definitely looking at long term and from an angel investment or any kind of investment standpoint, I personally don’t have an expectation that I’m getting my money back out in two, three years. I’m really betting on the founder, what’s their mission, what’s their vision, why are they doing this, and what is the pathway for them to make long term sustainable change. Anyone who’s had any long term sustainable change knows that it just takes a long time to go do that. It’s really finding either industries or segments or founders that are really interested in having that long term journey. That notion of compounding interest and starting to see that snowball effect, it happens in so many areas and oftentimes it’s very hard to recognize because when you’re talking about small numbers, and it can be small numbers of anything, whether it’s revenue or traffic, YouTube subscribers, whatever, you don’t necessarily see that compounding interest early on because that incremental growth looks so small. It’s like, oh, I made $10 today, oh, today I made $11. Well, $10 to $11 doesn’t feel like a lot, but when you’re going from a million dollars to $1.1 million, oh, that feels like a much more significant impact to have in a day, but those early compound interest, whether it’s relationships and your network effect and what your business is doing, it’s investing in people who understand that and are really in it for the long haul. Yeah. I think it’s hard to merge these two timeframes. I’ve been influenced by Nassim Taleb, obviously, and his Lindy effect, do something that’s something that he describes, he didn’t come up with this, but he made it popular, is something that you see that makes a real impact on the world, and it’s often a timeframe that’s maybe half a generation or a full generation. On the other hand, you build a startup where when you raise venture capital, they typically give you a timeframe of 12 to 18 months to write in your ship, which usually means you have extremely high milestones to hit, which you promise investors. I mean, I’m not saying the entrepreneurs are not guilty of this, but you put them out in order to get the funding in the first place. It’s a shaky ground, everyone is on, and we talked with Bill Reichert about this before that everyone has all the incentives to lie in this initial conversation when you talk about an investment. But there’s also the timeframe issue, I think, where both sides, entrepreneurs and investors constantly lie about because for investors, they’d rather be, you just said you have a very long term perspective, but after five years of no liquidity, it can be tricky. You want to see some of your startups exiting in a positive way, and I think a lot of people, a lot of ECs have that 10 year fun time. It’s often hard to consolidate these two ideas. On one hand, you want a long timeframe, big change that happens over a long timeframe, and compounds to a billion dollar company, or a hundred billion dollar company these days. On the other hand, you have those, I need to show my LPs something, and it’d better be good, and I’d rather push for this IPO. How do you feel you can consolidate those two things if you are in a startup invested with a bunch of other ECs that might be a very different timeframe than you have? Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really founders have to choose their investors and have to understand what the motivation of the people are who are investing in their company. I think there are good reasons to have accelerated timelines and timetables because it can provide positive pressure for founders to look for opportunities for growth where maybe they feel complacent. At the same time, sometimes growth pressure can be a negative pressure where you’re always chasing a number at the cost of your long term customers retention, churn, kind of the things that will longer term sustain your business. I don’t think there’s a blanket answer. I think it’s finding the velocity that is appropriate for your business, and that is going to be different on a per business basis. When I was starting my startup, my dad said, you have to choose slow burn or fast burn. I didn’t know what that meant, but he explained it like, you can go after VC dollars and venture capital and that will give you more fuel in the tank, but there will be an expectation that you will burn fast, that you will use that capital and it’ll accelerate your growth significantly. You can go for slow burn where you bootstrap your business and you’re not taking outside capital. You control the speed and velocity of your scale and you calibrate your risk profile to the growth that you want to see. There’s no right or wrong, like I’ve seen bootstrap founders be incredibly successful and I’ve seen bootstrap founders fail and I’ve seen venture capital based startups raise a ton of money like tens, 20, $50 million in fail and I’ve certainly seen VC companies raise a lot of money and be very successful as well. You have to calibrate both to the entrepreneur and the CEO and make sure that you’re mentally aligned with the expectations of investors. If you as a CEO are looking to be slow and steady burn and your investors are really expecting 10X year over year and either you succeed or you fail and they’re okay with it, that may not be the best match for you as a founder. Making sure you’re aligned and that expectations are set, I do think it’s useful for founders to set ambitious but somewhat realistic expectations in terms of their pitch decks or where they want to be. You don’t want to be like, oh yeah, we’re going to grow 5% year over year a little faster than inflation. That’s not going to be very exciting to investors at the same time if you say that you’re going to grow 300% year over year and you’re significantly under that, there’s going to be mismatch expectations as well. That’s absolutely true what you say. I just feel both sides have so much incentive to lie. Investors have incentive to lie because they say we’re in for the long term but they actually changed their mind after 12 months and the entrepreneurs obviously from their side have the same incentive and I’m amazed the market works so well at the startup market and the VC market. Again, I actually think the best relationships between founders and investors are built on trust and yes, each side can lie and be disingenuous and there are plenty of examples of both sides doing that but some of the best companies, some of the best investors, some of the best founders, they’re very transparent and they’ve built really strong relationships with their investors where their investors will really go deep into their business and help them achieve their growth, help them understand the problems and help them get to the next level of growth as well. You’re on the same team as your investor and if you think about it as adversarial, it’s just not as fun. You do a lot of YouTube tutorials. YouTube channel is pretty popular. I introduced you kind of Tong and Cheek as a YouTuber. I’m not sure if you like that label but I like your videos that you put out. I think you put a lot of effort in. Those are really in depth tutorial over for certain topic. I watched one about angel investing. There was another one about VC investing. There’s probably a few hundred. I thought they’re really well done. I think one of your most popular ones seemed to be the one about GPT3 which really explains what GPT3 does. How did you get into this whole YouTubing thing, is that your children helped you? How did you get started? Yeah, I think even before YouTube, I’ve been blogging for many, many years. When I started my business, I set up a blog to just journal some of the ideas, some of the things that I was thinking about and in the 2000s through 2015 or something like that. About 15 years, I was blogging and writing articles. For me, writing and blogging was a way to process my own thinking and let me think about a topic and jot down some notes and articulate it in a way that expressed what I was thinking. Blogging is not dead but blogging is not a good way to reach an audience anymore or it’s not as good as it used to be. I wanted to start again after I sold my business. I wanted to again put my thoughts down in some way, shape, or form and publish them. YouTube and video was just a very compelling new medium. Looking at YouTube as a space, there’s lots of niches. There’s lots of people creating content. For entrepreneurs, I saw a lot of sensational get rich quick. Let’s set up a Shopify store. Let’s do drop shipping. I saw a lot of investment channels and I didn’t see a ton of good advice for startup founders. I thought for me, it was a good way to both be creative, which I enjoy doing, putting content out in there and then give back. I’ve been mentoring and working with a lot of startups but I recognized early on that I’m not going to be able to mentor way too many startups. There’s just too many companies that need help. Some of the questions that I get asked a lot, I’ll write down, like, oh, I’ve been asked that question like six or seven or eight or 10 times, I’ll be like, hey, maybe I should do a video on that. That way, when I get asked that question, I can just shoot people a link. It’s been my way of journaling and blogging. I personally don’t like the term YouTuber because it implies that it’s a career for me. For me, it’s about creativity and making and putting ideas out into the world and getting feedback from the community and meeting new people. For me, it’s a tool like, I’m on this podcast. Maybe I wouldn’t be on this podcast if you hadn’t seen some of my videos. It’s a way for me to communicate out to smart and interesting people around the world and bridge new connections. Yeah. I think you’re onto something. I think blogging was the tour du jour about 20 years ago. I started 2002 over the exact same reason. I sold my company and I was trying to find a way to reach out to people across the Atlantic. I grew up in Europe and started my first company or my company that I sold in Europe. Then I went to the US and started from scratch. There was no LinkedIn at the time, so it was an ideal way to do that. I think it was still good for about 10, 15 more years and as you’ve analyzed already, this traffic mostly moved now into social media, mostly on YouTube. I fully agree. This is a great tool. I wonder when you see other YouTubers out there, it’s not a ton of VCs on YouTube from what I’ve seen. Maybe I’ve missed that. I’ve seen a lot of kids using the label YouTube where it makes you 20 years younger or 30 years younger. It makes us all look like 17 year olds. We have pimples that we need makeup for and then we go on YouTube and we have a huge audience. I keep arguing with my children if I’m a YouTuber or not because I put this podcast on YouTube. They’re like, no, no, no, daddy, that’s not right. He implies something else with that. It’s a lifestyle, as you say. They want to make money from it, but they also seek the social validation from it. It’s just a medium. For me, I produce videos, but I don’t mind the label just because that’s the label society uses. For me, it’s really about publishing ideas. If it wasn’t YouTube, it would be blogging. If it wasn’t blogging, it would be podcasts or doing Clubhouse or doing some other medium as well. It seems substack. It seems the medium a lot of people are going to. There’s so many publishing mechanisms, this just happens to be a really good way to reach a broad audience. From your audience, what’s kind of your feel are those mostly entrepreneurs or those people, technology experts or those kids, literally 17 year old who just put their money in Bitcoin? What’s kind of your gut feel for your audience? How does this distribute? I would say in general, the audience feels like it’s young entrepreneurs is where I’ve gotten more engagement. I set up a discord and I’ve answered some questions and certainly gotten pitch decks and things sent to me. It seems to be more first time entrepreneurs, but it is diverse. I get a lot of different folks checking the stuff out and figuring it out. Again, I’m pretty new at it as well. I started about one year ago, thereabouts, right when the pandemic started to do its thing. I was like, oh, this is going to be my way to blog this year and I’m going to experiment with it. I’ve been doing it for about a year. In that year, about 350,000 views, which again, I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I don’t know if a couple thousand subscribers is good or bad. For me, it’s just like it’ll compound. We talked about compounding interests, things like that compound over time. For me, it’s not about the subscribers of the viewers or any of that. If I can help one entrepreneur on their journey to building a successful company and doing something awesome, that’s pretty rewarding in and of itself. I appreciate it when people find the things that I’m putting out there helpful. One thing and what I was hoping you would get as this forum, and that’s one of the reasons I started this podcast, I felt the last almost 10, 15 years and we definitely had a bubble of entrepreneurship in the late 90s and it stretched in the early 2000s. But I felt the last 20 years, the role model of the entrepreneur, the opportunities offered opportunities that are not based on a platform, say Uber, eBay, YouTube, I would exclude those, but economic opportunities for folks between 15 and 30. And also the way funding worked, right, funding worked, there was a lot of early stage funding and then in between there wasn’t that much, I felt. And then there was the vision fund, which kind of created a monopoly. I felt the way entrepreneurship was viewed as a value and I still think that has lost a lot of value, especially in the U.S. I can’t speak so much for other countries because they are in a different trajectory. When I came to the U.S., I felt entrepreneurship as an ideal and that is like, you know, Adam Smith’s John Locke’s idea of creating something in the economy that is useful and that is creates a voluntary transaction that makes everyone better off both sides. And that was a core value of the U.S. and I felt the last 20 years, we didn’t have, we were in the big stagnation of entrepreneurship. And we might have turned this around with COVID or COVID kind of helped us rethink a lot of things. What is your gut feeling? Do you agree there was a big stagnation of entrepreneurship, especially last 10 years? Do you feel that’s kind of a first world problem and we are still leading the pack? Yeah, I don’t know if I agree and again, like I don’t have data to back this up. Just observationally, I think there is a lot more visibility of entrepreneurship and just as a simple example, looking at TV shows like Shark Tank, which I think have had just amazing kind of public success and kind of show the model of what an entrepreneur and the relationship between an entrepreneur and an investor looks like, podcasts like how I built this, I think I’ve seen a huge audience build of people building and starting businesses as well. So I do think there is perception that people are building businesses from the investor side. I’m also seeing a lot of early stage companies trying to start companies. So again, it’s hard for me to compare what’s happening today with what happened in the 2000s.com boom or kind of a different generation of entrepreneurship. But I definitely see kind of a renaissance of a lot of young people looking at entrepreneurship and even things like content creation, like people saying like, oh, I want to be making content on YouTube or on TikTok and viewing that like again, that’s not, that’s a form of entrepreneurship as well, right? Like you don’t have a boss, you get to decide how and when you work and what you talk about and what your strategy is. Again, that for me is a solo entrepreneur starting point and anyone who’s gone on the entrepreneurship journey, it starts with yourself and like how do you pay for your own, you know, your meals, your house, your whatever, you fill your own needs. And then from there, it’s how do you grow that into a larger business? And again, that can be, you know, anything up and down. Like it certainly doesn’t have to be a content business. There’s services businesses, there are product businesses, there are, you know, all sorts of other derivatives as well. Yeah. I mean, that’s certainly a part of entrepreneurship that absolutely counts. The problem with the platform based entrepreneurship, and I make this example with eBay, right? The platform controls everything, they control and Amazon for a while, the Amazon marketplace was a similar platform. There’s too much control on the side of the big platform, they control your payment, they control your customers, you can’t just switch, you can’t just take your customers from YouTube to, I don’t know, substandard, you can try it, but it’s almost impossible. For every business, and again, I don’t think it’s unique today, like every business has to think about what are the dependencies that your business has. You know, there are plenty of people who drive Uber and they are kind of considered independent contractors, independent businesses. In that model, there’s a huge dependency on Uber as a company. If that company changes what it does or how it does it, your business could go away. Every business, and again, even looking back 20 years, I remember businesses were very tied into Microsoft’s technology stack. If Microsoft changed a thing one way or another, that could be disruptive to their business. Most of businesses that are built on that platform are very dependent on Apple as an example of whether Apple does something or doesn’t. As businesses mature, it is the job of the entrepreneur to think through the risks of those dependencies, and in many cases, mitigate those dependencies. How do I remove that dependency on this third party? Should I be building my own technology? Should I have a backup plan for migrating from Amazon services to Microsoft, to Google, to standing on my own services? That is the journey of entrepreneurship, and I do think it’s important that entrepreneurs leverage the platforms when they can, but then also think about how they remove the risks in their business from failing. Yeah. 100%, that’s absolutely the role of the entrepreneur. I just feel that’s not really happening on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, but I agree with you. This could be like a breeding ground, like a Petri dish, right? So you start out there, and then you go on and create a venture out of this. Some people have Instagram influencers. When I talk to creators on some of these platforms, especially in the communities where creators are talking to other creators, there’s definitely a sense of diversification, like, hey, I have so many subscribers on this platform, what should I be doing? And if you listen to some of those conversations, it’s all about diversification, like, hey, don’t invest all your eggs into one basket, like, make sure that you’re really building a brand. And this is certainly something that larger companies think about as well, like, for Nike, it’s not just about their TV ads, it’s their radio, it’s their internet, it’s their social, it’s their Twitter, it’s their TikTok, it’s their everything, right? And then they build a uniform brand around all of it. And if one of those pillars goes away, the table does not fall over. It’s supported on multiple sides. Yeah, that’s the way to go, absolutely. And that’s related to it is there was this Twitter theme, and it keeps reoccurring. Maybe you probably did a video on this, but a lot of people say, and that’s a theme, it’s not yet something that we can really attach ourselves to or measure it. But a lot of people say, you know, the value of money as an investment tool is decreasing and the awareness, the attention that you get, if you are successful on social media, what influence is due, that’s increasing, right? So if they have the, and obviously it’s the platform, even more importantly, but it’s, we represent that often in the form of specific brands on social media. Do you feel that’s true? So do you feel the shift is going on and there’s a secular shift from the dollar economy to the attention economy, and that’s also measurable for startups? And you must see this like with the startups probably, that’s often harder for them to get attention to work, sell their product or get free users than to get investment dollars. I think it really depends on the business. You know, I think in a nutshell, you need to build a great product and you need to tell a great story. And when I was first starting my business, I thought it was all about building a great product. And I didn’t spend enough time thinking about how to tell a great story and how to reach my audience. Now I pay attention to both. I think it’s important to not only tell a great story, but have a great product, right? And one reaches the other. If you have a great product, you know, the adage of like, oh, field of dreams, if you build it, they will come, well, that’s really rare. Like it’s really rare that audiences or customers will just beat a path to your door to give you money. You need to figure out how to reach them. And that’s really about audience building, whether it’s sales or marketing or business development. And so it’s important that businesses think about both sides of the equation. How do you tell a great story? And again, that can be social, it can be media, it can be content, it could be direct marketing, it could be some other channel. And then once you’re able to reach that audience, you need to make sure that you can deliver them a fantastic product or service or business value such that you’re kind of creating that self fulfilling phone. Have you, from the investments that you’ve done, what do you feel is the baby you’re most proud of, right? Where these things came together to product market fit. It does tell a great story and it had the right product at the right time. Do you already have a success story where you’re really proud of? No, it’s like I said, I take a very long term view of this and so it’s way too early for me to look at any of the companies that I’ve invested in to have that perspective. There’s a number of companies that are doing really interesting things in their sector. I’m excited by the founder, what they’re doing, but it’s way too early to say. It’s way too early to say. Some of my investments have gone through from pre seed to seed to series A and so that gets me excited in terms of like there’s momentum, they’re seeing traction with the market, people are excited, they’re impacting real customers, but they’re on kind of that first leg of a marathon journey and there’s plenty of companies that stumbled along the way. When I started angel investing, I basically built a financial model to look at like, okay, what are my personal expectations for an angel return and how many companies do I need to invest in and how long might it take and so my general assumption with my investments is that 80 to 90% of the companies I invest in will fail and by fail, it means they will return less than 1X, maybe 1X or less than 1X and so with an 80 to 90% failure rate and an expected time horizon of six or seven years to even see early indications, it’s just like it’s way too early. At this point, I’ve invested in 13 to 15 companies thereabouts, they could all easily fail. On the flip side, it only takes one of those to be successful to pay back the entire fund and so I kind of have to take a longer term view of this. I also recognize that I am not kind of, I’m new at this and because of that, I expect my hit rate in the early years to be worse than my hit rate in the later years and so my kind of conversion rate for lack of a better word as an investor should improve over time. Therefore my early investments are more likely to be failures than things I may be doing in the fourth, fifth and sixth year of my journey. How do you find your investments, they cold call you, you build active channels to them because you already know you want to invest or they find you through YouTube, what’s like your method there? It’s funny you ask this because I’m actually in the process of writing my next video which is how to find angel investors and I’m trying to compile the data on how people have found me because I have been keeping track. I don’t have the data for you right now so I don’t know exactly what it is. I would say anecdotally a lot of people reach out to me through LinkedIn, I’ve seen a number of pitches through angel groups that I’m a member of and so I’m a member of three different angel groups and so I’ve seen pitches via the angel groups, I’ve seen a number of introductions where people have known me through prior work or prior relationships and they either reach out directly or through an introduction and then I’ve had a bunch of people reach out cold meaning that they either contact me through the website or through Reddit or through Discord or through YouTube or through some other channel as well. At the end of the day I actually don’t think it’s about the channel, certainly warm introductions are better than cold outreach but it’s about connecting with the investor and explaining why they’re reaching out to you in particular. Each investor, each angel, each venture capital firm has a different philosophy, has a different partner, has a different approach, has a different history of the things that they know and specialize in and if you’re kind of scatter shotting and throwing darts at a wall at 100 different investors hoping you’re going to get a hit, you’re going to have a pretty low percentage of people actually responding or reading your email or responding to your pitch whereas if you’re really targeted and surgical and you’re thoughtful about why you’re reaching out to certain investors and what they bring to the table, if you’re a biotech company you should be reaching out to people who have biotech experience. If you’re a robotics firm you should be looking at people who really understand the robotics field, if you’re in crypto you should be talking to people who can really add value or open up connections and doors and understand that crypto space. Again, people will invest outside of their area of expertise so it’s not just about the area of expertise but it’s about what value they can bring to you and so it may be that expertise, it may be relationships, it may be geography, it may be some other thing but you really need to think about what your rationale is for reaching out and connecting with a particular person because you’ll have a much higher response rate of people reacting to it. I always felt this whole process is ripe for disruption. I don’t want to say it’s broken, I felt there’s got to be a better model and I think angelists tried to do that, they’ve started that and now they have their own fund where they coinvest. It’s a tricky process that seems to be, everyone has their own ideas about it from investor to investor, there is some organization to it, there is some standardization but it is for both sides not easy and I think this is by design, it shouldn’t be too easy to find each other. There needs to be a certain challenge to overcome, it’s almost like a video game, there needs to be a certain challenge to overcome, you need to progress to level 10 and then when you’re at level 10 then you get an introduction. That seems to be part of that. It’s funny, I’ve actually been pitched apps that help you pitch and do that matchmaking and I don’t think it’s just general networking and this is true, there’s certainly dating apps and networking apps and LinkedIn and things of that nature but when founders are thoughtful and they really understand who they need helping them and they’re not just looking for someone who can write a check but looking for someone who can really shape the direction of their company or add value beyond just the capital, I think they’re more likely to have success in those conversations. One of the things I tell first time founders and entrepreneurs is before you start asking for money, ask for advice and because that will kind of orient you around what are the true things that are going to help you build a successful business. If you’re always asking for money people automatically put up their guard and they don’t necessarily want to give you money until you’ve jumped through the hurdles of traction and team and progress and whatever whereas if you’re like, look I know I don’t have my shit together, I’m still figuring things out, I’m trying to build a successful company, I’m looking for advice, can you point me in the right direction? I see you have this expertise which I think is really relevant to me or you’ve been there done that, you’ve started a company in this industry, can you tell me the things that worked for you? Then people’s guard comes down and they’re able to actually point you in the right direction and that’s where people will, I’ve found become advisors and in some cases even investors to these early stage companies because they really have opened up that door of like, okay let me be helpful. That’s a great hack. I fully agree with you, that’s kind of how I proceeded, most of my startups is to bring in advisors and first and then eventually make them ambassadors and they definitely had a higher social standing, they were older, they were more integrated in society, better connections to investors and they almost always brought investors, they typically didn’t bring the institutional arounds but they definitely brought in a larger angel network like half a million dollars or $100,000 from an individual that worked perfectly and I think it’s from both sides a little more honest and it’s kind of almost like when you think of dating it’s like it’s a way of having a conversation first and I think this is a very valuable advice and it also gives you an idea as an entrepreneur if that person might be a good match or not because literally I think investment most of the time and that’s what I feel and what I’ve been doing, the trouble is you can only do so much to diligence right, you only have so much time, so many resources so you need to be in a sector that an entrepreneur presents to you, it needs to be something you already feel very comfortable, it’s something where you can assess the risk very well because you know so many parameters in this industry and you’re ahead of the crowd so to speak but if you’re being thrown into an industry you know nothing about, you’re basically an idiot right, you do have some a lot of knowledge as a business knowledge and about startups but it’s very difficult to validate that say if you ask me and there’s a company to build submarines and I have to distinguish two submarines and one costs a million, one $100,000 and the entrepreneur say have we built the same thing it’s much cheaper, I’m like I have no idea how submarines work or how the buyers think so people underestimate how investing how much it is a risk reduction factor right, if you already know a lot about that place or you feel it’s going up anyway so that’s the trend following part, you’re much more open to the idea of actually investing because you feel you have superior data. Yeah and that’s a key thing like investors want to know that they have an unfair advantage and certainly their prior work expertise relationships can be that unfair advantage for people who do watch Shark Tank like it’s clear there’s certain investors who really know a particular vertical or industry whether it’s direct to consumer, QVC, technology, apparel whatever you know the particular person’s domain is and if you go to the wrong investor you know it just doesn’t work as well, their network isn’t as strong they don’t have the formula to turn key help that company be successful and the same is very true outside of Shark Tank as well like I’ve built my personal expertise is more on the fusion of technology and design and so where you know product has a real center around user experience or user interface or mobile UI you know I can help founders really significantly you know improve that user experience and prove that product but for many companies that’s not the linchpin for them being successful or failure sometimes it’s go to market sometimes it’s B2B sales sometimes it’s enterprise sometimes it’s cloud sometimes it’s you know something completely outside my domain and so being very surgical about who you’re approaching and why and making sure that you’re picking investors who have an unfair advantage because at the end of the day you want to win right like the goal is to find investors who will help get you to the next level of growth. How excited are you about crowdfunding? I had Darren Marble on and he’s having his show now on entrepreneur.com about raising funds it’s like a mini IPO these things have gone to I think up to 75 million that you consume raise in a crowdfund like literally out of nowhere you don’t need you need certain amount of documents but there isn’t much of a track history required how excited are you about that? I think it’s an interesting model like I think it works for certain types of product categories especially physical products there is some danger to crowdfunding and kind of entrepreneurs should be thinking about the operating costs of their business versus the kind of first time inventory capital because they’re not identical and I’ve seen lots of companies get themselves into trouble because they raise you know they have a good crowdfunding campaign but they don’t factor in their operating costs and so they either have to dip into the piggy bank with the crowdfund which reduces their longer term margins or they have to raise around the financing so you just have to have a financial model of like okay let’s say you blow it out of the water with a crowdfunding campaign like how do you actually pay your staff because the margins that you were expecting on those products don’t happen until that is actually delivered and so there’s a cash flow issue that companies can have if they’re not careful I mean all in all I think it’s great that there are alternative funding mechanisms and I do think that crowdfunding can be a fantastic way for first time entrepreneurs to effectively bootstrap their company the only caveat is like really think through what happens if you are successful to make sure that you don’t end up underwater there’s lots of stories where you know company had a successful crowdfunding campaign but underestimated the costs of R&D production operations and ended up not delivering the product and getting themselves into hot water so it’s a great great model it’s just like any business thinking through all the operational mechanics of how that’s going to work yeah I was thinking of it from a from a digital product of the digital service perspective and immediately it struck me as well so this you do all the marketing right you and you you you need a certain conversion rate but from a digital point of view if you have a digital service or product why don’t you just sell the product in the first place right so why do you go through the route of investing that’s a little odd now there is places where this makes a lot of sense we kind of move around cash flows because you rather have a few million now and then you can go to the next level so to speak or you might there’s an entry barrier over market you have to overcome but often I felt that’s that’s kind of my my only criticism I’m very excited about about crowdfunding but my only criticism is that in many places I feel I unless you have to like you’re literally Intel and you have to build up a factory for a couple of billion dollars but then you just put sand in and a bunch of people and then you come up with these valuable semiconductors a lot of industries it’s maybe better to just convert your customers right I mean this is expensive and there’s a slow sometimes but it helps you get so much more feedback especially in the beginning and customers almost always will tell you if this makes sense or not right so the product market fit people people talk about that a lot that you have something a lot of people say oh this sounds interesting but somehow nobody really puts the trigger up flips dissipation says I want to buy this but they will tell you if you ask them and if you’ve raised a lot of crowdfunding I think you raise expectations even more it’s kind of like the VC game you raise the expectations but actually you don’t know much more about your product yet yeah I mean I I do think there’s some industries and that’s why I say hardware in particular where the cost of building version one is particularly high and then kind of if you look at indigo go and Kickstarter and some of the other ones that are doing this you know a lot of their origins were from these more physical tangible assets where you have to you know cast the mold or do a production run of a minimum number of units and so you know some of those mechanics make sense you know I do think to your point like getting out to market and getting real customer feedback is so critical and oftentimes you don’t have to do anything complicated like put the product in the hands of real people even if you’re not monetizing it give it to people for free tell them you know would you use this for free if people won’t use your product for free like you haven’t found the thing that’s that’s going to be valuable to them you want to generate engagement and people leaning in excited about your product and asking for features and if you’re not getting that you’re not quite there yet yeah but I found interesting with the digital products I did often the customer acquisition cost for free customer is the same as for paying customer and I find this always very stunning because you know you get this little attention span in someone’s universe and say okay use me use me use me I might be useful for you but it’s actually unless you know that’s a product that like say Google search everyone is already looking out for the customer acquisition is the same for free paid or crowdfund customer so you can actually choose very often it’s better to go with that with a crowdfund place if you have with them with a full conversion to a customer if you have that option and not do the crowdfunding too well the other interesting thing I’ve seen this in a couple of companies where customers who pay or stick here and are more likely to actually use the product because they’ve invested money in like if you’ve invested nothing you know if something shows up in the mail and they’re like try this you know you know maybe I’ll use it maybe I I don’t but I don’t really care either way whereas you know if I invested $100 to try something I really don’t want to throw it out because I perceive that thing as having value because I made a prior decision so I’m more likely to give it more of a try and engage more with it prior to throwing it out and so yeah it’s kind of counterintuitive but sometimes paying for something increases the perceived value of it as well. It’s strange what’s going on in psychology there let me let me go to another topic and I know you feel strongly about you you’ve made videos about GPT and I think they’re very instructional they’re very helpful what do you feel is is the future of GPT 3 itself right and AI in general are we on the on the cusp of something great is it just something that looks like statistics we had Steven Schwartz on a couple episodes ago and he said well you know I basically did this in the 80s we have better computers now but statistics is the same and there isn’t any real learning in there and definitely there is nothing that resembles consciousness do you think this is going to happen and well I was listening to a podcast with one of the founders of GPT 3 if I’m open AI and he said you know a GPT 5 might actually feel like like an artificial general intelligence do you feel we’re pretty close do you think it’s a it’s a good tool in terms of you know not just developing starter but also the larger economy how bullish are you on artificial intelligence yeah I mean I’m really excited about it I think you know in making those videos I got a lot of feedback and a lot of people are scared you know if I were to summarize that they’re kind of nervous about their job they’re nervous about kind of you know pick your sci fi movie whether it’s Terminator or Alien or whatever where this this AI becomes sentient and destroys us all I don’t I don’t see that kind of dystopian future I think we’ll continue to see AI be introduced into more and more aspects of technology we already use like we’re you know in my office here I have a you know an Amazon product and a Google product I’m not going to say their names as I know people play the podcasts with the audio turned up and they were all respond and you know I have AirPods you have AirPods they have Siri integrated you know these technologies have AI and a lot of AI built into them and you know I see my daughters using these technologies in asking them questions assuming that they have some amount of general intelligence you know I can ask my various assistants general open ended questions I’d say they’re get it right some percentage of the time a lot of times they get it wrong in my expectation of open AI and similar AI technologies is that those technologies will continue to make their way into the things that we use every day and rather than getting it wrong you know our assistants will start to get things right more often you know Gmail and other email products voicemail already have AI elements built in Netflix already has elements built in you know or my Android TV my you know Tesla car my whatever like they all have elements of AI built in I do think that open AI could be a large step in terms of improving the quality because most of the quality of these tools is pretty poor and so I’m excited about a step function in improvement of quality I don’t think we’re on the cusp of general AI some of the things that I have seen are really interesting I mean the compelling products or the compelling tools that I think can simplify and improve people’s lives but we still have a huge challenge to figure out exactly how to do that and how to mitigate some of the risks I think and there are risks there are risks in you know spam in fake media in you know content farms generating a bunch of things that look authentic but in fact you know computer generated and so that’s that’s kind of a challenge for us as society to figure out how to make sure that the tools are used for good and similar to other technologies like spam and email marketing like these are all tools that can be used for a good or evil it’s up to us to to figure out kind of how to navigate those waters I had David Orban on a couple episodes ago and he made an extremely bullish case he he basically said we easily going to triple our GDP if we put AI on a very primary trajectory of development including research funding but obviously a lot of this comes from the from the private sector and one thing that he made and that’s that’s kind of a general difficulty dealing with this is the second we have a GI it doesn’t it and let’s assume it it happens in five years right it could be a hundred years out thousands of years out but to assume it it goes it’s relatively close say it’s ten years from now he said you know that’s actually not the problem and the problem is what happens a day later or five days later when they’ve been Microsoft puts another billion dollars into into running this model again and we’re finding it with user feedback it will not stop there right it will be 2x or will be 100x the next incarnation of GPT 10 so to speak is 100x better than GPT 9 like it doesn’t stop there and literally five years later you have an in HG after you had the first API five years later you have one that’s smarter than all nine billion people put together and I think this is this is this logarithmic effect and a lot of people I think I’m not prepared for thinking about a lot of practitioners of AI will say oh you know what I can’t predict the future but AI changes so much and I’d mark sorrow femon he wrote a bunch of articles about it he said there is a big stagnation but on the other hand things can change drastically just literally in a matter of two months like GPT 3 was not expected even by the people who build it and I think people have this this fear and maybe this there’s some justification to it maybe there’s a lot of justification to it that there’s something going on that once it’s out of the bag and it seems to be just ready to be jumping out of the bag there is no level of control that we have like we can prepare ourselves for that event but it’s like saying we have to prepare ourselves for the aliens and you’re like okay what do we do to prepare ourselves we’re like yeah we might come tomorrow yeah I just I I mean and again this is just my perspective like I think there’s the intelligence and let’s just imagine for a second that this exists today that you know on my phone or over IBM or Microsoft they have an algorithm that it’s really good at answering questions like better than any human has ever answered questions before for me that’s a tool right like in the question is how does that impact or change society I personally think the idea it’s a problem solving it’s like say when we have first AGI it’s like we have suddenly we have a billion more employees that can solve problems in a digital realm for overnight yeah and again like I I tend to be an optimist and I know that there’s a bunch of people who view the the world more pessimistically but there are problems that we as a society have had for hundreds of years that our stupid mammal brains have not been able to solve through politics through global pandemics through I mean pick a problem right you know I think that AI especially powerful AI if put to the right purposes would be fantastic at solving certain problems that we as humans have had a ton of problems and in fact have not been able to solve and so again pick pick your world world scale global problem if we can put AI and technology and tools into solving those I think that’s a really powerful thing oh I agree with you 100% I’m I’m I’m I think this is but the thought process is the problem right so it’s it’s the the say you you it’s like saying we have too many young men who have too much testosterone and that’s a problem for our country because if they’re all unemployed the society is going to go under and there’s going to be riots of people going to die and it’s true right but on the other hand this is an incredible resource for building then the country for the next 50 years and if we find a way to motivate people incentivize them then this is this is how we build the next generation right so and I think the same is true for a GI it’s just suddenly we will will go from 9 billion thinking brains to hundreds and millions of thinking of billions of extra thinking brains so to speak that obviously will help us but we have to the the AGI’s will have the same problem we have they will just grow and mature much quicker than we have have done in the last couple hundred thousand years even knowing what I know about GPT 3 and open AI and some of the advances like I happen to believe that technology just it takes a lot longer than we think for a number of different reasons some of those are society some of those are government some of those are politics some of them are bureaucracies but like you know if you go back and look at futurists in the 1950s and 60s you know we should be flying in cars with robots and all sorts of you know futurist tech and technology has advanced amazingly but some of the things that we either fear or hoped they don’t tend to happen or evolve or change at the pace that we expect and so while I do think AI will continue to improve probably in exponential ways I am more conservative in terms of my expectation of how society will change over the next 10, 20, 30 years like even if a more general intelligence does get developed I think its ability to impact society as a whole will take a lot longer. Yeah even looking at sci fi and you know whether it’s Star Wars or Star Trek where you know these are futures where you know artificial general intelligence exists and whether it’s data or R2D2 or C3PO you know a lot of these tools are crafted in these futures as a tool for society to utilize to the benefit of you know the protagonist goal. Again that’s a fictional future but I do think that a lot of these tools and technologies are being crafted in that way and that’s for me feels like the most probable application of some of these tools being injected into the digital assistance of the future. I mean as more I think I talk about this topic AI and I say two years ago I would have the exact same opinion now that I’ve been talking about it so much maybe that’s because I’m so so so influenced by some of the speakers we had on and Steve Schwartz was very conservative said you know forget about it it’s not going to happen with a bunch of other speakers and guests on and I felt like they’ve convinced me maybe that’s just you know my mind and I always felt I was always in love with science fiction from the time I could read I was reading basically only science fiction so maybe this is the fire they have they they’ve restarted in me but I think as more you learn about it as one at one point you’re like whoa it’s it’s maybe it’s definitely a question of time we don’t know if it’s ten a hundred years a thousand years but it might be a problem definitely for our grandchildren maybe not for us and our children but it’s this thought process and David Orgren was comparing it to to CRISPR technology which seemed really scary at the outset and a lot of people thought about it came up with guidelines and it kind of nobody even worries about it anymore it’s it’s gone a guy who came out of it’s not on people’s minds anymore and he was saying you know that’s all we need to do we have to go through this thought process and it’s we’re going to be fine we don’t have to worry about it but we have to go through the process and if we don’t we won’t get overly scared and it happens it will happen anyways we can’t we can’t just say it won’t we can’t just deexist it won’t this doesn’t work yeah and if you if you look at kind of the the original mission vision of why open AI was founded and put together you know a lot of that was for you know for that very reason how do we set up a company to think through the implications of artificial intelligence and how it affects society and make sure it doesn’t spiral out of control and so again you know I don’t I don’t work at open AI I don’t have anything other than I’ve read publicly but I know that’s of very top concern for them and having worked in other large companies I’m sure that notion of like how do we make sure that this is being used for for the betterment of society and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands yeah what you said earlier I think it sounded like you’re I am a big friend of that Peter Thiele somewhat contrary an idea still that we have this big stagnation right so outside of semiconductors and fields that have been heavily influenced by semiconductors and by financial services we didn’t see a ton of progress in technological adoption but also just a pure innovation and inventions since the 70s so to speak mid 70s that seems to be the point where where where it stopped happening but do you subscribe to that or you have a different world view I just want to make sure I understand what you mean you you’re saying you don’t think there’s been a lot of innovation over the last 50 years or yeah so outside of semiconductors right everything that’s influenced by semiconductors clearly made a lot of progress yeah no doubt about that but everything outside that and financial services also they made a lot of progress a lot of people say it’s not sustainable who knows we will see at some point but finance finance is extremely important for innovations right they usually go hand in hand because these things usually get really expensive at some point they need the finance at somehow and but outside of these two fields his thesis is you know not much happened the planes look the same the cars look the same all these kind of important expensive technologies the house like houses are built it kind of is exactly the same nothing much happened yeah I mean I don’t it’s all about the framing like I think you can certainly frame frame the conversation in terms of like hey things are all the same like I wake up I brush my teeth I have breakfast I go to work you know on the flip side you can look at any industry and be like okay where we get our food has completely changed and how agriculture works has completely changed over the last 50 years in terms of farming and centralization and things of that nature if you look at transportation you know the way we book our travel and you know services like Airbnb or services like Uber you know transportation has fundamentally changed pretty drastically from ownership to borrowing and kind of this this shared economy so there are really disruptive innovations across any sector that you choose out outside of finance outside of semiconductors whether it’s warehousing and Amazon or entertainment and movies and Netflix I do think there’s very large disruptive changes but at the end of the day we are still humans so we’re we’re we like to be entertained you know before it used to be at movie theaters now it’s on mobile devices we like to communicate you know before it was you know on telephones that were plugged into wires now it’s wireless or on apps like clubhouse and so a lot of the things I talk about with startups is really like how do you lean into the behaviors that people have and try not to drastically change the behaviors but provide the tools and technologies to make those behaviors better faster smarter more intuitive less disruptive kind of those types of things and those are the companies that that really I think have the opportunity to take off and have dramatic changes you know at the end of the day like even taking an example like Lyft and Uber you know I need to get from point A to point B like in the past I used to call a taxi cab or stand on the side of a corner and put my arm out and wait for the taxi cab to show up and then I’d have to pay like I was still getting from point A to point B what Uber did is they said okay I’m still gonna take that person from their goal from their objective from where they are to where they need to go I’m just gonna remove a bunch of friction of the things that are not fun about that experience you know Netflix did the same thing with entertainment you know Instagram and Facebook like these are not new concepts they’re just taking things that we would normally want to do which is share and communicate take photos and making them either more enjoyable or simpler and so I do think there’s been a ton of innovation a lot of it has been wrapped around digital in some way but even if we look at physical manufacturing and if we look at you know how people work and just go to blue color jobs you know how we file our taxes like every aspect of our life has shifted quite differently it’s still recognizable like if you dropped someone from the 1950s into 2020 like they’d be blown away by the technology but they’d still understand like oh this is how you watch your news on this screen and oh this is how you have a conversation some you know we’re still human so those things will not change and that’s why I say some technologies like open AI like yeah yeah well we’ll figure out how to integrate those technologies into our daily lives I’m more impatient I feel you these these are definitely innovations but many of them are very gradual and I feel like the innovation score that I would assign to Uber or Lyft is very low I mean it’s beautifully done right it has a huge marketing engine and I use it every day I miss it if I don’t have it if I go to a country like Germany where they don’t have uber or nothing that that’s similar to Uber at a relatively affordable price and I’d rather go to places that have uber but it’s and I’m I’m agree with you it has a big impact on people and it makes them comfortable it makes them safe but technology is barely in this equation I feel what would be big I innovation I guess that’s the other way to phrase it like flying cars wouldn’t be crazy innovative as well like those have been on the drawing board for the last 50 60 years as well so it’s really kind of what however you frame machine building machine machines robots so to speak that build houses or houses that can come up like a fully not just a temporary structure can come up in a week or planes planes that go everywhere in like an hour or we can go to mars right those are the things we all have all expected for 2020 and none of those happened right oh we we we I have a robot you know I have a 3d printer this is a robot that can manufacture anything I want right within a certain scale right like and it has bounds of things that it can do and can’t do but like a lot of those technologies would be tantamount to magic like wow like I have a device here that can put audio into my ears like directly wirelessly like I can listen to any song in the world ever produced you know just by typing into a little box like again you it doesn’t feel like magic it doesn’t feel like innovation because we’ve grown up with it and it’s been a little bits over time like oh we can put our CDs on an iPod wow that’s kind of cool like but that’s a small innovation oh we can take all of those things and wire them to the internet okay that’s a small change and like all those small changes it’s that compounding interest that you were talking about before like I do think there are huge leaps of innovation it just doesn’t feel that way because we’re living it I like your perspective on this I feel it’s different in a way that we as a society and I feel like and I draw this from religion and that’s but that’s a whole other topic that life and in the way we should live life is a self fulfilling prophecy right so we an entrepreneurship is an outgrowth of this is a really good mirror for this so in it’s kind of when you raise your children what do you want to do you want to set really high expectations you want to don’t want to make them too crazy far off so it can never be achieved right because then they’re useless but they want to you want to calibrate it that they’re relatively close but still challenging it’s kind of a moving target right so your children grow up and they do things when they’re 12 that they couldn’t even think of when they were six and you were still scolding them because they’re not good enough right so for children that’s confusing but I think for a society we should have this this positive self fulfilling prophecy and I think they’re kind of some people have it some don’t what I’m trying to say is we’ve lowered the goal of what we expect from the future and I think this is where we’ve reduced our growth rate in terms of productivity rate that’s a big big factor of it we are not as hardcore so to speak in expecting a better future for us and for our children as we used to be and that’s more a society element right that’s that’s each individual is obviously all over the map and the scale and I think this is why we see this stagnation and yes innovation still happens and probably we have more innovation and just total count but the the effect of it and the way we accumulate capital ideas together it’s not as challenging as I would feel oh we could be but maybe it’s just my god feeling and I’m one one of the people who’s who’s on the other side of that scale right yeah yeah I don’t we’ll have to see I don’t know that’s what one of those that you it’s hard to tell in the moment you have to kind of look back at it oh remember ten years ago when we said x like you know it’s it’s hard to recognize change when you’re living it it’s only kind of when you look back because when I look back on you know a different era like look back at the year 2000 you’re like wow like that was the year that the web became a thing and dot coms became and we started using these apps and amazon and google and yahoo and all these services and companies and aol formed and changed and again it’s all perspective like we can do that now because we have the perspective of what those companies did and became you know in the same way like we can be looking right now at uh you know tesla and evs and be like okay incrementally every year their uh evs and batteries and solar and and things are getting better and that’s nice to see um but it’s hard to put that in perspective from what it will look like 15 20 years from now and what that company will have become or open ai or apple or any of the other companies like it’s hard to to understand that context in the moment it’s hard to have an alternate history as well and i think it’s what you’re referring to is is is einstein right he was in in his elevator and realized you know once the elevator has has has um accelerated it’s impossible to tell what speed you’re traveling because for you it seems like you’re traveling at the normal speed whatever the normal speed is it’s all relative so you only feel the acceleration maybe but you don’t feel the actual speed you’re going so that’s a that’s a good example um i i want to i want to ask you about you know from your personal perspective and i know you’re ready to invest you have you you put your own money to it and you take that risk where do you feel our opportunities that gonna be big enough um and maybe that might not be the investment vehicle but it’s something you would love to see and love to invest to in the next five to ten years and i don’t know if you as specific as you can be um what are areas that really excite you for you right now yeah i mean i i’m looking across sectors so it’s not really um sector specific i like uh trends that that seem inevitable um and so you know certain things that seem inevitable and it’s just a matter of getting there and so um i think there’s large trends uh to electrification uh you know deoiling decoiling things of that nature i think there are large trends to um a reduction of single use plastics and packaging i think there’s large trends to uh multi sided marketplaces i think there’s a large trend to uh things like remote work um and so companies that lean into things that seem like they’re good long term uh 10 20 year bets you know are are interesting companies to go look at because they’re thinking about the long term and they’re leaning into a trend that’s otherwise happening it but you would focus on something with you invest into it on something that what is real user interface at at stake right like something that’s already been a process before but it hasn’t been done in a way that people really appreciate it say the iphone right they have a linux based phones around for a long time yeah like that that’s one of the areas that i i think i can add value but like i i do look across areas again my personal thesis or the things that i get excited about is you know products that improve lives through the combination of technology and design now you know my personal contribution to that can be anything like and again i i do like to feel like it can help founders um but where there’s an important union of technology and design that’s where i think you know i get more excited about the potential of what that company can be okay um that that sounds really exciting i’m i’m myself running out of battery today so um uh well hope we hope we can do this again in the future thanks for coming greg that was awesome thanks for sharing your knowledge and your ideas just let me know if i can help with anything we will we will and we try to find the proper background maybe a little um thanks for being so flexible we know we i appreciate that yeah no problem we’ll try to work some magic hopefully it’s going to turn out still very good yeah and there is a issue and you need me to repeat an answer or whatever just let me know awesome right i really appreciate it all right sounds good be well thanks for doing this yeah bye