Catching up with Keith Rabois of Founders Fund

Hi, I'm Connie Loizos.

And this is Alex Gove.

And this is Strictly VC Download. Friday. Oh, my God. Guys, this new job is exhilarating, but also All encompassing. I don't know where the week went. I'm going to keep this short so I can hang out with our teenage sons for a bit. They are both off to their school's homecoming tomorrow night, and I have to try and wring some details about these plans out of them, which is no easy objective. If you have teenagers, you may know the feeling. A highlight of the day was talking with this week's guest, Keith Raboy, earlier this morning. Raboy is part of the so-called PayPal Mafia, as many listeners will already know. So he spent his early career working alongside a group that includes PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk, and that group has impacted much of his career ever since. He wrote one of his first checks, for example, to LinkedIn, which Reid Hoffman co-founded. He works closely with Peter Thiel as a general partner at Founders Fund, which Thiel co-founded. as you'll hear in this interview, he also defends X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which feels to me like it's headed down the tubes some days, but that r boy clearly still enjoys. Indeed, if you follow him on social media, he can be a little terrifying. He doesn't suffer fools, and his takes aren't always widely embraced. But I've enjoyed talking with him on the few occasions I've had to do.

This over the years.

And in today's interview, you'll hear about his newest company that he co-founded he he has launched several. We also talked about the newest of his many investments, which include OpenAI, his thoughts on modern day LinkedIn, and why he's putting his chips behind former Governor Nikki Haley in the upcoming US presidential election. We hope you enjoyed the chat. It's coming up in a minute, but first a word from our sponsor.

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It's nice to talk to you. I haven't talked to you in years.

I know, that's true. I haven't had you interview me on one of those events you used to host.

I know, I know. Well, you know that Yahoo bought StrictlyVC?

I don't know if you'd seen that.

Yeah, yeah, of course. Okay. And so the good news is we're going to be doing more of these events all over the place.

So, I mean, maybe we can bring.

One to Miami if you would. Yeah, we'd love to host you. That would be great. But anyway, there's a lot for us to talk about today. I know we're talking in part about your fund and what you're funding right now, but I guess as a starting.

Point, I don't even know how much you've just raised. That's a good question because we had announced a larger out and then we wound up cutting it in half. So I don't remember the official number now. I'll get it to you, but it's confusing because we roughly cut it in half after we announced it.

Okay. Meaning you just told your LPs, basically, we're only going to need half of what we raised because of the market.

Yeah, exactly. After we had the commitments and we were proceeding, we realized that there wasn't a great way to generate venture returns with that size fund in the world we live in.

Yeah, I'm glad that you did that. I mean, only because I'd been waiting for more firms to do that. I mean, obviously you've been around, you saw this happen a million years ago with Excel and others, and I kept thinking, you know, when are we going to see firms downsizing some of these commitments? So I guess I also, if I ask you, the firm's assets under management.

At this point, do you, do you know roughly how much they are? No, I'd have to look it up. I don't really pay attention to these things.

Aaron can follow up with real numbers, but I don't track it. Sure. I've just sort of like lost sense over time. Well, you know, even concerning, I guess your role at Founders Fund, how are you dividing your time between Founders Fund and Open Store, which is your newest company?

Yeah, so obviously I'm a general partner at Founders Fund. That's my primary activity in life is finding extraordinary entrepreneurs, giving them the advice, counsel, and money so they can achieve their ambitions or increase the probabilities of success. Secondarily, as part of that process, as part of being a GP, I co-founded a company in Miami that's roughly about 130 employees where I serve as CEO. This is, as you know, part of the legacy and history of Founders Fund is that most of the people at Founders Fund have in fact founded companies successfully. So back in the day, Peter obviously was both co-founder and CEO of PayPal, co-founder of Palantir, another one of our general partners, Trey Stevens, co-founded Anduril, which is one of the more promising companies in our portfolio. Darian, Esfandiari has co-founded Farda. So it's a very standard practice for aspiring investors at Founders Fund to create successful companies. for lots of reasons. Obviously it helps you generate returns because you have proprietary deal flow. Number two, your advising counsel is probably more astute and more insightful. The process of actually running a company or building a company allows you to both commiserate with founders, but hopefully also be insightful because you're suffering through the same challenges, confronting the same kinds of difficulties, and you can help problem solve them a little bit more precisely.

Absolutely. Of course, typically though, somebody else has installed the CEO, isn't that right? I mean, you also co-founded Open Door.

Yeah, I wouldn't say typically, I think there's different techniques. I've seen successful investors be co-CEOs before. So it depends on the type of company and the skillset of people involved, the founders, co-founders, but it Open Door, I was earlier in my venture career when I started Open Door, it was the first year when I was at KV. And then secondarily, Eric really was ready to be CEO. so there's a good combination there.

Okay, great. So there's nobody that's sort of like, this is not something that you're about going to hand off in six months. This is permanent.

Yeah. I mean, unlikely. I think there's key milestones, key inflection moments for open store. And when we achieve those goals and becomes more operational excellence and less innovation and problem solving, maybe we consider a different model. But problem solving and confronting challenges with innovative solutions is something I can do really well. And so right now seems like a solid fit.

Okay, great. And I guess just for listeners who maybe aren't familiar with OpenStore, can you.

Just talk about for two seconds? Absolutely. So the goal of OpenStore is to reimagine e-commerce. So after 30 years of the internet, e-commerce in the United States roughly accounts for 15% of all transactions. It's a very low number after 30 years. There's fundamental reasons that I believe that block progress on e-commerce, even though despite the fact it's inconvenient. So if you think about going to a shopping mall, you have to drive there. You have to probably go between hours 11 and 6 where you're supposed to be You have to park, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of friction, but it still accounts for 85% of transactions. And so the reasons I think, or there are the fundamental, most important primary reason that e-commerce growth is blocked and stagnant is that most purchases, at least half purchases in the United States are things where you're marketed the product. You didn't have a pre-existing purchase intent. You serendipitously discovered new ideas, new concepts, new products, new brands. And nobody in the United States, in the West generally has figured out how to do that at scale. So the goal of Open Store is to create a destination shopping experience where you discover products and brands that you weren't intentionally searching for. You had low purchase intent, but something resonates with you, triggers you, and you're excited and ecstatic to buy something or try something new, just as if you were shopping in the real world so that roughly half of your trips to the mall or favorite retail store are cut in half because open stores so good.

Right. I mean, I guess it's a little bit like the Etsy model, although you're dealing with Shopify store fronts.

Yeah. There's some commonalities with Etsy. I think of Etsy as very artisan, fairly rare or unique goods versus mainstream products. Like Shopify stores are typically more scaled. They have unique brand stories. They're not commodities, but they are made for production. And I don't perceive Etsy that way. And I think most American consumers do not.

Keith, it does blow my mind that 85% of these sales are still happening offline as somebody who I guess rarely gets to a store myself. Can you talk though a little bit about maybe headwinds right now? I mean, obviously the economy is not good and because of the terrible things that are going on right now, looking like 2024 is going to be challenging as well.

Yeah, I don't think that really affects Shopify and I don't think it affects open store unless we enter a true and deep and prolonged recession. Discretionary purchases are pretty important. People have birthdays, they still need to need birthday gifts. People are going to have weddings. They still need wedding presents. So outfits, like you're going to a dinner party, people are going to want outfits. This isn't changing unless we're in a serious recession. So there is some economic evidence that the economy is not running on all cylinders, but there's no evidence that we're.

In a pronounced recession of any sort. Right. Let's keep our fingers crossed. Well, obviously, marketplaces are very interesting to you, have been historically remain. So one company that I guess your first bet from this new fund is Traba, which is connecting entry-level workers with shifts at fulfillment centers and event venues. Is that right?

Yeah. So what Traba does is it connects hourly workers to mostly light industrial, is the official vertical, which is typically a warehouse. And there are ad hoc events, think like a major concert where you need a lot of workers at once to set up the stage, remove the stage, et cetera. But light industrial is a massive market. It's about $50 billion a year. And very few people have built products to serve that industry. And light industrial depends upon variable staffing, meaning during peak season, imagine e-commerce as we were just talking about, 40% of all e-commerce occurs during the holiday season. So it doesn't make sense if you're running a warehouse to have full-time employees for the entire year when 40% of your sales are all going to occur in November and December. So they need variable labor. The economics of their business requires variable labor. And what Trava does is it connects, just as you suggested, workers who are looking for hourly wage opportunities with the right price and the right location to the right warehouse. And so it is a marketplace because it connects businesses to workers.

So there are things that exist like this, but I guess this is just a little bit more of a vertical play. I mean, there are companies that work with deskless workers or so-called blue collar workers, but this is the first of its kind that you've seen that's targeting the industrial space.

Yeah, Trauma does start with light industrial as the core vertical. I suspect the vision of the founders is much broader. But they're mastering this marketplace. They're mastering this market. There are unique features, there are unique value propositions that business customers require in this vertical. And as in Peter's book, Zero to One, Peter has this philosophy of you create a dominant market force in a marketplace in a defined vertical and then you expand from there. So Travis is following that playbook very well.

Okay, great. And this is a follow-on investment for you because it raised, I guess it's raising money now for announcing funding soon, but it also Raising a series A last year that was led by Khosla, your former employer and Founders Fund joined along with others.

Yeah. So Founders Fund history goes back with Truba to approximately June of 2021 when we led the seed financing. And then as you pointed out last year, my former partner, Samir Kaul at Coastal Ventures led and we participated in the series A. So now this is the third time the Founders Fund will be investing. We're leading this round. It's a $22 million financing. with a significant increase in evaluation, which is pretty rare these days. So everybody speaking for all my partners and all the general partners at Founders Fund, we're extremely ecstatic to kick off our new fund with a new investment in the trauma.

What is the valuation post money?

I don't know if we've disclosed that or not. I would say it's increased meaningfully, call it like 40% or more from the prior financing.

Okay. And so this was a seed investment for you. So I'm assuming you had a pre-existing relationship with the The founder, Mike, or how did you know?

Yeah, yeah. So Mike and I became friends when I moved to Miami. He reached out to me actually on LinkedIn. And at the time, he was still working as a product manager at Uber. But I kind of knew in the back of my brain that he wanted to found a company. So when he did start Trauma in May or June of 2021, we were excited to invest and lead that financing.

I'm always fascinated by VC math. So $22 million series B, what kind of traction has he seen? What made you think we should definitely triple Down here, there's a couple of exciting things.

I'll talk quantitatively and then non-quantitatively. On the quantitative side, the company is still accelerating growth in millions of dollars of annual revenue while expanding their contribution margins. And in my career as both an entrepreneur and as an investor, so let's say 23 years, it's extremely rare to see a company accelerating growth while at the exact same time increasing its margins. Usually you have to sacrifice one for the other. So that's very anomalous. So when you're a power law investors, and founders, we think of ourselves as power law investors, when you see something you've never seen or rarely see, that's when you know to double down. Then secondarily, Mike and his co-founder Akshay have built a high performance culture that's pretty differentiated from what I'd call the modern era of tech companies, let's say post 2015. They have an extremely dedicated team that works extremely hard. They borrowed the Chinese expression of 996. It became popular to describe Chinese Chinese technology companies is working at least nine to nine, six days a week. So they've taken that and built the company from the ground up very intentionally from day one to replicate that model. So the compounding advantages of velocity and speed and execution are really showing up in metrics. Now, the company just continues to be firing on all cylinders. Every month is better than the last month, and every quarter is better than the last quarter. They always beat their plans. So even since We agreed to finance the company probably at a verbal level a few months ago. Every month and every quarter since we agreed, so Invest has been better than the projections Mike showed us when he was pitching Peter and Trey, for example.

Okay, great. I also wanted to talk to you about Fair, which is another marketplace that you're on the board of connecting indie brands and retailers. So again, another really interesting company. Talking about VC Math, this is happening across the board, raised a lot of money at a very lofty valuation in 2020. well, first it was 7 billion in June of that year, and then suddenly 12.4 billion later that year, which again, we were seeing happening over and over again. It raised a 416 million dollar extension around last year. What happens next? I mean, again, happening across the board, but really Sky High valuations. Where does this company go from here?

Well, fair is an extraordinary company. Fair will be a public company. It'll be worth tens of billions of dollars. literally at YC Demo Day 2015, I believe, when they presented, I was sitting next to Semil Shah, who I know you know. And as they finished the presentation, I said, that's a $100 billion company right there. And Semil, I think tweeted this out so you can find public evidence of it. And there's no doubt in my mind that this is a $50 billion company. It's connecting, as you pointed out, independent brands with real world retailers. So back to my common refrain from Open Store, There's a lot more traction in commerce in the real world than most people realize. And Fair started with a very counterintuitive and contrarian model that don't believe the hype about Amazon, don't believe the hype about all these companies eating real world businesses. Independent retailers are doing better than ever before. And I was probably the only person in the world who actually believed the story in 2015. So I led the seed financing for Fair in 2015. And then we reinvested after I moved on from KB to Founders Fund. We've reinvested and led a subsequent round after I joined founders fund. So I've been involved in the company as a board member since 2015, so like eight plus years. But this is a company destined for an iconic company status. The founders are fantastic. The metrics are great. The market opportunity is wonderful, even though most people missed it. Max had this great slide in his initial seed deck where he actually exposed Amazon as not even constraining the growth of independent bookstores. So if you actually look at real numbers, independent bookstores have been thriving under the radar. We can get to the slide or it may even be available publicly, but my general philosophy and founders fund generally speaking likes to find things where people have superficial opinions or the consensus is just obviously broken and that creates blind spots. So for example, Anduril, one of our best investments ever, was a company that really creates modern technology that allows the United States and Democratic allies to defend themselves against threats. And most of Silicon Valley was allergic to funding technology to help the American government. And of course, we being patriotic Americans thought, this is a great idea. But every other VC was completely blind. Now, with the world changing and maybe things are more obvious and the traction of the company, most investors can be pretty derivative and like, oh great, Andreessen Horowitz is a great company. But there was nobody who really wanted to be involved in Andreessen Horowitz when it was founded. Right.

GovTech seems very top of mind for everybody suddenly. But my point was, is there a down round before it goes public?

I doubt that. In this particular case, I don't think the company will need more capital. So you probably noticed we did not need either of those two financings. Other people may have been spending years paying prices that may or may not have made sense. But I think at Founders Fund, we were pretty disciplined at KV back in my days, my six years there, we were extremely disciplined. And so, If the rest of the world wants to lose money as venture capitalists, sometimes it's in a founder's interest to take that money, especially if they can parlay that into real traction. But fortunately, a company like Thera has really good financials, is performing really well. I doubt we would do another private financing, so there'd be no reason. But there's a lot of great companies who have adjusted their valuations. Another great company that is kind of on my seed career list is Ramp. Right. Right. You recently RAMP announced the financing that was less than its prior financing where we at Founders Fund actually were ecstatic about the opportunity to reinvest for about the fifth time or something like that because RAMP is a phenomenal company with phenomenal founders, but they, for their own reasons, and they definitely did not need money. This is a company that doesn't even, that can't burn money even if it tries. They did not need to do this financing for any reason whatsoever. It was very opportunistic. But they decided to set their valuation and reset it to be appropriate with the modern world. So obviously, the world of tech stocks and valuation multiples went through a massive correction starting in October 2021. And so RAMP wanted to be intellectually honest and reset its valuation even though it didn't need to. Stripe obviously has readjusted its valuation recently. That's another core position for founders fund. So we're super excited about the company. So sometimes it's not necessarily a bad thing to reset your valuation appropriately. If your burn rate's too high and you need to raise money and you're consuming capital without enough progress, that's a dangerous and or disastrous place to be. But none of the companies we've been discussing are anywhere near, they're all progressing really well. They all have incredible upside potential. They're all run by amazing founders. These are very anomalous cases. But the meat and potatoes company with a high burn rate that raised an inflated valuation two to three years ago without top 1% progress on the planet is in deep trouble.

Right. And you're so early in these companies that basically you've done well either way. Ramps more speed.

Well, that's good. There is a benefit of being an early stage investor. I mean, most of my best investments and most of my best jobs are very, very early. So it is true that you insulate yourself from the macro currents when you're a really good early stage seed investor.

I was just gonna say more specifically, it went from 8.1 billion last year to 5.8 billion this year. Because I was gonna ask it what the formula is right now, but you're saying it looked at the comps in the public stock market and it assigned its own valuation.

Yeah, I mean, I think, look, there is a buyer and seller marketplace too. There are a lot of people badly wanted to be shareholders in RAMP. So there's always a supply and demand element to valuation exercise. But anybody who raised two or three years ago almost surely is in for a massive awakening if they have to raise more money, especially if they have to raise more money because the burn rate is extraordinarily high. Right.

What are you doing about secondary? So you're taking a bigger bite of some of these companies as their valuations are down and you're getting sort of a better price than their last late stage investor who maybe paid too high a price. Are you doing a lot on the secondary market?

Well, we do occasionally buy secondary shares. We're open to it. I wouldn't say never, but very rarely would we buy secondaries without a massive substantial primary position. It might be a compliment to a primary position, but we don't have any aversion to buying secondary.

Okay. Because are you going to be more specific about what you've bought? I would just be interested to know.

What you think is a great deal right now. I can't remember all the recent secondaries that we've explored, but usually they're in concert with a primary financing. Let me take a step back. Founders Fund is probably most notable for being high conviction investors. and what that means specifically is we have a very high concentrated ownership and we love doubling, tripling, quadrupling down. We talked about a few examples like Anderall, like Ramp, like Trava, where we love to lead multiple rounds. So that's always been the strategy at Founders Fund. If you believe in a power law, we believe in a power law of a power law. So we want the highest possible concentration of our capital into our best companies with our best founders. What that leads to is when there's secondary opportunities available in companies that we're very excited about, we will definitely explore how do we increase our ownership? You know, what's the best possible way? And some companies don't need more primary capital. It's inappropriate. They just don't need it. So that may be the best opportunity is to buy up secondary.

Are you an open AI?

We are a founders fund. We invested in the more recent financing.

Those are secondary shares, employee shares.

Yeah, they are. They are. Yeah. It was an extremely complicated transaction, but yes.

Was that with Thrive Capital?

I don't know who priced that one. I thought Microsoft maybe priced it, but. Okay.

Not the one that's in the news recently.

Got an 80 billion dollar valuation. Not that one. Okay. Yeah, I know. The prior round back in my day, you know, as you know, back when I was at Khosla, KV was the only venture fund that invested in the original financing, open AI. The node was extremely passionate about that investment and my to navigate that a bit. So, you know, I've been familiar with the company for a long time, but this is the first time founders fund invested.

Great. You know, I also just wanted to talk really quickly about Royal, because it's another one of your board seats. I had talked with Katie Hahn recently about this. She led around in the company back in her Andreessen Horowitz days, and I know believe strongly in seeing artists reap better rewards for their work. I think it's sort of an interesting model, but I'm not sure if I understand it. completely clearly. I wondered if you could explain it to listeners.

Yeah, so I'm gonna actually flying to the Bay Area to get an update on the company for a board meeting next week. But the general arc of the company is that the role of music labels is kind of artifact of history. So if you dial back a couple of decades ago, if you were an artist, what you do with a music label is you basically get funded. They give you some money in advance and you use that to produce tracks, vinyl or a CD or whatever. And then the label would also arrange for distribution. So the label would be responsible for marketing, getting you on the radio so consumers could discover you, putting you in retail stores. Because when I was growing up, that's how you found music, is you go shopping. Albums are back, by the way, which is kind of- yeah, no, I know. I have a vinyl player in my library. It's great. But that's what the music labels used to do, is they would do distribution. as well as the advance to help the artist produce the music. In the modern era with things like Spotify and Apple Music and platforms like TikTok or Instagram, the artist does the distribution. The label does virtually nothing. And so the economic trade that an artist used to make with a label doesn't make any sense when the label isn't providing customer acquisition and distribution. So what Royal was found to do is allow artists to keep more of their money and allow fans of a particular artist to own an economic percentage of the artist's success using crypto. So that's the goal of the company. And we did launch the company with some very well-known artists. And now the question is, what's the future of music and how is the company going to help quarterback that? So hopefully we'll have some exciting news to talk about soon.

I love the idea. I guess my concern just is with so many of these things, people are lazy and they want to push a button and listen to songs on Spotify. And I just keep wondering if that behavior is changeable.

Well, listening to the song, maybe not one of the reasons why I got involved with Royal is not only having a long relationship with both founders, but I'm actually a significant music fan. And so I listen to music all day, every day. And so I agree with that. What is different, though, is just like I was a baseball fan growing up, I would also collect baseball cards. Like, literally, I'm sitting in my office right now and there's a Derek Jeter rookie card. on the shelf, so people collect baseball cards. So the idea was originally to allow you to also invest in your favorite artists and be able to showcase that. Like when I discover a new artist, I want to be able to prove that to my friends. Like I found this artist as DJ before anybody else thought he or she was cool. And that I've been saying is pretty important and fundamental, especially as more music consumption and more of your personality goes online. Right. The ability to showcase that vinyl record that you have and be able to prove it to the world that you were like the first buyer or something, a little bit like signed art too. Some combination of like a rookie card and baseball and signed art related to music is the goal of the company.

Well, I noticed you've not used the word NFT, which is basically what we're talking about.

Well, yeah, I don't really believe in NFTs. There is a version that would maybe technically qualify as an NFT, but I wouldn't promote it, describe it, market it as an NFT, meaning, let's say I was one of the first 50 people to discover Kygo. I would want to be able to prove that. And you can use like an NFT like product, like you're buying a signed Warhol painting, you know, where it's a 1 of 50. That I believe there's a real value proposition in NFT is the way of executing it, but it's like a technical way to execute it. It's not a value proposition in and of itself.

Right, right. It's really kind of like a smart contract that you're talking about. And the word has been tied too closely to, Board of Trade Club essentially?

Yeah. The reason why maybe it's appropriate to use those kind of terms is we do intend to tie economics to the promotion. So you're entitled to some fraction of, let's say, the royalties of a song. And so having a crypto way of distributing that money is really efficient because you can imagine a million different people owning a fraction of a song using traditional check issuing programming process would definitely not be effective.

Right. No, it's super interesting. Keith, I know I probably have to let you go soon. If Erin were here, she'd probably be like, you know, signaling to wrap things up with you. I was just wondering labor marketplaces have always been interesting going forward. They're going to be even more so. I mean, sometimes I think there's going to be like a handful of companies in a decade and either you'll work for them or you'll be self employed, but maybe aided by some marketplace that makes everything on the back end. far easier. I'm just curious, what do you see when you try to guess at the future?

Well, as you know, I was an angel investor in LinkedIn and worked at LinkedIn earlier in my career. And that was the vision of LinkedIn actually in 2003 was that the world was moving this way where everybody has kind of their own brand and effectively markets themselves and is loosely tied together in a kind of a free agency sort of sense, and that you need a product to do that. create a marketplace, which LinkedIn has, and a way to showcase your skills, abilities, credentials, which is like a LinkedIn profile. So it's amazing that 20 years ago, that was really a vision. I don't know if the company ever really executed all of that, but you could see parts of it in the actual product today, the way people use it. So I think there's an opportunity there to create a more modern, more advanced way. In some ways, dialing back to Traub, what Traub really is planning to do for at least a massive part of the US called 40-50 million workers who to our hourly workers is kind of create that opportunity where it matches the worker skills, abilities, characteristics to the right roles and verifies that for the business. So I think that is a marketplace. It's not for every worker right now, but it's for 40 or 50 million who really depend upon these kind of roles to earn a living and support their families. So I think that is very consistent. There may be two marketplaces. Maybe there's a LinkedIn, maybe there's a trial. hopefully, Travis is worth more than LinkedIn.

I think it's fascinating. LinkedIn's for surgeons.

Well, I mean, look, it is the default way to recruit. And obviously, as technology has blossomed and there's more and more startups, more and more companies, there's more need for talent. Designers may use a slightly quirky portfolio process. And to some extent, engineers have a get something account that you can look at. But for normal people who are the business professionals, LinkedIn is really the only way to find new opportunities and represent yourself. So it is really powerful. And then on the content side, I do agree that we've seen evidence in our portfolio companies that the content engine on LinkedIn, the substantive content does resonate. And so you're seeing better posts, higher velocity of posts. And I think that's because you're seeing traction like business acquisition, talent acquisition through LinkedIn. So for example, I'll dial this back also to Trauma. The woman who runs finance there is in Jessica. And she actually found the company because of its unique culture. She proactively reached out to the company. And I think the reason why she knew about the culture was various posts, I think primarily on LinkedIn, about the unique culture, about the work ethic. And that became a magnet for talent. And that's why she reached out to the company and wound up joining and runs finance account.

It just seemed like a dumpster fire for so long candidly, and now everybody is putting all their content there. And I have to think there's a direct correlation between what's happening on X and Facebook.

Well, X is still critically important. World events, politics, sports, there's no substitute. But in business, quop business, LinkedIn may be able to carve that out and you may be seeing more evidence of that. But I don't think there's a substitute. I don't think Facebook or threads is any kind of threat to X.

That's kind of silly. What did you think of Mark's most recent manifesto? I mean, it's directionally interesting.

I mean, I obviously believe in the future of technology. Tweeted several times that virtually all technology is good. It moves the world forward, period. So I'm not one of these techno skeptics, obviously. I wouldn't have been doing venture investing, angel investing or entrepreneurial endeavors for 23 years of my life. I don't think it's particularly unique in any real sense, but I think having a tangible concrete document to rally people around. And, you know, a lot of the media and journalism are journalists, and some politicians are skeptical of tack. And I think sometimes that beats up on founders morale. And so I think having a rallying cry to remind people why we do what we do to remind them that there's lots of people who believe in this is very helpful, actually, because if you just read the New York Times, you'd be depressed every day.

I was wondering if you'd ever get into the business of writing with your ample free time. I mean, you obviously like to start the company.

In between being a founder's fund, 18 board seats, running a company as CEO, two kids, and two Barry's classes a day, and moving the world to Miami. I'll have lots of free time to write stuff.

One quick question. I mean, I don't really care about this personally, but I did see that You were backing DeSantis and now you're hosting this other fundraiser for Nikki Haley.

Oh, yeah. I'll give you a quick comment on that. So I love the governor of Florida. We couldn't be happier here. I think Governor DeSantis is by far the best governor in the country. I am supporting Nikki Haley for president. I think she's phenomenal. I'll be super excited when she's the nominee. And if she is the nominee, she'll easily defeat Biden. It'll be a landslide. So I'm excited about that, but it's not a criticism of the governor, who I really like. We do have restrictions, as you might know from strictly BC days. I can't actually give money to the governor of Florida. We have LPs that are state entities. So there's very significant restrictions on DCs giving money to state elected officials. So even if I wanted to give money to them, I'm actually legally prohibited from it.

But also you think she's got a better shot.

I think she's going to be phenomenal. She is phenomenal. Very happy to be working with her.

What do you think of Avak? You know, he came to a Strictly VC event years ago.

I think he's a clown. He's a savvy business person, but I don't think he realizes that politics is for real and it's very serious and it's not something you just pick up on a dime. I think personally his domestic policy ideas are actually pretty good directionally correct. Some of his cultural critiques are dead on. But his foreign policy level of knowledge is literally like my baby. My two-year-old probably has better views than he does. What did Nikki Haley say that it.

Was active in making her stupider? Listening to him?

Yeah, listening to him talk about TikTok, it definitely makes you stupider. The idea, two months ago at the Republican debate, he proposed defunding Israel, which would have been literally the most catastrophic decision by an American in 50, 60, 70 years. He's trying to walk that stuff back, but he keeps making silly uneducated mistakes. He makes Trump look incredibly disciplined and smart, which is an accomplishment in and of itself.

Absolutely. Okay, Keith, again, really nice talking to you and hope to talk to you soon.

Cool, great.

Take care.

Take care.

Bye.

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