His Last Startup Sold For $45 Million - Interview with Golden CEO Jude Gomila | The Visionary Show

I'm Jaren Lucas, and with me today is Jude Gomila, who's the CEO and founder of Golden, the world's first self-constructing knowledge database built by artificial and human intelligence. Jude was previously president and co-founder of HazeApp, which was backed by Union Square Ventures and Y Combinator, and it sold to Fiverr for $45 million in 2016. He has also made over 200 angel investments into startups. Jude, thanks for being here.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

So Jude, you and I were chatting before and I am very excited about this one. I mean, you really cover an entire background of successful startups, how to run a company operationally all the way to investing in startups. And so where I think we might want to start today is really on the trends that you're seeing in Silicon Valley right now and maybe areas that entrepreneurs might want to look at being in.

Absolutely. So, you know, I think there's quite a few trends right now. We're at, I guess, an end of a particular phase of Silicon Valley. So I got here more than 10 years ago and switched over from London over in 2008. And there was a certain— even that was the end of a different phase of, you know, pre— the pre kind of 2000 and 1999 run. Um, and there were many companies that were actually built from that 2006-2007, uh, run. And, you know, back— if we think back then, people, people being amazed, you know, when companies were paying up $1.5 billion or $1 billion, you know, Instagram was being bought and This was a very different age where, you know, we had to pay money to send a text message. I remember having to pay money to do— to send a text message, to send a tweet. So, you know, in order to do a tweet, I had to spend money. And now we're in an age where seemingly many people can start the funds. You can possibly build a scalable company from anywhere in the world. Um, there are, you know, tons of accelerators that popped up everywhere specializing and verticalizing. We've seen, you know, people that went through the accelerators became, you know, went on to run the accelerators and then went on to go on to found other companies. And we saw many billion-dollar exits come out of accelerators like Y Combinator. Um, and we've seen this cycle go back around again. So I think in 2019, we're, we're a really interesting place now where Silicon Valley has become fairly commercialized in, in some respects and, and kind of distributed. Like, the kind of idea of it is, is now everywhere. It's not just in the Bay Area. Um, every— everywhere seemingly you could possibly build a startup now, and all the tools seem in place for maybe the world to become, become the kind of startup village. Um, And that kind of also got accelerated by the crypto movement as well. And the energy that went into that seemed, you know, out the back of it, even though we're in a slight kind of crypto lull, has gone back into the entrepreneurial spirit of wanting to build lots of projects and opened up the kind of eyes to everybody of, hey, you could take an alternative path in your career and go build something.

So that's—

the main opener, I think, of, you know, is everywhere going to be like the Bay Area in terms of the ability to make a company? Could we have unicorns coming from every single place on the globe?

Yeah, well, I think you make a good point too there, which is 10 years ago it almost seemed like you— the challenge was figuring out what you could build technically. And now it almost seems like anything possible. And the real challenge, I think, a lot of times is actually picking an idea and sticking with it?

Yeah, there's a lot of variety now. So the tooling has definitely improved. So before, you know, you had to run payroll manually and had to be involved in a lot of processes of just running a company. So your percentage time between building the core competency and the special thing you were trying to make and the rest of running a company, the balance was not optimal. And now things have become a lot more automated. You know, places like cap table, you couldn't access your cap table 10 years ago. You had to go via the lawyers. So now you can just log into Carta or log into, you know, your cap table provider or set autopilot on your payroll or have a bank like Mercury and have that bank like do automatic processes for you. You know, I think if we look at all the tooling, the tooling is a major part of the efficiency of being able to run a company without having to worry about remembering every single legal rule and every single thing that you have to do at different times while you're still trying to build the core product. And that at least, that allows maybe people to be a little bit more creative. At the same time, there's some potential magic that's disappeared in some directions that, um, you know, I've seen, um, this kind of Wall Street-ification of, of some of Silicon Valley. Like, people have seen the money and said, okay, I'm gonna go move there and take part in that, take part in the money side rather than take part in the engineering side and take part in the building side. So that's led to certain downsides as well. Um, and then obviously prices have gone up massively for living. For everybody in that area. And I think around the globe as well, as things have become more expensive. So these dynamics are all changing the background all the time, are changing the way that companies are being built. And it still leads to— I mean, price rises lead to people wanting to go more remote now and build companies in different places, and maybe even going full circle to where they originally came from. There was a lot of movement from Europe into the Valley 10 years ago, and that visas became really difficult maybe 3, 4 years ago. So that, that's kind of cut off some of the supply, and you get this kind of potential reverse brain drain occurring, or the brain drain is not happening so much. It's different, different movement of people. And then the capital moved as well. So there was a lot of cross-connection between Um, Asia and, and, and San Francisco capital-wise. And then there was a lot of more distributed capital. Um, so a lot of operators became, have become, um, investors as well. And a lot of people set up very small funds, micro funds, you know, $1 to $5 million type funds. And, um, that's made capital a lot more distributed, at least at this kind of, in this kind of special network of, of technology people and the sheer scale of it as well. You know, there weren't as many, you know, in my batch in Y Combinator, there were something like 10 to 12 companies. And now the batch size is 250 companies. So there's massive scale in changing through various different scale, you know, 10x of scale. There's lots of different effects that start happening. You know, a sense of community changes. into more, oh, this is not a community necessarily anymore. This is just it happening. And yeah, so there's lots of interesting changes that have occurred that have changed maybe the way you build companies now and the opportunities around building a company.

Yeah, definitely. I'm curious how important you found the Y Combinator experience to be for you and if you Do you feel that it's something that entrepreneurs should really consider if they're on the fence about it?

Yeah, for me it was amazing. It was very transformational. So to be next to a group of very motivated and creative people, motivated in a sense of building a business and also very scrappy in trying out distribution mechanisms that no one thought was possible. And then watching some of the unicorns kind of take off like Airbnb and see Dropbox at 6 people. And we had an office, we had a desk in Dropbox for free. That was very nice of Drew to give us that for a little bit of time. And watching these teams of 3, 4, 5 people become unicorns and have massive success was quite exciting. And then the learnings in the ecosystem, And then, you know, learning how to be— to invest in companies by seeing so many different examples of real startups and which ones that are failing and ones that become zombies and ones that become unicorns or do somewhere in between. And I think now, I mean, I would definitely highly recommend going through the program if you can. It's tough to necessarily get in, and possibly there are more alternatives around the world now. Some of the verticalized like IndieBio and Techstars and— or Techstars is not verticalized so much, but Yeah, so there are different alternatives now, and maybe the access to capital, if you've got something interesting, is easier. And the learning is out there. There's a lot of, there's a lot of playbooks out there to read about. And, and the geocentricity around, you know, the Bay Area is not necessarily once what it was. Some argue it still is, that it's absolutely essential that you go through And some argue that it's, it's, it's not, not the real thing anymore. So yeah, the, the program is amazing and the community is, you know, there's just very unique people inside there and it's changed a lot as well. It's gone through a lot of different dynamics change— changes.

Yeah, definitely. So on that note, you know, you're kind of in the center of things there. What are some of the trends that you're seeing in terms of general applications that companies are focusing on that you find to be most interesting right now? And especially for entrepreneurs who are listening to this and maybe interested in starting a tech company right now, where would you kind of guide people to focus?

I think I'd guide them to focus not necessarily on a market, but to focus on what they enjoy and to figure out what are they good at. What are the special skills that they have that no one else has? It might be design, it might be front-end engineering, it might be that they're really good at optimizing endpoints, or, you know, they're very creative on schemas. Or they're really good at UI, or they're good at distribution, and somehow they can always hack distribution. So figuring out what they're good at and what they have that's special, and maybe pairing that with what they think is meaningful. And choosing meaningfulness is tricky necessarily on your first startup because you're just trying to get going. You're trying to learn the ropes. And if you maybe pick something meaningful and you're not fully ready for it, maybe you'll mess it up due to execution problems, not necessarily the idea. Or the market that you're in. So I think picking something that's easy to make a business out of it first is a good idea to get like a win behind you and to start understanding going through scaling. And doing that quickly is important and not waiting for people to do it for you. You're gonna have to make it yourself. There's lots of interesting markets. So there's various waves you can jump behind and it does kind of relate to, you You got to pick the wave that you really want to ride. So a lot of people went in recently to ride a crypto and blockchain wave. And there are many carcasses inside that area and not necessarily— and some people that got some reasonable money out of various different ICOs along the way. So if you were going to go into that, for example, you would really need to look at what's happened in the space and be like, how am I going to make this different? How are we going to not play the same playbook that everybody else did? AI is pretty interesting. And, you know, just picking AI because it's a hot buzzword is a waste of time. But there are many things that we could maybe apply automation to. I mean, automation in general is, is, is a big area, and people are trying to automate everything from planes to trucks to imaging to background checks. So automation, thinking through automation is a good area to be in. And biology, I mean, if you have a biotech background, then that's now a great place to be. And before, there was a big shift as well from your kind of classic East Coast biotech companies to more using software and systems and marketing and distribution engines to produce biotech companies. So bio is an interesting place. And if we look at where the spending is going, you know, despite the spending is increasing a lot for, you know, real estate, biotechnology, healthcare spending, these things, people will spend unlimited amounts of money to keep themselves in great condition. And there are certain trends where the economics, it you know, show that, you know, it's worth going in that area. And also, it's more fundamentally, it's just a super exciting space to be in because there's so much discovery occurring. So biology is going through a rapid discovery phase. It still is. I remember blogging about this in 2012 about biotech heading to the cloud, and it happened. And we ended up with all these interesting unicorns and software companies like Benchling and Ginkgo Bioworks and all this amazing stuff that came out of it. So that was a great— that is a great area to be in. And then there's microbiome and gut health and stem cell technologies. And then we've seen this revolution in agriculture and food. So we know food is pretty messed up, but it's one of the most important things we do with our bodies. And food is very linked to healthcare. So food itself, it's going through rapid changes. There's various different pressures from— there's always a financial pressure and economic pressure of efficiency, but there's also all these externalities and, you know, the environment and the ethics of having animals in pens for our food and stuff. So I think food itself is a great one to think through. And then also programming the brain. So the brain education, like, you know, we still spend most— a lot of our time of our life in schools and being taught and going to university and then trying to keep ourselves trained up. So the software— well, programming the brain is another way to call it. That is a really cool area, I think, still. And you're seeing some really cool stuff coming out of that area. Financial technology seems to be a lot of re-engineering to occur there. And even from like a non-crypto perspective. And then there's also quantum stuff. Quantum stuff is kind of interesting in that it's probably going to be a huge area. You probably need some specialism in it maybe to get into it. So I think really thinking what aren't, you know, thinking of verticals that aren't necessarily also what we've just talked about. Space is interesting.

Yeah, although I will say you just gave the greatest top 10 list there is right now, and I'm gonna throw that up on Twitter after the show.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think those are some of the exciting spaces, and maybe we can abstract it to other kinds of dimensions of thinking in that what is going to make— Elon Musk talks about this stuff about this exciting future. I buy into that. Like, what will make an exciting future? And what will make a sustainable future in order to make it exciting in the first place? Because you could have an exciting future that, you know, is over in a millisecond, right? It's just like a flash of light and it's over in a millisecond. But if you want to have a repeatable, exciting future, sustainable, exciting future, what is it that you need to have in the ecosystem of companies and technologies to get that done? So stuff like Sandbox VR is at the kind of exciting end of like play and simulation. And on the other stuff, you've got like going up into space is pretty exciting and very tangible and physical and real. Or, you know, customizing your body with CRISPR is pretty exciting and risky. So anything with risk, I think risk is an interesting one to say, where is there an area of high risk and how could I make that low risk? And not expecting, not expecting things to be incremental, like saying, okay, we're boom, we're going to go do supersonic jets because we're sick of going at 600 miles per hour and we want to go, we want to go Mach 5 or we want to go Mach 10. And making things electric is another good theme. If it's previously been non-electric, trying to find a way to an electric future is a good thing.

You know what I'm waiting to go electric, and I might just go start this company because I'm so annoyed with this myself, is every device that landscapers use— dust blowers, lawn mowers.

Sure.

I— it's only when I— since I set up my, my studio in my house, and, you know, I'm out here recording, and unfortunately I have an omnidirectional microphone, which means it picks up everything from all directions. And I realized that at least twice a day for about 45 minutes, there's some lawnmower or noisy effing device that goes off from a landscaper. And so that— it's interesting you say that because that's one thing that I'm just waiting to go electric.

Yeah, and I think that's a good place to start, by the way, when you come up with something that annoys you and annoys you a lot and almost like to an irrational point where your competition is not necessarily annoyed as much as you are. And if you're more annoyed than they are, maybe you would build a better product. And maybe if— and there's different ways to do it. You could say, okay, I'm gonna build better noise canceling, active noise canceling that I can install in my house for, you know, people that do podcasts. Or you could go in this kind of specialist music hardware direction, or you could do it in software and say, well, we're gonna record We're going to record it and it's going to have the sound on it, but I'm going to remove it. So we're going to do, we're going to do a better codec to remove, um, noise in the back— background.

Um, you know what I like about that solution is it doesn't require government regulation to make it happen. Because I think that's the biggest challenge with moving, uh, a lot of people over to electric is ultimately it is, it's going to take a lot of time. People need to go buy new equipment and And so always thinking about the software route might be a really good piece of advice for people listening.

Yeah, thinking about a route that— I mean, hardware is difficult. And thinking about— I think it's about thinking about all the different solutions to the problem, right? And thinking it through of like, hey, we have this problem, where could I solve it? And kind of following the story, the timeline of the things that move around. And in this case, it's some kind of pressure wave. Well, it starts with this engine moving around and the strimmer moving around, and then it cuts the blades of grass, and you've got this kind of air pressure wave heading towards you, and then it's hitting your ear and it's hitting the microphone, and then it's getting encoded. And then this file that has the issue encoded is then going across the internet or it's being streamed. And like tracing down that signal in a funnel of time and thinking like, where are the different solutions that could catch the problem? And sometimes there are different different solutions that can be much easier to create or much easier to distribute. And hopefully you get both at the same time. So you got to think through the distribution and you got to think through the regulation or blockers. And that regulation can sometimes be a really good thing if it's highly regulated but you can get through, then maybe you can stop all your competition. But you got to think through the dynamics of these different solutions. And a lot of people just jump into solving a problem. And don't— like Juicero is one of these funny case studies where they're solving a problem in a really extreme way, but was that really a problem in the first place? Was it difficult to make a juice drink? I don't think so. So it's kind of solving the wrong problem, solving at the wrong place. And that's another kind of principle. I think collecting the principles is important of like what's gonna work. Otherwise, everything is left to kind of luck and spinning the dice each time you try a company.

Speaking of principles, I was listening to a mentor session that Ray Dalio gave to P. Diddy today, and very interesting advice that, you know, I think you were kind of hinting at as well is When you're looking at a problem, look at it from all perspectives. And so, what that means is, I think he has a term, something like extreme openness. And it's this idea that have a strong opinion, but for as strong as you are about that opinion, be equally as strong as trying to disprove it as possible. And so, when you come in with an idea, kind of like you were saying, Don't just be set on that one solution. Also look at all other possible solutions. Is there one that's quicker, cheaper? This has certainly been a mistake I made in my early entrepreneurial career where I wanted to build things that were very complex, almost for the heck of it. I don't know. I haven't psychoanalyzed that one enough, but usually there's a simple solution that you can come to and And really still solve people's problems in the way you wanted to. And so, I think that that's really important advice to be giving entrepreneurs right now, which is really think through how you're solving the problem. This is something that has really disappointed me in the blockchain space personally, is people are constantly trying to fit a solution into a problem and they actually don't What my biggest problem with this last cycle was just the greed, and so people weren't really thinking about solving the problem; they were just thinking about how do you make money. And and I think I personally meet a lot of entrepreneurs who come from a finance background, and that's one of the the biggest kind of mental things that they need to get over a lot of times is is this idea of thinking in terms of money and. And like, what's in it for me? And moving on to an extreme form of helping people. You said something before we got onto the call, which is that you're not trying to make a billion dollars, you're trying to have a billion-dollar impact. And I so vibe with that because if you really think about what our purpose here on Earth is, I have come to the belief that everyone's purpose is fundamentally to help others. And so when I'm thinking about starting a company lately, I'm always thinking about it from the standpoint of it's not about getting customers, it's about finding people I can help so that they can then go help others and kind of creating that chain reaction of help that makes the world better.

Yeah, I think the impact is what's more important really. And some people accumulate. I mean, you can do it with capital for sure. You can have large impact. That's why I said billion-dollar impact rather than high impact, because there's a big difference between like high impact and billion-dollar scale impact. So, so I think on, on that, thinking through, you know, back to that money question, back to the incentives. So thinking through your own incentives of what, what did you come here to do? And coming back to some of that, the principles part, like to have, you know, try to collect some principles around what you're doing here and be willing to trade them, upgrade them, change them if they're wrong. They might be inconsistent and you might have to even float with it being inconsistent for a while because you might want to keep both, but they may be opposed to each other. Um, so you've got to figure out which one you're going to keep long run. And then reading other people's systems of principles and understanding that Um, and yeah, being open to the data coming in because the data, the, the, the stuff, the data coming in are arguments and, and just raw data, um, facts or non-facts, claims, false claims, um, proofs and, and falsehoods. So these, these things coming in, you've got to keep a really open mind for models that may be wrong or right and trying to keep a lot of them in your collection. So kind of like collecting these different things. and maybe try and establish some commonality amongst them. And it's, it's funny because if you look at conspiracy theorists, sometimes they get a collection of these claims wrong and they end up getting the whole thing wrong, and they interlink all the conspiracy theories because they got— they started to get some of these things wrong in their brain. And so I think coming back, if you can come back to math or physics and or biology, that's a great grounding. So if you come back to nature and reality, uh, what they used to call maybe natural philosophy, and just have that as your key, as your grounding, then everything else will kind of fit into place. Um, and, and that, that's what runs the universe that we're in. So that's a great grounding to have, and that, that's the grounding that I, I like to try and chase. Um, and it's hard and it's difficult, and it's sometimes extremely counterintuitive with the way our brains are wired for survival. So battling that is always a fun one.

Yeah, I'd like to transition the topic a little bit to something else we were discussing before we got on the air, which is thinking about, you know, okay, so you have an idea, you've started a company, maybe you've raised some capital, you're building a product. How do you think about actually creating sales and getting your product into the market?

Sure. And so I think there are lots of different models here. So we could start with one of the dimensions, which might be, you know, the ACV of the sale, as in the average kind of per year value of this sale. Is it, is this a $100 per year type sale or is this a $1,000 per year type sale or $10K? or $100K or $1 million or $10 million, or in some cases $100 million. So you gotta architect possibly where you're gonna be on the spectrum. And you may not know, 'cause this is gonna dictate your distribution strategies, or it might be that you figured out a distribution strategy and now you've gotta find out the product to efficiently attach to that distribution strategy. So I'll give you an example. If you are making calm.com, And I'm not sure how much they charge for this meditate— for the meditation app, but let's just say it's $50 per year, $100 per year. You can't get on the phone to have a sales phone call to convince one person to get the app because the time, obviously the cost of that time, the CAC is gonna outweigh the LTV, as in lifetime value of that customer. So that distribution mechanism has to be through something that can scale without someone getting on the phone or sending out direct mail. It's going to have to be through an app store or word of mouth, something very cheap. So sometimes people discover distribution mechanisms with their products, or sometimes the product becomes a distribution mechanism or attaches itself to natural distribution mechanisms, and they dictate some of the cost of the user acquisitions, and that kind of dictates some of the prices that you're going to sell it for. Now, if you're aware of some of these dynamics, you could try and architect it and say, Well, I want to sell a service that's going to be $100,000 per year to a company. And therefore I can have salespeople make phone calls because this is $100,000 per year minimum contract. So I think starting to think about this in terms of the constraints of your interests, of what you're interested in building, what you're good at building, what you end up building, and then even trying to attach that, the whole product market fit problem. Ends up getting attached a lot of the times to distribution problems. And those distribution problems end up getting attached to certain economics and unit economics of CAC and LTV, which come back around to the product. So there's actually this little loop because the LTV that, you know, how much you can make over the year is linked to the product and what you built. So you got to kind of see the full picture and run through and you can change things. You can be like, okay, it's not working. We can't buy customers cheap enough. Okay, well, can you increase the prices? Can you change the product to demand those kind of prices? Or you can say, yeah, we got this massive distribution opportunity. Let's connect it into something that many people can convert on. So sometimes there's a mismatch as well. The distribution might not match the kind of customers you want to have necessarily. So there's a playoff in terms of opportunities and how you wanna architect it and what you wanna build. And sometimes people get it right by intuition. They just end up building it correctly, right? But I think if you can understand some of the dynamics, it helps you architect that and dictate that kind of sales strategy.

Building it right is so crucial. The most important aspect of getting to rapid growth is word of mouth. So if you can build a product that people are talking about and they love it so much, they get their friends and they get their friends without you even asking for it. That's true word of mouth. Before that comes referrals, and referrals are kind of like the half step up to that. If people like it enough and you give them a referral incentive and you're kind of pushing them to do it, That also isn't very common. Most people don't build products that people love enough to do that. And then before that, I think one thing I've really liked over the past few years, especially on YouTube, is this whole ClickFunnels community that's developed. And I don't know if you're familiar with it. I feel like there's a kind of a huge divide between Silicon Valley and the sales funnel, ClickFunnels world. But it's really this idea of being completely self-reliant and focusing on your own sales efforts to bootstrap your company without outside capital. And the true answer really depends on what your product is, but to the extent that you can build a marketing funnel that attracts people hopefully at a profit. And then as you're saying, Jude, get to that point where you've built a great product and then step up to referrals and word of mouth. That's really the, from what I've seen, the secret to creating huge growth in a startup.

Yeah, I think there's lots of untracked channels. Like, for example, word of mouth is difficult to track and metricize and get data about. And, and part of the nature of being untrackable is that it's kind of unengineerable in a very easy, like, straightforward way. And because it's unengineerable, it makes it very special, and it becomes more of an art form necessarily than a science. And when it's an art form, very few will get it right. Which makes it even better, compounds that distribution. And there's a second effect there where, you know, you were saying individuals are effectively mastering their distribution. I think that's a good thing, that the cost of these distribution mechanisms are going down. And an individual with talent— because it does come back down to talent as well, in both the ability to build something and the ability to build, which may be content in the case of YouTube or music. Or it might be a product, which is kind of like content in a sense, in an abstract sense. So their ability, yeah, this ability to get your talent unlocked into the marketplace is shifting as these distribution mechanisms shift. And I think to the ClickFunnels part or YouTube at large, I could imagine there being a better bridge between individuals who are making their own way And then being able to scale that up into a large business and productize it more as they go along. So, I think that's a good thing for people to be able to get started and get in there and be possibly fully profitable before necessarily scaling into a massive organization. And right now, this seems like there's a disconnect between what was classically called a lifestyle business is now this— now for some, a very special thing. It can be very scalable as well, right? So there's this— the concept of lifestyle business is kind of blurring with scale-out companies. And, you know, at some point we'll see a single-employee trillion-dollar company be made, which will probably be around the brands. And that's going to be kind of interesting. And that points to everything being more networks where individuals maybe, you know, walk around with their private contracts and can engage different companies at different times. There might be a lot of— right now the company is kind of this old object that's, you know, segmented and very siloed from the other different companies. And we do partnerships and we have to do redlining with agreements between all of them. And imagine a different kind of configuration where individuals are bringing talent to the table and trading their talent, and the contract is really around the IP that they own and produce. So that could be kind of interesting. That might change. I don't know whether it's going to change because people do like to be in teams and offices and together as groups, you know.

Yeah, I've thought about that a lot. I definitely don't have the answer, but one thing I can say that would kind of hint to the fact that companies will still be a thing in the future, or at least teams as you're saying, is the fact that companies have proprietary information that they don't want to share with a bunch of people on Mechanical Turk and Upwork.

Mm-hmm.

So, depending on your layer of privacy, and certainly manufacturing, which may just be AI robots someday, but for now, people actually need to go into a manufacturing facility and build. You definitely still have that vibe, but I think the trend is away from that, right? It's really moving towards more people want to work remotely. More people are, as you mentioned, they're building these lifestyle businesses and then realizing, oh, I can automate all these things and then hire a few people offshore and triple the size of my business this year. And as that keeps growing, it actually turns into a real business. There's one YouTuber who I follow, Alex Becker, who is— he is now officially the most woke homeless entrepreneur multimillionaire on YouTube, as he proclaims. He's just given everything away except for his bed, his camera for live streaming, and his laptop, basically. And He like gave everything up, and it's it's all because he took this this small business that started out as kind of a lifestyle business, grew it to eight figures last year, or over the last few years. But last year it did eight figures, and and and it's kind of part of that trend. Like now now he's really working on competing with the Silicon Valley crowd, and what I mean by that is like these just really. high-end technology platforms that are being built. His is in the ad tech space. So, I think you're really onto something there that a lot of the paradigm's changing. And I mean, Alex lives in Dallas. And so, it really kind of speaks to him just being one example of kind of like the globalness of this change.

Yeah, and it could be that we end up with two. There are some definite advantages to having the company, right, in that the company can keep holding IP, as you said, and fight legal battles and give— one point I heard someone make was, you know, the company provides legal risk protection in a certain framework to the people working in there, and that allows them to take risks that they wouldn't normally be able to take, and those risks can actually be really useful. The company can keep existing beyond the lifespans of all the people. So maybe it can do something very, very special in the very long run. Over hundreds and hundreds of years, it can refine a product to be amazing. So there are things, there are definitely different models here that it might just be that we have so much interesting possibilities with cameras nowadays that It just, you know, unlocks this extra layer to living where you can, you can dial into people's lives and watch them eat food and make things. And the education part is, is definitely part of it, right? Like, there's on YouTube, there are huge numbers of videos of people teaching people to do things, making, doing experiments, describing experiences. And that, that layer of complexity is kind of interesting, um, that there's a lot more, there's a lot more content out there. And we are in this kind of post— attention world now where the attention economy has kind of caught up to us. And now there's like 6 different or 20 different Netflix-type things to pick from. Like, which one are you going to subscribe to? All of them?

Any one that has The Mandalorian.

Yeah, exactly. So you have to— so you end up with all these different kinds of subscriptions and Music subscriptions and content coming from everywhere. And I think the limit ends up being how much stuff you can even get through. And I have seen this as an interesting trend that people are— we're experiencing a lot of stuff. Like, we're listening to podcasts, we're listening to audiobooks, we're watching programs and reading books and blogs, and we're on Twitter, and we're taking a lot of stuff in. There's a question of whether— how much time is there going to be left to create things? Like, are we going to have to shut ourselves out for a day. And I was reading a, reading a book yesterday that, um, I, I— one of the, uh, founding fathers of, of, uh, quantum physics had to lock himself away in a ski chalet. They were all going skiing, and this was a long time ago, like '40-something. Um, and, you know, him just locking himself away, I managed to get, um, some significant formula, um, by just being indoors for a day and being disconnected. And it would have been no phone. And no one would've been bothering you. No alerts, no kind of battery anxiety or range anxiety or kind of any kind of thing in the back of your head that you're expecting something to break your concentration. So I think that's, that's a big problem that we gotta deal with. I'd like to see like companies around how do you allow people to work for a long time focused on something cool because you have to go super deep to make something nowadays. The le— the tools from the leverage— sorry, the leverage from the tools. are going up. So the tools are really helping us go deep quickly. Like, you know, you can, you can get into Figma and do some really cool stuff in design. Um, and maybe that's the solution. You, we just keep, keep tooling up, get being able to get deep, um, with, with a problem set in a very short amount of time. Um, yeah, I'd like to see what you think about this attention economy where we have a billion things thrown at you at once in one day.

Yeah, I agree. It's so overwhelming at this point. And the problem is, is that Instagram feels like it's getting a little outdated. Twitter has a very specific audience to it. Um, the real problem with Instagram right now is that they have placed so many restrictions on their platform that it's impossible to grow as a new content creator. So when you have a platform that kind of favors the incumbents people who were using growth hacking strategies in 2011 when no one was looking and have a million followers. And now you kind of have some people getting out of high school and they wanna respond to 50 comments and then they get action blocked after 30, even though it was like totally legitimate. I think a lot of platforms are starting to hit that level and are based off of phones now on the Netflix, Amazon, Disney Plus side. I mean, and they're competing with YouTube. I think Twitch is highly, highly underrated. Twitch is currently only gaming. That actually reminds me of when I entered Bitcoin in 2012. It was all kind of like underground websites, like everyone communicated on a forum. That's all it was. That's how I feel Twitch is. Big opportunity there. I think that's going to expand outside gaming, and and there's no shortage of places to put your attention. But the I think I think from a creator perspective, people want to be able to own their audience more than they currently do on some of the platforms. So where you've seen again, like all these platforms that I've already mentioned, is you don't. Have a choice over what people are shown on their stream. And even if they've subscribed to you, they might not actually be shown your content. And so where I think this is gonna head, this is why you're seeing a lot of people really starting to— you're seeing a big comeback in email marketing and people are starting to talk about Facebook chatbots a lot because You get that one-on-one communication that's not being screened, so to speak, and you have 90% open rates. So email doesn't have that. And so when you look at all these platforms, I think tribe.so is really interesting for people who are trying to build a community. There are all these little platforms that are starting to pop up. There isn't a clear winner yet necessarily, but I think— But Substack. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The trend towards owning your audience, I think, is something that we're going to be seeing more of. And yeah, it, you know, I mean, I also, I think we have AR right around the corner, VR possibly with that. I would think that social platforms grow on both those platforms natively. And with that, I think My prediction is that people are actually going to interact not so much with a profile, but with your bot and in a way with you.

So you're gonna have a— yeah. So you're thinking that your bot would kind of represent you a little bit and kind of mirror kind of what you would say and what you would do?

Exactly.

Yeah, I saw this on Twitter today from Sian Bannister talking about her wanting to clone herself AI-wise so that she could have an AI VC that could be alongside her. That's kind of an interesting idea of, hey, like, I'm in this attention economy. We're getting so busy with the things that we could create and the things that we could consume that we need, we need like replicants of ourselves to be able to answer, answer questions from the network, right? It's kind of a dangerous idea as well. Like if your friends are talking to not you and talking to someone similar to you, but not the real you, that's, that kind of opens up a lot of interesting ideas.

I think someday it'll be the norm. I'm in the middle of automating a lot of my communication just because I have to. And it's like, I want people to be talking to me even though I'm trying to do it in a more effective way. And I I think where a lot of this is coming from is actually the pressure to create a personal brand. And as people now, the definition of a personal brand, I think, is not very well understood. A lot of people kind of put that with Instagram, maybe Twitter, maybe YouTube. But the fact is, is that trying to compete on the most competitive platforms that have already selected their incumbents might not be the best place. Whereas I, I, I've been really interested in learning a lot about how you grow on sites like Quora. I think Quora is extremely interesting for people who have time to just be posting, um, useful content every day. I have a feeling Reddit might be coming back in certain areas. And, and like I said, I'm kind of on the lookout for new social media platforms. Like I've been playing around with TikTok, it seems like there's starting to fix some of their algorithm problems that they had over the past 6 months. But I think people want something new. Jude, I would like to switch topics one final time. And you are a serial entrepreneur. You're an investor in 200 companies, and now you're focused on Golden. Tell me a little bit about what you and your team are doing Sure.

So we've taken a fairly ambitious mission to try and map out every single entity that exists that we know about, and we want to map out full information around that entity. So the entity might be something like a Turing structure, which is a predicted kind of structure, um, from a paper in 2018, uh, very connected to Alan Turing's kind of chemical morphogenesis paper around Turing patterns that you see, you know, you see these patterns on animals and they're predictable possibly with mathematics. And there's a 3D version called a Turing structure. And this, this idea is stuck in this academic paper and a couple of academic papers, and there's no simple place to read about this idea. So you would expect something like this to be on Wikipedia. And it's not, it's not there. So when I've been looking up things over the last 10 years, companies, people, technologies, locations, I've not been able to have necessarily always a place that I can just get full information about that thing. And the expectations have always been there that, yeah, it's going to show up on Wikipedia or it's just going to be on Google. And it's not always there. And I, we don't— I claim that the information is not being compiled in the most efficient way, um, around an entity that you can just look it up from a human perspective and read it, read about it, get structured data. Might be that you want to get some funding round information on a company, or maybe you want to read about, um, a particular new field like regenerative agriculture, or You want to find every blockchain project in logistics and keep up to date with that, or the principles of what are different kind of sub-attack mechanisms in 51% attack specifically for blockchain security. So there isn't a really good place for this. And the affordances for getting the data in there, collecting it, the schema. Have not really been innovative— innovated. They've— lots of different innovations have occurred across different product areas, but it has not been pulled together. So what we're trying to do on golden.com and encourage people to have a look, make sure if they're involved in a company, the company's represented there in a neutral way, is that we want to cover all these topics. And we believe that— so Wikipedia has about 6 million topics And we're aiming for the 10 to 20 billion entities. And then we want to be able to allow this stuff to be open, all these pages to be open. Companies pay us for also querying the data as well. So companies like PE firms, hedge funds, insurance companies, large blue-chip companies, banks can pay us for introspecting the information in a detailed way or getting access on bulk. to the data. And we use that revenue to improve the product as well. But one of the most interesting things that we're using AI to actually try and create the information, that's by either extracting it from the web. So we crawl the web and we read academic papers and we read the news and we try to find— we try to infer facts from this information. It might be a new material that's been discovered or produced. It might be a new company that's being launched. So that's the kind of stuff we're trying to collect. And I think if we do it right, it should be something that's really useful for everybody. And we know that Wikipedia has been highly useful for the world, like top 6 website in the world and at massive scale. So that's the kind of aim that we're looking for. We raised a seed round back in 2017 from Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund and GigaFund. GigaFund put $100 million into SpaceX. I think that was the other investment they did. So we put together a team and the product's live and it's growing all the time. It grows and we always get records every week, which is nice. And the content's growing. The data is the most important thing for us. So growing up this information is key.

How should entrepreneurs who are listening to this, who are looking for ways to kind of get ahead of others in terms of, I guess, their technical capabilities and tools they have, how should they look at using your platform?

So I would say don't get ahead, don't try and get ahead of others. Try and get just behind someone that is really good because that person is going to be moving at light speed. And if you can gel with that person, learn from that person, and teach them other things and help them, then you will be moving fast as well. Getting in front of them probably means you're comparing yourself to the wrong kind of thing. Like, you should be finding someone that you can grow with and grow and, and you're trying to catch up to. But maybe you'll never catch up with them. Maybe that's okay. Or they're very complementary and you're both you're both bouncing off each other, you're both, you know, kind of friendly, kind of learning together, bit of competitiveness, like healthy competition. So, that helps. Putting yourself in the right ecosystem of people, curious people. Maybe you want to go in a more intellectual direction, maybe you want to go in a more practical direction. So, I think picking what you want to learn and hanging out with those people and being useful to them as well. And, you know, making your own path. You can't, you know, you're not surfing someone else's line here. You're surfing your own wave at the same time.

I think you literally just summarized the key to success.

Maybe. I hope so. Yeah, I think making it so it's not you against the world. And it's really like, how do I fit? Like, where, where should I be? Like, where should I be working? Which team should I be working with? Who should I be working for? Or who should I be having working for me? And getting all that positioning right. And that's going to keep changing. It may not— no, you may enter the labor marketplace and not have a clue where you are, and you're going to have to find out over years. And most people, I don't think, find out where they really could have been. So figuring that out and asking yourself that question all the time, and that can be binding yourself to a mission as well, that can help.

Wow, that's great. Well, on that note, Jude, thanks so much. This has been truly enlightening of a conversation. I would love to have you back on in the future. And for those of you at home who have been listening, feel free to leave any comments below if you have any questions relevant to the show. If you've listened this long, you might as well subscribe. We are interviewing many entrepreneurs who have raised venture capital and are creating the future on this program. So thank you for joining The Visionary Show. I'm Jaren Lucas. If you see a like button below, why don't you just give that a big snap, turn it blue. If you have anger problems, take your anger out on it, but just Make sure it turns blue. And with that said, we'll see you next time.

Yep. Thank you very much.