How to build Billion Dollar companies with Keith Rabois, General Partner at Founders Fund

Hey guys, this is Rohan and thanks so much for joining me today. I just had a conversation with Keith Raboy who's a general partner at Founders Fund. He began his career in tech as a senior executive at PayPal and subsequently served in influential roles at LinkedIn and as Chief Operating Officer of Square. He co-founded and currently serves as CEO of OpenStore which acquires small direct to consumer businesses. As a board member, Keith guided Yelp and Zoom from inception to successful IPOs and served on the board of Reddit from 2012 to 2018. Simultaneously, he also made early investments in YouTube, Palantir, Lyft, Airbnb, Eventbrite, and Wish. He led the first institutional investment in DoorDash. He's also led investments in Faire, Ramp, Trade Republic, and Stripe. We had a fascinating conversation discussing his work on a presidential campaign, what he learned working at legendary Silicon Valley companies, how he recruits the absolute best people, a few of his current investments, and his routines and habits. Thanks again for joining me, and I hope you enjoy the conversation with Keith. Keith, thanks so much for being here.

Pleasure to be with you.

I wanted to start off with a story, which I think a lot of people don't know or really talk about, and that is that you started off as a lawyer in kind of focused on Wall Street, However, you went after that to go work on Dan Quayle's presidential campaign. Just how did that opportunity come about and kind of why did you make that move?

Yeah, so I was, I guess, a fan of the vice president of the United States when I was growing up. I thought he was a principal conservative who had different ideas and was willing to speak and support them and was somewhat immune from criticism, which is very important for a conservative. against the US media. And so he wrote a great autobiography called Standing Firm, which really resonated with me. I started getting involved in some of his preparations for various activities, speeches, debates, TV appearances through some friends in common. Some of them went well. He performed really well. Somehow or another, causation or correlation or randomness, I got some of the credit. So I had the opportunity to write more speeches. become his policy advisor, sort of half ghost wrote a book, et cetera, on his behalf. And so it got involved actively in the campaign in 2000.

What is it like working on a presidential campaign? Like, what are the roles and responsibility? What do the hours look like?

It's a lot like a healthy, early stage startup actually, which is probably useful for me. Hours are nonstop, constant. Obviously, the world moves really fast, rapidly. You always need to be 10 steps ahead of that. There isn't a lot of organizational support. Campaigns are very efficient in their use of capital. So you have to do things with your hands. People need to be willing to have an ownership mentality and jump on various versions of grenades. So all that, and it's quite collaborative with the team exercise. The biggest difference is you sort of have this finish line that set versus like managing a burn rate or something like that. So you have one measuring point that is the only thing that matters, which is very different than building an iconic company, which can take a decade, 20, 30 years, and ideally is permanent. So that's the biggest difference. But the culture, the teamwork, the collaboration, the energy, and the work ethic are very, very comparable to a great early stage company.

And were you always interested in politics from a young age and what sparked that?

Yeah, I've been interested in politics since maybe fourth, fifth grade kind of thing. It's a pretty common career path for litigators or lawyers to be interested in both politics and law. I was a litigator and lawyer primarily in Washington, DC, which is the intersection of the two. Yeah, I was going down the central casting program for lawyers who are interested in politics. That's been true probably for over a century.

Got it. We'll talk a little bit about geopolitics and US-China relations later. But after working for Dan, you then kind of found yourself in Silicon Valley, moving to PayPal. Would love to hear kind of how Peter and others convinced you to move to Silicon Valley and what sparked that.

Well, I joined the internet revolution a month before the market collapsed in March of 2000. And I was asking Peter for advice of what I should do. And Peter said, I can introduce you to a lot of people in Silicon Valley. However, what you should really do is come work for us. Peter had taken over as interim CEO on March, sorry, September 25th, 2000. And so he persuaded me to join him in Silicon Valley at PayPal in November 2000. So about six weeks after PayPal, after Peter had assumed the role, I joined PayPal. Yeah.

And when you joined, what was it like going from, you know, law, presidential campaign, right into early stage startup?

Well, the biggest, I mean, certainly the lack of support structure, you know, as a lawyer, I had a full-time secretary. I hand wrote things and she would type them into a computer, you know, very different kind of culture. We'd wear suits and ties to work, like at least five days a week. Saturdays and Sundays were casual days. So obviously the vibe and the culture associated with a well-run Silicon Valley startup is nothing like that. If engineers were anything other than gym shorts, it was a formal day in the office. So our t-shirts and gym shorts were definitely formal attire. So work ethic was similar. PayPal is a very difficult company. We had a lot of competitors. We had a lot of large institutions that really didn't like us. So as a lawyer, I was working 24/7. It certainly felt like I built 360 hours the last month of my legal career, maybe not accidentally. But PayPal was, I was working seven days a week for years until we sold the company. So that was very similar. The density of talent was incredible. I worked at a very elite law firm where clearly people had been well educated with high IQs and very strong work ethic. So that felt comparable, but the density of talent at PayPal has been proven 20 years in hindsight to be unparalleled. But it was pretty starkly obvious even at the time without the benefits of hindsight that there was an amazing people running around left and to the right of me. Let's see, yeah, those are maybe the biggest commonalities and differences.

Yeah, in terms of that density of talent obviously resulted in the PayPal mafia, Was it very obvious and clear at the time? Because it's easy to look back in hindsight and say, yeah, this was a success and everyone was going to continue to be successful. But those were tough times in the market towards the end of that. So, yeah, just curious to hear that.

I would just ambiguate a few things. The difference between density of talent, which was obvious at the time, and the likelihood of success, which was definitely not obvious. So when I joined PayPal, I remember thinking, this probably isn't going to work, but at least the people there seem smart and interesting. And I knew some of them from college. And secondarily, the brand had cut through the Clutter. There was a survey that had just been published where PayPal was the eighth largest recognizable brand on the internet. So I figured at least people would know kind of what the company was and what we tried to do. But we were burning 10 million dollars a month, didn't have an infinite amount of money. The market for raising money was very. poor, and we just hired our third CEO in six months. All those do not usually add up well. In any event, very quickly after Peter took over, by three to four months, the company was actually borderline break-even. In 2001 was off to the races. We executed across multiple dimensions extremely well, basically across every department in the company. We were really firing on all cylinders. So by September of 2001, we were ready to file our S-1. and we filed our S-1 actually the day before 9/11.

And what was that like?

You know, it was a tumultuous few months. We actually did succeed with our IPO ultimately in February 2002. So we were able to get public. It was a very painful process. There was a lot of ups and downs. It was kind of a roller coaster ride. Several of us were involved in managing a lot of that roller coaster ride. but we were able to succeed, which is great. The density talent point, though, was very obvious. I remember Roloff Botta, who now runs Sequoia, who's our CFO at the time, saying to me in February of 2001, so about three months after I joined or so, we went and had coffee and he said, the density of talent here is better than Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, where both places he had actually worked. And I actually looked at him kind of quizzically But it was pretty obvious to me two or three months later that he was right.

Wow. That piece of density of talent and then finding undiscovered talent. I remember reading somewhere, I think, that a few months into you working there, you had a conversation with David Sachs about the output of your organization and then that had led you to change your hiring philosophy. Can you talk a little bit about what that change was and then practically, How did you go about finding that undiscovered talent?

Yeah, so David took over COO of the entire organization very early of 2002 and made it very clear to me that his criteria for success as an executive, basically as he took over COO, I moved to report to him, his criteria for success was nonlinear scaling of your organization. So he was not happy if by hiring more people we produce more output, he more than linear output per person. And his critique of me was like, your team's doing fine, but when you add people, it's not clearly producing nonlinear output, so you're not getting promoted until you fix this. So like any ambitious, you know, 30 year old at the time, I was like, okay, damn, I gotta fix this pretty fast. Like what the hell do I do? Fortunately, you know, Peter a year earlier had given me the guidance of how to fix it. So my first week at PayPal, the first Saturday after I started on Tuesday, we went for a jog around the Stanford campus. looped around and Peter basically gave me the hiring philosophy that I needed to adopt, which is you need to hire undiscovered talent. Basically people below the age of 30, mostly because by the time you're 30, typically any organization can accurately assess you. There's just enough data points on your resume back then, LinkedIn profile now, that everybody's gonna come to roughly the same conclusion about your abilities. But if you can intercept people earlier in their career when there's not data points, the more homogenous organizations, don't know how to process you and evaluate you. So that's what Peter basically taught me. And so I, I needed to learn to apply that. And basically, David's critique was, you know, my hiring was okay. I hired some good people, some okay people, but it was mixed. And so I needed to improve that pretty radically if I wanted the output function to be significantly better. And so what I started to do is basically recruit people from around the organization that were under leveraged, in my view, recruit them into my team. I felt I had, like, insight into their abilities and motivations. And that's what I did. So I recruited three, at least three different people from other teams, brought them into my team, and then they started performing really, really well. And the team is all over, overall was really producing significant results that everybody in the company cared about, you know, from CEO down and the board up. And so we were getting a lot of credit. And so what the record, once I got the credit and saw the results, my conclusion was, I was actually pretty astute at evaluating people that I was working with. I just wasn't very good at hiring people randomly off the street, but that I could do it with enough data points and enough context. So then I need to figure out, well, how the hell do I learn eventually to hire people off the street? Because you can't scale by stealing people from your team, from other people's teams. That doesn't work like permanently.

People definitely start noticing what you're doing.

Right.

And how do you evaluate that? So there's a person inside an organization you believe that they have the potential, but maybe they're not being utilized as effectively as they can. How are you able to identify that, you know, this person has a lot of potential?

Good question. You kind of just watch, do they have insights? Do you see, I mean, in our old school organization, we just have coffee, lunch, dinner in the office, late night pizza, whatever. And you can tell that people have ideas that are interesting and they're getting blocked in different ways and can be channeled better. You can tell also some managers are a little bit more controlling and some people who have high potential are sort of like free radicals. They don't take instructions very well. So if you the kind of manager can enable people who are free radicals to be successful, you can recruit the free radicals because the controlling discipline oriented managers, top down managers, really don't even want them on their team. They frustrate them. So it's actually pretty easy to recruit those people because their manager doesn't even really want them. So you're basically making everybody happy and the employee's happy, their old manager's happy and you're happy. Not everybody I recruited was a total.

Free radical, but that was definitely part of the formula. Got it. And then you said, to be able to scale it, then you need to find people outside of the organization as well. So is it similar having conversations with people and saying, oh, this person has potential, they just need the avenue to.

Be able to grow? Well, yes, that's what you want to get to as a conclusion. The question is how do you derive that? So internal to an organization, you have a lot of data points. You can kind of watch and learn. And you have conversations about information, because you have context about the business. You can talk about the, you have the same vocabulary, same metrics, you can brainstorm, et cetera. It's very difficult to do that with a candidate who doesn't have that context. So the question is how in the world do you develop this kind of intuition without the data points? And that's the hiring process. The hiring process almost everybody uses. at some level is evaluating strangers. And how do you do that insightfully is the art. And it would take me years in a lot of trial and error to figure out how to get proficient at it. Yeah.

Is there kind of a framework that you have been using or I had also heard that Peter and Max, I believe, interviewed every hire up until the IPO. Is there a process or general framework that people can take back that you used to evaluate outside talent?

I think that is true. Peter and Max did interview everybody. Elon, you know, to some level of scale at Tesla and SpaceX has taken that with them as well. And I think it's an excellent discipline. Tony at DoorDash interviewed at least the first 3,000 employees at DoorDash. So I think if you want a certain culture and a certain performance bar, it's a good mechanism. But it still doesn't tell you who to hire. At the end of the day, you still need a framework. and ability to assess. And I think it does vary by role and by what you're trying to achieve as a company. So for example, and I've blogged about this with my colleague Delian, there are times when you want value creation, like 10x value creation, and there's times when you want downside protection. The interview process associated with those type of roles should be very different because what you're looking for is quite distinct. So, you know, I would take more risk, for example, on a value creation role about being wrong than I would in a value protection role where I really want to be right, 99% of the time with the hire.

Yeah. In terms of that value creation that reminds me of the barrels versus ammunition concept. For anyone who doesn't know, can you just briefly explain that?

Yeah. So the basic frustration that a lot of founders, CEOs, executives run into is they hire more and more people, but they don't get more done. In fact, sometimes they get less done. and people struggle with this, it seems counterintuitive. And the reason I believe fundamentally, I think there's actually two reasons, but one of the primary drivers of this phenomenon is there's only so many people that are actually what I call burials that can actually take an initiative, drive that initiative, bring people across the finish line, and everybody else in the organization is ammunition that makes that effective and makes that possible. And so you can only do, you can only perform in parallel the same number of unique functions or initiatives as you have barrels. So every barrel you add to the organization is incredibly valuable, but you can't just add more ammunition and expect to get more done. And then the collaboration and coordination tasks of more and more people actually slows you down. So that's why I'm always conscious of the ratio of barrels to ammunition, because it means we're actually getting more output when we hire versus just more expense, which is what many companies suffer through.

And how are you able to find barrels? Because that's probably a constraint that most organizations are dealing with.

It's extremely difficult externally, referring back to the paradigm of the difficulty of hiring internally versus externally. It's even more powerfully true for assessing barrels. I think barrels are culturally specific. There are people who probably would be barrels at Apple who would not thrive at Google and vice versa. So I think you need people actually in the organization performing their roles before you recognize their potential as a barrel. So you never really know that you've hired a barrel until you've seen them, him or her perform or maybe if you've worked with a person before.

Yeah. When you are kind of like building or investing in a team, both of which you've done quite a few times now, how are you What is the makeup of the team that you're looking for? Maybe using like open door versus open store as an example?

So the way we approach this is we think through what are the core risks to a business. There's usually two to three, like things that really matter and you have to get right and everything else is sort of a detail. And so what we want is the right person, the right DRI, directly responsible individual assigned against each of the core risks and you want to calculate what's the right skill set that gives you an unfair advantage in solving one of those core risks? So for an open door, for example, pricing homes using data was obviously a core risk. So I clearly needed a world class data scientist and co-founded the company with me. We needed something to do with real estate. You know, I didn't at the time know much about real estate other than I felt like most people who were in real estate didn't really understand what they were trying to solve for. But Eric, who's CEO was the CEO, is the CEO, actually had a fair amount of real estate background. His first startup was a real estate oriented data visualization product. It was acquired by Trulia, which is a real estate company. He had been buying and selling houses on the side for a while of his own, you know, capital in Phoenix. So he had the real estate background and then we needed to build a product. So JD had built products before, so we recruited JD to build the product. That was basically the Venn diagram overlap. OpenStore has different issues. We do have a data issue. We did need a price, how to price Shopify merchants, long-tail Shopify merchants, we provide instant liquidity to. I need someone who knew how to do that, who had suffered through the same sort of challenges before, recruited someone from Square for that. Again, we needed to build a product, we needed to track SMBs, you sort of decompose the problem, and then make sure you have the right people assigned to the most important problems. and then you revisit it in a year. The problems and the challenges may shift, the prioritization of them may shift and you may have people with the right DNA or you may need to go to the external market and recruit those people.

When you are kind of like prioritizing these risks and then saying, you know, these are the risks we need to attack in order and this is what they are right now and this is what they'll be in the future potentially. How are you approaching those? For example, at DoorDash, I believe Tony said, We're going to start with restaurants because that's likely the hardest problem rather than some other type of vertical. Do you think about it that way as well? Like we need to attack the hardest problems first or is there a framework there?

Yes, I always believe in tackling the hardest problems first. Basically, you're doing risk reduction and maybe this is counterintuitive, many people think startups are embracing risk, they're actually reducing risk. So every time you take a risk off the table by proving you can do it, you've increased the valuation of the company because there's all the things people are discounting you by. So in order of challenge, you want to remove the biggest possible blockers that can be fatal as fast as you can. So typically that's in reverse order, a degree of difficulty. There may be some times when you defer one or two challenges because you may need sort of more traction in some other dimension to actually conquer it. But fundamentally you really want to decompose This is something Elon talks about publicly. It's a very good process and it's not totally intuitive to every founder.

And so, because I guess one line of thinking, and obviously I'm not an inventor, but one line of thinking would be let's start with the easy problems, learn, iterate, gain momentum, but you're saying no, that's the wrong advice. You should be starting with the hardest thing because you take that off the table, that's going to increase your valuation. It's going to convince more people. Because you've effectively solved the hardest thing first.

It's also gonna convince yourself. At the end of the day, if you know there's three things you need to solve, solving the easiest one doesn't really improve your confidence and conviction. Like almost defer the things that you know you can solve and focus obsessively on the things that you don't quite know how to solve yet.

Yeah, totally. That makes sense. And then before we jump to Open Store and Open Door, @PayPal, Peter would say this thing of, you should only be focused on one thing. I only want to talk to you about one thing and don't talk to me about anything else. Practically, how does that actually work? Are you able to continue? Do you advise your companies? Do you still do that with the companies that you've co-founded?

I think it's an excellent discipline and it relates to our prior conversation of, if there's one or two things that really matter, then you want people focused on the one or two things that really matter. And you don't want them solving problems that can be solved later and that really don't move the needle. But people's natural human tendency is to solve problems they know how to solve. So if you have a checklist in the morning, you write down, you know, three things. Most people are not going to look at the hardest one all day long. They're going to want to cross off the second or third tier one and have the satisfaction of crossing was off the list. But what you want to do is build an organization that solves A+ problems that produce A+ rewards, and you need to bang your head against the wall typically for a sustained period of time to solve those. And so Peter's philosophy, by definition, required everybody to be focused on an A+ problem. And by not allowing people to get the psychological satisfaction of crossing off the B or the C, people just didn't cross off the Bs or Cs until they solved the A. And so occasionally, not every day, but occasionally we get breakthroughs on A or A+ problems.

And is this something that you continue to implement the companies you've founded and you advise?

It's difficult. It takes a leader like Peter to apply it. It's very counterintuitive to most people's humans emotions and how they've been trained. So there's versions of it with higher or less fidelity. I think it's a very good problem. One of the CEOs I'm working with now uses it, reframes it as what's the most important thing? So basically asks everybody in the company, deputies on down, cascading on down, what's the most important thing you're working on? And it's a way of a little.

Bit less edgy way of implementing Peter's philosophy. Got it. Okay, I want to switch gears to Open Door first. So Open Door is now, you know, a multi-billion dollar public company. The idea, I believe, started in 2003. in a conversation that you had. Can you just talk about the evolution of like from 2003 to actually launching it? You know, what happened during that time? Yeah.

So Peter actually sort of in a top-down way asked me to look at innovation of residential real estate, primary residential real estate in 2003. I asked him why and he said basically it's the biggest area of the economy unaffected by the internet back then. Seemed like a good enough reason. So, you know, I did and I spent some with a colleague of mine that I had hired out of Stanford. And we came back to Peter, presented an idea that kind of looked a little bit like Zillow, this is before Zillow launched. And Peter threw us out of the conference room in like three minutes and said that it was so boring. And so we went back, ran back to the other side of the office and my colleague and friend Steve was very depressed. He didn't have the benefit of having worked with Peter for a while. So he thought he was gonna get fired the next day, I was like, I just left Stanford and I'm gonna get fired a month into my job. Anyway, I went home that day, came back the next morning with an epiphany and I said, Hey Steve, what do you think if we actually bought the houses? Because we were gonna stamp prices like his estimate on each house. That was part of the idea that Peter found very boring. So what if we actually bought them? And so then we spent a month roughly figure out whether we could do that. Could we build them out a model that we had enough conviction to buy them? Could we finance the purchase of them? Was it legal for an entity to buy all these things, et cetera? Came back a month later with, you know, hired some consultants, helped triangulate this, had a different vision, and then presented to Peter, which he actually really liked. Like any good idea, not everybody at our fund at the time liked it. There were several cynics. Fortunately, they're no longer involved in technology, but Cerulean's complaining all the time about it. But we built a very high fidelity version of it called actually Home Run. We bought the URL Home Run, which I maybe still prefer over Open Door, but Open Door has turned out to work well enough. We built it, tested it out, and got pretty close to launching it permanently in 2003. For a variety of reasons, we didn't, and so we kind of put it back on the shelf. and every three to five years I get tempted to launch it again. So it took a strong look at launching in 2007 and 10, and then really was never able to recruit in the interval years. I'd be pitching all my friends, everybody I knew professionally on this idea of what they should be doing with their lives, and it can never really persuade somebody. And then Eric Wu, after he left Trulia in 2012, came back he scheduled a coffee with me. He's like, this time I want to do something really ambitious. Do you still think that idea that you were trying to pitch me on in 2009 is good? And I was like, yeah, absolutely, it's great. You need to do this. And so he's like, yeah, I think I'm actually ready to do it. And so in 2013, we went down the path of actually what would it take to build this, what would it take from a team, and marshaled the team, the money, et cetera, to go pursue it.

And then launched in 2014. It's a pretty quick turnaround, I think, from launch to ultimately going public. I think it was about five and a half years or so. Did you envision that when you launched it, or was that just a function of how well the team executed plus market dynamics?

I'm typically a very big advocate of going public very early in the history of a technology company. Five years is long, actually long for me. No. I wrote a whole chapter in that Gill's high growth handbook on why companies should go public as fast as possible. Five years is about as fast as post bubble it's been done. So four years would be exceptional. Five years is pretty good. Six years is not bad. But I tend to like speed to IPO. I like the transparency, the accountability. Actually, in Open Door's case, the access to debt under attractive terms improves. But I think most of the reasons why people don't go public or excuses.

What were the risks that you guys prioritized in the very beginning on Open Door? Yeah, curious to hear you kind of walk through those and then how you attacked each one.

So the good news is you can find our seed deck on the internet from sometime in 2013 when we pitched the business to Coastal Ventures. And we were very clear about what the core risks were. The most important one was could we price could a home in fact be treated like a commodity and priced using data, basically purely data and almost no human intervention. And that was the core risk to the business completely. There were some secondary risks like would we suffer adverse selection, et cetera. But fundamentally that was the key issue. And so that was mostly what we talked about in the deck, but the deck is still a pretty good blueprint for the company, even though it was written in 2013.

When you guys launched and then you went public, the one question everyone always asks is what happens in a down market? And I think you have said before we would actually perform better in a down market. Can you unpack that a little bit and explain to people like me?

Exactly. In the seed deck, we addressed this head on because it's an obvious question. Any potential investor, many employees, et cetera, would ask. and so we did the obvious things. There are some things you can do to sort of validate your assumptions, but we basically back tested models against 2008, which is one of the more severe downturns in American history, and actually validated that the models we were using were likely to have performed reasonably well in 2008. Now, black swan, there's a problem with back testing against black swans, which is the next black swan doesn't look like the last black swan. So you never really know, but the logic behind the company was we were going to be real estate neutral, meaning we did not take a directional position of real estate. We don't want to care whether it risks it goes up or down. And so the platform, the data, the models were always built from that perspective. And the key reason why downturns in some ways are better for the company is we charge a liquidity premium. That's basically what Open Door's fee is. It's premium for liquidity. You have an asset that's pretty illiquid. you want instant liquidity, we provide that and we charge for it. Like any other asset class in the world, there's a premium for liquidity. Well, guess what? When markets are going up, the desire for instant liquidity goes down. And when markets start collapsing, there's a lot of demand for instant liquidity because people need or want to get out fast. They have fear, basically either need or fear. And so the premium you can charge in a down market is substantially greater than what you can charge in an appreciating market. So the opportunity to create profit, it should increase significantly in a downturn. We've been able to establish this in what we call micro markets. So it turns out another sort of fallacy people have about residential real estate is that a city like Miami or Phoenix or Denver is one market. It's in fact a pocket of micro markets. So as the macro market may be going up, there may be micro markets that are declining, zip codes that you could analyze. And in fact, it's been true forever since we launched Opendoor that in zip codes that were declining, we actually performed better on a profit basis than in zip codes that we're appreciating.

Yeah, I think that's a good insight. A lot of people will always ask these broad questions. What do you think is going to happen with the real estate market? And it's like, look, things are going to happen differently based on Fed increases and things like that across the country. What happens in Florida or Texas is going to be much different than what's happening in Detroit or Chicago.

And so I... Yeah, that's another key insight that was also addressed in our seed deck, which is geographic diversity. So if you analyze 2008, if you had been... if you had exposure in the top 12 to 15 markets, you would have performed reasonably okay. So geographic diversity was critical. It's one of the reasons why we expanded fairly fast at Open Door, was we wanted to get to to double-digit markets so we can take advantage of that geographic diversity.

And I saw just yesterday they announced that they're expanding into the Bay Area. So that will be exciting to see.

I'm really excited about this. I had no confidence that this would ever happen. The Bay Area is anomalous in many ways, but the team has been so successful, thriving, is really excellent at pricing. So they decided they really were ready to tackle the Bay Area, which is great, because a lot of people are trying to escape the Bay Area. So we're going to make it easy.

Yeah.

And.

Something funny is that, you know, when you guys launched Open Door, it took a few years, but effectively you, you know, got the previous Zillow, I believe, founder and then CEO out of retirement back into Zillow, shifted the business model, and then ultimately it failed. why did they fail versus open door succeeding? Is this simply a byproduct of the data science team?

No, I think there's two elements. That is one, which is building models from the ground up with the right people, knowing the problem you're trying to solve is very different than a generic data science problem. And so I think we're incredibly thoughtful from the beginning of exactly what we wanted to do and why. But secondarily, the biggest issue for Zillow is at the end of the day, there software ad product team with typically, let's say 90% gross margins, operational excellence is also required in an open door business model. So you need to move real people around the real world and you need every basis point matters. And so the culture like a DoorDash or an Instacart or Lyft, where you're moving people around and there's significant demands on the performance has to to be baked into the company culture. It's not something to just bolt on to a software-based 90% gross margin business. And I don't think Zillow really understood that.

Yeah, got it. Shifting gears, talking about Open Store. It seems like you took the same type of playbook and then just applied it to a different industry. Can you talk a little bit about how the idea of Open Store came about?

There's some commonalities. I wouldn't say it's the exact same playbook. It's actually Square meets Open Door, maybe. The idea was not mine. A friend of mine, Jack Abraham, pitched me on the idea. A few minutes into the description, it immediately resonated with me both the opportunity, what parts would be key challenges, and then where the accumulating advantages were. I was excited about the opportunity to build a company in Miami, being evangelical towards building companies in Miami. I felt it'd be a great idea to set an example by building a company in Miami.

Myself.

So we're kind of off to the races. Jack pitched me on the idea late December of 2020. Basically founded the company in March 2021 and launched it July or August last summer. We now have about 45 people all in Miami. We're recruiting very aggressively. So if anybody wants to join, you know, email me, keith@foundersfund.com.

Can you just briefly explain the concept of open source?

So, I'm listening. So there's about 1.4 4 million or so long tail Shopify merchants. By that I mean, let's say selling less than $10 million worth of goods every year. Shopify has been growing over the last decade. The number of people starting Shopify stores as a primary occupation is increasing. The number of people starting Shopify stores as a supplementary source of income is increasing. But these people don't really necessarily want to run the business forever. They may not have the option to run the business forever. And unless they have explosive growth, which is extremely rare, they're not really attractive candidates for venture capital. So we wanted to provide instant liquidity, just like at Opendoor, for business owners who decided, for whatever set of reasons, they no longer wanted to operate the business. So that's what we do. Giving you give us access to some of your Shopify data, et cetera, and we will give you a price within 24 hours. And if you're interested, we'll buy your business out, and then we will run these businesses together. collectively. So that's what we've been doing. We started buying businesses over the summer. We've now bought and closed more than 20 of them. We'll be up to 50 plus businesses pretty soon, maybe this week or so. So we're starting to buy one a day sort of pacing. And that's really the next step for the company.

What are the, similar to how when you did the C Deck for Open Door, what are the core risks at Open Store? I would imagine pricing, accurately of stores might be one. What else is there?

Yep. Same issues. Can you use data to evaluate a business? Can you avoid adverse selection? Can you subtract the core team and run the business better? Once you get that working, the accumulating advantages are pretty stark. There's a lot of benefits of economies of scale here. There's a lot of advantages of data, but you need to do the blocking and tackling part first. What price would you have to pay? to be interesting, nobody really knew what the liquidity, you know, sort of premium or discount would be here. There were some better metaphors in Open Door, like for example, auto, like you use auto as a proxy. But in any event, yeah, I think we have a pretty good understanding of all those moving pieces by now.

How are you able to run them? Yeah, how are you able to run the stores? Because you have someone who's spending like virtually a lot of time on it and then you integrate it into Open Store.

It's a good question. So there are common Lego building blocks sort of that go into running these stores. Like they have to do customer acquisition, they have to do customer support, they have to do procurement. So what we're basically doing is building specialized functions in each of the sub components and then some components can then handle a lot of scale and they actually can use more math than art hopefully.

And then it seems like the flywheel of the open store business is buy more businesses, get more data, keep being able to refine the pricing, which makes you more accurate, then also you're able to get better unit economics from shipping, procurement, that kind of stuff. And then you create a network of stores and you can kind of have a recommendation engine as well, is that right?

Sounds pretty good.

On the point of Miami, it seems like you and Mayor Francis Suarez have just, you know, made Miami come to fruition over the past year, two years or so. Talk about like, yeah, what that has been like moving from the Bay Area to Miami and then, you know, how you've set this vision and kind of executed on it.

Yeah, so it feels like paradise. I think I got my escape from Alcatraz. hard. So everything in Miami is better. The weather is better, the traffic is better, the safety is better, the affordability of real estate is significantly better, the culture is better, the cuisine is better, proximity to other places and people is better. So Miami is by far the best place to live in the United States. The question was whether you can make it a technology Center. So I basically reversed engineered what I thought was the history of Silicon Valley, what worked and what didn't work over the last 50, 60 years, and basically decided we're going to replicate it and create a unique version, blending a more art and design with technology, more forward looking version, but using some of the insights for what actually mattered in the history of Silicon Valley. So I started proselytizing and very selectively recruiting certain people with certain skills to move here right after I did. I felt sort of like in the beginning, like Noah's Ark, like I need two designers, two angel investors, two VCs, two engineers, two founders, and let me go recruit them one by one by one.

Right, right. And the companies that you're investing in, let's say over the past, you know, year or so since maybe 2021, do you have a makeup of like what is in Miami versus remote versus other regions?

Yeah, roughly. So I probably led an investment in some way or another of about 18 companies last year. And three plus are in Miami, about another six or seven are in New York. So the Eastern Seaboard is at least half, a little maybe a little more. One's in Austin, two or so are in the Bay Area. so pretty much one or two is remote. Two are probably remote first, at least one's in basically Vegas and Salt Lake City. There's some that it's hard to tell where they are because like the headquarters versus the people versus where the company was when we funded it. It's a work in progress.

Yeah, totally. How have things changed in a remote world? Is it from an investor standpoint? I've heard you say before, like, you can walk into an office and you know you're investing or not. How has that kind of changed?

You definitely have to shift your signals. And that's been one of the biggest challenges for me and I'd say for at least one or two of my partners as well is pretty honed signal collection and algorithm for making decisions over the years. So in 2000, I only led investments in two new companies where I didn't already know of the founders because we were doing fully Zoom-based investing, which I don't really enjoy. I don't think I'm that super proficient at. Last year, because I moved to Miami and basically everything in Miami is in person has been for a very long time, I was able to lead investments in probably about 12 of the 18 companies were founders that I didn't have a pre-existing connection to. And so that's a 6X growth year to year. And I think it's primarily driven by the fact that I meet founders in person and have conviction and confidence in my assessment.

Got it. And then, you know, one thing I think is that you've talked about and I've thought about has been structured learning versus unstructured. Structured, you can kind of replicate in a remote world. Unstructured is much tougher. Have you found any ways to be able to or has it just been, like, we've went back to in person? haven't had to deal with that.

Well, fortunately, yeah, the company I'm running is fully in person, which allows us to hire undiscovered talent, lets them learn by osmosis. I don't know how people learn by osmosis earlier in their career, develop a craft in a structured Zoom based conversation. If anybody develops products or ideas, I'm certainly willing to adopt them, but I haven't haven't seen any, haven't seen any really deployed in any of the 18 companies I'm involved in. So I think this is a real fundamental problem. It doesn't mean it can't be solved.

But I don't believe it has been solved. Yeah, got it. You mentioned a lot of the people that you invested in over the past year have been, you know, people you didn't have pre-existing relationships with. How do founders kind of get your attention? Is it cold emails? Is it like just start a company and get traction, reach out to me? what's the best way that like is your signal for finding new people?

It's actually all over the map. Many come in through other founders that they may already know. Several worked at companies that I was previously involved in. Some are actually cold emails or cold tweets at. Some are introduced by the current cap table, whether seed investor, angel investor, other VC if it's a later stage each company. So it actually is probably all of the above. So there's no one formula that seems to work best. Probably if I had to analyze it empirically, usually introductions from a current member of the CAP table, seed investor, angel investor, probably is the number one. And number two is probably they were employees at a company I'm already involved in.

Got it. When you invested in Ramp, I believe you were actively looking to fund that specific problem. How did the founders convince you, and I think Delian as well, that they were the ones to be attacking this? If I remember correctly, Delian, we were.

Actively looking for a way of competing, a better way to compete with Amex's business card division. And we were looking for people who we thought had the right DNA and the right approach. I'd been trying to proselytize this to people I already knew and trying to persuade them that this is what they should do with their lives. That was in process. And then Delian intercepted Kareem, CTO and co-founder of Ramp, and said, I think I found them for you. And so they flew out to San Francisco to meet us. And about three minutes, they loaded up this document. It was like a Google Doc on broadcast on the screen. About three minutes into describing what they wanted to do, I was completely convinced that they were the right people. I looked at Dolly and I was like, you,'re right. We need to fund this. So we gave him a term sheet like that day.

Got it. And was there anything specific that kind of like jumped out backgrounds, characteristics, anything like that where you said these are, this is the right team to go focus on this problem?

Yeah, they were able to, well, they were able to frame the value proposition of how would one do this in a differentiated way astutely, accurately avoiding some of the superficial, sort of what I call trapdoors. Number two, the team that they had already created was quite good. You could see some signal from the people they were recruiting for their core team. Three, the prior background they had worked together at a company that had some traction but was acquired fairly early in its trajectory by Capital One. There was some leverage from things and problems they had solved before that could be applied somewhat subtly to what we wanted in Aspire to build at Ramp. So it's the combination of those things.

Yeah, got it. And then are there any problems today that you kind of look to and say, look, someone needs to be focusing on this. I've heard you mention something about like one in the nutrition slash fitness space that you've been looking for a while.

There's a few in the back of my brain. Nothing so acute. pretty rare for me to have what I'd call a top down or describe as a top down vision for something. It's like a once every four year kind of epiphany. Um, so I don't sit around with a notebook of ideas. There are areas where I would love to find people who have better ideas. Like I happen to think, for example, improving human sleep is the single best thing we can do for society. We like to fund entrepreneurs who have ideas, interesting arresting technologies in sleep enhancement, but I'm kind of waiting for the right founder with the right idea, the right product. you know, to sort of cross our transom in there. It's not like I have a top down solution. I would like someone to couple nutrition with fitness, with recovery. I think, like, if you divide into silos of what do you eat versus how do you sleep versus how do you work out and train yourself, you actually get very sub-optimal results. And there's not one product that stitches this all together and makes it sort of intuitive. So I would love to find that. I don't know how to do it, so I don't. have an idea. If I had an idea, I might do it. There's one specific idea I've talked about for the last five years that I am pretty passionate about eventually solving, and I do have some ideas about how to solve. I haven't been able to quite recruit the right team. I thought I would actually probably do it before Open Store and then shifted the order as Open Store felt like a time sensitive opportunity and maybe the right opportunity to do in Miami. But I would like to come back to the drawing board. I've talked about it you know, in podcasts publicly, just like it took me 10 years to launch Open Door. I'm not too worried. It's only, it's five years in for this other idea. We'll eventually get around to it.

Right, right. Okay. And I wanted to switch a little bit to kind of like personal finance markets, how you think about things. I know you've been pretty vocal right now on the markets. Yeah, just first, like, how do you think about your own personal portfolio construction? outside of, you know, founders fund and venture?

I honestly don't. My general decision making is, is this a great investment opportunity or not? So I meet a founder and I'm either intrigued or not. And even if I'm very busy, if I think the founder is exceptional, extraordinary, and the idea is important, I'll figure out a way to fund it. And if not, it doesn't matter if we funded something or not recently. So, it's a benefit of a large fund with multiple partners is I don't really need to dial this in. I think more about exposure a little bit over time. I think there is something to vintages and venture a little bit like wines. So you do want some diversity over the years, but I don't really overthink that too much. I prefer to be involved as early as possible. I'd be doing seed investments on Keynote decks only if I could do that. It's hard to find all of those opportunities. They take a lot of meetings. So it's almost impossible to deploy $1.4 billion or so just in those. But if I could do seed investments all day long every day, that's what I'd prefer to be doing. I typically do a lot, you know, highly weighted towards seed and series A's, but I have absolutely led Sears B's, C's, even D's on occasion. But it's all about the right founder, the right founding team resonating with me about the problem they're trying to solve.

Got it. On markets, markets have obviously been shaken this year. Technology stocks have gotten hit harder, obviously, because of interest rates. How do you see the markets playing out? Caveating that obviously this is an investment advice for anybody.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think this is actually pretty straightforward and simple, and I think most people just overthink this and confuse it. It's really just a sole function of predicting the interest rates. If you know what the interest rates are, you can tell what the valuation associated with tech companies should be. And good news is there's a lot of data that you can use to predict what's likely to happen with interest rates. And inflation is basically the only thing you need to know right now. the environment is more complicated. But if inflation is higher than expected, interest rates have to go up. And if inflation is lower than expected, they may not have to go up. And the valuations will increase. The reason why is all you're doing is taking a valuation of a company is a simple expression of the future expected cash flow is discounted by the probability of those cash flows and the time value of money. So if you change the time value of money input, by definition, your valuation goes up or down. And so all you need to do is figure out what's time value of money, is it going up or down?

And is this affected corporate finance theory?

Basically half of the corporate finance theory class in 30 seconds.

Right, just doing a DCF. Has this affected earlier stage investments or is that too early for the valuations to be affected there?

It hasn't seemed to affect early stage investments, which makes sense. I mean, when we're funding an early stage investment, we're really thinking six to 10 years in the future. And so trying to predict what the world looks like in to 10 years, there's absolutely a fool's errand, or maybe Peter can do it, but I certainly can't. But trying to figure out what the world looks like six months from today and a year or two years from today, which is a later stage, investment absolutely is a tractable problem. It needs to be calculated and thought through pretty carefully. What we've seen in our portfolio is later-stage companies absolutely are suffering through impact pricing, time on market, degrees of difficulty raising, companies pitching us are definitely adjusting their expectations, sometimes quite meaningfully, but those are typically later stage companies right now.

Got it. Okay, and I think we have about 10 minutes if that works for your schedule, so just want to get to some of the stuff past business a little bit. So you recently somewhat recently became a parent just just want to hear a little bit about, you know, how's that changed you as a person?

It's a good question. Well, yeah, our kids are only six months old, so we'll see. I think there's different evolutions you go through at different ages. So more focus on now I have to learn what's the best way to educate kids. Like, you know, and like, it's one of these topics too. It's really interesting because everybody has a different perspective in the data. Research is very inconsistent. So to some extent, I have my own views and may just, you know, sort of, as I usually do, just follow my own views and then find the research later. Yeah.

And what have you learned so far? Because that's something, you know, ours is 15 months and I'm going through the same process of seeing conflicting stuff and trying to form my own views.

I mean, it's incredibly, there's a couple of epiphanies I've had. One is, I think, you know, given how much the world is regulated and controlled these days, you need permission to do anything. It's shocking that you can have a baby with nobody's permission. That was the first epiphany. It was like, oh my God, where's the license and where's the approval? And these days, the government tells you where to wear a mask, not wear a mask, vaccinations, et cetera, and you can just have a baby because you decide to or sometimes not even because you decide to. And so it's like one of these magical things that you still have control of your life about, which is actually interesting and rusting by comparison. Secondly, you do think in longer time horizons because obviously, you know, kids mature over at least 15 years, let's say. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, that feels like an eternity, like 15 years, like unfathomable amount of time. As a VC, it's actually not that hard to think in decade long doses. And so I think I'm actually more comfortable with the sort of sort of raising children kind of perspective and timeline than I would have been back in my entrepreneurial days. You know, we're expecting things to change every day, every week, every month, every quarter. Like, what the hell is going on here if they're not? Whereas now when you think about a venture fund over a decade, education may.

Be better for socializing.

I don't even think they're better for socializing. I think schools have become babysitting functions. If you want to read Paul Graham's book Hackers and Painters, which is a brilliant book on many, many topics and dimensions, he really nails the public schools as, you know, babysitters metaphor. And I think it was published in 2007. So, you know, we'll explore whether we should be homeschooling our kids or some version of that. If we found a public school option, you know, that was equal in pacing and challenging our kids, we'd probably, you know, be willing to do that. but starting to look at innovation there. I think homeschooling now, 5 million Americans are homeschooled, up from roughly 38,000 in the late '70s. So it's been this massive trend, but I think more and more people are contemplating the need to homeschool to maximize potential and happiness of their children.

My hope is that, I believe at Synthesis School, they'll turn into that. They might be located in Miami.

I don't know. There's a bunch, I ran into some people last night that are running interesting schools around the globe, some in Singapore. So we're starting to look at precedent, maybe we'll start some schools here. I know the mayor is very interested in cutting edge, Mayor of Miami. Suarez is very interested and intrigued by launching progressive charter schools that have a differentiated value proposition here. So that's something pretty exciting to look forward to.

In terms of routines and habits, kind of what's a day in the life look like for you now?

It's pretty boring. I basically maximize, you know, try to maximize sleep, you know, and reverse engineer my schedule around how do I get eight hour sleep? I use various devices and techniques like eight sleep mattress to cool and improve deep sleep, have a new device of checking out the measure of sleep, and we funded a sleep enhancing device that hopefully will have you know, products in the market this year. I wake up and I go to my normal high intensity workout program at Barry's, usually one in the morning, ideally one in the evening. And in between, I'm taking meetings, combination of new pitches, interviews for candidates in a portfolio, board meetings, and one-on-ones with CEOs. And then about 10% of the time is moving people to Miami. Yeah, real estate shopping, persuading, lobbying, tweeting, marshaling evidence. Right.

Those sleep devices you use. So I use Eight Sleep, I use Whoop, Apple Watch. Is there anything in particular you can talk about that you use?

Yeah, the key issue with most of the products on the market is they don't track sleep stages accurately or at all. And I think to really optimize your sleep, you need sleep stage discrimination, like REM sleep versus deep sleep. And wrist-worn devices are very poor at that. There's a new product I'm trying that's maybe better at it, and the product we funded should be excellent and accurate. But I think unless you maximize your deep sleep and optimize that, you don't really know what you're toggling other than just get more sleep, which is generic advice.

And like most generic advice, people ignore it. Yeah. How do you end the day in terms of a sleep routine? Is it like eliminating blue light, anything like that?

Well, I try to go to bed is the most important advice that everybody will give you is trying to go to bed at the same time consistently. It's very difficult to do. Miami definitely doesn't make it easy. There's a lot of activities in Miami and even if you're only going to go out one night a week, that's going to shift your sleep schedule, which is not ideal. But I do try to be as height within a half hour band, let's say 80 and probably achieve it truly 80% of nights within a half hour band. So that's one. Secondly, you know, blackout shades, I use sleep masks. I have a prescription drug that I've been using for a while that's under the radar. It's very effective for sleep onset. So magical. My doctor recommended to me a decade ago. I'm completely convinced that, you know, maybe saved my life. I used to have the classic problem with ambitious type A personalities of not being able to fall asleep by running my brain too much, thinking through the meetings of the day, the next day. And this drug's really been effective. It's called Razoreum. Second, in addition to that, I probably don't actually maximize the blue light I find I'm checking email and often tweeting a little bit later than I probably should be. I do have magnesium as a supplement sometimes. I have a workout recovery supplement that actually does help with sleep. So I have these little bit of hacks but basically the fundamentals really work. Consistent sleep time, cool temperature, cooling, body cooling, sleep, but generally you want to also have your ambient temperature to be 64 to 67 degrees. So, I just do all the basics and that mostly works.

Yeah, got it. In terms of the workout, you're obviously a big proponent of Barry's. What's the metric that you're optimizing for?

Is it the two-minute heart rate recovery? Yeah, two-minute heart rate recovery. If you know nothing else about somebody, we'll give you with one data point, give you incredible insights into their health. potential lifespan. You can look at other things in addition. Obviously, people care about aesthetic appeal. That is part of the reason why people work out. So that's not just solely a function of how long am I going to live. Resting heart rate is pretty relevant in many ways. Certainly changes in resting heart rate can be quite meaningful whether it's going up and it can be a signal that you have serious health issues or you have COVID. or it can decrease, which is generally showing progress. So there are like things like that, but I'm kind of on the optimization function of increasing telomere length, which high intensity training does do. Telomere length is probably causal, but certainly correlated with living longer. And two minute recovery time is probably a pretty good predictor for whether you're improving your telomere length. So that's mostly what I'm optimizing. So basically you want to go high intensity up, come back down, go up and down, more like a roller coaster ride. The more times you do that, the steeper the cycles in between that, the better it is for your health.

Yep. And then how do you spend your weekends? Did it used to be work and now you spend more time with family with kids or still a lot of work?

It's a mix. Saturdays I typically don't work. So Saturdays I typically will do anything but work that can include reading. It does include, definitely always includes time with kids. It can include fun activities. In Miami, there's a lot of fun activities, including boats on the water. But it would typically be very rare for me to be doing focused work on a Saturday. Sundays, I often do do work. I will take interview meetings or pitch meetings or certainly spend a lot of time composing or responding to emails, looking at metrics, et cetera. So Sundays, a blend maybe not, maybe like a third half of a workday, but it's also a way to catch up on things that, you know, sort of got neglected or falling behind during the week. And we'll typically, you know, combine that with some version of some social activity, brunch, dinner, et cetera. And then because Mondays are my most aggressive CEO day, like I'm in the office all day at open store, typically we'll go to bed even earlier than usual on a Sunday to make sure I have as much possible energy. for 10 hours of meetings on Monday.

Is there anything specific you take on Monday mornings? Is it drinking coffee or anything like that to sustain the energy through the day?

Not really. I switched over the years. Back when I was involved in Square and before that, LinkedIn, et cetera, I drink a lot of Diet Coke. I've totally gone cold turkey on Diet Coke. So I switched to green tea, ice green tea and some espresso. but also these new moderate energy drinks like Celsius or Onnit. I'll mix those in, but I never have caffeine after 2:00 p.m. Got it.

And then your reading process, how do you read? Do you take highlights, take notes, just read and just remember it?

I'm very old school in my reading, so I love to read. It's one of my favorite things to do. I think it's one of the best ways to learn. I've also noticed that almost all the successful people I know are voracious readers. It's basically a way of learning from other people and learning from their mistakes for free. So it's great. I'm kind of old school, so I read books in print edition only, and I take notes with a pen in the margins. It's not the most efficient in terms of retrieving. I understand that. It's pretty proven, though, it's better for retaining information. So depends what, again, what you're optimizing for. I'll read fiction. I can read fiction on a mobile, you know, on a device because I'm not usually reading fiction to retain it. But I almost never will read nonfiction, you know, on a Kindle or iPad.

Do you just go back and pick up books sometimes and like read through your notes in the margins or you're looking for something?

I actually have a system. I can kind of tell what my highlights mean in terms of prioritization. It is funny. When I lived in the Bay Area, I had a library at home and I'm building a library in my house now. And younger founders are confused. It's kind of like I have final records when they see the library. Right, right.

And I've read a lot of the books you've recommended. Two of my favorites were the Upside of Stress and then the Score Takes Care of Itself. What books do you commonly gift to others outside of those two?

I know those are a couple of your favorites. Those are two of my favorites. Absolutely. The Checklist Manifesto, I think, very valuable. Seven Powers for Entrepreneurs and for Executives, I think is quite valuable. Starting to recommend Frank Slootman's new book, Amp It Up, mostly for founders. I think it applies for people building companies. It's not more, not general, like where upside stress, I think applies to everybody. So those are like the top of high output management is a canonical one for founders and executives. Those are the ones I'm typically giving. Everything else I give to people recommending people is more like a custom recommendation. So I know what people's interests are. There's some people who are fanatically interested in life extension, some people are interested in fitness. And so I have different kind of lists for different people.

Yeah, got it. Okay, just a few final questions to wrap up. What purchase of less than $1,000 has most positively affected your life?

Purchase for less than $1,000. Great question, actually. I mean, the easy answer is just retrieving these books we talked about. All the books we just named have absolutely shaped my life and they cost roughly $20. In fact, actually, one of the best things my parents did for me when I was growing up was I basically had an unlimited book budget. So anytime I wanted to buy a book, I could buy as many books as I want. And I had a very strictly limited budget on everything else. Shockingly, I became a fan of buying books. It's incredibly effective.

Yeah, my wife and I had that.

Single thing I'm going to copy from them and apply it to my kids.

Yeah, my wife and I had that conversation. I said we should have an unlimited budget for books and courses. And then what's the most worthwhile investment you've made in time, money, or energy?

Wow.

And it can be multiple investments. You don't need to just single it down to one.

That's a great question as well. So the sleep drug rozerem is maybe one of the most indispensable investments of my life. It costs about $60 a month. and the reason why is I would say quantitatively, maybe half the nights before I found and discovered this drug, I would struggle to fall asleep. And now I struggle to fall asleep once a month. So that's a massive improvement in quality of life, health, et cetera, immunity, et cetera, sharpness, performance at work, almost surely. And so that's probably easily in the top, maybe the most important in many ways, and since I've been using the drug for 11 years, so it's pretty much transformed a lot of my life.

Yeah, great. Where can people go to find more about you? @Raboy on Twitter, R-A-B-O-I-S. Is there anything else you'd like them to check out in particular?

That's probably the most actionable content, frequent content. I do have a substack that, you know, occasionally I'll write something, but right now I'm more focused, unfortunately, or fortunately, as being CEO, and so writing less. At some point, I'll go back to writing more, hopefully soon.

Awesome. Well, Keith, you've been really generous with your time. I just want to say thank you so much, not only for coming on the show, but I've learned a lot from you in terms of how to be a better business person, a better operator, and it's been really impactful for me. So thanks so much.

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. Bye.

All right, take care.