Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio

Thank you for having me. Growing up in the UK, I’m proud to have known of you before you became a world famous podcaster.

If you’re not motivated by the fear of losing, I think you’re asleep at the wheel. Only the paranoid survive, and the world is changing. It feels like the world is changing a year’s worth of progress every few weeks, so definitely the fear of losing.

There’s a saying among the Thiel fellows that they have an expiry date. We all know these people who are very hyped and then maybe didn’t stay relevant and they just, some of them lost their minds. And so that was always a huge fear of mine. You always have to constantly be reinventing yourself to kind of stay relevant and adapt because the world changes very quickly. I started do not pay in high school when I was 17. That was a completely different world back then. That was in 2015.

I think young founders have no option but to succeed. If you back a Google engineer, the first thing they’ll do is they’ll hire 10 of their friends, and it’s like this endless scheme of hiring. The first thing a young founder will do is they’ll build the product and they don’t have anything to fall back on, especially if they have a chip on their shoulder. The only thing they can do is succeed. And so I think the grit level with young founders is 10x. Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass.

If you don’t have a true dedication to win, they’ll give up at the first opportunity.

The number one thing I look for is a deep connection to the problem that they won’t give up. I go back to my own journey. I’m Do Not Pay. I’m the type of person to get 10 parking tickets just to test out the service or wait on hold for hours to save £20 or dollars. And I look for those founders with with a really deep connection to the problem. So for example, I was in the very, very, first pre seed of a company called owner.com with Adam Gilt.

He built the initial version of his product to help his mother’s dog grooming business. So many of these founders come up with these BS stories, but that is a real story, and he really did it to help his mother. And similarly with me, I really did it because I hate the government with parking tickets. And so I look for that sort of founder market fit where they’re their own first customer. And I joke, if you’re building for yourself, at least you have one customer.

Yes. So I escaped the UK to go to Stanford, and there was a Stanford Review article, which is a student publication, and the publication said it’s easier for a Stanford student to get into YC than it is for them to get a job now. We’ve seen a rise of, I would say, fake founders where they don’t have that connection to their problem and they’re just starting something just because it’s cool or because they have nothing to do for the summer. And actually, being an investor, you have to be very careful about backing students over the summer because part of the signal is they’ve dropped out and they’re going all in on this.

But of course, during the summer, you can’t actually tell if they’ve dropped out. So I’m actually scaled back a bit during the summer, not because I’m in Capri like all the other VCs, but because you have to worry about these fake founders.

So I have a huge list of heuristics and I have small signals and big signals. So a small signal would be, let’s meet at 11PM. And the best founders would say, sure. The mediocre ones would say, oh, no, can we meet Tuesday week? So we meet at 11PM, and then I just hit them quick fire with questions. And everything they say, I want them to validate, and it’s almost like a visa interview. For example, they’ll say, I’m at 5,000 in revenue. I say, let’s look up your Stripe right now.

Fake ones get really nervous. They’re like, I don’t have my Stripe on my phone. What serious entrepreneur doesn’t have the Stripe app on their phone? And then I go into these tactical questions like, what’s your goal for the next three months, six months, one year? A D minus answer would be some vague nonsense like, I want to get a partnership with Anthropic. An A plus answer would be, I’m going to fly to Milwaukee to meet with a dentist to get them to sign my $500 a month SaaS plan.

So it’s very tactical. Then I look for, do they have a top 1% skill in something to achieve their business goals? And you see the best entrepreneurs, they’ve proved something in their childhood. Maybe they were selling Minecraft servers like Adam Guild or John Andrew, the founder of Wanda. Maybe they were doing sneaker bots like the founder of WAP. My generation, when we were growing up, it was very big to do jailbreaking. So jailbreaking or competitive drone racing, so many of these things. And it doesn’t have to be engineering.

I I backed the youngest engineer at Amazon. That was really cool. But it can also be distribution and, like, making sure their sneaker bots get to the the right audience.

I noticed over the years, so I’ve I’ve tried all sorts of investments over the years and things have done very well. But the best sort of investments are the day one investments for me. And I think everyone is playing different games. Some people are playing the games where they’re getting into the hottest companies, in million valuation, and then they become worth billion one day. The game I’m playing is I’m getting into founders who, when they’re just starting, they’re not polished at all, and they can really use my advice and my reliving my founder journey to polish them.

And I try and get in sub million valuation. And the question I’m sure you have is how do you account for the adverse selection of getting in at those low valuations? And I noticed that over the years, the best founders that I invested in, I actually lived with them at some point. I was roommates with the founder of a company called Assured, where we both rented the house where Facebook was started over the summer at Stanford. I was roommates with the founder of a company called Yuzu, where he worked at Do Not pay, so he lived at the do Not Pay house.

The founder of Micro One lived in my spare bedroom when I was his first investor. And what is it you see in the best in those periods? So I’ve made so many mistakes with Do Not Pay. I’m 10 years in now. I can give them a crash course so they don’t make the same mistakes as me in a matter of three weeks. And bear in mind, these are very young college first time founders, so they don’t even know the difference between pre money and post money valuation and all of this.

So it’s almost like a one person accelerator. It’s one partner at the accelerator, me, and then one founder or one company. And you mentioned Four Seasons. I would say it’s not that luxurious. It’s adjacent to the Four Seasons. It’s technically a Four Seasons residence. But sometimes if there’s four co founders, it’s four beds in one room. So I’ll rent beds for $50 a night, and then they all one company, they live in one room. And I say to them, it’s like it’s in California. So it’s like Hotel California where you can’t check out until you’ve raised your institutional seed.

And then the company is off life support I can relax a bit.

At the very beginning, there’s three reasons why pre seed companies fail. They run out of money, they run out of hope, and co founder disputes. running The out of money comes down to pitching, and I help I’m lucky to have pitched almost everyone in Silicon Valley over the years, successfully and unsuccessfully. And so I teach them how to present their business. Running out of hope is also really important. I want them to make them feel like they’re making progress every single day, encouraging them to ignore all of the kind of vanity signals of being a young founder in SF and actually focus on their customers.

And then cofounder disputes and building the team. I sometimes recruit my smart friends who are not ready to start a company into their organization, and I get them the vesting and all the boring stuff. Like Everything that YC would say, I I I say to them.

So the good news is that with all sort of red flags, young founders are very bad at lying. If they say we’re we’re kind of best friends and then they start interrupting each other, you kind of know that that that’s not true. So I look for kind of a long history. The best cofounder dynamic that I’ve seen among young founders is friends from high school. So I I was the first and they live with me as well. I was the first investor in a company called Halideer very recently.

They were friends from high school, went to different colleges, dropped out and rejoined. So that’s the that’s the kind of perfect dynamic. One thing I’ll say is I’ve I’ve noticed a really worrying trend of people reverse engineering what I say on podcasts and in articles to pitch me exactly what I’m looking for. Just now I said, friends from high school. I can guarantee you in three weeks, someone is to say, we were best friends in high school. And so this is a worrying trend where they’re using Claude and chatgpt deep research.

And so I have to worry about that.

Yeah, it’s it’s disgusting. disgusting. It’s It’s a certain type of fraud. I call it ideological fraud.

Yes. So I put I put it in just before. Okay. And

Yeah. Yeah. And it it varies depending on how many cofounders there are, if it’s just one. Sometimes I I I don’t mind solo founders. If it’s like three dropouts from Harvard, then the price reflects that. Do you find that million price is still attainable? that’s that Sometimes sometimes can be lower, sometimes can be higher.

Oftentimes it’s so early that it’s it’s it’s definitely possible. For my latest fund, I’ve done 33 deals so far. The median across the entire fund is five. The minimum is 1.5. Maximum is 21.

I think that at the earliest stages, the only fraud there can be is ideological, which is not illegal. It’s not illegal to say you’ve had childhood trauma when you’ve actually grown up middle class. And that’s a huge, huge issue. It’s It’s interesting because the best founders are hustlers in some ways. So it’s it’s a it’s a balance. I actually think it’s becoming easier and easier The world is becoming much more transparent. You have Twitter sleuths who will detect anything as like, several companies recently have been taken down because of like, someone published an article about stock two or something like that, and the entire company is done.

So I think actually that the illegal type of fraud is becoming harder.

I I think it was Marc Andreessen. Like so many founders, after Do Not Pay got all of the hype and we were starting to get a lot of usage, he reached out on X he said, do you want to have breakfast? I was very mission driven. I I was not one of these like, Stanford founders or anything. I was actually on the verge of making Do Not Pay a nonprofit. In fact, I had a pitch to, like nonprofit style investors not investors, just funders, to make a legal nonprofit to help people with their rights.

I was that focused on fighting the system. And I went to this breakfast and Mark convinced me that the biggest organizations are for profit entities, and you can have 10 times the impact of a for profit company because the incentives are aligned. And do not pay was a very small example of this, but I guess you’re seeing this today with OpenAI with the billion lawsuit where they switched from nonprofit to for profit. So that was the first major lesson I learned, I would say. How old were you at that breakfast?

I was 18 or 19. Were you nervous? I was so nervous, and was a breakfast meeting. Where was it? it? at his house in Atherton and he came down in like, breakfast clothes. And What are breakfast was fresh off the boat. I’m not trying to get in trouble, but I was like, fresh off the boat from the UK, Came down in breakfast clothes. And yeah, but I would say all of the luminaries are incredibly nice people, but Marc Andreessen is by far my favorite, and I’m very fortunate.

He’s my first investor at Do Not Pay and also first institutional investor for my fund.

I have a friend. He has a great saying, which I’ll copy. There are three types of people. those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who wonder what happened. And I think at best, venture investors are in the second one. Sometimes, unfortunately, they can be in the third. So the biggest issue is they don’t go crazy on the founders, which happens a lot. But of course, they can add value at strategic points.

People see their life as paint by numbers. So they say, if I go graduate, I go to business school, I go work at X company, then in five years, I’ll be ready to start my company. problem is the world changes so quickly that the paint by numbers approach doesn’t work anymore. I would say to any founder who has an idea of what they want to do, they should just go for it and the world won’t wait for them. On the other hand, you see a lot of people drop out just for the sake of it.

In fact, when I when I dropped out in 2018, I actually had like one or two classes left at Stanford. I was very close. It was very kind of taboo to drop out. Now dropping out is almost the establishment. So you see people drop out just for the sake of it. And I think that’s definitely wrong because there are huge advantages to being in college. Even if you’re doing a startup, Like, you can recruit your friends, you have your college email, and people will take you more seriously if you email them from Stanford or MIT MIT.edu. edu.

Also, people give college students more of a free pass. If all of these founders who are getting this controversial stuff are in college, they might be able to kind of pivot more quickly.

No, I think the opposite was true. So I was sitting, and I’ve never told this story before, but I was sitting at a poker game at Stanford with my friends. This is no exaggeration. I got a news alert saying, so my father is a human rights activist and he’s like, an enemy of the Russians. It was a news alert about my father that he’d just been arrested. They’d The the Russians managed to get him. It’s just made me incredibly paranoid. And so I I think I was more paranoid.

Most people don’t have the mafia after your family. and so I was always paranoid and fearless. And so I think actually it kind of made me more paranoid to like, take big swings. I called him, it didn’t go through. I called my mother and then I like cashed out my chips and left the poker game and dealt with this situation. And as a 19 year old college student, there’s very little you can do in that situation. But my biggest thing was trying to make sure he didn’t get extradited to Russia, because if he got extradited, really bad things would happen.

I went to an event, British students at Stanford, and it was hosted by the Consul General. And I thought the one thing I can do, maybe I’ll email the Consul General. So even as a teenager, I was just trying everything. Of course, that made no difference.

Yeah, it was a Financial Times news alert.

This is probably the the hardest point of Do Not Pay, which is three years into the company. So I’d raised the pre seed from Andreessen, from Mark. It came time to raise the seed two or three years later. Do Not Pay was incredibly popular. Millions of people were using our free product, and I thought it was a slam dunk pitch. That was a huge mistake. I was going down Sand Hill Road because all the VC firms were in Sand Hill Road back then. And one after the other, they were rejecting me.

I went just down the list, rejection, rejection, rejection, This was really depressing because I had actually just dropped out a week before. As passionate as I as I was about do Not Pay, there’s only so far I could go with just me. I needed to hire a real team and then raise some serious money to keep it going. I had like two or three pitches left, and I thought, if these don’t go well, I’m just to throw in the towel and do something really depressing, like like go work for big tech or or something.

Go work at Google because I I just have to give up. I’m even go back to Stanford. So it was the next day. It was one of my last pitches. I guess this kind of speaks for how bad the situation was, but I turned to my outside counsel lawyer for advice. If you’re turning to outside counsel for business advice, then you know things are really bad. He’s an amazing lawyer. He’s a partner at a firm called Wilson Sonsini. His name is Damian Weiss. He’s on the cap table of all the amazing companies.

I told him the predicament I was in, and he said, well, do the whole pitch in front of me right now. So I gave him the whole pitch, and he interrupted me halfway through, and he said, you’re doing it completely wrong. He said, first of all, they’re not investing in the PDF deck or some presentation. They’re investing in you and the product. And so the fact that you’re not doing a demo is criminal. So I’ve kind of quickly scrambled together a demo of a robot appealing someone’s bank fees because Do Not Pay was expanding to bank fees in the US and added that to the presentation.

He said, second of all, no one really knows what this can be. You should put the logos of the biggest companies that you one day want to emulate. So I stuck in the logo of Intuit, which is a billion company in the US, and I said, want to be the TurboTax, which is one of their products of consumer rights. And I also put the Honey logo, which was just acquired that year for billion. And then I put Credit Karma, which was acquired for billion. Put that in the deck.

He said, finally, this was around the time of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, You shouldn’t say you want to do advertising. advertising. is not very fashionable right now among VCs. said, okay, what should I do? He said, subscription. So I put in subscription. And I didn’t even really believe that it could be like people would subscribe to it, but I put in subscription. And he turned out to be right. Everyone now subscription is our main business model. So I made those three very minor changes to the deck, did my presentation the next day, and Harry, it was like a night and day difference.

Everything changed. Not only did they to invest, I I left the room for a few minutes. I came back, and they wanted to invest on the spot. First of all, Silicon Valley is such a kind of herd mentality place. Even the people that previously rejected me, once they found out that this firm wants to invest, everyone started rescinding their rejections. And I thought that was a bit depressing. And second of all, it taught me a really valuable lesson, which is nothing changed about the company, Nothing changed about me, nothing changed about the team, Nothing changed about our usage.

But the most minor differences in framing and strategy made all the difference. That’s actually some of the lessons I give the founders I invest in. If things aren’t working, you just need to change the framing just slightly, and that can make a monumental difference.

I tell every founder I invest in, don’t have too high of expectations. Pitching VCs is like a game of poker. You should never reveal too much information about what you’re seeking. So every founder I invest in, I say, don’t reveal the price that you want. The price is a function of how hot the deal is, which ironically is less hot if you go in swinging for the fences with something too high. Secondly, I try and relive my story and I say, you have to do a demo.

There’s a famous story. I gave this founder advice to do a demo. He’s a biotech founder and he even did a demo, a very personal demo. Everyone was passing on him, and then he did this demo and then a top tier person came in. So I definitely do the demo, make it all about them. Also, I mean, there’s a million things. Like, the CEO should be doing it, not like, five founders speaking over each other. There’s like, a whole list. I I send it to any founder I invest

Yeah, well, Zoom is the first per se. They should fly to London. In person, I say you should reject Zoom and always do in person where possible. If I was pitching you, I’d fly to London. very

I would invest

So I think being British, the substance is always I try and be more substantive than hypey. I think it’s just the UK culture. When I give references, I always say this reference is actually really good because it’s coming from a British person. I’m not like one of these like, hypey Americans. And I give founders I invest in this advice. It’s okay to be as hyped as possible with your vision and ambition. You should have boundless ambition. But with how you’re describing the current state, it should be very accurate.

So I think there’s a balance with what your plans are versus where it is today.

Unfortunately, all of the best founders I’ve invested in, they’ve they’ve had delusional levels of ambition. The more delusional, the better. And unfortunately, it is a sign of success to be delusional. So I think it’s better that they’re more on the delusional side. But I I agree with you. Do not pay. Initially, we got an acquisition offer for million from, like, one of these OG legal tech companies when we when we just started. I was about to take it. So I I I agree that you never kind of realize how big things can be.

Why did you not take it? A million pounds, you’re very young, a teenager. Why did you not? I asked a lot of people I knew for advice and they kind of laughed at me. And I was actually really upset with them for, like, not kind of validating this achievement that we got this It It was actually a million dollar acquisition offer. That was a bit depressing, but I think they actually gave me good advice, which is you can do better than this.

One should create their own luck and meet as many peers as possible because you get different things from different people. One person is an expert at growth. One person is an expert at fundraising. One person is an expert at life. Cliff, who introduced us, I I think he’s an expert at life.

Yeah. So I was at Stanford and to graduate Stanford, like many universities, they have diversity requirements. You have to do various things in the curriculum to get your degree. And one thing you have to do is it’s called creative expression. And I’m not sure how I seem, but I’m not the most creative person. I’m more of a Claude Code style person. I love the code. This was the last requirement I had. And the easiest way to satisfy this requirement was to go to dance class once a week.

There’s this famous class at Stanford called Social Dance. It was at 9am AM. It like a schlep, and do not pay servers were crashing. And I really am very bad at dancing. So I had a decision to make. Did I want go to this dance class or did I to keep my business up for millions of users? I didn’t go to the dance class. I kept Do Not Pay running, failed out the dance class. and that was my kind of precipitated my dropping out, not the Thiel Fellowship.

And I actually got the Thiel Fellowship a few weeks later. The Thiel Fellowship, the best thing about it is you have 19 other people who also have these dance class style problems, who have the same problems as me as an entrepreneur. Like, one example would be how can you convince a 60 year old to work for you? At the time, Do Not Pay was very early in the machine learning days. We were trying to do some machine learning classification for parking tickets. and I was trying to get one of these old OG machine learning people to work for the company.

I was turning to one of my Stanford dormmates who was also trying to do apps and projects, but he was more a committed college student. And I said, do have any idea about how I can convince this person to work for me? And he had no idea, rightly so, because he was dealing with his own college problems versus building a company. So I think the biggest benefit of the Thiel Fellowship is having 19 other young people who are dealing with the same challenges as you. And I went to the first Thiel Fellowship retreat, and back then they made you share rooms.

Now Peter Thiel is so wealthy, if you go on the retreat, they actually give you your own room. But back then you had to share rooms with the other fellows.

And my roommate was a fellow Brit. I guess they put the two Brits together. He went on to found a company called FluidStack, which is publicly reported to be a tens of billions kind of company. And so just having those peers is absolutely incredible.

I think not being transactional, it’s a price. So it goes to the individual as a price. And you can do anything you want with the prize money. You can use it on research on how to grow organs. You can invest it like I did in my teal Fellow classmates. Is that what you used it for? Yeah. I put all my Teal Fellowship money and I invested it in Adam Guild and other amazing entrepreneurs. That’s how I started investing. Maybe I’m an investor at heart in some ways because that’s what I did.

So back in my day, before the hyperinflation, I’m getting old, it was 100k Then last year was 200k, now it’s 250 k. So it’s going up.

So they have this tradition where obviously the ultimate decision on who gets the fellowship is up to the foundation and Peter finally. But fellows help out every year in in the selection in in various ways. And I was helping out one year and I was actually interviewing fellows for the next class. And that’s how I met a lot of these people.

No. So they pay it in installments because I guess they think these crazy young people, we don’t give them 250k at once. They might buy drugs or something. or Probably not, but do some crazy at least with me, they gave it to me in installments. So I took all my first installment and just put it into him. Into Adam? Yeah.

I think when it’s all said and done, it’ll be the eight figures.

That’s why I started my fund because I I I did other investments as well that did very well. I also invested in my going back to my Stanford roommate, Justin, and various other ones at the time. What did Justin do? He’s building insurance claims processing software. Assured. Yeah. Lots of deals like that. And so I thought, okay, I’m out of my Thiel Fellowship money. Maybe I should raise a small fund to keep this going because it it pays to be early.

So it’s ultimately up to the fellowship to decide, but I help out.

So when the Thiel Fellowship started, it was really about backing incredible incredible individuals out of distribution individuals. Like, Dylan Field was working on a photo sharing app and and then I think some drone ideas. Vitalik was just a crazy individual doing crypto, which was not exciting at the time. it it was really about the individual. In the kind of late tens, a flood of people were applying to the Thiel Fellowship with huge external validation. But now I think it’s going back to really focusing on the individual.

Every founder needs some first believer, whether it’s taking my spare bedroom or the amazing programs out there. I really think you you need a first believer and YC can be a great first believer for them. Some companies do better in YC than others. The problem with any accelerator not speaking specifically about YC is you’re competing for attention with all the other companies in the accelerator. If you’re the top of the accelerator, then that’s incredible. You’re the king made or queen made company. If you’re like a middling company, it might actually be better to not be compared to all those other companies.

And going back to my spare bedroom, it’s a supply constraint. There’s only one spare bedroom. And so it actually is a bar for me as I do I want to put these people in my spare bedroom? And there’s only one. so all my focus is on them. So there’s no dilution in terms of the brand. I’m not doing 100 companies in my spare bedroom. In fact, one of my LPs asked me, why don’t you start buying a hotel or rent out a hotel and just do 10 at a time?

And I said, well, that that removes the artificial constraint of one. And so I think that’s why I try and be different. It’s like a one person accelerator.

Yeah.

So I was thinking of buying the Facebook house. It’s actually not that expensive house, the actual house where Facebook started. And when I was starting Do Not Pay, I didn’t know it was a Facebook house. The first I found out it was a Facebook house is there’s a bus of tourists from Asia who would show up at the house. And it would be like Avenue of the Stars. I I guess growing growing up, I visit LA and you’d go on a bus with all the stars.

And and this was on the tour route. And this bus showed up of these tourists. And I said, what are you here for? And they said, we’re here to see Mark Zuckerberg’s house. I immediately thought, I guess this is the content marketer in me. You can come in, but you have to subscribe to Do Not Pay. We had a Do Not Pay employee outside with a clipboard. And to enter the house, you actually had to become a Do Not Pay user.

Such an LP question. I think Thanks, Josh. think you should start funder funds. You have amazing judgment. I think there’s something special about one. How long are they in there for? As long As it takes. Hotel California, they can’t check until they’re in a stable spot. Usually that’s a few weeks. Usually a few weeks?

to Maybe a traditional pre seed or seed.

Yeah. And I will go very personally to do everything to help them. So oftentimes this arbitrage is I’m moving them internationally. I’ll put that o O1 Genius Visa on my credit card. I’ll use all my social capital to introduce them to whoever it takes. I had one person, he was building in data centers. I phoned up my old friend Jamie and introduced him to Jamie from Fluidstack. Do anything anything possible to kind of build up credibility, build their team and get them in a stable spot.

No, I’ve never lost belief in someone who stayed with me. I I think there’s enough filters before that. The opposite is true. I’ve accosted them at 2am while they’re sitting on my couch. I’m like, I to put in another 300k. It’s difficult to say no.

Yeah, some some are off to the races. So some, I introduce them to a top three firm and they get it, and then they’re like and it’s actually going back to it’s actually sickening. Once they get the top three firm, it’s like a stampede. It’s like Safari stampede. Everyone is trying to invest, I was thinking, where were all these people just three weeks ago? Sometimes they require a bit more time and then maybe I bring in a sector expert. Like if they’re doing government, I bring in a top government VC. or if they’re doing consumer, I bring in consumer.

Sometimes it takes longer, but I always get them in a stable spot. And it it depends on the company.

No, the the opposite is true, actually. The The crazier it is, the better they do. Ali Ansari is a micro one is objectively my best performing investment in terms of multiple. The founders get upset when I reveal exact valuation numbers, but let’s say over a thousand x, well over a thousand x, And based on the of the scale of the business, when I met him, Facebook I said, I’ll invest only on three conditions. So as a California LLC, uninvestable. It has to be Delaware C Corp.

He was based in kind of Los Angeles as a solo founder, and he was running kind of a staffing business, which there’s a million staffing companies even in the UK. So I said, you have to move to the Bay Area. You can live in my spare bedroom. You have to reincorporate in Delaware or or shift to Delaware, and you have to do a software style product. I don’t mind what you do, but it can be anything. We grinded and he’s the hardest one of the hardest working people I’ve ever seen.

And actually he still lives in my building to this day. And I like come at 12AM, and he’s like, working middle of the night. And he did all those three things and it changed everything.

Never give up. You If back someone who’s above average IQ, very smart, and never give up, of course they’ll succeed. And I think this is actually a mistake a lot of VCs are making. They are focusing too much on these credentials. So there’s a race right now to back the math Olympiads. VCs are going to spelling bees and math competitions in high school. And I think IQ is very important. You need someone smart, but much more important is they’ll never give up. And I could tell from my own journey and and interviewing people for the Thiel Fellowship and seeing so many founders that Ali was someone who has never give up.

And he’s overcome huge challenges along the way to kind of build his business.

Yes, I I I would agree with that. I think athletes is one form of never giving up, and and you can kind of tell. A huge chip on your shoulder is another way. There are so many.

I think that once the minor things get sorted, it’s actually quite There’s there’s so much money. People ask me, are you worried about competition from XYZ B5 seed firm? I’m like, no, they’re helpful. They can kind of join these companies and babysit them. And so once these minor things are sorted, it becomes legible fairly quickly, not for like a a unicorn, but certainly for an institutional seed.

So this is the biggest mistake I think I’ve made as an investor over the years, which is as an investor and entrepreneur, my imagination can run wild as to what they can build. I think if only they did this, it would be huge. The problem with that is unless it comes from them, it’s not their life’s work. And so I’m very cautious. I I have a rule. I never tell the entrepreneurs what to build, which which might seem surprising as an investor. I say to them, it’s your job to build the product and get customers.

I can help with everything else. So I never index too much about the idea. It’s about the person. With that said, there’s a few things that I’ll never touch. I’ll never touch crypto. I’m not getting into whether I believe in crypto or not. I think it has huge use cases, but I think it’s best left to the crypto funds. Consumer hardware is tough because of various different consumer hardware issues. So I try and stay away from that, least from my fund. But beyond that, anything. And wet science as well.

Stay away from that.

Yeah. I’m not a scientist.

No, I’m more excited than ever. Everyone is pitching this AI infrastructure nonsense. We’re building agent observability, like the jargon levels. I’m British. I I think that’s all BS. Like, they just add on the jargon. I love people building real businesses, so the more real it is, the better. What’s real? So I think enterprise AI is really exciting, like Assured or Owner or Micro One, things like that.

If you can’t explain the business to someone at the pub in the UK, like, if you go to a pub and say, I’m building observability for AI agents, they’ll laugh at you. But if you say, I’m building software to automate health insurance claims, that makes sense.

There’s kind of two groups of firms. There’s like the kingmaker firms that you should accept at any price. One example would be Founders Fund or Sequoia or people like that. And so if you get an offer from them at X and the offer from someone else is at 2x, you you should take their offer because even if you’re maximizing amount raised and minimizing dilution, in the long run, you’re you’re king kingmade and it will save you in the next round. But another mistake these entrepreneurs make is they have the list of the kingmaker firms as too big.

There’s probably like, some tier two firm that think very highly of themselves that aren’t in that same level as Founders Fund or Sequoia.

be? I No, it depends on the sector. It really depends on the sector. If you’re a consumer company, getting forerunner could be the king making thing. generally. generally, it could be Founders Fund or Sequoia or or something. So that’s a very diplomatic answer.

100%. We live in such a noisy world that people outsource their judgment to establish brands.

Yeah. And it’s not just law firms, even consumers who use do not pay. I think I’m sure lots of people have signed up because of the investors that backed us.

I I think it’s it’s nonsense. I think they shouldn’t do something stupid like sell 50% of their company to a Midwest angel for like 100k like you see with some of these Shark Tank deals. But at the same time, the number one thing I say to, especially these young founders I back is either it succeeds or it doesn’t. If it succeeds, at a minimum, you’re worth hundreds of millions or billions. You’re on the cover of magazines. It’s life changing. If it fails, you’re nothing. So if taking that extra money can reduce the chance of failure by even 5%, the kind of expected value is infinity in terms of life improvement. 5% of infinity, you should still do it.

I’m on my fourth fund. My first three funds, I did do reserves, and I I did some great reserve investments. For example, I did a very hummingbird style investment. I put 15% of my third fund in owner at the Series a. That fund has micro one, lots of other good things. So that be a very good fund because of that reserve investment and also because of these pre-seeds.

it? So in the private markets, there’s no insider information. Speaking generally, all of these founders are like my good friends. I speak to them sometimes at 2am AM And so if you can build that depth of relationship and conviction, it’s a kind of adverse kind of positive selection through that kind of relationship that you can build with the founders. You can tell if it’s real because I’m not a professional investor And I’m sure you’ll ask me about being a founder versus investor. I think people consider me as a founder and that’s a unique edge.

Anyway, going back to your question. So that was a good investment. But I realized the opportunity cost of that investment, given where I come in, it could be 20 to 30 pre-seeds. And the value creation at the pre-seed is so high that I decided for my fourth fund, no reserves, just everything upfront. Browder hotel, let’s go.

The people buying these secondaries are sharks. If someone is emailing you asking to buy Anthropic shares, the value of Anthropic is probably to go up. And the same is true with these founders. And so I would say to them, if you’re being bombarded with secondary offers, perhaps they have more experience with the market than even you do as a founder of your own business. I think a lot of founders, they’ve regretted, a lot of my friends, they’ve regretted taking secondaries. They’ve got one of these kingmaker firms in, and then the valuation has gone up 3x in a few weeks.

So why not do the secondary at the higher price? So I would say if it’s too much inbound, there could be something that they have within their investing experience that as a founder, maybe it’s their first time business, they maybe shouldn’t jump to sell too quickly. Did you sell secondaries? Do not pay. We We haven’t really had to because of dividends, which is a whole nother thing.

Yeah, I’ll give you a classic example of how this impacts decision making, which is safe versus priced rounds. As a pre seed and seed investor, the kind of B minus VC investors will to get that next round on a priced basis to get that gap markup. But if you actually care about the economics and making money in the long term, you want the next round on a safe because safes don’t dilute other safes. And so I was actually talking to a seed investor about this and I said to them, why don’t everyone just encourage more safes?

Safes are beneficial for founders because they can raise more quickly and all of this stuff. And they said no, but they want to get the price round to raise the next fund. So I think this raising the next fund nonsense really does impact decision making and actually directly hurts founders with some of these things.

Well, the VCs always win. If they do a price round, some some of them are shocks. Say, we want a 15% option pool at the seed. So safe you you can just pursue the existing option pool and wait till the company becomes more valuable. But I’m biased.

So I say to the young founders, the VCs will say anything to get you to sign right there and then. Anything. They’ll reverse engineer what the founder is looking for and say, oh, I’m friends. I’m buddies with that guy. I know someone at that company. We’re golf buddies. I can get him to be a customer. Like, right now, I can introduce you to so many customers. And they just say exactly what the founders want to hear. And these poor young founders, they’re so impressionable. Sometimes they sign the safe on the spot.

Afterwards, of course, it never materializes. They never get that customer that they were wanting because it turns out they weren’t as close golf buddies as the person made it out. So I say to founders, do not sign on the spot. And going back to my offers, I don’t make them sign on the spot. It’s just too much, especially for these young founders. I say you have the night to think about it. I think decisiveness is a key quality, so I do want to know by the next morning.

If not, it’s done, but they can’t sign on the spot.

Either a hell yes or a hell no.

I say it’s probably not a fit, especially given my investing model. I want to so many ways to win. I’m sure that they might win or not, but that’s not a fit for me. I say good luck.

Yeah, no, I definitely not. If they’re running a process, it’s too I want to help them with that process. And I’m very collaborative. I typically take take to 7%. I say to them, and I really think this has proven true, I will save them that over the life of the company. Even if they have the most top tier people, I will save them that through various founder tactics, helping founders at 2AM, even raise their Series C. It never ends. I will make it worth it for them.

It’s not like I’m trying to get 25% of these founders.

I tell them the market sets the price price optimization is a function of how many offers you have. So you should never say what price you want. And of course, they ignore my advice and then they get hit with, oh, I’m passed because the price is too high when the VC would probably would have given them an offer and that would have actually helped improve the price.

Do Not Pay in some ways is a media business. We get 90% plus of our customers organically through SEO and media like viral stories and referrals. And so we’re not playing the meta spend a month on meta game that some other founders are playing. And that is a double edged sword. It has positives and negatives. The positives are it’s extremely efficient and profitable. We have hundreds of thousands of customers and it’s only a team of 11 people. It’s automated, fully automated, so it’s very efficient. The downside is we can’t just decide to dump a million into meta ads and grow by X percent.

And so the organic is kind of a ceiling. Another ceiling is that coming from the UK, I’ve always wanted to build a real business. We had a competitor in the 2021 peak. They were spending like, $300 to acquire a customer worth $150, and they actually managed to sell at the peak of the market. Good for them. can’t play these games. I think that the best thing is to actually build a real business.

So GEO, the AI version of SEO, is is rising in parallel. So we’re we’re not too worried that people always rely on some acquisition channel. Fortunately for us, we haven’t yet seen it because one of my life philosophies is the world doesn’t move at the pace of San Francisco. A lot of our customers are from middle America and actually the UK. I mean, Google is still huge, so it’ll take a while, but we are definitely ensuring ourselves with lots of GEO related strategy.

I think from the very beginning, we were always, I mean, the the clue is in the name. Do not pay. I joke. It’s not just a company, it’s a lifestyle. I’m like, Mr. Do not pay. And so we never wanted to do anything stupid. And when I was was hiring my friends, I was always hiring the people who were browsing Reddit at 2am trying to save money. I think this is controversial. I think founders who burn all the money, I think that’s not cool. I think it’s kind of lame because why did they run out of money?

Why didn’t they just cut the burn? And obviously some founders fail because of some like, black swan event, and I can understand that. They take a massive swing there’s like, back like, some huge litigation or something, a patent thing that Apple crushes them or something. That makes sense. But if they just run out of the money, that’s not cool. That’s kind of lame. They should have just managed their burn better.

So we have more money than we’ve raised and we’re actually doing another dividend next month. So it’s like quarterly. Yeah, we’re planning on doing it now quarterly. And the investors, I think it works for us because the investors got in at such low prices. We We didn’t raise a million, We could have at the peak of 2021. You raised 22. Yeah. Which when I was fresh off the boat from the UK dropping out of college, that seemed like the world of money. But in the grand scheme of things, given the scale of our business, it’s not actually that much money.

We are to take some big swings this year. We are looking to kind of roll up some different consumer things within Do not pay. I’m still 10 years in, still extremely excited and ambitious. Who knows? You said about

Well, I think business school is actually a counter signal. I’m not going be very popular among the business school people. but

Yeah. So stay away from the strategy hires. Strategy is a meaningless hire because what does that even mean? Everything is strategic. I think connection to the problem is really important, similar to investing. Do not pay employees, they’re scaling themselves. Like, had one do not pay employee, he would go to Target, the US retailer, and he’d buy prepaid Visa gift cards so that whenever he would sign up for a free trial, they wouldn’t be linked to his direct debit real payment details. And we were like one of your products.

Yeah. That would make a great product. So we’re trying to hire people to scale themselves. My very first hire at Do Not Pay, obviously, I built the thing myself. The design looked terrible. It gave me a headache. It was like a moving road background. You would look at it and it’d give our early users headaches. We’d get complaints. People would get headaches from the design. So the first hire for me was a designer. So you need to immediately solve these bottlenecks quickly.

I think custom evals. Everyone is very excited about foundation models like Claude code and all of this stuff. The future of AI will actually be organization specific, specifically around the data that Do Not Pay has where we’re doing evals on our own data. So I think custom eval has will be really big.

I think there’ll be a rise of medium sized businesses like almost do not pay that fill the niche and then these massive companies. But the the middle where there’s just like, a large company, I think they have to be very worried. I was saying to a friend, for every Anthropic employee who’s making 20 to million, there’s 7,000 block employees being laid off. I think there is a huge transfer going on between the extremely large companies and the quite large companies. But I think the smaller ones will still have a role.

I think there’s a lot of pain happening in San Francisco at the same time. I think a lot of matter employees are being laid off. A lot of big tech employees are being laid off. I think there’s two types of goods. There’s absolute goods, like a standard apartment or some food and things like that. And I think the the price of that will stay the same, but then there’s like, positional goods. There’s only like, eight seats in Delta first class. There’s only eight houses where they to buy it, like, on the best road in San Francisco, and the positional goods will just go off the charts.

So if you’re someone who values your success in life by attaining positional goods, like one of the eight houses that everyone wants to be in, good luck. I

In terms of my diversification retirement, I take all the money I make and I buy land. I don’t put in the stock market. I don’t keep it in cash because I think the dollar doesn’t have a good future. don’t buy bonds or anything like that, and I buy land. It could be being British. There’s a famous quote from Winston Churchill, land is the only scarce resource. And I think I’m diversifying on two outcomes. The first outcome is that AI creates like a post economic world where it replaces all big companies and the only thing that’s scarce that’s left is land.

And so AI doing extremely well, land can still be valuable. And then the second is maybe maybe it’s all a bubble and all of tech goes to zero, but land will still be valuable. the land I buy is in Nevada, far away from the tech bubble. It has nail salons and all sorts of things. There’s passive investment. And it’s just diversification for the AI, the various outcomes that will happen with AI. Why Nevada? I think there’s secular trends regarding it being very pro business, population growth.

Three things are true in Nevada. There’s no state income tax, there’s very low property tax, and it has a rising population. That is not true, in my opinion, anywhere else in the US. So if you compare it to Florida, for example, there is no state income tax, but very high property tax.

It’s not sustainable. You can’t have 50,000 people with all the money. I I think actually there could be a revolution in our lifetime. Something has to change.

I’m an optimist. I think that the jobs that will exist in 20 years, we couldn’t even imagine what jobs would exist. Like AI data cleaning, like these companies like Mercour or One. those jobs didn’t even exist five years ago. And I think similarly, AI will create a huge number of jobs, maybe working in air conditioning and data centers and all of that stuff. The problem is there’ll be a shift in the economy and people will have to transition. And I think the government will have to get a lot better at helping people transition.

Absolutely. I think that whether you agree or disagree with what’s going on right now, it’s objective that for tech, the current administration is a lot better. Lina Khan, in my view, is evil. Several companies I invested in had their acquisitions blocked by the kind of Lina Khan style approach. The worst kind of Lina Khan story I heard is there’s like a biotech company that was being acquired by a much larger kind of pharmaceutical company, and Lina Khan’s FTC blocked the acquisition and the drug didn’t get developed.

And to this day, people die a year because of the acquisition being blocked. So I actually think that the kind of tech policies of the last administration were not very good.

I think that inflation every year is just going crazy and it’s just going to get worse. House prices and SF seem to be doubling. Things are not what they used to be. And the only way to stay ahead in this AI world is is to have real assets.

It’s only like, 10 to 20%. It’s very safe.

There’s all sorts of advantages. Like, you don’t have to There’s There’s depreciation and things like that.

No, that’s it. And I just set it and forget it with the land.

I think it depends on the company. With Meta, I think it’s AI driven. It’s clear that they’re spending so much money on their data centers and AI has made their engineering more productive. They need fewer engineers. But maybe with a company like Block, maybe it’s controversial, but I think it’s more about the COVID hiring.

Absolutely. It’s objective. You You don’t need even with do not pay customer support, we’re seeing optimizations. Previously you had to hire like, three people to do the job of one person. now. So we do have like, 10 extra contractors for customer support. We found that maybe even that’s too many. Now they press a button and an agent kind of identifies the issue and pre processes the refund, for example.

All of my best investments have actually been in very competitive markets. Owner as well has dominated a category that’s traditionally very competitive, small business restaurant technology. There’s a reason it’s competitive. The competitive markets tend to be absolutely massive. They tend to have a huge number of customers and that’s why everyone is going for them. Going to the kind of data labeling example, it’s not unusual for large labs to throw these companies million even close to billion contracts. And so I think there’s a reason everyone is excited about it.

I think so. And I think there’s this illusion that the valuations are lower than series a, so it’s less risk. But sometimes the best place to be could actually be investing a billion, where it’s de risked. You can model the cash flows.

I think secondaries are an increasing driver of kind of exits. That’s why it’s helpful to be on the smaller fund size because it kind of opens up a whole new channel. Have you done many secondaries from the fund? We’re We’re doing some now, actually. It’s a lot easier to do a secondary when you’re a friendly pre seed seed investor than if you’re a big firm. If Menlo Ventures sell secondary in a company, the company is dead because the signaling is is huge or any firm. But with a seed or pre seed firm, that’s not necessarily true, and the fund sizes are smaller, so it’s easier to achieve good outcomes with secondary.

So I’m not too worried about it because of the secondaries market, which seems to be more active than ever. How long ago was your first fund? 2020. Should you have done them sooner, do you think, knowing what you know now? Going back to the sharks thing, when people say that the things that are most attractive to the secondary buyers, you never want to sell, but we’re finally selling some now.

Oh, that’s really nice. Thank you.

No, I I think it depends. If it’s like a small part of one stake, and the good thing is these things can be sizable and you only sell a small portion, then there’s not much signaling risk in that. Additionally, it sometimes helps the founders. Oftentimes they’re performing so well, their rounds are so oversubscribed, they want let someone in, and they still have me because I have the rest of my stake, but they can bring in an amazing new name that helps them. Maybe someone strategic.

That’s That’s a great great. think, unfortunately, I’ll make more money from the investing.

How do you feel about that? I think you always have to remember who believes in you and do right by them, whatever it takes. Some of these companies are up 100x, 1000x. I brought them in alongside me, sometimes direct, not even SPV. just like direct, they can invest directly. There’s a huge amount of overlap between do not pay and my fund in terms of LPs, Mark Andreessen is the first believer in both in some ways. So I think you just have to do right by people.

I think there’s advantages for both LPs and also investing and being a founder at the same time. On the founder side, I’ve learned things that I wouldn’t learn had I not invested. That’s help Do Not pay. For example, this whole SEO strategy. And on the investing side, founders love to work with other founders. They hate professional money managers. So I think it actually makes you a better investor. And you see some of the best investors now they’re also founders like Locky Groom or Deleon. One thing I love about tech is you can refer to people by their first names and everyone knows who you’re talking about, like Locky or Deleon.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I I see that a lot.

Definitely bill negotiation. If you phone up the utility company and say you’re going switch to a different Internet, they will by default give you a discount. The Internet barely works sometimes. They don’t credit you properly. So that’s that’s number one. I would also say in flight Wi Fi. We have 100% success rate with inflight flight Wi Fi refunds because it works, but it’s slow and it’s not what they advertise.

Well, Well, now with Starlink, that that will finally be solved. I think do not pay as an ETF on the world’s problems. some problems go up, some problems go down. Fortunately for us, the general trend of problems is up. Do you think chat interface is

It’s good in some areas, terrible in others. I think for the travel use case, it’s terrible. There’s a big debate on X going on about this right now. The reason it works for us is you’re taking unstructured responses and making them structured. When I started Do Not Pay, did a Freedom of Information Act request in the UK for the top 12 reasons why parking tickets are canceled. Poor signage, the parking bay being legally too small, all of the reasons. The reason I did a chatbot is the consumers had no idea which reason to pick.

And they’d pick the wrong reason or they just wouldn’t select what was the best thing to pick. So when I did chat, they could write whatever gibberish they wanted and it would match them to the correct defense. And that was really the the unlock of do not pay.

Like, world experts. I was in my high school. That was my reputation.

Okay, so I don’t want denigrate my country too much. I’ll say two advantages and then one huge disadvantage. One advantage, it’s good to be a big fish in a small pond. Starting out in the UK, it’s it’s kind of less competitive for talent, less competitive for media even. Like, anyone can get on the front page of the Daily Mail with the right story. The media in the US is much more jaded, so it’s a lot more noisy, a lot more competition. And actually, when I was growing up, the very first thing I did was I created iPhone apps.

I built the iPhone app for Pret a Manger, the sandwich chain. What? What? Yeah, I built the official iPhone app for Pret a I actually did it unofficially. I just made it for fun and then ripped off all the the graphics and stuff, and then it eventually became the official app.

So they didn’t realize it was it was a was 14 at the time. They didn’t realize it was a 14 year old behind it, and they were considering taking legal action. But they realized that once there was a 14 year old behind it, it, would be a terrible PR thing for Pratomage to sue a 14 year old. And so they actually invited me to the headquarters, and we made it official app. And that me a very valuable lesson growing up, which is it’s best to ask for forgiveness versus permission.

How much did they pay you for it? I can’t disclose. No. It it was, you know, it was a huge win for me at the time, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t wasn’t material.

amazing. What did your parents say? say? were say? my mother actually, you’re you’re the only tech podcast my mother listens to because she really appreciates your wholesome mother content on LinkedIn. So So she really is a big fan of you. And I’m not just saying that. She’s not in the tech world. She doesn’t really know how to use iPhone or anything like that. She was just worried, as any parent would be. And actually, when I went to meet the CEO of Pret-a-Manger at the headquarters, she was actually worried because I was 14 that maybe it was inappropriate or something.

She said, I want to come with you. I said, no, mom, it’s a business meeting. She said, no, I have to come with you. I don’t want you meeting strangers on your own. So she was more worried about the personal thing. Anyway, going back to the UK, building an iPhone app at that time in the UK was seen as cutting edge, like whiz kid genius style thing. In the US, people are building iPhone apps every day, and that gives you an idea of why it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond.

Second advantage of the UK is that for the idea I was working on, the UK is repressed. They’re perfect target market for do not pay. I tell people in the US about some of the things that go on in the UK they’re shocked. So one example is the concept of average speed cameras. So I tell my friends in the US, if you drive from here to Birmingham, which is a city north of here, for for those who don’t know, too quickly, it’s not about if you go past a speed camera too quickly.

If you get there too quickly, the average speed, they’ll give you a ticket. My US friends are shocked by that. They think that’s like some sort of surveillance state. And it’s true. The UK is handing out tickets, all these fines, all these environmental regulations. It’s just finetopia. So I think for the specific idea, some ideas work better in the UK, and so that’s why I started here. So those are the two positives. One huge negative is the scale of ambition in the US is 100 times bigger.

The most successful companies in the UK are in the tens of billions range, like Revolut and great outcomes like that. In the US, it’s in the trillions, and it’s just an order of magnitude more.

I think you’re right in some ways, and there could be an arbitrage where the leadership lives in San Francisco, but you get talent globally. Deal is a great example of that in some ways. I guess it’s also New York, but San Francisco has such serendipity. You bump into Sam Altman on the street. I’ve seen personally seen Sam Altman on the street. You should

to interview him

And another thing about San Francisco is it’s so boring. All of these people, no one specific, just all of these people, they’re so bored. If you’re just moderately interesting, you can become friends with anyone in San Francisco. It’s less stratified. In London, the rich keep to themselves in their fancy clubs. In San Francisco, you can play pickleball with anyone.

You have to get rid of these ridiculous regulations. I made a mistake of trying personally to invest in a company in Germany. Oh my God. There was like a no notary. I couldn’t I do not pay. I’m an expert in bureaucracy. I didn’t want do it. Did you end up doing it? No, I didn’t. And also, why are they charging VAT on investments in the UK and some investments? How can you charge a sales tax on investments? Who thinks that’s a good idea?

okay?

I think that the AI shift is is extremely real. I thought twelve months ago it was a bubble. Now I don’t think it’s big enough. I think Anthropic will get to a trillion in revenue. I think the value shifting is very real. We’re not in a bubble. That’s what I think.

Why don’t

same? I’m very lucky I do have an investment in Fluidstack. That’s my favorite of the AI infrastructure.

I I would actually say Ali Ansari. I think he’s in a very crowded space, but he is a force of nature in terms of execution. Watch this space. I think in the next twelve to eighteen months, he’s going to be very hyped.

There’s a class at Stanford. It was only 20 people. As I was not I was focused on building my business, not necessarily focused on classes. And it was taught by a billionaire, Pat Hanrahan, who’s the founder of Tableau. Just the fact that you can have billionaire professors teaching classes of 20 people is something that wouldn’t exist anywhere outside of the Bay Area. And I remember working through a problem set, and he was spending thirty minutes with me working through this very elementary problem. And I was thinking, why is he spending his time?

And and I realized it’s all about human connection, and he just wants to kind of meet interesting people. And I think the same is true across the Bay Area, where everyone is just a human, and you can kind of short circuit the kind of business guards that people put on just by having a human connection with them. Kind of aligned, but what’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for you? I have founder. I don’t wanna say too many details because I’m under ultra NDA, but I was a personal investment, one of my earliest investments.

They lost my money. They went on to start an absolutely blockbuster company, and they gifted me the shares in the blockbuster company as if I had been an investor at the same price in in the in the blockbuster one. And I think that’s a very upstanding thing to do. I think I it’s almost a very British thing to do.

I’m I’m not sure. I think I really believe in them. It’s so lame, the reasons people invest. Oftentimes they invest because someone else has invested. Oftentimes that’s like, 75% of the time. But I really believe in them to do great things, and I’m their first believer often.

Definitely. it puts everything into perspective to just be fearless. I’ve I’ve physically seen the Russians. They’ve They’ve come to our house, knocked on the door. That news alert where he was arrested, growing up through all of that, it puts everything in perspective. And so when maybe like there’s a bureaucrat who’s upset that I’m getting too many people out of parking tickets or things, it’s all noise. It doesn’t really matter. Yeah.

I I think definitely Marc Andreessen. What does no one know about

I think he is the most curious of the luminaries. I think he spends an immense amount of time reading on x, and people see this when he’s liking all of the X posts. But I think that speaks to his curiosity. When I met him, he was referencing obscure tweets and things that are part of my do not pay journey. So he really, really, reads a lot about everything.

I think that they’re going to find a cure to a lot of diseases. My grandmother passed away from Alzheimer’s and Alzheimer’s is like, one of the most difficult diseases to crack, and I think AI will hopefully make a big dent in that.