EP 7: Bain Capital Crypto, Bolt's Breslow back w/ Crypto Pharma, Alumni Ventures and Standard VC Fees, Tiger Partners Fund Seed Managers

Foreign. Welcome to the seventh episode of three Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett, and I am joined today by my esteemed co hosts, Nikita Beer and Zach Kukoff. How we doing, guys?

Portfolio's getting destroyed every day, but other than that, pretty good.

So it's the end of the world for you, Nikita.

Every day is.

Well, Nikita, you've had some good news recently. I saw on Twitter your family got out of Poland and, or got out of Ukraine and to Poland. Is that right?

Yeah, I, I tweeted, can anyone take them in? And I had a bunch of followers in Poland that offered their place. And one guy in Warsaw, actually, I think he, he left his own place and got a hotel and gave up his entire apartment. They stayed there for like a week almost. He brought them groceries. It was kind of incredible. Polish people have been super generous.

That's amazing.

I think my Polish family thrilled to hear that. My grandmother is dancing right now. When she turned tunes into this podcast

this week, it's maybe the first good use of Twitter ever. Is shitposting your way to humanitarian rescue is pretty impressive.

It's like this and Arab Spring. Back to back, the two top uses of Twitter.

Well, good. Well, minus the war that's going on and the public markets melting down, at least there's some solace in all of that. Well, that's great to hear. So, first topic this week that, that we were going to cover is Bain Capital announced a dedicated crypto fund. And normally Bain Capital or Anyone announcing a $560 million fund wouldn't be newsworthy. But the reason, I guess that this one was is that it went totally viral on Twitter for, for all the wrong reasons. So Stephen Cohen, who's, who's leading the initiative for Bain, announced on Twitter saying, I feel privileged to introduce such a special team. A thread. And the pictures that they showed were seven men and that all wearing the same outfit. It seemed just different colors of the same long sleeve shirt. And so people went to work and ultimately dragged them for both using the word privilege as well as the composition of their team. Uh, Zach, any thoughts on this one specifically?

I mean, listen, there's so much here. I, I actually like the team, so I kind of feel bad, but International Women's Day, a team of all men. As one of my friends said, it looked like they googled men with their hands in their pockets and just picked out the Google Images page as their new team page. You know, I, I think they're good people and I, I, I like actually a lot of the People there just a. It's a hell of a day to go and, and make an announcement like that.

I mean, I, I usually don't duck on people like if mean well, but what did they think would happen by posting just a bunch of men's photos?

That was actually the, the interesting part of all of it. Like the, the timing was weird to do it on International Women's Day. That was, that was just like total ignorance. The use of the word privilege was definitely lacking some level of self awareness. But in general, just posting a picture of seven men, you're totally missing just any self awareness of how that's going to be perceived. And so I wonder, I mean, Bain's a big institution, right? They have to have, I mean they certainly have crisis PR firms on retainer now. But like before then they had to have some PR person around to sanity check something, right? That like they shouldn't tweet out that picture on that day, specifically with those terms.

Did they tweet?

They did.

Yeah, they did.

Which is a cardinal sin. Which is our one rule is do not delete and do not explain. And they did both.

I hate to say the king of this, this is the Trumpian move. Never apologize, never delete and just keep powering through and they can't get you. That's what, that's what we learned.

What did you say, Logan? The only reason to delete a tweet is if it doesn't get enough likes.

Yeah, exactly. You don't delete tweets. You don't delete tweets because of like public dragging and shaming. You delete tweets just because like it's not a banger. You know, that's the reason you do it.

Right?

No amount of PR outrage will make me delete a tweet, but like you know, five likes in the first couple of minutes and I. That thing is going down.

I kind of wish they had leaned into a little bit. Like there were so many funny memes that came out with so the image format, I think we'll put it in the show notes, but the image format they posted with all the people in the sort of like Jigsaw collage esque framing. There were so many funny memes afterwards that people did a photoshopping other things onto that. Like it's kind of a missed opportunity to lean into the meme aspect of it a little bit and be a little tongue in cheek. I would have liked that. They have a good sense of humor. I would like to have seen it.

I. Yeah, I don't, I don't know if the same group that posts that is going to be the one that's going to be able to like capitalize on the moment and like, you know, with some self awareness and irreverence. I'm not sure that's going to be the group that's going to do it. So. So the, the next thing a recurring person that we've covered in the podcast, I don't know if we should call them like friends of the pod or something but. Ryan Breslow is, is back again in the news this week for teaming up with a psychedelics founder to start what was, quote unquote, a crypto pharma startup. So he's planning to develop drugs initially based on food derived substances that have health benefits to treat sleep and pain problems. Breslow founded the company with J.R. ron, who is a co founder of Mindmed, which is a publicly traded developer of psychedelic medicines, and Ashwath Rajan who co founded, if people remember the company, Bodega, which ultimately became Stockwell AI, an ill fated vending machine that got. Got dragged for appropriating the term bodega and culture in all of that. So this is a Miami based company that plans to perform clinical trials to seek FDA approval for drugs which will focus on solutions to the opioid crisis. Love will eventually expand to pharmaceuticals and has no immediate plans to use psychedelics, he said. So they also bought the love.com domain. So it's. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting all around here. Of course this company has to be based in, based in Miami.

I will say if we keep talking about him, one more week of talking about Ryan, we have to call him the fourth cartoon avatar. We basically rolled out the red carpet.

Do you think we can get him to switch his avatar? I mean if I would be, I would welcome him on at some point if we can get him at least to switch his cartoon avatar.

Ryan, make. We will make a cartoon for you and get you on the pod. Please. First guest has to be.

When you guys read this headline like did you, did you double take? Like it's felt like an AI bot wrote like totally.

Yeah, yeah Nikita. Honestly, it felt like it was tech Twitter bingo. Like almost mad libs of like filling in. You know, Martin Shkre Kelly got the pharma thing and then crypto was all in and psychedelics, it was just like, you know, all of these terms. I guess you throw in Dao and NFTs and bored apes or something and that would have gotten like all of Tech Twitter there. But yeah, it was.

It's the worst game of Clue of all time. Right. It's Ryan Breslow in Miami with the candlestick, the whole thing, doing psychedelics.

So I saw that they bought, they also bought love.com, which. I don't know who had that domain before and what purpose it was used for, but. Nikita, do you have any perspective? I mean you've, you've dealt in this world a little bit what a domain like that would cost.

Yeah. So for sure it was like a seven figure domain. The interesting part is like the domain was previously owned by Yahoo, which what. From what I gathered from the old DNS records, so I mean, if they paid cash, it's definitely in the millions.

How, how would you approach buying a domain like love.com, like how do you go about doing something like that?

I. Well, when you look at the stories behind domain acquisitions, they're always kind of legendary because like the owner could be literally anyone, like, ranging from like a big company to like a farmer in Oklahoma. Side side note, there, like there is a farmer in Oklahoma, a watermelon farmer that owns most of the dictionary words. He bought them in the 90s. I actually met him in. I flew out to Oklahoma to try to buy one of his domains a few years back. But the second part is you're dealing with this one of a kind asset that is really hard to appraise. The number of buyers is super finite. Only a handful of people will ever want that specific name. And of those people, they can actually pay up. So the negotiation process is always like a poker game. It's a battle of emotions and people trying to call each other's bluff. Um, and so I, I actually tried to. I was in a similar transaction five years ago. I was trying to buy the domain teleport.com also from like kind of a legacy Internet company, Earthlink. And I network my way to one of the board members who then connected me to their VP of Business development. And naturally, like as a startup I had like zero money and I couldn't pay, you know, whatever, like six figures for it. I'm sure they were getting that offered every year, but here's how I made it work. And it's actually worked for me like multiple times. You offer them equity in your company, like around typically 1% or less. You draft up an agreement where they get the domain back if your company shuts down or pivots, and that way the domain holder gets a payout if your company works out. But it Also hedges the downside that they don't lose the asset if it doesn't work out. The only trade off with that is like the asset the domain gets locked up for a few years. But I imagine that's probably what they did instead of straight up pay just a seven figure price.

Is it really worth 1%? And the reason I ask, I had a portfolio company recently that bought a4letter.com domain and I have another that's going through the process right now. Apparently there's a, there's a whole like sea of these brokers who have made very lucrative careers just sitting between and doing all the creative stuff. Nikita, you mentioned sitting between the Oklahoma farmer who bought all the dictionary domains 20 years ago and the you know, 19 year old in SF who would very much like to start a company with that name. So is it, is it worth having like, is it worth going through all the rigamarole to actually get a hot domain now?

So I don't think domains matter as much as they did like five years ago. Like even for consumer products because, because you know, most people have moved to mobile. If you're searching in the app store, it doesn't matter whether you own the.com and people are getting more comfortable like remembering kind of random extensions like.xyz. wTF. But I think there's a different kind of value and maybe this kind of is telling of how shallow sometimes investors are. But like if you have a high value domain, it's pretty strong signaling and it when I did a fundraise I did it with a four letter domain in 2013 and it raised our valuation significantly from what we were like originally fielding. So you know, you give up 1%, you get a 50% higher valuation. I think it's totally worth it.

So you're saying the options to raise your valuation or go through Y combinator or buy a four letter domain, but either way you're going to get a hefty bump because we know there's a group of investors who we know care as much about doing great deals as they do signaling other investors that they do great deals. Right? And the short domain name is such an easy way to say oh yeah, I got into the hot round recently X, Y and Z and this company's sexy and yada yada yada. That's like we know there are many investors who care about that far more or as much as they care about actually investing in great companies.

The when our domain name was in the subject line of our intros, like we got Responses like within an hour from every investor that that's when we were raised we had a. We owned the domain5.com and every investor wanted to be, you know. Oh we, we were in the five round.

Oh yeah. Go to the dinner party. Oh, you didn't hear about the five round. Yeah, we recently loved that one. Yeah it's a dictionary.com domain name. So we're kind of us in Sequoia.

I am surprised that domain names I mean Nikki, to your point like they most searches I so many of these companies either have ending in dot something different or they have like go or try or something at the beginning of the domain. So I actually just can't even really remember these. And so I either start in well one if I have the, the app I'll obviously use that. But like even on web I'll start in Google search. Right. And that's like my first thing. If I'm trying to go to the page I never try to go directly. Right. It's just like starting in Google search. So I'm amazed that these things still retaining this level of. Of value. But I, I will say to your point one of one of my friends invested in a company remote.com I don't know if you guys know this know this business but and one of his part of his original investment was having them buy remote.com and this is international payroll. Right. And so it's enabling remote workers. And I was just when he did that and said this I was like this business just is going to work remote.com like it's just a perfect name for remote workers international payroll. I was very simple in lizard brain in my thinking just like oh yeah, that's going to be a public company.

Well, no comment on Remote.com, which is a GC portfolio company. But what I will say is that like it does strike me such a vanity thing to care about having the hot Twitter handle. Do you guys know how on Bloomberg Bloomberg journalism on Twitter they own all of these like generic Twitter handles? Like at crypto is the Bloomberg crypto vertical or like at business I think is the Bloomberg business handle. Like they, they've clearly gone and bought out all of these generic handles. I actually think it's a really smart vanity play to own on Twitter maybe even more or as much as a domain if you're in journalism or media where people or venture people talk about this all the time. It's so smart to own the generic handle that people are talking about. It does kind of have the lizard brain like, oh, these guys must be legitimate crypto reporters that they own at Crypto.

Yeah. One of my friends is the CEO of Shortcut, which was formerly Clubhouse. And so when Clubhouse launched originally, and I'm not going to share anything that's, you know, overly sensitive out of confidentialities, but when Clubhouse launched originally, they had the Clubhouse Twitter handle. And so their support was inundated and their Slack community was inundated with people just, hey, how can I get in? Hey, this feature in your bug, you know, or this bug in your product isn't working out. Like, I don't know, Clubhouse would have, like, some Alex Jones impersonator come on and. And, like, rant about some, you know, whatever, some conspiracy theory, and then everyone would freak out and keep adding the Clubhouse Twitter handle. And so it became such a nightmare for the company. Like, they spent literally six months, I feel like answering and triaging, like, okay, no, that's a developer using our software product. That's an angry person trying to, like, you know, get back at this Alex Jones person. It was like, a total nightmare. And so the Twitter handles do have a lot of value in general. Right. But I wonder if there's anything else. Right now. It seems like everyone was squatting on eth as, like, something that was going to be the next one of these. I don't know if there's something that's, like, a burgeoning thing that people are going to squat on.

Have you guys ever tried to buy a Twitter handle or a domain personally? Like, you thought about being at Nikita? Oh, you have?

I bought it for a company or a product that I was building a while back. It was like, 2014. I paid, like, a thousand dollars for it. But it's kind of a weird transaction because it's technically, like, against the terms of service. And I. I have, like, I have a few other Twitter handles that I've bought for other products, and eventually they all get, like, attacked by people trying to recover the passwords. One guy went as far as, like, calling me and pretending to be Google and saying, we've just sent you a code to. Your account has been locked. Can you please read the code? And they were. They were trying to do two factor authentication, and they tried to hijack some of my, like, one of my Twitter accounts that I owned.

They're getting pretty good now. I have Zach on Instagram, and I. They get, like, actually pretty sophisticated phishing attempts. Somebody recently sent me one, and it was like, we've detected an unusual login from Jaipur, India. And then I got the real notification from Facebook saying we've attempted an unusual login attempt from Jaipur, India. And they were asking me to text them back the like the two step authentication verification code. Right. But it was actually like I could imagine that working. It was a pretty, a pretty good slick hack. There's a guy I know in tech who will remain nameless, whose goal is to be his first name everywhere. He wants to be the first Google result for his first name. He wants to own the domain of his first name. He wants to own his Twitter and his Instagram and yada yada yada. And given the weird way that I spell Zach, I sort of feel like I kind of want that too. I'm like, I'm like one, I have the Twitter, I have a.co there's a Zach.com which is an arts and crafts company who I'd very much like to buy it from, but I can't. There's a guy who owns at Zach on Twitter and he's like some random Australian guy. I'm sure he's a lovely guy, but he tweets like just enough to know that he's still alive but not enough to like actually care about giving it to me. And it's, it's a little bit frustrating to know that he's never going to get rid of that handle.

I, I so I'm squatting on like seven of my friends domains because it was done to me and so I just felt like I had, I had to pay it back to someone else. So my friend has loganbartlett.com and then I have like seven other people's.coms but the Gmail one is the one that there's some New Zealand guy who has loganbartlettmail.com and he gets like people just randomly add him to email threads and he'll forward them back to me and be like, hey mate, I think this is you. You know, and it'll be like fantasy football or like you know, some party that getting invited to. And he's like, hey, I assume I'm the only other Logan Bartlett he knows. So he sends it to me all the time and we have like this very nice correspondence and if ever I go to New Zealand, I'm definitely going to look him up. But yeah, it's pretty hilarious.

So Logan, you bought the domains of all your friends? You're squatting at all?

Yeah, I guess you guys have Nikita beer and Zach Kukoff. I, I might be going to do that right after. Okay, both you have yours?

Yeah, I Be buying Nikita beer xxx after this call is over. Just in case for. For venture capital thirst traps.

Yeah.

In. In. In high school, I bought the valedictorians domain, and I was going to extort him later for it.

Yeah, it turned out you actually had a far better career than he has, I assume.

But I. I remember I. I was out at dinner and his parents were there, and somehow the conversation came up that I had bought his domain and they just were really upset about it.

I. I accidentally just. Speaking of high school friends, I submitted one time that my buddy got engaged. This was like, 10 years ago. We were still in college, and our high school ran it. And I will tell you that one. They didn't have a QA process of validating real or fake news at that point in time. And people's parents don't particularly like when their kids get fake. Engagement announcements run in your high school newspaper, so. So that. That, like, soured our relationship for a little while, believe it or not. And I think his parents aren't. Aren't big fans of mine.

Did you guys have a senior superlative in high school?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. What were you, Nikita?

I got a future politician. I dressed up in a wig before the photo.

I'll.

I'll share it in the. On the show notes.

Yeah, I would love. I would love to see Nikita beer, future politician, running for office one day.

Zach. I got most likely to work at our high school, which is just like such a hilarious random. There were a bunch of.

That's, like, depressing.

Yeah, it was a pretty depressing. There was a run of, like, a bunch of football players that came back and coached. And. And so I think that was, like, the angle. I don't know. At least I'm telling myself that. But I got smoked. I. I really thought it was like, neck and neck. I wanted to be most likely to succeed. And a guy, Adam Goldstein, who founded Hipmunk, who's a brillian, brilliant, you know, whatever, he actually, he was coding and writing books at, like, 15, and I thought it was close. And one of my buddies, like, actually counted the votes, and it was like, you know, two versus like, 90 or something.

Not even close.

Yeah. What were you.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I was. I was least seen on campus, which spiritually felt correct to me. Like, that was. That was. And I'm honestly not going to say that I. I wasn't proud of that because I actually am, like, relatively proud of that one.

Yeah. Okay, well, so next up here in the news was alumni ventures they were fined this past week $700,000. And their CEO was personally found fined another hundred thousand dollars. And they were forced to pay $4.8 million for interest that should have been charged as loans. So for people that aren't aware, Alumni Ventures is kind of a sketchy network of venture funds for alumni associations. So basically what they would do is they would say, hey, this is a fund exclusively, exclusively for Harvard alums investing in, you know, Harvard backed founders. And so, and they would name it that was called Yard Ventures, which I guess has something to do with Harvard. Right. And Yale's also had a name, Blue Ivy Ventures, that has something to do with Yale. So when alumni would see it, they would say, oh, this is, you know, clearly associated with the university or about the university, even though it wasn't. Wasn't associated with it at all. And so they had $425 million under management. And these fines came because they advertised in their fundraising material fees as Industry Standard 2 and 20, which is typically, that means there's a 2% management fee that you get every year of a fund, and then there's 20% carried interest, which is the upside that happens when the portfolio companies are realized. And so for simple terms, 2% of 100 million would be $2 million every year. And then if they return, let's say, 300 from that 100, then 20% of that incremental 200 would go back to the founders or to the venture capitalists. Now what Alumni Ventures did was they actually collected instead of the 2% every year. So you would get $2 million. $2 million. $2 million for eight to 10 years. They collected all 2% or all 20% upfront. Right. And so in this case, $100 million fund would be $20 million collected upfront. And that was a little bit of a bait and switch or certainly is an industry standard. And so their response was that the low investment minimum enabled more inclusive people to participate in the capital. And this is actually better than more complex traditional VC models which have high investment minimums, multiple capital calls, and hidden fees. So kind of a first venture firm I've seen in a while that's been sort of sanctioned for misrepresenting and fraud. Nikita, do you have any thoughts on this?

I mean, how many years does a fund typically collect fees?

Usually it's, it's. I mean, it can be whatever, but I would say industry standard is probably 7, 8 to 10 on the outer end. And generally they're not linear. Right. It's, it's some percentage 2% up front and. Or 2% each of the first couple years when you're actually deploying most of the capital and then it winds down maybe it's one and a half that year. 7, 8, 9, 10, something like that.

Is it of the original fund size or is it based on how much is left?

Okay, it's of the original. Of the original fund size. Yep.

I mean, I think I've heard of VCs taking like loans against their money. The money they've. That happens, right?

Yeah, that happens. And honestly I would say like what they did of taking all, like taking this all up front. So some managers actually front load some of their fees. And so instead of taking, you know, if you're raising a $10 million fund, instead of taking $200,000 every year, maybe they'll take $500,000 or a million dollars upfront to get office space, to hire people on your team to build out a website or something. Right. And so they front load the fees instead of spreading them out over time. I think what Alumni Ventures did wrong is when you do that, you have to be very transparent. Right. That that's what you're doing. And I actually think comfortable supporting that because, you know, at lowish dollars, you need to hire a team and you need office space and all that. And so I think it actually can make sense. But that's not industry standard, right? That is very much not that.

Well, it's become fairly standard for a lot of emerging funds I think, who say, hey Logan, to your point, we're going to do, you know, three and a half percent or 4% fees for two to three years. Because like the other thing that's happening too here is funds get deployed so much faster now that this sort of like 10 year lifespan isn't really how long funds take. So if you're raising a, you know, two or $3 million fund, I mean, I see all the time people say, hey, we'll take 3% fees for two years and then zero fees thereafter.

Yeah, generally they do. And so there can be small administrative fees in the, in the outer years or something associated with it for sure.

But nikita, the dropdown 0 is more representative of emerging managers. Nikita. Than institutional managers.

Nikita, to your point, there are like SVB or other financial institutions that will lend to managers. Right. Because this is an annuity that, that people are contractually signing up for once you raise the money. And so you can get loans against future management fees. And so hey, you know, a $10 million fund is $2 million over the lifetime. If you don't want to collect all that cash up front from your limited partners. Right. Like a bank will do that for you. Sophisticated ones will say, okay, this is annuity. Over the next 10 years, we'll discount it back and we'll give you some amount up front. And so again, there's like a lot of ways to do this that are different than the way they did. Now they say that they disclosed it, but it was buried in the footnotes of subscription docs, which I don't know about you, but when DocuSigns come in, I am not the most rigorous reader of all the footnotes on stuff. And so I. It was definitely a bait and switch.

That's an invitation, by the way, for anyone listening just to send Logan docusigns anything you want Logan to sign, go ahead and send it to him because apparently he's just not going to read it.

Do you read? I mean, in my defense here, will you read anything that you're signing your name to? Will you actually go through each document?

I've never read it.

Every line I was like, I don't know how to read.

Yeah. Both of those answers are not particularly surprising to me. That Zach reads every word and that Nikita reads no words. And this one, I am on Nikita's side.

But you guys don't read every single term and condition. You sign every single time. That's odd to me.

When, when you guys do a small check into a fun, like into a company, are you reading anything? Because like I, I've had kind of a dogmatic view like if, if, if you're a small time investor, you should probably just sign the documents without even reading them. Because like when I was, you know, selling and liquidating during the merger of my 50 investors, like three of them were like, no, I, I need to, I need more time to read this. And they literally held up the deal for a week over a 50k check. And so now I'm like, you know, at least in my mind, those investors are blacklisted.

Yeah. To be clear, you should read like everyone should read things that are being sent. But if reading a document makes you hold up a financing for a week and you're a 50k check investor, or frankly an investor of any size, maybe you're just not good at reading. That might be the answer to this.

Yeah, I do think there's a lack. I mean, again, this sort of goes back to one of the recurring topics here, but there's a lack of awareness. The role that like some people play in the venture ecosystem. And I think 15 years ago, Nikita, what was the age of these people that were doing this? Like this sounds like a behavior of someone that's, you know, their, their peak time in the industry would have been 2005 or something and not, you know, not now.

It was a 75 year old in Boston.

Yeah, exactly.

And he just was like, oh, I want to redline the merger agreement. And I'm like, your check was like like 0.5% of the round. Like what?

Yet yet another drive by L for Boston on the pod.

Unfortunately I imagine Facebook's lawyer sitting down with the 75 year old being like what are you talking about? Right? Like no, you, we're not negotiating with. You did this. What was Facebook's reaction to this old guy dragging this out?

I mean I just had to ask other investors to talk to him. I think that's what I mean, that's what I recommend most founders if one of their investors is kind of giving them a hard time with signing some consents, just get another investor to call them. And I always volunteer to do it. I'm happy to get on the phone. But it's funny though because in contrast to him, so Founders Fund was our biggest shareholder. They turned around the documents in like three hours and were like congratulations. Like no, they didn't even read anything. It was, it was awesome. I think it goes to show like if, if you're going to raise money like raising from a big fund and is probably going to be the simplest liquidation process if you sell at the seed stage. Because they just want to preserve their reputation totally.

Like it's, it's a life changing amount of money to oftentimes to the founder and like, like the, the angel investor, it could be a really meaningful amount but likely if you're not investing, if you're not exiting for over. I mean today billion dollar plus like funds just want to stay in the founder's good graces if they're doing right and ethical in general. And so it's like once you make the decision to sell, the incentive of the fund is just like keep, you know, keep everything amicable, pat you on the back, wish you well and wait for you to go for your next this bigger company. Because I mean some of the best founders that I've ever seen or worked with are ones that had like modest outcomes in their first exit. Right. And then they're just willing to go all out on the second one and they're willing to take risks that you know, because their, their bank accounts Padded. And, and so it's actually a very good thing as a founder, as a vc, just to stay in, even if it's a small outcome, stay in the good graces of that founder because that could be the person that's building the next 10, 20, 40, $50 billion business. All right, well next, next topic that we wanted to cover. So this is a little bit of navel gazing, but Twitter is actually working on a podcast part of their, their app. I guess this came out because an engineer reversed or someone went in and looked at the actual code base that was, that was posted and they were able to detect that there was an additional tab dedicated to hosting podcasts on Twitter. So Nikita, what are your, what are your thoughts on this as our resident social app expert?

I mean I, this, it might be weird to say on a podcast, but I think like everyone like the, the in retail investor market, like the commentators, I think we all overstate the size of the podcast market. I think it, because it requires like listening to a podcast requires a huge amount of attention. It's the content's pretty high brow, so it's limits even it becomes even a smaller market. And you know, the Internet does operate on this winner take all market. And with podcasts, they're especially in that kind of framework because there are only a handful of podcasts that get real scale. Like just looking at our own viewers, I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can

see that Freaking outside of breaking outside of Zach Kukoff's family has been a real slog.

But there's a solution to that, which is to have more cousins. You both, if you both could just marry Jews, we could really rock it up the listener count here very easily.

But I, you know, I think for Twitter, the, the, the idea makes sense. I mean their audience is, and their content's pretty highbrow, at least some of it. There's a lot of shit posts that aren't. But so I think it makes sense for them to try to capture that entire market. And you know, all their top accounts have podcasts, so you probably want to keep those users inside of the Twitter app.

So this seems like a logical extension of the Twitter spaces part. I mean, as people probably know, Twitter made a run at trying to buy Clubhouse about a year ago now for I think $3 billion or something. And so this makes sense that, that you can record live or you can promote live audio and then to extend that into the podcast space as well makes. Makes sense for Twitter in my mind.

It's, it's kind of interesting though. Because like they, they did not only lift the spaces concept from Clubhouse, but Clubhouse has launched also a recording feature so you can listen to it as essentially a podcast. And I mean it, it's a shame that like this has all happened to Clubhouse like over the last two years because, I mean, the product they made was pretty amazing. Like it was one of the few social apps that really, you know, got traction in the last few years. And I mean I, I have great respect for Paul Davison. I think he's probably the most talented product developer in social, like ever. He like the craftsmanship and design sense. He, from all the products he's built over the years, he's, I mean he built highlight rolls. Shorts was another one. And then this was his magnum opus. It's, you know, it's not the first time that Twitter has done this. Yeah, they, when Ben Rubin launched Meerkat, which was like the first mobile live video experience, they quickly copied it with Periscope. So it's kind of a shame you have like both, both these guys are probably the, the best in their craft and they both got destroyed by Twitter.

And by the way, it's funny that Facebook has such a reputation for shamelessly copying as you're going through these examples, Nikita, it makes me feel like Twitter, for all that people for years sort of undercounted perhaps. The ruthlessness of that team has been pretty ruthless about copying great stuff too.

Twitter's definitely faster than Facebook. I mean it takes like two years for Facebook to notice something happening in the market and actually act on it. But at the end of the day, I like, it's not really such a, like malicious thing. I think when big, big tech companies do it, it's just like it happens almost organically because if you're a product manager inside of these companies, it's really hard to like propose a new idea that hasn't. That you don't have signals in the market already. Incentives aren't aligned to take those kind of risks. So the best thing you could do is say like, here's this app that has traction. It clearly is demonstrating latent demand for this particular use case, so we should staff it. So it's just, it's just the way the incentives are aligned. When you have like a salary job at, you know, a massive tech company.

Oh, I mean, it's interesting that it totally makes sense. Like VC and startup basically subsidize all these ideas and we're basically running simulations of what actually can work. And so why would you at. At Facebook or Twitter Be out there experimenting with thousands of different things. It's just not possible. Instead, just pick the cream of the crop of, of the the best of them. Right? So it's actually a very logical way to operate.

I will say poor LinkedIn gets no credit. They also launched a social audio product and no one is giving them the credit for the ruthlessness that those PMs have deserved. Did you guys see the video last year that went viral? It was like a day in the life of a LinkedIn PM on TikTok. And it was like, I wake up at 10am, I drink my second cup of coffee, I meditate for 45 minutes, I go on a hike with my friends for two hours. It was like.

It was a joke, right? Like, this wasn't someone actually reliving their day.

Oh, no, this was like earnest, unfortunately. I mean, I think it was a little bit like rage bait designed to go viral. But my, it's funny. My friend was unintentionally in the video because it was his roommate who posted it and he was like, this isn't not correct about LinkedIn PMs. Like, it's not a particularly grueling environment.

Yeah, well, it shows up in their product, I would say.

I mean, they haven't really. They probably innovated the least out of all the big social networks. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous how

linked LinkedIn is pioneered new types of posting. Nikita, that's classic innovation. I'm sorry, but you won't see the kind of bro tree innovation and the format happening on Twitter or Facebook. No la. No laughs on that.

I was trying to put together what that joke meant.

Maybe we just get a laugh track for when, you know, we can try to splice it in for any leeway.

And sure, it's a tough audience for me.

Zach's gonna get all our producers on just to, you know, have them as

I, I'm a volume player. This is not a quality over quantity situation for me.

Yeah, it's funny. Nikita and I just don't suffer fools on this stuff. We're like, ah, you know, not for me. Right. Let's move on.

You benefit because I'm an easy laugh. I laugh at all your jokes.

It's true.

It is true. You're really, you're like a point guard. You're just teeing it up and, you know, letting me dunk. But then when you go for it, I don't pass the ball. Okay, so. So another topic. Tiger Global, in an information article this week, it was, it was stated that they were going to commit a billion dollars for early stage tech funds. So this was actually going to be not out of their, not out of the $10 billion or whatever that they raised, but this is going to be personal commitments from Scott Schliefer and Chase Coleman. They said it was going to be a little over $300 million every year. And in terms of folks that they had already committed to, so they have invested in a few slightly more established funds, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Moxie Ventures, Chapter One Ventures, as well as Maple VC as well. They actually had a quote in here from Maple VC who said that they asked Tiger to invest in a new $16.5 million fund and Tiger agreed to invest two and a half million, the largest check in the fund in less than eight hours. So the typical speed that Tiger operates with. So, Zach, do you have any thoughts on Tiger investing in seed managers?

I mean, it's interesting. We know that not just Tiger, there are a ton of big funds who have played this game. Although, interestingly, the split between funds who have done it out of the fund and funds who do it personally is fairly evenly split. Like, you know, I'm sure we've all seen their, you know, addition is a huge LP in a number of emerging funds and actually has a strong reputation for that. But also we know that, you know, the Andreessen partners have also personally seeded. Right. A lot of venture funds. And that's not to say there, you know, there aren't many others there too. So I guess I was a little bit surprised that it was a story that they were doing it personally when we know so many other GPs at top funds do this to personally see deal flow. But maybe this is an unusual volume of it. I couldn't figure out why was it newsworthy?

Well, I actually, I mean, I found it interesting and I shared it. I had one of my friends that's a seed manager. I think they had roughly a $250 billion fund. And Scott and Chase committed, I think, $32 million in like 18 hours or something. And so, I mean just that speed. And I think anything with Tiger gets some level of attention or clickbait out of it. But I mean, a billion dollars is a lot of money for people to be doing it out of their personal, like their personal bankroll and to do it over three years. And so I assume that was what it was. But what was interesting and I don't know why the information went down this path, but they seemed, they said it's unclear why Tiger is doing this out of their, their personal pockets as opposed to out of their fund. And I thought that, you know, that's not what they get paid to do. They can do this as kind of a side project to enable their business, but they're not a fund of funds. So I think it's pretty simple why they're doing it, but it just goes to show how much money these guys have if they're able to kind of write $300 million a year to emerging managers.

What I mean, but what signal does it send to LPs when they're investing in these, like, smaller funds that are probably getting better prices because they're, you know, they're very close to the, you know, the pulse of the startup community. Like, you know, chapter one is very early. I mean, if I was an LP in Tiger, I would be like, I want my money in those deals.

Yeah. And this isn't, I mean, people don't go to Tiger because they're looking for like, you know, 10x funds. Right. They're not really looking for the real alpha in the market. If you're giving money to Tiger, it's like, hey, where can I park $500 million? Because I'm a sovereign wealth fund and I, you know, I don't want to do it in the public markets. And so I don't think this can be broken down into, into chunks that will actually fit into. And they don't want to maintain the relationships. And so if Scott and Chase can just do this at a personal level, then I think it's, you know, it makes sense for them. Yeah.

Where can I get an index exposure to private early stage tech. Right. And not. And then like a true index. Right. Get a relatively decent return but not need to have the editorial taste necessarily.

Exactly. So that'll do it for the seventh episode of three Cartoon Avatars. Thanks everyone for joining. Feel free to share with any friends, family, anyone that you think would be interested. And we're, for the first week, we're not doing Nikita Outro because we all forgot to record the outro. So I am solo here. But thank you everyone for joining and we'll see you next week on three Cartoon Avatars.