Kevin Hartz | Backing Teen Founders, Lessons from the PayPal Mafia

Welcome to the Peel. I'm your host Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital. Today's guest is Kevin Hartz, co founder of Astar, Eventbrite, Zoom and Sauron. Kevin has been building and investing in technology companies for over 30 years and we talk about how the industry's evolved.

Why he calls A.I.

The mother of all bubbles, why we're still early, and lessons today's breakout AI companies can learn from those that survived the dot com crash. Kevin is a big proponent of backing young founders. A significant percentage of his latest fund at A Star is invested in teenagers, and he shares how he identifies outlier talent so early, from seed investments in Airbnb, PayPal and Pinterest to many of.

Today'S hottest AI companies.

He also shares the insane story of investing 100% of the proceeds from his first startup into PayPal's seed round, how PayPal's early fraud systems inspired Palantir, what he Learned from the PayPal mafia from Peter Thiel, and what makes Founders Fund so special. We also talk about how he and his wife recently had two babies five months apart using genome editing and surrogates. I also want to call it the obvious that Kevin is a co founder of Eventbrite. If you've been following the company, they're in the middle of closing an acquisition, selling to bending spoons for illegal purposes. We had to cut most of our conversation related to that, but hopefully Kevin can join the show again sometime and we can run it back. A quick thank you to Ramtin Naimi, Navia, Gudimitla and Bennett Siegel for helping brainstorm topics for Kevin. A reminder that I published two episodes of the Peel every week exploring the world's greatest startup stories just like this one.

Check out the back catalog of over.

100 episodes and tune in next week for conversation with Marcelo Lebre, co founder of global HR platform remote.com now let's talk to Kevin after a quick word.

From Numerl and Flex. This episode is brought to you by Numerl. Numeral is the fastest, easiest way to stay compliant with US Sales tax and global vat. It's easy to set up and they.

Automatically handle all registrations, ongoing filings, and.

Their API provides sales tax rates wherever you need them with all the integrations you need.

Numero sports over 2,000 customers in both.

The US and globally and they pride themselves on white Glove High Touch customer service. Plus they guarantee their work and they'll cover the difference if they mess anything up. They're fresh off a Fundraise hosting a $35 million Series B from Mayfield, which.

They'Re going to reinvest into building an even better product.

If you want to put your sales tax on AutoPilot, check out numerl@ their new domain numeral.com. that's n u m e r a l.com for the end to end platform.

For sales tax and VAT compliance. This episode is brought to you by Flex. It's the AI native private bank for business owners. I use Flex personally and I love it because they use AI to underwrite the cash flow of your business, giving you a real credit line. The best part is 60 days afloat, double the industry standard. Flex has all the features you'd expect from a modern financial platform like unlimited cards, expense management, bill pay that syncs with your credit line and their new consumer card, flexelite. Flexelite is a brand new ramp like experience for your personal life. A credit card with points, premium perks, concierge services, personal banking, cars and expense management for your family. Net worth tracking across public and private assets and, and a whole lot more fully integrated with your business spend. One card for your businesses, one card for your personal life. One card for everything. To skip the waitlist, head to Flex 1 and use my code turner to get an additional 100,000 points worth $1,000 after spending your first $10,000 with Flex Leap, that's Flex 1 and code turner for $1,000 on your first $10,000 of spend. Thank you, Flex and. And now let's jump in.

Kevin, welcome to the show.

Thanks. So excited to be here. Thank you, Turner.

Yeah, I'm excited to have you. You've been investing in and building technology companies for the past 30 years. A lot of stuff we can talk about. I think probably the most interesting thing to me is just like, how have things changed in your opinion over the past couple decades?

Well, Turner, Yeah, I mean, I have been mostly building companies, you know, over that period of time, you know, since the, the mid, late 90s. And then it's, it's kind of like, I don't know, it's when, when you, you're not as effective building anymore, you, you invest maybe. No, I'm, I'm kidding. But how has it changed over time? Like the thing that I, I will certainly say is that everything like in the structure of how we do things today is almost like identical to long ago. The difference is that it was such a smaller industry. I can't believe how much of a cottage industry it is and in hindsight have now seen the just sheer breadth and growth of this market. The tech industry was this nichy small little area and now all of a sudden it just covers so many different things. Then when you think about venture and investing, without a doubt the power or the authority or so on was in the hands of the venture capitalists. They just had these incredibly sort of aggressive term sheets and terms and could really get away with that. And that's changed dramatically as well.

What do you think caused the change? Is it just. There's more fun so if you gave me a bad deal, I just go to someone else?

Exactly. It's a supply and demand thing. There is much more capital, much more capital sources and somebody's, as you said, will do things to the terms that are much more fair. So you see valuations rise, but also you don't see these ratcheted terms of 3x liquidation preferences or things that used to be fairly common in the past.

So even in a down the fairway seed round, companies raising $5 million, it's like a good product in business, they would still get like a 3x liquidation preference from a good fund.

I guess I'm giving an example of a ratcheted term. It really depends from deal to deal with. You know, it was much more bespoke. You know, here in this day and age, we just do these like quick, safe notes and they're all fairly standard, but everything was kind of cooked up individually to its, its own situation. And that situation was usually very well controlled by the investor.

So. And it was probably that it was a lot harder. Like you couldn't just go on the Internet and type in best seed investors and get a list of 1,000 people and you're probably connected with some of them. Some of them probably take cold pitches and you get 100 meetings today. I don't want to say it's easy, but probably way easier to meet 100 investors today than back in the 90s.

Yeah, I don't even know if you could find a list that long back in that time period. Then there is the oligarchy of venture firms, Sequoias and Excels and Mayfields and so on.

Is there any other ways you feel like the broader venture industry has changed? Do you feel like people behave any different or are we smarter, maybe dumber than we were in the past? I don't know.

You just see different behavior, primarily motivated by the amount of competition, you know, which by the way, is good. And I, I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm actually an advocate for an environment such as this. Because it's great for founders. You know, I guess if I put on my A star hat, it would be nice to, to have not as much competition out there. But, you know, this is where innovation comes, is when you have relative plentiful capital available for these, these businesses to experiment in a lot of ways that in previous eras and periods and so on, that the money just wasn't there. And now you see financings and all these different, different countries of the world and all these different segments of innovation and technology. And so that's really, really great.

Yeah. One thing you mentioned, you kind of hinted the current environment and I guess some people would say, like, today, are we in an AI bubble? I think one of I saw a tweet from my friend Finn Murphy saying he saw his first thousand x ARR round close, which is, I think we're like round tripping back to 2022, the very beginning of 2022. When that happened the last time, do you think, like, are we in an AI bubble or how do you feel about the AI bubble if we are in one?

Well, we are in an AI bubble and I would call it the mother of all bubbles. It'll be a bubble that makes every other bubble look like a tiny, tiny little bubble. We can call it a super cycle is a good description of it. However, two things. One is we're still in the very, very, very early stages, whereas the Wall Street Journal and New York Times and everyone else is saying, oh, it's going to pop any minute and core weave's down 50% and it's already starting to happen. And two, I think it's really good. And when I say bubble, I always see capitalism as like a pendulum. It never just kind of stays right in the middle. It's either swinging too far towards, you know, like, like the bus side or too far towards the boom side. And we're on the boom side, you know, right now. But to, to the point earlier, we're in the early stages and, and the reason I say that is that we're still at the very low layers of, you know, the, the innovation revolution here in AI. And that is if you go all the way down deep into a system, it's the chip, and Nvidia's still cranking along and selling chips. And that just kind of lays the groundwork for all the great things to happen. On top of it, of course, building data centers around that. But then the foundational models, anthropic and OpenAI, not to mention all the existing players, are building these foundational model platforms. But what I'm most excited about in what we've been investing in as aggressively as we can, is the application layer. And we're just in the early innings. And so if you can kind of picture things coming up and up and up, we're now starting to see companies like Cursor and Cognition and the code copilots really ramping off as, like the ramping up as these kind of first enterprise segments. And you're also seeing Decagon and Sierra and the customer service world ramping up. But there's still so much more to be done and, you know, there's still so many categories to happen that, you know, again, I think this is going to, or I know this is going to continue for some time.

So those are like famous last words though. It's like, you know, we're, we're still early, like this has more room to run. What makes you so confident? Is it just that, like, not enough people are using it and it's a useful technology and it's clear that like, this is what the future of all software is going to look like, where.

It'S.

Applying AI to do work for you. And we're only 0.1% penetration and it's going to get up to 100% of software. So there's just 1000x room to run or something. Is that basically the argument or is there something more than that?

Right. I mean, what are these chips producing? What are these foundational model companies producing? You know, it's the app, it's the application layer. And you look out at all the companies throughout the country in the world that can lower their opex and dramatically decrease things through, you know, kind of BPO replacement or. Yeah, just all the other areas of automation. You know, it's, it like, it's almost embarrassing how far along we are. Like we're just, you know, just in the like first inning or maybe we'll say second inning. Not to be too bullish.

Yeah, fair. We still got at least 80% of the game yet to play, maybe 70% of the game yet to play. So then when you're investing today, like you run a star, we can talk a little bit more maybe about like the kind of theses you guys have where you fit into the market. But how do you kind of separate what is maybe smart to be deploying capital into today versus not deploying capital?

So Astar is a seed, pre seed and seed fund primarily. And we're, we're the $300 million fund. We're just wrapping up our second fund. And you know, for us it's really a focus around talent and pe, you know, talent and people. Because, you know, at those stages, what else do you really have? You don't have working products and things of that nature. So, so we're really making bet on the right people. And so we hope we can continue to deploy capital, you know, towards that. We backed Decagon, for example. We seeded decagon, which is this customer service AI, customer service rep. And it's Ashwin and Jesse, the two co founders are extraordinary people. And that's really what's lifted and drives.

The business is the people, the founders and the team.

Yes. And you know, they set the case agents. They, you know, find that right talent, you know, in like, kind of in the, the notion that they expect to, you know, hire towards, you know, like their VP of engineering or their new VP of sales, like all incredibly driven, like fast builders.

So I think if I was talking to pretty much anyone else and they told me this, that it was all about the people and the talent, I'd be like, you know, every VC says that you're full of shit, but when I look at your track record, it's like, you did this with Pinterest, Airbnb, PayPal. There's probably a bunch more that I'm forgetting that they're in my notes. You've done it so many times, so how do you do it? Like, how do you, how do you find really good founders super early like that?

Well, I think I was lucky that fairly early on in my career, Peter. I invested in the seed round of PayPal, reconnected with Peter Thiel when he came back to the Valley. I had known Peter from student politics at Stanford. And you know, he was an extraordinary person. Like at Stanford people are smart. And then there was like, Peter, who was, you know, like head and shoulders above that.

Am I remembering that you guys were kind of like opposite sides in the political spectrum? Am I remembering this right?

I was chair of the Stanford Democrats. And you know, okay, and he was.

He was wrote that he liked the Stanford Review, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, like it was at a time where some of these issues were boiling that people actually could listen and respect other opinions, which makes me sad today, but that's an aside, but Peter was just extraordinary at bringing his team together. And so I got this amazing lesson. I'd come off the a very modest sale of a company. We were providing high speed Internet access to hotels in the mid late 90s and a public company called LodgeNet acquired us and, and I had a. No large fortune but you know, some cash and, and put as much as I, as I could into, you know, into PayPal.

What, what percentage of the exit proceeds, you know, post tax and everything. Do you think you invested in PayPal?

I think it was just like 100% like what else would say would I do with it, you know?

Yeah. Fair.

Yeah.

Were you not thinking like, oh, I should, you know, create a portfolio of angel investments or was it just like, this is an incredible team and insight and market and time and I'm just going to give them all my capital because they're going to build a big, they're going to build something amazing.

It was the latter. And you know, I was at an age where I could, you know, take these shots on, on goal and the status quo at the time was like, oh, you should always put aside, you know, most of your earned income and maybe put some into mutual funds or something. Like there was all the, there were all these like, you know, kind of stock gurus and money managers that would tell you how to save up and that in, you know, 50 years you could have enough to retire and, and that just wasn't of interest. And maybe that's where like my early VC self was, was showing.

Yeah. I mean if you're thinking about, if you look at the data on the asset classes as a whole venture typically outperforms like on average. And then there's a massive skew too within side venture. Like it's like the highest performing, widest variance. So you either make a lot of money or you lose it all. So it's, I mean, if you're really thinking about, you know, I'm trying to make a lot of money here, like it's probably the smartest bet if you know what you're doing.

Yes. I mean, and you know, the venture side, you get a number of shots on goal and it's so much better to take, you know, those shots. You know, in my case back then, you know, I guess I went for it all at once and it just worked out. But to the point, I think it was like more of seeing this team together and seeing what an incredibly functional and the ingenuity of that team and the things they did to win like were, were just above and beyond and like they just outsmarted, you know, everyone on like kind of on every plane when they were expected to not be able to do that. And you see why now, today, when you look at the caliber of all those people, they're they're all extraordinary in their own right and you know, what a special period to have them all together.

Yeah. So I think I was, I was probably 6 or 7 when PayPal was founded. So I do not remember what it was like at that time. So were they was like the PayPal team? Kind of today it's the PayPal mafia. Most people listening to us have probably heard of that. Were they not kind of as highly regarded back in the 90s? It was just kind of a bunch of random guys and nobody knew what they were going to become.

Yeah, I mean, completely disregarded. In fact, what happened is that you had the dot com boom in the late 90s. PayPal or its predecessor started in, I think it was 97. And they launched the PayPal product, I think at the end of 98. They pivoted a few times and then really took off in 99 and beyond. And then so when they were really cranking, it was 99, 2000 and the Internet economy was in overdrive and everything looked like it was incredibly great and nobody could do, you could do no wrong in the Internet side. And then the bubble burst and you know, they, then they were almost seen as anonymous or they, they weren't considered. It was just considered like they would go out of business or that they wouldn't make it or they were kind of counted out when in fact, you know, it was a substantial business and it was growing so fast and doing so well.

And so are there any parallels between now and today? Like when you look back in the same time periods, like, I have a friend who there's a certain category of AI company and he's just like, every single startup in this category is working. Like everyone is ripping and all my friends are invested and they're like, oh, you know, blank. You missed out by not investing in this specific category. You got to put some capital to work. And his thing is that is bad. I'm scared that everything in the category is working. So I don't know, it's kind of. That story really resonated with me as like, man, there's definitely something to that of like, does the success of certain categories today kind of mask or hide certain under the radar founders or like, are there any. Do you feel like there's any parallels between now and today?

The parallels are very strong that, you know, these patterns kind of emerge. Like the. Maybe the difference is that there were a few different, a couple different PayPal competitors, copycats. And when the dot com crash occurred, they mostly went out of business. Or they all went out of business. But the businesses in that time period, you know, if you recall, you needed, I guess you wouldn't because you were six or seven years old, but like they needed like the infrastructure. Like you buy your own servers and you fill up like your server cage. You go down to like south of market and go into your cage and like, you know, rack your servers up. And so things were expensive to manage and maintain and there is like high complexity. And so now we can see this hypergrowth happen, like say on the coding copilots, you can see this rapid growth happen. And then the markets today are so much larger. Like you have such a larger tam of who you can reach, the number of developers, for example, that you just see a group of players up and to the right. However, if I were to draw back another analogy that's maybe more appropriate is there are a number of search engines. During the 90s there was two dozen search engines and a few different that had been public or so on. And in the end, you know, it was really just Google, like the almost last to market, became the market leader. And the kind of lesson there is that, you know, on the coding copilot space they're like, you know, there's going to be an enormous number one and then, you know, significantly smaller number two. Then who knows what happens after that. But, you know, that's about it. And so like the important thing is to be the market leader.

Hmm. And so are you thinking about that when, when you're investing or building today, you're just like, can this be the number one in a category all, all.

The time that's so relevant. I mean, you know, in that next generation, it was MySpace and Friendster. I was an angel in Jonathan Abrams. Friendster, MySpace, you know, had, had won the market. And then Facebook, the save last entrance entrant, came along and took everything away. So really ensuring that you're in that and you know, and you don't want to be in the one that's not going to be positioned to win the market.

Yeah. How do you figure out if they're positioned to win? Like, is there anything you'd be dissecting or does it come back to team again?

You gotta invest in the next. Peter Thiel really comes down to team. How extraordinary grit, resilience, all these things. But the other side is what you do want to find is what we call this N of one effect or N of one. One factor is, you know, you meet a company where you're the only one doing something that Seems pretty far field and really weird. I always felt like Founders Fund was so good at finding companies like that, you know, that if Sequoia, when they make an investment, you would say like, oh, that's so smart. You know, wow, I get it. You know, like, how cool if Founders Fund would make an investment and you'd be like, what are they doing? That's so weird. I don't get it. And then, you know, three years later you'd be like, wow. You know, and that's kind of the mindset, you know, I, I think like Cyan Bannister over. I was, I worked with her at Founders Fun. I felt she had that great sense of finding these, like, kind of weird things, but could see where it goes. You know, she was a seed investor in Uber, for example. I didn't get in there to Series A or no, sorry, Series B.

Did you try before that?

No. I had spent some time with Lyft and kept looking at the numbers and, you know, I was with Logan and, and I like secretly felt sorry for them. I was like, oh, man, this is going to be a tough business. And I was very wrong on that one.

Yeah. What do you think you got wrong?

I should have thought through the, the capital light model more appropriately and then certainly the size of market. But I wouldn't say Series B is later. But, you know, not. It was $300 million versus I think the market cap's what, 170 billion?

Yeah, that's usually my threshold is like 100x, you know, post dilution, et cetera. Like change in share price. If you get a hundred x increase in share price, that's, that's a venture investment. Like, that's, that's kind of the target and you can. You get an all nuance, maybe 95x counts, but like if you get into something and it's up 300x, like that's pretty good. That's hard to do. Most people, 99.9% of investors will never get that. And one thing you mentioned was, you mentioned Founders Fund. They're really good at finding these kind of weird, wonky things. I think you kind of joined early on for it was maybe like a fun cycle. I think you were there for like 2 ish, 3 ish years.

Yes.

What was it like back then? Like, was it pretty much the same or has it changed much?

I mean, it just, it like it's such an extraordinary, you know, group of investors. It is weird, you know, like, you know, it's like I grew up in the East Bay Near Berkeley. And we used to call it berserkly. And like Founders Fund was like this like weird place that was so kind of, it was like counterculture and you know, the anti vc. And so it had this in that just like gave it this like coolness around it. And then, you know, like process and all these things that anal retentive people, neurotic people like myself, like hate. Like there was, you know, no partner meetings and you know, like no organizing your list of deals. And it was, it was, you know, like very much each individual go out and, you know, kind of find, you know, that, that next great company.

So how did, how were like investment decisions made? Because usually you think your classic venture fund is like a Monday morning partner meeting. Maybe there's a Thursday, everyone talks kind of pitch. The founders come in and present and then, I don't know, you vote or sometimes it's just like a dictatorship. How did it work?

At Founders Fund, there was voting and it was based on number of or, you know, check size. Like so the larger the check, the more number of partners needed to get something through. So there was, you know, so there's always some aspect that reels it back in. But the most important part and what Brian Singerman would always say, you know, is like he would always kind of like come up to you and sort of berate you. Like, are you sure you have absolute conviction, you know, and you would lie down on the train tracks and that this is going to be bigger than Google, you know, and I didn't maybe appreciate the braiding as much at the time as I do now, like that, you know, you like, if a individual partner at Founders Fund has like that high, high, high conviction, then, you know, like votes. All that is almost irrelevant to, you know, just saying, okay, like, we'll do it.

And I feel like that's kind of the point of venture. Like, the point of it is we are putting some capital into this pretty early, like business or product or team, you know, go up or down the list of like how early or late this thing is, and it will become one of the most consequential companies of all time. Like it's going to become a generational business and we don't actually know like it. Like the statistics say that it probably won't, but if it does, we're going to make a lot of money. The fund will return itself multiple times over. And that's kind of the point. I feel like a lot of people maybe lose that. It's more of like, oh, there's people are blogging about this certain thing and we know that all these other funds are looking at this. If we can just get in before them then they'll mark us up and we'll will be able to raise the next fund. And by the way the product doesn't even work or they have no customers. But we got markups but who cares? No one needs to talk about that.

Yeah, while I was there Trey Stevens and Palmer got together and started Anduril inside of Founders Fund. And that was extraordinary. I mean it was exciting but I in you know watching them go through the process and seeing you know, the company get off the ground was exciting but now it's extraordinary in light of like you know, how far that business has gone in just these few short years.

And it's interesting like when you just look back at the time they started the company like you had, you know Google was signing a deal to basically provide cloud services for the military and employees were protesting it like we will not serve the like the US military because it's unethical or whatever. And just like it was like the most contrarian possible position you could have is like we're going to. And also selling to the government is like on paper you'll talk about VC blog posts. Historically it's like the government moves slow, don't sell to the government, they never make decisions, it's all corrupt, et cetera, whatever. But then you flip it and you look at today Palantir has, I don't know, I'm sure they have some nine figure customer deals with certain governments around the world. Enterprise software, the beauty of just these massive contracts. So I mean same thing with Anduril. It's like I'm sure they have some customers where they're making nine figures. They have nine figure contracts or probably will eventually. And just contrast it today and back when they started it's like so different.

Yeah. What's interesting is both Palantir and Enduro were these contrarian beliefs rolled into companies with Peter very much you know involved in both. And I mean and now the value, I mean the value of what's of Palantir is just extraordinary like of you know how far it's come then you know in the case of Palantir it took 20 years to then like really inflect because like Palantir kept like moving along at like a good sized business and it was almost like kind of line in weight of transformers and this awareness of this being needed and it had found the perfect audience of government and so on to spend those first 20 years and then exploded as this AI boom has happened.

Yeah, I remember there's even maybe as recent as like six or seven, eight years ago. Maybe it was like 2018. Someone do a presentation of like these are the most overvalued private startups and Palantir was always on those lists. It was always pretty close to the top of like this is like an example of bubbles in the private markets.

And These companies are A04 deployed engineers were called consultants and a negative thing. And you know, it's just a company that does consulting and shouldn't get any kind of high, you know, marks. So yeah, like the, you know, and seen that from like its creation. It was really based on or one of the kind of currents that like pushed it forward was the fraud models at PayPal which could in a networked way kind of find similarities amongst say devices or IPs or otherwise and then identify and find this kind of networked fraud. And that was the inspiration with Palantir as well.

Interesting. So using just data of broader Internet usage, like pick up potential threats to a nation or to a democracy or to civilians or the military, et cetera.

Correct. Max Lupchen and the team would see that a horse set of IPs had somewhat similar attributes or some tie and then, you know, transfer that over to discovering, okay, there's a terrorist cell and they used a phone over here and computer in a different country and. And tie those all together and find gain insights was like the original premise.

Interesting. So you think that the premise of palantir started at PayPal?

I think so, yeah. In fact, the day that PayPal announced the acquisition, I had lunch with Peter and he said that, you know, he said like, I'm going to start this company and it's going to be based on like, similar to how PayPal models are used to, you know, like find to find fraudsters. We can use them to catch the bad guys.

Interesting. I've never heard that before. That's crazy. I guess. Well, you also sort of started a company off of insights from PayPal.

Yes.

Was it the very first company built on kind of like the PayPal platform or API, I guess I don't know the inside full story, but what's kind of the story with kind of getting that one started? It was called Zoom, Right. Is that how you pronounce it?

So O M Not to be confused with the video conferencing. Yes. XOM is a money transfer business, much like a remitly or wise or so on and the business is really about helping immigrants send money back to their family overseas. But how it began, my business partner and I, Alan, who went to uiuc and so he was in school with folks like Max Levchin and Libor and all these other. There's this whole mafia of UI UC folks. And like, I had had a conversation with Michael Moritz and he said, like, you know, the most successful companies are not just companies. They create industries, you know that they're like enormous industries sprout out from it. And you know, certainly you look at Apple and the iPhone and the App Store, like there's just an enormous sort of like universe created of value, which Uber and Airbnb benefited massively from, despite Apple's hefty tax on everything. And so when I saw the world melting down, you know, in 2000, March of, starting March of 2000, 2001 and so on, you know, everything was, was kind of collapsing except for Google and, and PayPal. And like PayPal was like rocketing up. And so, you know, the thesis was like, well, let's build apps on top of PayPal. And there was like a kind of mutual desire to do this by the PayPal team because at the time they were like 99% relying on the ebay auction markets marketplace for. And they were concerned that Meg Whitman, the CEO at the time, would like shut them off one day or. And they wanted to, you know, kind of drive non eBay GMV. So Alan and I just, we talked to David Sachs and convinced him to open up an API and became the very first developers on that API.

What was that process? Like this was, Was this like 2001, I'm assuming?

Yeah, it was, it was, yeah, towards the fall of 2001. And in fact, like, I think we launched Zoom not long after 9 11, which, you know, it's like.com/9 11. You know, it was like a crazy. But you know, like, I guess I've always found that a time to be very sort of counterintuitively greedy is during these really terrible times because, you know, one is like you kind of can't fall off the floor and you know, it's, it's like this time where you really learn how to be scrappy and build like great bones to a company and, and you know, in it's the, the warm up and the run up to, you know, the, the next kind of accelerated period. So, you know, no doubt there were a lot of questions. Great companies that were started or came out of that downturn period as the Same as with 2008, 2009 as the same with that 22, 23 period.

Yeah. So was there anything that you did differently between Zoom and the first company? I think it was called Connect Group. The one that you sold to the, that was the hotel Internet was like, okay, so like, what was your approach second time? Or maybe there's multiple companies in between here that I'm, I'm missing. But what was the difference between the first time and with Zoom?

Well, the first time with Connect Group, there were five founders. We had, you know, we had hardly got off the ground. You know, we hardly really built. We didn't really build a business. We had one installation and then a suitor came calling and we went with them. So I don't know, I honestly didn't learn that much from it.

Why did you sell the company then if it was still so early?

I think we maybe felt there were greener pastures and, you know, they, they came calling and it seemed like a good option that would. But I don't know. I, I don't. At that time you didn't have like all these great podcasts or, you know, material substacks to read up on, like when you should exit your company and when you shouldn't.

And so it's basically just like you thought. It seems like a good deal to take. Just risk, reward seemed good. Make some cash.

Good enough. Yeah.

So then obviously you didn't do that with, you didn't do that with Zoom right away. I think you guys sold it like 13, 13 years in.

Yeah, well, Zoom was, yeah, we were founded in like 2001. Ish, into 2001. We went public in 2013. We're acquired by PayPal in 2015. However, in 2005. Ish, I moved onto the board out of the CEO role.

You've, you've done that like a couple times. I know we're going to talk a little bit about Eventbrite. I think you did a similar thing. Like, how did you know it was the right time? Like, how do you think about when you kind of shift away into more of like a chairman role?

Yeah, I think, I think like in general, like the best practice for it is really spending time with those that, you know, mentors, people you respect to hear through, you know, is this a net positive or net negative for the business? You know, like, what are the trade offs one is doing?

So it's kind of like, is there somebody else who could actually do this better than I can? And let's plug them in.

There's certainly that, yes, but you know, do always be aware that, you know, it's, it's. If you have somebody, an outsider come in, it's rare that they'll have that founder quality. They may have great skills and leadership and building, but that, you know, kind of founder variable would be absent. But we kind of got the best of both worlds with Eventbrite because it was my co founder Julia who took the seat.

So then with. Did you start Eventbrite around the time that you stepped down from Zoom? I'm just trying to remember the timelines.

Yes. In fact we back to that period with Alan when we were becoming the first to build on PayPal's new API. We built a whole ring like over, you know, a number of weeks or months. We built a number of different payment related applications and one of them is like a very rudimentary ticket ticketing application that, you know, when I found myself with more time on my hands was like this, you know, took a look at the like admin and the, there was like volume and people were publishing events and nobody was touching the thing. It was just like running on its own.

Oh, so this was just like a little mockup that you had built?

More than a mockup. I mean it was a functional application.

Did you just like take it and say like this is Eventbrite, let's go or are you like it's all rebuild this from scratch?

Well, with the two new founders, the founders of Eventbrite, Renaud Visage and Julia Hartz and myself, we kind of took a close look at it and also would kind of debate maybe there's other things to work on or what could we do, but let's start working on this. And we just started to kind of iterate like the product, I mean it seems like obvious or no big deal, but it was a plg, you know, it was a PLG product. Like at a time that there really wasn't much maybe Netflix or something in Gmail, you know, out there. And we would have this 24 hour dev cycle because Renault was over in, and he was based in France for most of the year. Hit a flat over there. And so we would, you know, like I'd kind of work on product mocks and specs and things and file bugs and throw them over the fence and. And he would go after wake up.

And he'd have it fixed.

Yeah. And just. And we did that for a fairly long amount of time. You know, I had felt like, oh, we raised too much money for Zoom. And so the reaction to that is to like be in a very like, like go the other direction. And so we kind of worked like almost two years on just kind of iterating and optimizing that.

And what, what like was or is Eventbrite for people who are not familiar. I've done like some research over the years, followed it, but I'm sure I don't even know exactly what like the core product and like customer base is.

Got it. It's, it's really kind of ticketing for the rest of us. Not for Madison Square Gardens or the large football stadium. It's ticketing for everyone else. And it's simplicity, ease of use allows you to really kind of get the word out about one's event but also around, you know, we like benefited greatly on lowering the cost of acquisition because you would see, you would get these Eventbrite invites and you would see these pages, Eventbrite registration pages. And that really helps spread the word.

And I think you like there's a significant chunk of people that like that run businesses on Eventbrite. If I'm remembering right. Like there are people who, they just host a lot of events as sort of like how they make money and make a living and I think you guys essentially just take a cut and then there's maybe some advertising revenue too once you hit scale.

That's right. It was kind of this religion for us to one take very low fees as opposed to what you would see from the incumbents in the space. But you know, also just this notion that we only take a fee if you actually make a sale, you know, was, was kind of like this religion at the time that was like substantially different than most of these or most of the services or so on out there.

Yeah, and I think I remember you've, you've said before in the past that when you did decide to raise money it was kind of tricky because this wasn't like a well known market. Like you couldn't Google, you know, what's the TAM of this thing? How did you kind of size this and figure out how big of a company it could be?

Yeah, I, I hated this part because coming from Zoom, like you know, you could just get the, the bank, the like the central bank figures for remittances in the Philippines, in India and Mexico and you had this like very clear enormous TAM and take your percentage of it. But in this case, you know, it was like a kind of SMB audience. You know, I would call them creator. Like it was an early creator audience and those that you know, made their living with this type of craft and there's, you know, and this is now just multiplied. I'm on the board and we're investors in a company called wop, which is general creator tools. Think of it as like Shopify for services. And you know, their volumes are now in the GMV is now in the billions. And you know, this, this is just the general notion that you don't go and you don't do what your parents did. Like which is go to one company and work your whole career and get a W2. Now you get a 1099, you know, and you're like, you're like your own boss and. But you need the infrastructure to do that. But that was like, you know, Eventbrite was very much a kind of early version of that. There is.

And I know people listening to this are like, Turner, you got to ask them this. I know you guys, recently there's some news that came out, you had, I forget like what, what the phrasing around this was, but you're under an LOI or closing an acquisition, you're getting acquired. Not sure what you're allowed to say, but what exactly is going on right now with Eventbrite?

Yeah, so Eventbrite announced that it is being acquired by Bending Spoons, a Milan based. It kind of. I would, I kind of describe Bending Spoons as kind of like a new age iac. So it's, it's sort of like a holding company. It's a number of different companies that are assembled together and LUCA has just done an extraordinary job of building that business. We just announced the, we just announced this happen and because like of all the SEC regulation and so on, it can't like go into grand detail until it closes.

Well, I did want to ask you a little bit more about. We kind of hit on a little bit, but we didn't get too deep into it. So there's a headline. If you look at TechCrunch when it's like, it's like a sensationalist headline like, oh, this fund invested 20% of their fund in teenage founders. I think that's the headline. If I'm remembering it right, we hit it a little bit more. So that's a pretty big thesis for you at Astar right now is just finding people very, very early in their kind of professional journey and their building journey and just helping them out, giving them some capital, seeing what happens.

Well, it's funny because we didn't really seek it out. It's happening if you're in the pre seed market around Universities or the Twitter sphere or so on. You're seeing the age has been dropping precipitously whether it's through YC or whether it's through like I do a lot of work with Corey Levy, you know, known him for years and he is, he's got a program called Z Fellows and he backs dropouts and it was always drops dropout from college but, but you know, in the last like 18 months like dropout from high school is like extraordinary high, extraordinarily high. Then running into and meeting founders that you know, one of the Z Fellows was the creator of the Cal, you know the calorie counting app. I and you know, I think at the time when I met with them he had something like 30 million in net revenue.

That's wild. There's like a bootstrap company that out raised any capital.

Correct. He hadn't raised the dime and you know, and he was like, you know, and had this great, you know, business he had assembled.

Yeah. It's interesting because there's like two sides of the coin of this. When you look at Facebook was started I think zuck was like 19, 20ish, something like that when he started it. Now one of the most consequential companies of all time on the other side there's like a lot of cases you could say you're giving this 17 year old or 18 year old like $10 million. This could end an absolute disaster. They have no idea what they're doing.

In some cases like a Facebook or an Apple computer, it's almost like you need that so style of, you need that new manner of thinking. You know, describe it as kind of seen around corners like, like that age segment just knows what the world is going to look like in five and 10 years. Whereas you know, we all like don't see the world that way anymore if that makes sense. But it doesn't. But there are certain businesses like if they were going into like you know, enterprise resource planning, ERP systems for the enterprise, it's probably not the best place for a teenager to try to mess around.

So you think it makes the most sense when it's something that's like they have an insight or an industry is like obviously going to look radically different. And you're like holy shit, this is like the craziest thing I've ever heard. And like it could work like this could be they, you could be the.

Kid to do this and then you know, look like there's the reason why Marines are 18 years old is like they charged into Battle and you know, that energy is, you know, and like fearlessness is pretty amazing to see.

Yeah, yeah. I think when you, when you think about like Facebook like we were talking about earlier, like there was 15 other social media companies, it's like any rational person might say I should find a different market with fewer competitors, I guess but. And so aside from just investing in people dropping out of high school, any other areas you're really interested in right now at a star?

Well, we're generalists so we try not to like take sides to say we're just like looking for those extraordinary people. And that has brought us to everything from all the AI application layer companies. Decagon is exemplary of that to I mentioned WAP on creator services that isn't AI oriented to general biological, which is where Abhi is a graduated from Yale at age 21 and he's a chemist that is really building this industrial biotech company. So instead of using petroleum to make chemicals, he, he does this with sugars. And there was like a kind of wipeout in the market about five years ago, 10 years ago, with a number of companies that didn't make it and how the market has changed and how things have evolved. We think this is the right time and he's the right person. So he just bought out of quasi bankruptcy a factory in Louisiana to make his product, which is interesting. And then we're on the defense side where in companies like Mock Industries, which is, you know, like propulsion based drones, that was started by an 18 year old dropout of MIT or Neros, which is a military drone business.

And I think you also have incubated some companies too. Maybe, maybe more than I, than I know of. Is that also kind of a part of the strategy or is that more of like a. It's kind of been a one off thing?

Yes, we've, we've incubated three companies in the five years that we've been around and we, we try to be very thoughtful and deliberate about the incubations so we're not like churning them out every, you know, week.

There's some people that do.

I guess, you know, like what is it like? I guess you have more chances of success with higher numbers perhaps. But you know, our first is a company called Multiply which is AI Mortgages and that's backed by Mamoon and Finer. The second is a company called 15th and that is a kind of AI powered tax accountant. So you get your tax return done.

On the 15th of the month. Is that what it is?

That is, yes.

Okay. Nice, that's a nice name.

And then my kind of little darling incubation has been sore on which is home security.

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. So what's the thesis there? Because that sounds, some people might say that sounds super boring. Market might not be that big. I don't know what makes it interesting.

Well the notion behind Sauron and the home security market is just we haven't seen innovation there and you know, maybe it was maybe ring 10 years ago. There's just not a lot of change. Like the companies that were in the space that they've been like gobbled up by the you know, big players there. And there is a, in the big players, the oligarchs have this, you know, kind of third rail of privacy where they can't do aggressive things like face recognition and so on. And you know, and of course we can and we are, but we're really, you know, what we saw was that over the last like two decades you have had you know, a hundred billion plus dollars put into self driving. So all the different sensors have come down dramatically in price. All the different, like the perception stack, a lot of innovation has happened there. And so take the self driving stack and move it over to home security. And we think that's pretty exciting.

Yeah, because I guess I kind of think about I did have a home security system for about two years. We lived in the not greatest neighborhood and we had a baby so we were like we should probably get a system. I think we use a company called SimpliSafe. I don't know if they're still around but I think it was like most affordable seemed like the best option. And then it seemed like, I think Comcast had a home security but it was basically like a bundle with your cable bill. And I don't know, product never seemed that great to me. I think AT and T maybe had one ADT maybe was a big player. They were really expensive and didn't seem that great. Kind of your classic big conglomerate, price increases, et cetera. And it was all like no tech. It was like you'd have a box on the wall right next to the door and then there would be a motion sensor on the door and if the door opened you had 30 seconds to press the button and then the alarm wouldn't go off. Or would I think maybe there was an app, if I'm remembering right, you could maybe control it remotely from an app, but it just didn't seem like people were doing that much with it. To your point?

Yeah, it's interesting. In some cases, maybe the innovation failed as it settled into a number of the assets you mentioned. Settled into private equity or again into the big oligarch, tech oligarchs. But all of them, what they don't share is like the kind of real time nature is that who's really like is somebody going to come if there's truly an emergency? And you described the sensors at adt. Well, that alerts their help center but it doesn't mean the police are going to be dispatched because you know, 90% of the time it's, it's a false false positive. You know, somebody's set the alarm off by accident and they call to confirm and go through this. So what we're trying to do is like have that situational awareness, like be able to, you know, see what is happening in real time and have you know, high resolution sensors to, you know, know if there's an urgent situation.

Wow. So depending on what you sense, you might just call the fire department and so it doesn't even go to the Sauron help center. It just goes straight to calling 911, saying there's a fire, we need someone in the house.

Well, it'd always be kind of confirmed by people. The help center, it's kind of like self driving where you had humans in the loop. So we have humans in the loop and ours are very well trained. Many are like actually I think all of them are military veterans and a lot of them had exec protection and so on and you know, they're, they're there. You know that you're not paying 20 grand a month to have a security person on site. You, you know, you have this virtual security. And over time, you know, as we train the system, the computer vision will allow us to kind of scale many more homes, you know, and not have 10,000 virtual guards.

I know we were talking about this before we started recording, but it's kind of like, it's like a way to get into someone's home, right? Like it's like almost like land and expand. Like people spend the average person, their biggest line item on their monthly budget is their home. And it might be like rent, mortgage. If your home is paid off, you're just like buying shit for it basically. Like you're making your upgrade and stuff. So it's like an interesting way to just kind of like get into that kind of budget of a high percentage of someone's income, honestly.

Yeah, we like to even think, you know, as we win trust, like what would it look like to have Store on sensors in the home. You know, it'd be something like, you know, where did I leave my keys? Or where's my blue sweater?

That actually, that'd be amazing. I run into that problem daily.

Yes. Or catch your, your child's first steps. Your baby's first steps.

Steps, yeah, that'd be awesome. The thing I like, can't wait for is so like, I make my kids breakfast every morning and there's so many mornings where we're like out of peanut butter or, or out of oatmeal or yogurt and it just turns into a disaster in the morning because they don't get the yogurt they thought they were going to get and you're trying to figure out what to make them for breakfast. It'd be awesome if it's just like, hey, we placed an instacart or Amazon order and just there's going to be peanut butter that shows up tomorrow. That'd be amazing.

What's your go to breakfast in the morning?

For me personally or for the kids?

For the kids.

For the kids. I have one that likes oatmeal and I have one that likes yogurt and specifically vanilla yogurt. So the oatmeal one, she'll have strawberry yogurt, she'll have oatmeal, whatever. But the one that only likes yogurt, she will only have vanilla yogurt. So if you give her any other flavor, she completely loses it.

Well, can you put fruit in the yogurt or nuts or anything?

Yeah, you can, but it has to be vanilla flavored. So like, if it's vanilla yogurt with like cut up blueberries and strawberries, she's fine. But if it's strawberry flavored yogurt that has whatever else in it, she just doesn't. She like won't eat it.

Is that the nine year old or the five year old?

It's a five year old. You know, she's, she's gotten so much better over the past year, like trying different foods. And I mean, huge credit to my wife of like being super patient and like, you know, strategically introducing different foods. And we always encourage her, like, we make it a big deal of like, oh, you tried, you know, beef or, you know, you tried green beans or something and you know, we make it a big event and celebrate it and you know, we make it because, I don't know, for some kids she like, she used to be really good at eating and then suddenly she just decided she doesn't like anything that's Green, which is basically no vegetables, which is not good.

Is it an age thing? It's just like all of a sudden. Yeah. What they say is that, I think they say at a certain age you become very picky about food because you don't want the four or five year old to walk out in the woods and just pick a mushroom and eat it and drop dead. And so it's actually a Darwinistic thing because our 16 and 11 month old daughters, like we were feeding them, you know, broccoli and salmon and like just best food and they're eating everything, you know, like they're just taking like down stuff. And now I'm like thinking forward like oh God, yeah.

Probably the funniest thing was both my kids really loved sushi when they were babies and it got really expensive. Like you know, they wanted sushi, sushi every night. And it's like, like in still when I'm like, hey, you know, we want to, let's go out for dinner. And they always want to go to like the most expensive sushi restaurant. I'm like, we can't go out to get sushi every night. Like that's like, you know, a six figure run rate on like the, the dinner meal for the family. Like we can't do that.

It's like a conundrum. You want to get the high end sushi too. You want to get the nicest fish for the kids, you know, but you can't like go every night.

And we've like evolved. So like when, when we used to do date night when we were like, you know, first married, you're like scrapping every penny and you're. We'd go to a place where we could like split a meal, right? You could pay like 20 bucks and get like a really nice dinner. But it's super fascinating. Like the past couple years I think it's like we make a little bit more money but also the price of everything has gone up. So like there's almost this like relative difference of like before family meal was 50 bucks and a really nice meal was 100 and the difference in price was 2x. And now the family meal, low quality is 100 bucks and the really nice meal is 150. And on a relative basis just getting the better food actually seems cheaper. So what we've been doing is we've just been like, you know what? If we're going to go out to eat, we're just going to go to a nice place and we're going to enjoy it because it's actually not that much more expensive than going to the. We'll go to Shake Shack and it's like 100 bucks for the family. And I'm like, what? This is insane. Let's just go to the fancy fine dining and pay 150 for the family. And it's way better and the kids like it a little bit more.

That makes perfect sense. Shake shack probably has 17 MBAs figuring out, like how to keep pushing the price up.

And Shake Shack is good. I love Shake Shack. It's like a family favorite.

Yeah, it's. Who's the famous chef that's behind it?

I don't remember his name, but he's got the book. It's like Tabletop Manners or something or it's like how to treat your employees really well. And that leads to a good business, I think. But I actually wanted to ask you. So you have two older daughters, but you mentioned you have two younger daughters. So how did that come about? I think you described it as like your second cohort of children.

Yeah, a second cohort. A nice antiseptic term for like our like child rearing cohort analysis.

You're running like spaghetti charts and analyzing.

Cohort 1, Cohort 2, keep up on their growth curves. So we have four daughters, 17 years old, 13 years old, and then 16 months and 11 months, which is like the most confusing thing to most people.

Yeah, five months difference. You're like, what's. How did that happen?

Yeah, Julia and I just decided, like, we weren't done. And you know, we were kind of exposed to all this different tech and so we decided to kind of like have two more babies. Or should I say like, like cook up or, you know, like grow two more babies. They create with science. Two more babies. We're like, I'm in. I'm an angel. In a company called Orchid. Noor is an amazing founder. And that's like a full genomic test for babies. Something. Sorry, for embryos. Something that just hadn't existed before. So we were able to see like this like fine grain resolution of. Of all the embryos that we chose from. So I don't know, I think it's. It's, you know, it's a little bit costly and. But, you know, I would imagine in 10 years time that as the prices of all this, cost of all these go down, that you'll have a lot of different families having kind of later in life, children.

So how does this work? Kind of practically, like, if I was going to go through this process, do I, like, so what Was it like kind of from the like beginning to end? Can you just kind of explain how it works for somebody? Because I'm curious but I've never done it, so I just.

Yep. Yeah, well, we, you know, first like one would create like the, you know, the embryos. Like you know, you need sperm and egg, put them, combine them in like.

A lab environment of some kind in it.

Yeah, like IVF style, combine them and then like freeze them and keep them on ice. And then you have, you know, kind of optionality and that when was relatively inexpensive versus some of the other areas. The next component there is that you do need a surrogate to carry the baby to term. And that seems to be growing in popularity in the U.S. the Wall Street Journal reported that I guess there was some foreign national who was, who's trying to have something like 100 babies with surrogates.

And so yeah, I saw the headline.

Yeah, I foresee regulation coming in the area and it's probably a good idea because you know, this is, there's kind of scary things that can happen on both sides and you know, and, and once that happens, then you know, it's the surrogate that is going through the different checkups and making sure everything is healthy. And, and so I mean I described a relatively simple process, but it just, ours took quite a, quite a long time to get everything together properly.

So you mentioned you, you get to see the embryos and does it, does it like simulate kind of what might happen to the baby in terms of like, I don't know, how they like grow health things like what all do you get to see when you're kind of getting like all the data around it?

You know, it's, it's like, you know, it's like just, it's really describing traits and you know, I should probably like pull the report back but you know, there's this dystopian, you know, sort of like concern that you're, you'll choose babies based on IQ and you know, and honestly that can be done to a certain extent or these like traits can you know, now be like, you know, you could pick embryos that have, you know, certain traits versus the other. But you know, you're looking for a healthy, healthy embryo that there's not some significant disease or the like.

So the main thing that you get from this is it says like there's a percentage chance of like this thing, this thing, this thing. And you're kind of looking for like the lowest percentage of there being some kind of like life threatening or Very debilitating issue that will come up throughout the course of the baby or the child's life.

Correct. And, you know, like one, you know, thing, like a embryo. If the embryo has, like a BRCA2 gene, you know, there's that very high likelihood of breast cancer then occurrence.

So then you would say, like, okay, let's try to select one of the embryos that just has less of a. Lowest likelihood of probably like, as many things as possible.

Exactly.

Yeah. Because I think. I mean, if you don't have kids and you're listening to this, me and my wife were just talking about this the other day. Like, literally, our worst fear is something happens to the kids. Like something that we can't control. And so, I mean, it's like, I feel like it's most parents, it's just like, you really just want a healthy kid. Like, it's not even like, I want my kid to be the smartest in the world. It's just like, I want them to have all the opportunities of everyone. And the worst thing you want to do is you have a child who struggles with something that's kind of outside of their control. So I don't know, we've thought about that a lot. It's like our worst fear. It's just like your kid is hit with something that is uncontrollable. So I don't know.

Yeah, I recommend any couple just also freeze a bunch of embryos and. Yeah. And then be able to, like, have some degree of preventing, you know, these bad things from happening by, you know, being able to have this higher fidelity. Look at the embryo.

Our mutual friend Navya, who works for you at the moment, mentioned you've been getting really into art lately. I was like, what's something I gotta talk to him about that he probably might be interesting to get into? So tell me, what's your favorite art piece of everything that you own?

Well, I mean, first, I have a mentor, Michael Ovitz, who is just this incredible collector. He's collected since the late 70s. He was the founder of CAA, and so I have him, and he's very shrewd and in how he collects and how he conducts business and so on. And so it's been great to have him help me or provide insights. And then I also collect alongside with Romt and Naimi from Abstract, whose fund is just a block away. And so we get this kind of fun little competitive element to know, like, collecting. Although, I don't know, I. I have to admit, I think he's like, has an incredible eye and he's like done a great job. But you know, my, I would say like I, I'm into this. There's this, this group of artists that have come out of like, they came out of Yale in like the mid-80s, like John Curran and Lisa Juskovic and, and others. And they've been, they've been out of vogue in some regards, like from, you know, like art goes through this in and out, you know, sort of thing. And you know, I just love their work and you know, see it as an opportunity to know, build the collection more.

So do you, when you're investing in art or do you see it as investing like you're trying to buy things that the value will appreciate? Or is it like this just kind of looks cool. I want to put this in my house. I think it would look nice like on the vase on the table or picture on the wall. Like how do you think about.

Has to be both. So you know, I have to love it. And, and I want to believe that, you know, the, the artist, him or herself is, is something very, very special. You know, that kind of, you know, like there's very few entrepreneurs that in this case it is producing, you know, something that's going to stand the test of time. And, and that's, that's represented by the appreciation over time. Interestingly, over the last five years we've had this terrible market where everything has. Art has been overlooked, kind of hit rock bottom relative prices. And so I don't know, Romson and I think it's a great time to.

Like scooping up, scooping up new pieces.

But it looks like, you know, just as expected, you know, with the super cycle that we're. We've entered the art market starting to pick up and just in the last like couple quarters you're seeing like pretty astounding records happening in the auction houses and elsewhere.

So how do you get into art? Do you have to have like a broker or do you like, you know, like email the contact email email on one of the auction houses. How do you get started?

It's a very particular space. So the best thing to do is to go to the major art fairs. Art Basel in Switzerland is the major one over the summer and there all the galleries gather together and bring works from. They're represented artists and you know, in, in like then there's Basel, Miami just happened and they tend to be a scene and a lot of parties and things of that nature. And then you build relationships with the galleries. So like Gagosian is is like a very well known gallery. Larry Gagosian has been, you know, running his gallery for, you know, what, three or four decades and he is probably, they probably sell like a couple billion dollars worth of art a year, which he takes a nice cut of that.

A nice cut. Yeah. It's going to be a good business.

Yeah. But I have got a representative over, you know, over at Goshen that you know, will help me or if something comes into the gallery, they'll share a PDF, you know, of a particular artist, like they represent John Curran for example. And there's a. Then the other piece is Christie's and Phillips and you know, on the auction house side. So that's interesting to see where prices are happening and it's great to have, you know, friends at the auction house that also can give you insights, you know, at the same time.

Yeah, I'm probably not quite there yet where I can start acquiring art, but it's. I want to hopefully soon need some liquidity on the venture portfolio first.

But you could start local artists or some of the. You try to get somebody coming out of art school.

Yeah, that's true. Maybe. Plus it's like pre seed investing in art. Buy something for 100 bucks versus 10,000. It's investing early.

Exactly.

Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it. Where can people find kind of find you? Do you tweet LinkedIn? You don't have a podcast. How can people follow you?

Twitter and LinkedIn are fantastic and DM me but love doing this. And thank you so much, Turner.

Yeah, this is a lot of fun.

And I hope you had fun. Thanks again to numerl and Flex for supporting this episode. If you missed it, make sure to check out last week's with Jason Calkanis going inside the all in podcast and everything he's learned from Elon, Oprah and Travis Kalanick. Tune in next week for Remote.com co founder Marcelo Lebre on building one of the largest companies in Europe. If you like this conversation, please like comment, subscribe and name your next child after me. If you don't want to miss a future episode, subscribe to my newsletter. The split linked in the description to get each episode plus the transcripts emailed directly to your inbox every week. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.