Growing your first 120K Twitter Followers with Romeen Sheth

The people that I'm talking to on Twitter is higher than like quality of DMs on like a LinkedIn or Instagram.

Yeah. Not even close. I think somebody described this well to me, which was like, and I'm gonna butcher this, but it was like, Facebook is where you go to talk about who you were. Instagram's where you go to talk about like what you want people to think of you as. And Twitter's where you really go to talk about like who you actually are. All right, everyone. Today we've got Ramin Shah.

who I've been following on Twitter for a, for a while. And he writes some really good tweet threads, which we're gonna talk about that in a little bit. But first and foremost, he's the president of Metasys Technologies, which is a bootstrapped workforce management advisory firm. That's a mouthful. I'm gonna let him explain what that means in a second. In Atlanta, that does over $50 million plus a year. He also invests a few million bucks a year into startups like Republic and also has a podcast called Square One. Romain, how are you?

Thanks, Eric. I'm good. How are you?

I'm doing well, thanks. So yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit about kind of what your story is first, and then we'll kind of, we'll take the conversation from there.

Yeah, sure. So I've spent the last 10 years kind of building businesses in the, what I like to call is like kind of like information knowledge or information management space. So basically, you know, the easiest way to think about it is on kind of one side, let's say on the left-hand side, people that want access to information, and then on the right-hand side, people that can provide that information. And so that's kind of manifests as itself in marketplace businesses like expert networks, right, where you service hedge funds, consulting firms, etc., that need information. And then we would find, you know, different types of experts that could basically supply that information. It's manifested in like pure enterprise SaaS startups. One of our startups we partnered with Harvard Law, digitized all their case law library, and then built— used machine learning and NLP to build different types of tools on top. So Basically, how can you surface interesting information in a more accessible and digestible way? And then my latest business that I'm running right now that you mentioned, Metasys, where we help companies kind of solve every and any issue related to their non-full-time workforce. So the gig economy and concepts like that have become a lot more familiarized and popularized over the last decade or so. And so we help really large enterprises when they spend, you know, $100, $200, $500 million a year on this type of non-full-time talent, basically think through that. So that can be finding the talent, it can be managing the talent, it can be strategy and advice and counsel, you know, throughout setting up programs to actually, you know, source and manage that talent. So basically anything and everything that has to do, you know, with that type of population base. And then you mentioned I invest a ton. I have a podcast as well. And so, so yeah, I like to, I mean, I like to interface with like super smart founders that hopefully, you know, I can teach them something, but most of the time they teach me something. It's a selfish way to get a lot of R&D, you know, for my business and to get smarter as well. But so yeah, those are a couple of the things that I do.

Yeah, podcasting is a nice hack to just have conversations with interesting people. And then like you find it often carries over into real life because you've had that conversation even for 30 minutes or an hour.

Good deal.

So, um, Metasis, so from what I've read, um, it's— you took the company over, correct?

That's right. Yep.

Got it. So what's the story there?

Yeah, so I, I did a lot of work, as I mentioned, kind of in building these different types of businesses and saw, you know, I saw a pretty big need for this kind of gig economy space, um, 5, 6 years ago, uh, but not the way that we talk about in Silicon Valley and in tech. Right. The way that you talk about it in Silicon Valley and tech is you think of, you know, the Ubers, the DoorDashes, etc., of the world. And that's certainly a portion of the population. But a large part that's not talked about as much is what happens in the enterprise and in the Fortune 500 space. And what often happens in those spaces is they're using a significant amount of contract labor or contingent labor. They're using a significant amount of contract and contingent labor to actually do some pretty strategic things for their businesses. And so I spent a little bit of time at McKinsey also doing consulting. And when I was at McKinsey, I did a lot of M&A work. And what was interesting was when we were doing these kind of large-scale M&A initiatives, a lot of the ways that the companies would integrate is they would actually use very, very large contractor bases. And there were ways for companies to get smart and get information that they didn't natively have in their own employee base. And it was also a way for them to scale up and scale down with demand. And so a lot of these businesses that we were merging were, you know, they were highly seasonal businesses, right? They were payments businesses, et cetera, that didn't have as much predictability around transaction flow. And what was interesting to me from an insight perspective was seeing that a lot of these mergers were happening through contract labor. And you would think differently. You would think this is the most strategic thing that's happening to the company. Of course they would keep this in-house, and they weren't, right? And so So I, um, so that was a really interesting kind of observation, and I saw that kind of consistently across companies, across sectors, etc. As I was leaving McKinsey, I was looking kind of for my next thing to do, and I had found this business, you know, here in Atlanta that was set up in a really interesting way that had a lot of opportunities to scale. But that next level of kind of skill set on how can that business scale, uh, was missing from the equation, right? So I took over the business, and basically we've done kind of what you mentioned at the outset, right?

We've, we've tripled the business over the last couple years.

We scaled it significantly, um, and the business is growing, you know, quite fast. And it's an exciting time in the industry, right? I mean, there's, there's a lot of this kind of, uh, knowledge base that's happening in the enterprise space on, you know, how to use these types of workers. So it's been a ton of fun.

So for you personally right now, um, like you mentioned investing, I guess, how do— what does the workflow look like for you? Like, how do you tie the business in with your investing activities? So for me personally, like The way I look at my— the marketing agency that we have, I'm like, how can we use it as like almost like an investment vehicle where it's like I'm basically like a super angel at the end of the day? So I don't know how you look at it.

Yeah. Yeah. I think all these things are complementary, right? Like the way I like to think about these things is it's really hard to— you know, one way you can kind of frame the story, and I'm not unique by any stretch in this kind of space, but one way you can frame the story is like you're running a business and you're doing a podcast and you're investing and kind of how do you find all the time, right? I think that's a gracious way to frame it. The way I frame is more so like, what are the different pieces that interlock with one another, right? And so I look, I look at a lot of businesses in this space, right? And I'm investing in this space, and it makes a ton of sense because I know about the space. We can add strategic value. You know, there's, there's often opportunities to collaborate, partner, etc. And down the line, you know, that can turn into, that can turn into an investment, right? The way I think about, you know, the podcast and such as well is, is Pretty similar, right? Which is chatting with interesting people and seeing how they're thinking about either their portfolios, either their investors or their founders, and how they're thinking about their businesses. And a lot of that for me is breaking out of my own business forcibly, at least once or twice a week, and getting alternative perspectives. And many of those ideas that I've discussed on my podcast with guests, et cetera, can translate actually pretty organically into our business, and some of them can't, but they They open up the aperture at least for, you know, are we thinking about things the right way? And so I look at kind of all of these activities as overlapped activities and how can they kind of compound upon one another as opposed to being, you know, distinct or separate activities.

Yeah, I think so. Exactly what I'm hearing is everything's interlocked and interconnected. And then the whole ship, the whole rising tide analogy, right? You know, all the boats go up. So interesting. So, you know, I want to talk about the podcast, but I first want to go to Twitter too, because I, you know, when I looked at your Twitter, I mean, there are some threads that you put up that have like 10,000 likes on them, some even higher than that, um, where you're getting pretty good reach. I think you have 120,000 or 130,000 followers or so. So what does Twitter mean to you? And, um, what is your Twitter strategy being that this is a marketing podcast?

Sure, sure. Um, so 2 questions. So what does Twitter mean to me? I mean, I, it's funny because I actually, I had like 1,000 followers a year ago. So this is actually very recent for me. Which I think probably says a couple of things. So one is there's a lot of learnings that are really recent. The second thing is kind of growing audience fast is very plausible, right? Like, that's, that's exactly what kind of I've done in the last year or so. I think Twitter is amazing, right? It's like the town square of the internet. And for the longest time, I was kind of, you know, lurking or kind of passively participating, reading, observing what other people wrote, etc. But I saw a pretty material shift once I kind of inserted myself as being a part of the conversation. Right. It's led to a whole bunch of interesting relationships. I like to write a lot just generally, right? And kind of as a reflection piece on how we run the business or lessons learned or whatever that might be. And I think actually sharing those externally is really positive from a personal perspective because what you, what you end up doing, which I didn't kind of realize as much. So what you end up doing is you're basically passively building your, your brand and your perspective online. And so what you're doing is, you know, if you kind of think of a prototypical way to build a relationship, it's a very one-to-one way to build a relationship, right? And this is kind of a one-to-many way, and there's a latency factor on it, which is, you know, I might write some of these threads or so, and Eric, you might read, you know, a couple of these threads and say, hey, they really resonate with me, so let me reach out to Ramin and let's establish a relationship. And so I think what starts to end up happening— one of my friends has this really good phrase, which is, you know, in life you kind of want to create the honeypot, right? And the honeypot, the idea is basically if you create the honeypot, you know, the bees come to you as opposed to you kind of going out, right? And so That's kind of how I look at Twitter, which is very much so building an online honeypot. There's going to be people that read those threads and think, you know, that's, that's not right, or I have a different perspective, etc. And that's totally fine, right? They're not meant for everybody and anybody. But there's a lot of people, in my experience at least so far, a lot more than fewer, that look at things like that and say, hey, that actually resonates pretty deeply, right? And I think it's really important to kind of put your thoughts out like that in the world. I've put a thread out which is like, You know, these are the 10 themes that I'm looking at, you know, putting money behind and investing. Right. And it pulls a lot of, you know, interesting founders out of the woodwork that may not have found you. Right. And for no other reason than, you know, kind of the serendipity of the world. Right. I mean, these are really strong founders that can raise from whoever they want to raise from. There's a whole bunch of strong kind of operators, founders, etc., that want to invest. And for whatever reason, those like matches don't happen. Right. Because That's kind of the way the world works. And I think if you're active and such on a forum in a place like Twitter, then you start basically creating, you start manifesting a little bit of that serendipity, right? And so that's kind of the way I've thought about it. We can get into some of the learnings too, if that's helpful. But at a conceptual level, really kind of Twitter to me has been like, how do you actually manifest serendipity or meeting folks as opposed to kind of passively hoping that people come across your desk?

I think that's the keyword. I do want to touch upon the learnings in a second, but when I think about, you know, the podcast events, you know, us blogging, you know, all the stuff related to kind of content marketing, right? It is basically creating serendipity at the end of the day. It's creating those touchpoints and, you know, bringing— at least for me, I'm an extroverted introvert, so I don't like going up to people at events. I prefer to just have people come to me. It's just easier that way. It's funny because it's a lot harder in terms of work, but it's It's also, if you look at it as fun, like it makes it easier. So I guess my first question for you would be, um, before we get into Twitter learnings is, you know, how much time are you spending? Cause I'm looking at some of your posts out there. Like I can tell that, um, they're, they're very, you're very thoughtful with how you're doing like a thread. So how long would like an epic thread take you in terms of time commitment?

Yeah. I mean, it used to take me a lot longer because it was less so about the content and it was more so about the practice of writing. Right. So I think there's 2 elements that go into this. One is, you know, being a good writer or being a better writer. And I think that's like you just have to put the reps in. And then the other part is the underlying content. And I'm a really firm believer, like, to make this a sustainable habit for you or to have kind of not just like one thread go viral, to like continually get reach and such, you have to, as much as you write in a compelling way, What you're saying has to be super compelling, right? And I think the only way what you are saying ends up being compelling is if you do interesting things, right? Like, so for me, actually, the content part is not as much because I'm not one of these folks on Twitter that's like, hey, let me, you know, let me curate 10 podcasts or 15 frameworks or this, that, and the other. And there's no knock on that. I mean, that's all fine and well as well. But my approach to this has generally been, what am I actually experiencing in my day-to-day, whether that's lessons from running a company, lessons from investing, so on and so forth? And what are the interesting observations and insights that come to bear? And that should come naturally. That should come from day in and day out, the work that you're putting in, right? Your job is not sitting on Twitter for 8 hours, 10 hours a day. Your job is actually doing something in the real world and then You know, translating that. And then the writing piece of that is you just get kind of better with time. So it used to be, you know, it'd take me like a full day, right, to write like a good thread. And I wouldn't sit down kind of one day and do it, but take me an hour, 2 hours, kind of a couple days, and take me like a week to put something together. Now it takes like an hour, hour and a half or so. And it's typically because I maintain kind of a running list of like observations, ideas, etc., in bullet point format. And then it really kind of like When something triggers that, when some experience triggers that, that's typically the inspiration to say, okay, you know, I kind of had a latent set of thoughts, right? Sometimes they're related, sometimes they're not related. And now I've had a specific experience that's actually prompted this. Now let me actually go, you know, and write. And I think that's the way, like, for anybody listening that's saying, hey, I want to get into Twitter or blogging or any kind of content marketing, um, that I would recommend you really kind of think think hard about both of those pieces, which is how do you become a good communicator, but also how do you become a communicator that's worthy of communicating something?

Well, there you go. That's a, that's a big one. That, that's— everyone remind— everyone rewind that one. Um, so, so what I'm hearing too is, is your Twitter is more or less like a stream of consciousness.

Yeah. And, and I don't want to like— it's not like it's like, hey, there's no thought and like I'm a genius and I just like write these things up. Like it's It's definitely like I sit there and I digest and I try to think about it. I try to write as best as I can. But so stream of consciousness would probably be too generous. But the opposite end of that spectrum is like book report, right? It's like it can't be a stream of consciousness because I don't think it's thoughtful then. But if you're kind of setting out to do a book report, you're not really living that experience, right? You're sitting down and you're researching, et cetera. You're not really living that experience. And so neither of those is really genuine. Right. Or maybe they're both, you know, one is genuine. The stream of consciousness is genuine, but it's maybe it's not worthy of reading. The other one is probably worthy of reading because it's super detailed, thorough, et cetera, but it's not really genuine. Right. And so I think you kind of have to find that balance, which is, you know, what is my genuine perspective? What is my interesting observation, take, et cetera? But what is it in a way in which it's actually genuine? Right. Because I think that's the way you actually sustain. That's how you don't just write 1 thread, 2 threads, you know, 2 blogs, 3 blog posts, et cetera, but how you pump out, you know, 50, 100, 200 over whatever period of time, right. That, that you do that over.

Totally. Yeah. I mean, look, we talk a lot about SEO on, on this podcast, but what I, what I've been kind of advocating for is for people starting out, Twitter is probably better because of discoverability and because it's an open graph. Um, and just like the, I would just say even the quality of DMs, the people that I'm talking to on Twitter is higher than like the quality of DMs on like a LinkedIn or Instagram. Exactly.

Yeah, not even close. I think somebody described this well to me, which was like— and I'm gonna butcher this— but it was like, Facebook is where you go to talk about who you were, Instagram's where you go to talk about like what you want people to think of you as, and Twitter's where you really go to talk about like who you actually are, right?

Yeah.

And like, it's, it's an intellectual social network, as silly as that sounds, compared to the others, because there's like not opportunities to like cleanly put you know, pictures in a discoverable way or this, that, and the other. So it's really like you're kind of left with your thoughts, and there's the good and the bad of that. That's not like, you know, that's not all positive. There's bots and spam and lack of nuance often, and, you know, um, you know, so on and so forth. But if you treat it in the right way, it really is kind of meritocratic, right? Because, you know, there's no barrier to you putting your thoughts out into the world and then people reacting to them, resonating with it however they want to.

Yeah, I just keep remembering, remembering that when Sean Peery, um, Did, uh, he did the, the thread on Clubhouse and that got him on the CNBC and like a whole host of other things. And I think he got like 20,000 or 30,000 followers off of that one. So, um, yeah, yeah, I just think it's, it's fascinating what, what one thread can do for you. So, um, any other Twitter threads?

And what I'd say on that is like, and Sean is a good friend, we went to college together actually, we actually do a lot of investing, our investing together. Um, but the thing, the thing that I think is important about that is you're right, like that one thread, let's say, got Sean onto CNBC, but Sean was always going to get onto CNBC, right? And the reason why, you know, he didn't have that one insight about Clubhouse and that didn't just kind of come to him overnight, that might've been the prompt, you know, but Sean has been thinking interesting things since I've known him in college, right? And so a lot of these things, I think like using these tools, they're not replacement tools or hacks to kind of get to where you want to go, but I think they're accelerators, you know, or augmenters of what you're already doing. And I think if you think of these things as as, as just that, which is they're accelerators, then I think you're thinking about it the right way. They're not replacements, right? You can't just get onto Twitter and come up, you know, and, and, you know, magically that's what's going to give you the insight. It's really— you have to— I think you genuinely have to live an interesting experience, meet interesting people, you know, work really, really hard, and then use those forums to actually accelerate, augment, you know, and communicate, you know, what it is that's, that's going on in I guess let's finish off on Twitter real quick.

So any other lessons that you want to— any other Twitter lessons you want to share before we move on?

Uh, no. I mean, I think, I think if you— I think the summation probably is if you use it the right way, it's like an unbelievable tool. Um, and I, I think the way to use it the right way is like to figure out how you can use it sustainably and, and put your, your kind of own imprint on the world. And if you do that, then like, yeah, it's a, it's a pretty It's a pretty awesome tool.

And I mean, this is kind of related to Twitter because Twitter requires clarity of thought. So you actually had a note on the world's most valuable skill being clarity of thought. So I mean, just listening to you talk, I can tell that you're thoughtful with how you choose your words, right? There's a lot to unpack here. So A, what do you mean by clarity of thought and how do you kind of continue to hone that?

Yeah, I think clarity of thought is like, I think that thread that I wrote, if I remember correctly, was basically speaking To like, you know, calling out, I don't know, like 10 or 15 cognitive distortions I've definitely faced, you know, in my, you know, career and early career. And I notice all the time in junior folks, right? And so we can kind of go into any of those specifically. I think like one, like one example was like all or nothing thinking. It's very— I see that very, very commonly where people will think, you know, literally 100%. If it's not 100%, it's 0%. Right? If it's, if it's not black, it's white, and typically, you know, business operates in the gray. But I think the clarity of thought skill is, is really, really important. One of the most difficult things in business in general is prioritizing and judging things for their relative sets of importance. If you treat everything equivalently, if you put the same level of effort into Everything, you're just not gonna get great output, right? You're just not. And, and even when you, if let's say you're, you have really good judgment and you pick the one thing that matters and you pick that thing, but you don't have the ability to then, you know, go to your team and sequence out, you know, to get this done, we're gonna do step A and then step B and then step C and then step D, right? Or, you know, person 1 is gonna do this, person 2 is gonna do this, person 3 is gonna do this. And that can apply in any context. That can apply like in the agency, Eric, that you have on a kind of small team project. It can apply, you know, for the largest companies that need to command and corral, you know, 100 to 1,000 people to get something done. Right. But if you don't have clarity of thought, I'm not sure how you actually operate with any level of actual impact. Right. Because you can have the best ideas and you can have the best ideas in the world, but it's like the old saying, which is like, You know, the old saying is ideas are meaningless, execution is everything. I would kind of tweak that, which is I think ideas matter a whole heck of a lot, but execution is also everything, right? And so I think you need clarity of thought and clear, clear-minded thinking to get to good ideas, but then also to understand how do you actually do those ideas. Clarity of thought to me means not being, you know, too high or too low, right? In, you know, in business, I think anybody that runs a business Whether it's, you know, their own kind of individual consulting shop or a larger organization. There are times in our business that I think, you know, the whole business is breaking, and there's times that I think, man, there's nothing that's going to stop us to get to $500 million in revenue, sometimes in the same day, right? It's very, very natural when you're operating a business. And so I think you just have to— honing in on clarity of thought, and, and there's so many components to that. It's, you know, part of that is experience, right, in your space or your sector. Part of that is having a good kind of R&D process, which is talking to different people, corralling data points, getting their thoughts, etc., and then, you know, coalescing that and synthesizing it and applying it in a way that makes sense for your environment. Part of that is just your emotional steadiness, right? Not getting too high, not getting too low. But at the end of the day, I think anybody that's kind of worth their while or has done something interesting, you know, the personalities can be different, the emotional You know, the EQ can be different, etc., but they typically have really good clarity of thought. So that's, that's what I was trying to communicate in that one.

Got it. Yeah. And so around clarity of thought, obviously learning's a big piece that goes into that. So I'm just curious for you, like, what actually goes into your learning stack? Like, and you can answer this question anyway. I mean, basically I'm just asking about your learning habits.

Yeah, I read a lot, um, and I read a lot of different things. Um, I read about, you know, I read about politics. I'm I'm a big sports fan. I read about business, of course. I just read a lot, right? And I like, I consume a lot of content and I try to consume more long-form content because I think more and more the competitive advantage in the world is actually critical thought. It's getting past kind of the headlines and the short tweets and the lack of nuance. And I try to read things that are timeless, right? From a principles perspective, because human nature is the same, right? I mean, the facts change, but human nature is the same. I think when you, when you read a lot or you consume a lot of, you know, high-quality content, um, you're just able to connect the dots, right? And, and kind of connecting the dots doesn't come from sitting in an empty room and just reading. Then I think you're, you're too academic. But it's sitting and reading a lot and kind of being with your own thoughts, but then, you know, putting yourself in the game to actually apply some of those principles and concepts to most importantly learn about yourself, right? Because it's, it's not just the knowledge that you consume, but it's the actual application of that knowledge that turns into wisdom, right? And so I think you can consume all the information in the world, but if you don't actually know how you're going to act upon that information, um, and, and the only way you do that candidly is getting in the game, right? I mean, it's— I, I used to think that, you know, when, when folks talked about You know, business, etc. You know, business was so easy to analyze from a spreadsheets and etc. perspective, but business is a collection of people and emotions, least of which, you know, or rather I should say most of which are your own emotions if you're the leader, right? And so understanding how you react in different types of environments and such is super, super important. So yeah, I mean, I think it's consuming a lot of good content, but then actually being in the game to see how do you translate You know, that, that content and that knowledge, you know, into actual application.

Yeah. It's perspective at the end of the day. And you just reminded me, I was like, I was like, damn, what's that one site that has all the long reads? It's longreads.com. And I'm sure you're familiar with it. Um, so.

Great. Great. Yeah, no, I'm not actually, but I'll check it out.

Oh, there you go. Yeah, no, it's, it's got all the, it's the collection of the latest, like long-form reads, but, um, God. So for, I had a good question, but now, now it's actually brought me to the next one. Um, so you talking about, 2022 to 2030 being a Renaissance decade and how you're investing $3 million in 2022. So A, what do you mean by Renaissance decade? And then, um, you know, B, if you want to expand on that, that tweet.

Yeah, well, 2022 has gotten off to, I'd say, less than a Renaissance decade type start. Um, this morning too, in all seriousness. Yeah. Um, you know, the pandemic is obviously ending, but it's still serious. And then of course course, geopolitical tensions with Ukraine and Russia. And so there's very real things going on in the world. So my heart goes out to all the folks that are affected. When I wrote that thread, and I still believe it from a more macro perspective, basically what I was trying to communicate was we were coming off a hopefully, call it once in a lifetime type moment with the pandemic. And there was a really good tweetstorm that somebody wrote You know, this past week, which is basically, you know, you can segment businesses into different types of ways. There were some businesses that got, you know, one sort of demand shock. There were some that, you know, COVID truly pulled forward demand. Right. And, you know, this was the trend and the trajectory these businesses were going on anyways. And then there were some that were completely, you know, kind of head fakes. And I think the interesting thing, you know, when I, when I said Renaissance decade, what I really meant by that was If you think of the Renaissance period, it was just a period of like Cambrian explosion in creativity and innovation and just newness, right? And I think the way that you get that in the modern world, because it's so difficult to break free from inertia, is when you have just a really sharp object that kind of changes the contours of the world. And we had that with COVID right? And so You know, with, with kind of that change that's come into play, I think there's all sorts of impacts, and we're obviously seeing them in things like education and healthcare and cybersecurity and enterprise cloud and crypto, you know, and so on and so forth, right? And so I think we're going to see a dramatic amount of change, you know, over the next 10 years, which makes it really, really interesting and exciting from an investment perspective. I think the other thing that happens when you have these types of you know, when you have these types of events is you also have to separate a little bit what was already happening, you know, in the world and what was the trajectory the world was going on, and then what's happening because of this event, right? But I think if you look forth at what was already happening in the world, you know, technology is becoming more and more of a mainstay of our conversations. It used to be a cottage industry, used to be a niche industry. Venture capital used to be a cottage and niche industry, right? It's becoming more and more institutionalized. What's happening in venture capital right now is actually what happened in private equity And investment banking, you know, 15, 20 years ago, right? And with that comes a lot of grift, and there will be a lot of waste and excess and so on and so forth. But when you marshal that number of smart people focused in the same direction, you marshal that amount of capital, right? Interesting things happen, right? And if you look at the market cap, you know, of the S&P 500 and you compare that with, you know, all the unicorns in the world, all of crypto, you know, I'm sure the stat is a little bit different now because crypto and, and kind of some of these late-stage companies are definitely overvalued. But there was a stat I was reading kind of a month or two ago that I think I'd put out on Twitter, which was if you add up the market cap of all of crypto and all of the world's unicorns, it was less than Microsoft and Apple, right? And to me, that's like the most bullish stat possible, right? Like, if you're telling me that like all of the world's, you know, billion-dollar companies on paper, right, at this current moment in time Plus all of cryptocurrency is smaller than the 2 largest tech companies in the world in kind of 2022 terms. I'm not sure how you can't be bullish, you know, on how some of these companies look like in 2030, 2040, 2050, and beyond. That's not to say by any stretch— that's actually not to— and I think it's important to make this distinction— that's not to say that there's any specific insight there on valuation. Right. There's not to say there's any specific insight there on, you know, what's going to happen in the world geopolitically or with inflation or kind of all these other kind of different, different things. But I think the comment that it's basically making is, you know, there are always diamonds in the rough. And right now, I think we've gotten kind of the rough start to the decade, but there's lots and lots of diamonds. And so I think if you're investing, I think if you're thoughtful and you're, again, you're in the game, right, which I keep coming back to because I think it's such an important concept of not being on the sidelines but being in the game. I think it's hard not to be excited about finding really interesting businesses and opportunities over the next decade.

Oh, that's a good follow-up question. So what are you— what are kind of the opportunities that you're investing into right now? What are you most excited about personally?

Yeah, I mean, I have to say, the more I read about and learn about crypto, the more I get kind of pulled down this rabbit hole. I think we've seen kind of, you know, a lot of geopolitical events You know, in whether it's been in Canada, in the U.S., you know, etc. Obviously, what's happening on with Russia and Ukraine, where it really starts to make sense. You know, what's the value of some of these cryptocurrency projects? I think there's a lot of stuff, like a lot of NFTs, etc., that are going to go to zero. There's no utility. There's a lot of pump and dump, right? There's a lot of wash trading. So, you know, regulation needs to catch up. Sophistication needs to catch up. A lot of this is kind of buyer beware. But the underlying premise of what you know, crypto solves for, which is really trust through decentralization as opposed to through centralized institutions, is just really, really powerful. I mean, it's a powerful technical breakthrough, but it's really a powerful— it's more than that. It's a powerful philosophical breakthrough. Right. And so I'm really interested in learning. I'm not an expert by any stretch, and I'm learning kind of every single day, but I'm just really interested in a lot of the different types of crypto projects that are coming out. And then separately, I mean, You know, kind of back to that stat that I put out, like, I'm super excited by vertical software, right? Like software that's going into kind of small and medium-sized business spaces where there's just not a good solution. A lot of really good tech that we use in kind of startups in Silicon Valley, etc., is good horizontal software. But I've been more so looking for like vertical software, like software that just applies to a given industry and it meets the use cases of a given industry. Right? And it's basic, basic blocking and tackling, whether it's like your CRM, you know, email automation, whatever it is. But, you know, a tool like HubSpot is just not going to make sense, right? Because for an architecture firm, there's all sorts of, you know, specific things, or professional services firm, there's all sorts of specific things. So I've seen a bunch of, um, a bunch of vertical software I'm really interested in. And then I'm, I'm Indian by descent, um, but I'm just super bullish on India and what's going on in India. I've invested in a of Indian companies. You know, fortunately, many of them have done really well, um, and not, you know, just on paper, but these businesses are actually like very, very much so growing. And I think India has just seen this very large, you know, kind of inflection point and transformation over the last 5 years. Uh, we can get into some of the details of that if that's interesting for folks. That's probably a separate conversation, but, um, there's just a whole bunch of interesting activity that really has a shot at being sustained activity. Right. And so, um, so yeah, I, I mean, I'm excited by a lot of themes. I think actually what I try to do as an angel is not have too many top-down theses and actually have more of a bottoms-up kind of view on the world, right? It's, it's really not my job to come up with the next 100 interesting ideas, but it's to find the founders that are working on those next 100 interesting ideas. But, um, I'm super bullish across like a lot of different, a lot of different areas right now.

You know, one of my friends, um, he's, he's an angel. He also, you know, right now he's like invested into commodities. We're going into this, who knows what's going to happen long-term with inflation. So I was just asking him, I was like, obviously we know Warren Buffett reads around 5, 6 hours a day or so. I was like, so how many hours are you reading per day right now? He's like, around 4, 5-ish or so. So you're operating right now, you've got other stuff that you're cooking up. How many hours do you think you're averaging per day?

Oh man. Well, I'm certainly not in the league of somebody like Warren Buffett where I can spend that much time reading or I'm smart enough to put the dots together. I try to spend like an hour a day on average, and that's not an hour every single day. I don't think that's realistic, but some days it's 2 hours, 3 hours, some days it's half an hour, but I try to average like an hour or so a day. Naval had a really good tweet on this. I think it was a couple years ago, which was basically like, again, I'm going to butcher this, Maybe we can find it, but it was something to the tune of like, if you read like 10 minutes a day or something, you were already in the like the top 1% of the world, right? And it surprised me because it was just like the barrier is so, so low.

Yep.

And I think that just becomes like all the more important in a world in which we're so affected and trained by short-term information, right? Short-term information and content is coming at you from every single direction. And so I think having the ability to curate Kind of a good information diet. I pulled up Longreads actually while you were, um, uh, while, while you pointed it out and it looks really interesting. I'm gonna dig into it more, but I think finding like really good content like this and just spending the consistent time to read, um, is, is so important, right?

It compounds. Yeah.

Yeah. It compounds. Yeah. It, it totally compounds.

Got it. All right. Um, and so 2 final questions from my side. Favorite business book?

Favorite business book? I really like Clay Christensen, and so Innovator's Dilemma was kind of my favorite business book for a long time. But I think a more important book that he wrote, you know, maybe not in terms of contribution to the world of business, but, you know, just to kind of human psychology, is How to Measure Your Life.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that book is, if folks haven't read it, I highly recommend reading it. Christensen takes, you know, kind of a very interesting perspective of just, you know, being around incredibly sophisticated and well-accomplished people on paper and in profession by any stretch of life, but also many of those people being terribly miserable and unhappy. And so his whole kind of premise of the book is, you know, what are the different ways, what are the different tools, you know, frameworks, um, I I cringe a little bit in saying frameworks because I think there's too much conversation around frameworks and not enough around action and actually applying things. But it has some good frameworks. But more importantly, it has really good tools, I think, to really understand your own personal psychology. And ultimately, how are you going to measure your life, right? The title of the book, right? And so that's a great one. I love that one.

You know, I was trying to shortcut that one because like, you know, I think the general premise around it is just how much impact you're gonna have around people around you. But like the way you just explained it makes me I'm going to add to cart after this. So, you know.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's cool because it's like, I don't know, Eric, like some people don't really, like, don't really care about how much impact they have around others. And that's okay, right? Like, I think it's similar to when you see a lot of the advice that's like, you know, how obsessed we are around like founder culture. So like, you know, a lot of the great companies got built because There were number 2s and number 7s and number 57s and 100s, etc., that were super awesome and, you know, did what they needed to do as number 57 at the company. And, you know, those people might not have actually really had a great life for— forget the success part, but just from an enjoyment part, fulfillment part, whatever, quality of life part, if they were number 1s, right? And so But we kind of have this culture thesis of like, you gotta be number one, right? Like the founder gets the glory, right? And so I think it's a really important book to read earlier or sooner rather than later in your life, because I think answering that question earlier rather than later, it just gets you on the right track, right? And it gets you— there's another book that I really like that I read recently. It's called Wanting by Luke Burgess. It's all about memetic Mm. And the concept of mimetic desires is basically a lot of the things that we, we want in the world actually have nothing to do with what we intrinsically want. We want it because we see somebody else has it, right? So, you know what, you know, um, to use your example earlier, if I see a friend on CNBC, maybe I want to be on CNBC. Well, it's not really that I want to be on CNBC, but I kind of want that because I've seen somebody that I know that's on CNBC.

Right?

Or somebody that's written a book, or somebody that's raised a lot of money, or somebody that's done X, Y, and Z, or whatever it might be, right? And so, um, the, the book is really good because unlike most kind of books, you know, most books would kind of say, well, here's the secret sauce, here's the answer around how you don't have any mimetic desires. That's actually not the premise of the book at all. The premise of the book is that it's supernatural, it's superhuman, you can't get rid of mimetic desires. But here are the ways to actually be self-aware that you're having a mimetic desire, right? So I think Wanting and How to Measure Your Life are just great. I can't recommend them enough. In fact, I periodically reread them to remind myself, you know, of those concepts.

Oh, they're pretty evergreen. Okay, cool. What is your favorite— could be business or personal tool?

Yeah, this is totally going to be a shout out to like a product that I've been using for like 3 months or so. So TBD on whether this answer holds in a year. Um, but I just got an Oura ring recently and I, I love it. Um, and I used to kind of be of the belief that like, if you're not getting good sleep, like, or if you feel shitty in the morning, then you're not getting good sleep. Like, why do you need a ring or why do you need something to actually tell you that?

Yeah.

And I was thinking again, kind of back to our earlier point on clarity of thought, I was thinking kind of all or nothing thinking. Um, but Oura has just been so cool to see like You know, if I eat at a certain point in time, what does that do for my energy? How do I feel the next day? And, and I, I mean less so as like productivity hack and how am I my most energetic, et cetera, but I just mean like, how do you feel better and how are you healthy? Right. And so the Oura Ring has been amazing. There's a couple other, you know, tools I've gotten like really into, like just like fitness and like metabolic age and stuff like lately. And again, less from a place of like, I wanna work out and be like super jacked, but more from a place of like, I just want to be really healthy, uh, and know like what's in my body. And so the, the latest probably flavor of the month is the, is the Oura Ring.

Got it. I love that. I combine my Oura with my, my Eight Sleep and it's like a nice combination because you, you have double analytics.

Um, yeah, yeah.

So yeah, it's great. Um, cool, man. So Romain, this has been great. What's the best way for, for people to find you online?

Thanks, Eric. This has been fun. You can just follow me on Twitter. I'm @romainshep. It's the first name and last name. And that's typically where I hang out on the internet.

All right, everyone check him out. Ramin, we're going to do another one for sure if you're down in the future, talk more about investing stuff. And thanks so much for doing this.

Awesome. Thanks, Eric. Appreciate it.

When you're going to launch a product, right, really you're, you're constantly iterating, you're constantly testing. You don't want to launch to a large audience and have a bunch of things broken. And I think that's kind of what's broken in the space right now. It's really iterating, testing, iterating, testing, collecting feedback, and just constantly doing the same thing over and over and over. And that's what it is.