This is my first conversation with Evan Burns, CEO of State Affairs. I think Evan is building one of the most interesting companies at the intersection of politics and capitalism, with the ambitious goal of creating the category of “policy markets” which he says is more important than financial markets. In this conversation we discuss the state of media, the thesis and business of State Affairs and more.

Keith Rabois was one of the first believers in the idea and they just came out of stealth with a $70m seed round funded by Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund.

To understand how Evan got here, perhaps sharing some of his background is important. He started a media company called Odyssey which he ran for eight years before eventually exiting and went on to start a beverage company called The Long Drink that was wildly successful in a short period of time doing 500 million in sales. Through that he learnt how important it was for companies to understand policy in real time and have relationships with policymakers.

One of the best things about doing the show is meeting people that lay low and are underrated in the mainstream discourse. I think Evan is one of those people who is going to build a generational company and will be household name in the next five years or so.

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Timestamps

00:00 - Intro
01:41 - Evan's First Venture: Odyssey and the Plurality of America
03:00 - Seeking "Alpha" Outside Coastal Media Hubs
05:00 - Groupthink in Silicon Valley & the Grifter Problem
08:26 - Moving into the Beverage Space: The Origin of Finnish Long Drink
10:45 - Navigating Nuanced State Policy Laws & Early Mistakes
12:45 - Changing the Overton Window: Lessons from Uber & SpaceX
14:50 - Connecting with People: The Pandemic Underwear Campaign Goes Viral
16:44 - Entrepreneurial Survival Instinct & the Strategy Behind Media Narratives
19:08 - News Bias, Fact-Seeking
21:28 - Defending Democracy and Fixing Education
24:06 - Optimism for Future Progress
25:47 - Why Negativity Dominates Politics
27:00 - The Thesis Behind State Affairs: Introducing "Policy Markets"
29:00 - Tracking Opaque State Legislation and Government Data
31:00 - Building a Base Layer Knowledge Graph for Real-Time Access
32:58 - Business Model, Key Corporate Customers, and Moving at Real-Time Speed
35:25 - Regulatory Capture and Relationships in the AI Age
37:21 - Use Cases for Elected Officials, Lobbyists, and Executives
39:51 - Customizing Policy Models for Startups & Mid-Sized Businesses
41:54 - Bringing Policy Makers and the Startup World Together
44:33 - The Value of Objective Nonpartisan News in the Next 10 Years
49:40 - Deep Journalism on the Ground: Engendering Trust Over Content "Slop"
55:30 - Exploring the Pillars of a Monopoly Business Structure
58:06 - Economies of Scale in Proprietary Data Collection
01:01:00 - Apprenticing in the Modern Workforce
01:03:26 - Moon Landing Debate
01:04:53 - The Mistake of International Expansion Before Winning America
01:06:29 - Palantir-Inspired Go-To-Market Model
01:07:07 - Why MBAs are Bad for Startup Careers
01:08:24 - What people disagreed with him on early in State Affairs journey
01:09:58 - Closing

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Mike Solana is the CMO of Founders Fund and Founder of Pirate Wires. Marketing and media teams in technology and venture seem to be in this competition of capturing attention of the right people. The consensus strategy is covering entrepreneurs and investors on a podcast. All that has its own place but you don’t create cultural institutions or artifacts while following consensus strategies.

I often think about how few cultural institutions get built that matter. They are usually decades in the making and when they arrive, they are timeless and etched in memory. Think about Starwars, Harry Potter, Lord of Rings franchises that people are still culturally relevant decades on. How would one do that in the world of technology and venture capital?

In recent memory, Mike has produced at least two cultural artifacts, Hereticon which was a conference for what was described as thought crime and now the show Mafia featuring celebrities in tech and venture that took over the Twitter/X timeline when it launched with millions of views and all of tech elite engaged. Everyone I met was talking about it for at least a month after and you can always rewatch it as a good holiday watch like you would replay your favorite TV show.

I asked him about the making of Mafia, whether he will transition to player from moderator, how he thinks about creating these unique new cultural artifacts and what’s next (if it happens, it will be the wildest show of all time).

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Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction to Mafia the Game as a Show
03:01 - Redefining "New Media" and Its History
04:06 - The Inspiration Behind Creating Celebrity Mafia
06:02 - Moving Away from Standard Tech Interview Podcasts
07:56 - Standalone Projects and Cultural Artifacts
10:50 - Selecting the Cast and Showing Their Real Selves
13:51 - Choosing the Location: The PayPal Mafia Photo Connection
15:58 - Future Plans: Will There Be a Full Season?
18:01 - Why the Speaker Hates Playing as the Mafia
18:41 - Current Projects: Pirate Wires and Founders Fund
22:23 - Challenges in Putting the Show Together
24:30 - Lessons Learned from Past Media Ventures
26:41 - The Role of a Modern CMO in Venture Capital
31:10 - Creative Marketing and Brand Strategy at Founders Fund
33:05 - Playing Mafia with Peter Thiel and The Dream Casts
35:01 - Closing Remarks

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I had a conversation with Justin Lopas on building Base Power a few months back, last week they announced $1B in new funding at a $13B valuation. Justin cofounded Base Power with Zach Dell in 2023. I first met him at one of the deeptech dinners I was hosting in Austin back when they were still in stealth (adding to the list of incredible markups for anyone investing in founders from these dinners).

The latest round was led by Addition with participation from friends of the show at A16Z, Trust Ventures, 137 Ventures and others.

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction and Background at SpaceX
03:31 - SpaceX Culture and Giving Agency to Early-Career Talent
05:32 - What to Filter for When Hiring Non-Experienced Talent
09:03 - Implementing and Automating AI in Non-Technical Roles
10:50 - Defining Base Power: The Vision to Fix the Grid
15:05 - Regulated vs. Deregulated Energy Markets in Texas
17:32 - How Home Batteries Act as an Energy Hedge
21:50 - Battery Storage Capacity and Bypassing the Interconnection Queue
22:56 - Smooth Variability in Energy Supply and Demand
24:48 - Aligning Incentives and Structural Practical Limits for Home Batteries
26:13 - Navigating the Patchwork of US Energy Regulation and Expansion
32:07 - The Hardest Challenges and Landed-Cost Optimization
34:04 - Treating Every Aspect of a Business as a Factory
38:37 - Recruiting Pitch for Base Power
40:25 - Embracing Internal Failures to Foster Innovation
41:39 - Learning Methods: YouTube, LLMs, and Peer Insights
43:44 - Building and Maintaining a Strong Company Culture
48:24 - Key Takeaways from Leading Manufacturing at Anduril
50:19 - Managing Diverse Subcultures Within a Consistent Mission
51:42 - Future Outlook: New Products, AI Support, and Scaling Production

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Scott Kupor was the first employee at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture capital firms in the arena today with over $90B in AUM. The firm started with the ambition to build a product to serve founders and with Michael Ovitz joining the board, it took inspiration from how talent agencies operated. Today, it is part a media company with venture capital as a business model and part recruiting firm for the startup ecosystem. Scott shares the story of how it possibly could have been Andreessen Horowitz Kupor.

He worked with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz for 25 years before leaving for his current role as Director of the Office of Personnel Management at the White House, which oversees the 2 million of the government employees that don’t serve in the military, which has over $2 trillion in budget and is probably the largest workforce/HR department in the world. In our conversation, he shares the story of how he got involved in politics and the current admin, the challenges in running an organization of this size and scale, what he hopes to accomplish and more.

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Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction & OPM Overview
00:36 A Lifer with Ben Horowitz & Mark Andreessen
01:29 The Origin & Founding of A16Z
03:43 Deconstructing Venture Capital via the CAA Agency Model
06:43 Scaling a Modern VC Firm Vertically
09:16 Centralization vs. Decentralization in Operations
11:09 Building Long-Term Trust with Executive Talent
13:50 Cultural Precepts: First-Class Business Only
16:42 Organic Firm Evolution & Partner Autonomy
20:35 Saying No to Rollups & PE Buyouts
23:12 The Intersection of Public Policy and Tech
26:01 Transitioning into Public Service
29:42 Startups, Immigration, and National Security
32:17 OPM’s Scale & Enforcing High Performance
35:45 Permissioned Innovation & IT Overhauls
40:05 Breaking Institutional Status Quo
41:59 Silicon Valley Root-Cause Math in Government
47:53 Flat Communications Within a Bureaucracy
50:04 Reforming Civil Service Promotion Rules
54:36 The Shift Toward Skills-Based Hiring
57:21 Rethinking the Value of Credentials
01:00:20 Solving the Government Tech Talent Gap
01:02:51 Ending the Over-Outsourcing Crisis
01:04:55 The "NASA Forces" Public-Private Exchange
01:08:45 A Personal Journey Through the Study of Happiness

Ian Cinnamon is the Cofounder and CEO of Apex Space. He was previously at Zynga and Palantir (after selling his company). He joined Palantir after selling his weapon detection company to them which had gotten impacted by covid since all live events came to a halt for ~1 year. Interestingly, my final year project in electrical engineering was also weapon detection using Computer Vision - which I take no credit for since my teammates did all the work, I even back then thought I could just support on the BD/research side since my dad was working in the security administration function.

He is the second member of the Palantir mafia on the show to have started a billion dollar company. The first was Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz. Both backed by friends of the show at XYZ Ventures.

The company was valued at $2.3 billion as of their most recent fundraise which was led by Glade Brook and Washington Harbor. Their early investors include Andreessen Horowitz, XYZ Ventures and Point72, all friends of the show.

We talked about his idea maze and choosing the right thing to work on in the middle of the crypto-craze in 2022, in that time he joined Village Global as an EIR to figure out what he wanted to pursue. I am a big fan of exploration and taking your time to decide what you want to go all-in on. Recently discussed the importance of this on the show with Ali Tamaseb (GP at DCVC and author of SuperFounders) as well, he conducted thorough research on billion dollar founders and companies and one of the things that is common is the fact that billion dollar founders take time to decide what they want to pursue. Another example that comes to mind is Qasar Younis of Applied Intuition who took ~2 years before he locked in the idea for Applied Intuition. Matt Angle at Paradromics was in his PhD and was thinking about it for ~4 years or more before starting the company. Brandon Sorbom at Commonwealth Fusion Systems also spent an ample amount of time working on the idea including at first starting a nonprofit dedicated to research before doing it as a startup.

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Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
01:22 - Moving from software and AI to the space industry
02:12 - Using computer vision to protect public safety
04:37 - Learning from the flat, fast-moving culture at Palantir
07:54 - Deciding to build the last company I would ever start
09:59 - How SpaceX made rocket launch reliable and frequent
12:10 - Stepping away to incubate a new kind of satellite business
13:56 - Building the Ford Model T of the satellite world
15:15 - What is a satellite platform?
16:43 - Partnering with Northrop Grumman for missile defense
19:12 - Understanding how much room is actually left up in space
21:19 - Choosing the right altitude based on what a satellite does
24:13 - Shifting space tech from custom crafts to a volume game
27:25 - How factory automation helps America win the current space race
29:46 - Closing

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Austen Allred is the Cofounder and CEO of Gauntlet AI which is running an AI training school which through its intensive bootcamp makes engineers AI-first operators. Austen originally founded Lambda School as a coding bootcamp, which later became Bloom Institute of Technology - backed by venture firms like GigaFund, Y Combinator, Ashton Kutcher and Google Ventures. Their business model for Lambda School was income share agreements for which there wasn't really a regulatory framework, this was the eventual reason for why the company went almost bankrupt as they got sued and couldn't keep operating.

This is a wide ranging conversation where we talk about the decade long lessons from Lambda and why it didn't work out, how he came about the idea for Gauntlet and different models for the future of education.

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Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
01:21 - The strategic advantage of building a raw internet audience
06:30 - How an impressive product magnetically pulls a network
10:34 - Finding the Keel: Simplicity and the metrics of Paul Graham
13:30 - Navigating the extreme highs and lows of a tech hype cycle
19:32 - Ditching college to sleep in a Honda Civic
24:11 - Launching a growth hacking book to wipe out personal debt
26:28 - Turning lambda calculus into a bootlegged code bootcamp
29:47 - Bootstrapping a massive student waiting list on pure cash flow
35:17 - Surviving five separate YC interviews on the bubble
39:27 - Pitching alternative asset managers to financialize education
43:39 - Creating a brand new financial asset class out of human potential
47:32 - Risk-adjusting human data sets at a thousand ISAs at a time
52:40 - The Capitol Hill lobbying
1:06:38 - Running on an empty bank account and a one-month runway
1:09:14 - Reverse engineering how elite enterprise software teams use AI
1:11:51 - Relocating the family to Austin for the thousand-hour Gauntlet
1:15:34 - Swapping the ISA model for upfront corporate recruitment fees
1:22:02 - Alpha School: Replacing traditional teachers with personalized AI software
1:24:44 - The Texas Education Freedom Act voucher experiment
1:26:28 - Why legacy Higher-Ed institutions cannot turn the big ship fast enough
1:28:30 - The ultimate necessity of overriding generic consensus LLM views
1:32:46 - Reclaiming localized outdoor communities over heavy lecture halls
1:39:50 - Do modern tech companies emerge as the new universities?
1:42:40 - Closing

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Brian Hooks is the CEO of Stand Together, President of Charles Koch Foundation and co-author of “Believe in People” with Charles Koch. He has scaled Stand Together to a network of 1,000 partner organizations and has deployed over $1B using a framework he called “venture philanthropy”. They are driven by problems and don’t get restricted by whether the vehicle through which they fund the problem is a donation or an investment. Which is a very interesting approach.

He also described some of his work as backing “social entrepreneurs”. My career actually started in social entrepreneurship and I thought that the experiment doesn’t always work but my biases come from a completely different set of circumstances and structure. Setting up a million dollar prize of teams of student entrepreneurs might be a great way to catalyze more high agency college students and build a community of these people but might be a misdirected approach to solve the problem at hand. I shared this concern with him to get his thoughts on what he has seen work based on their work so far.

We talked about the parallels of backing talent in venture capital and philanthropy. I was particularly interested in this question because Brian’s career started at Mercatus Centre at the George Mason University where he got a chance to work alongside Tyler Cowen who has written an incredible book called “Talent” with Daniel Gross, I was curious about his lessons from his time there.

This is a special edition of our interview from Reagan National Economic Forum, I hope to have Brian back on for a longer wide-ranging conversation. Hope you enjoy the show!

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Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
03:46 - Thesis behind backing Trust Ventures
07:13 - Learning insatiable curiosity from Tyler Cowen
10:29 - Discarding what works to achieve real scale
13:41 - Pooling the minds of a thousand business leaders
20:03 - Reforming a one-size-fits-all school system
23:32 - Using a venture capital model to fund classrooms
26:53 - Why higher education is completely broken
30:38 - Changing how modern companies look at talent
34:42 - The skills of the future
38:19 - Trying something different after a thousand years
41:34 - Closing

This is a special edition of our show from Reagan National Economic Forum where I interviewed Dan Wright, Cofounder and CEO of Armada, a decentralized cloud for the edge. They are valued at $2B according to their last round and are funded by some of the friends of the show at Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8090 Industries, Overmatch and strategic capital from firms like M12 (Microsoft's venture fund), Pinegrove and a few others.

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Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
01:16 - Dan Wright's early journey
04:32 - Hyperscaling the remote edge data center
06:41 - Full stack commercial deployments from oil fields to the Navy bay
09:12 - Why DIY closet servers failed the scale test
11:06 - What Armada enables its customers to do?
14:26 - Joint ventures and open model ecosystem network effects
17:42 - Reason behind Armada's "hyper" growth
22:39 -Why go for energy and mining companies?
27:21 - Hiring the top 1 percent talent
30:51 - Closing

Eric Jorgenson started a nights and weekends projects compiling the most useful ideas Naval Ravikant had publicly shared, this has sold five million copies so far. He has since doubled down on this niche of curating the best ideas from the best thinkers and entrepreneurs in the technology industry. He went on to write the Anthology of Balaji and most recently, The Book of Elon. I talked to him about the process of writing with a high density of useful ideas and compiling, curating and shaping the final form of the book.

He took five years to write the Book of Elon, I asked him about some of the concepts Elon has shared in his own words that he has highlighted in his book and his biggest takeaways having studied Elon for half a decade.

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Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
00:37 - The success of “The Almanac of Naval”
02:22 - Writing the “The Book of Elon”
04:32 - Inspiring a million future builders
07:56 - Finding useful ideas and cutting out the noise
11:17 - Clawing up the power law of book sales
15:44 - When Mike Moritz passed on Tesla
19:14 - Chasing problems from clean sheets to janky car demos
23:47 - The high internal metabolism of Elon companies
27:53 - How the Twitter acquisition changed the startup world
32:06 - Treating tech companies as a form of philanthropy
36:37 - Completing a tour of duty at warp speed
40:57 - Mission first empathy and the hardcore Tesla culture
44:57 - Leading from the front lines like military generals
48:37 - Self-education and learning anything you want
52:58 - Re-reading sci-fi to break technological stagnation
56:46 - What happens to money in a post-scarcity economy
1:01:09 - Aligning raw talent with genuine interest
1:04:49 - The high effort way to sample and shadow careers
1:08:52 - Forcing breakthroughs through tight constraints
1:12:31 - Guerrilla battles inside the early PayPal Mafia
1:18:09 - Mapping the maze with long root building
1:23:00 - Closing

Chauncey Hamilton is a General Partner at XYZ, a firm which was started with the thesis of backing Palantir alumni. I met Chauncey earlier in the year and had the chance to hang out a few times at Chapter’s office in NYC. I know founders who camp at their investor’s office, I don’t know many investors camping at their portfolio company’s offices. She explains how this helps her at her job, we discussed archetypes of venture capitalists and how to identify which one you are or what you are best suited to doing.

We have been back and forth talking about live experiences and media for a few months now and I was particularly interested because she started her career doing special projects at Wired in their prime when an index fund of the public companies on their cover could have made you your retirement money. Media and venture capital have always had an overlap, a ton of people with media backgrounds have become successful VCs or have been highly sought after. More recently we have seen people like Mario Gabriele (Generalist newsletter) joining Hummingbird VC, Mike Moritz is one of the OGs, another journalist who was at the helm of Sequoia. We talk about some of the transferrable lessons there in our conversation.

Some of these Palantir alumni are past and upcoming guests of the show like Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz (cofounder of Chapter, a $3B medicare and retirement company) and Ian Cinnamon (cofounder of Apex Space, a $2B satellite manufacturing platform) and having met them I can see why the thesis made sense especially given that Ross Fubini, founder of XYZ had been an advisor to Palantir in early days and has a special relationship with them. I had questions though about the thesis because the firm is now $1.2 billion under management and I am not sure there is an endless supply of top entrepreneurial talent at Palantir so we got intro discussing the evolution of the thesis and the role of networks in VC.

In some way both of us started our career working in a Chief of Staff/Special Projects like role which wasn’t called that at the time. The upside of that is an incredible apprenticeship that acts as an incredible catalyst for your career. I asked her about her lessons from her time at First Round where she got that apprenticeship and later co-running Dorm Room Fund as a young mom, flying around the country to college campuses. Having done that in my early twenties, I know how hard it is to build that network and also realize how it becomes a moat in the long term. We talk about building these unique founder networks at length and how she goes about it.

Hope you enjoy our hang as much as we did!

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Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
01:28 - Meme culture and internet micro-cultures
03:16 - Career lessons at Wired
05:08 - The path to Chief of Staff
06:25 - Finding space for analog technology
09:12 - Category creation and business model shifts
12:10 - The culture of early 2010s Silicon Valley
14:34 - Transitioning into institutional venture capital
17:55 - Sourcing, due diligence, and building conviction
21:20 - Becoming the founder's first call
24:07 - Evolving through career and life phases
27:55 - Core thesis at XYZ: Accessing unique networks
29:47 - The Palantir thesis and the Forward Deployed Engineer
33:01 - Evaluating talent pipelines: The Chapter case study
36:40 - Observing operational cultures in-person
40:17 - Sourcing talent through the Dorm Room Fund
44:34 - Campus programs as durable marketing engines
53:19 - Being short-term contrarian, long-term consensus
59:29 - Josh Kopelman: Lessons in leadership and firm building
1:00:50 - Unvarnished feedback and the willingness to pivot
1:09:11 - Sourcing talent and building firm ecosystems
1:12:37 - The platform engine and the 10-year alignment test
1:15:49 - Closing

David Ulevitch is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture firms by AUM with $90B. He cofounded the American Dynamism practice with Katherine Boyle about 4 years ago. Since then, it has taken over the timeline and become the language many use to describe frontier, deep or hard tech. Friend of the show Christopher Lochhead calls this Category Design, where you don’t necessarily have to be the first to become a category leader, you need to frame the problem and do it better than everyone else.

American Dynamism focuses on investing in areas such as public safety, aerospace, logistics, national security, defense, manufacturing, industrialization, logistics. Some of the companies in their portfolio include Anduril, Amca, Applied Intuition, Apex Space, Astro Mechanica, Astranis, Base Power, California Forever, Castelion, Hadrian, Northwood Space, Radiant Nuclear and of course SpaceX. Founders of many of these will be featured in upcoming episodes or are friends of the show.

David was previously the founder and CEO of OpenDNS, a cloud-delivered security service that was acquired by Cisco in 2015 for $635 million. While at Cisco, David was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Security — a $2.4 billion annual revenue business with more than 5,000 team members — where he oversaw the company’s global cybersecurity strategy, product portfolio, and business (via A16Z).

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
01:57 - Defining American Dynamism
05:43 - Project Maven and Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy
07:24 - Competing with General Catalyst for Anduril
08:49 - Category creation and defining the market
10:57 - The marketing engine of “The American Dream”
15:20 - Replicating Silicon Valley
18:22 - Robot Dogs and General Catalyst
19:47 - 1776 Million: Building the American Dynamism Practice
20:59 - Why Hardware Outperforms Software Over Time
22:38 - Coupling Defense, Energy, and Space
26:28 - Investing in Public Safety
33:01 - Investment Committees are “stupid”
35:39 - Long-term partners over short-term bets
39:23 - Policy, Regulations, and navigating relationships in DC
43:11 - How regulations are slowing us down
46:54 - The Industrial Supply Chain Divergence
51:29 - Global Maritime Dominance and Expanding TAMs
53:39 - Venture-Backable Bets in Critical Industrial Infrastructure
1:00:24 - Applying Anthropology: Study of People, Culture, and Political Power
1:04:08 - What Drives Innovation Across Nations?
1:11:49 - Regional Talent and State Incentives
1:15:48 - Moving from Benevolent Dictator to Minority Investor
1:20:42 - Life is Checkers, Not Chess: Agency and Knowing When to Sell
1:26:57 - OpenDNS and the Pivot to Enterprise: Letting Markets Dictate Your Revenue
1:30:13 - The High Bar for Talent: Grittiness, Grind, and Magnetic Leadership
1:33:09 - Attracting Capital via Narrative: Storytelling vs. Lying
1:35:07 - Toastmasters and Single-Topic Debates: Sharpening Communication
1:37:20 - Modern Credentials: Domain Expertise and Sourcing True Signals
1:44:23 - Government Sales 101: Enterprise Sales on Steroids
1:46:34 - Closing

Sunil Dhaliwal has been in investing for 27 years, he was a General Partner at Battery Ventures for 14 years before starting Amplify Partners. He founded Amplify 13 years ago with the thesis of backing technical founders. Interestingly, the “business guy” was more investable back in the 2010/11 era.

Amplify is an investor in companies like Datadog, Fastly, Recursion, Chai Discovery, Langchain, Anchorage Digital, Covariant, Runway ML, Temporal, Luma AI to name a few. These are either publicly traded or have privately achieved unicorn valuations.

They have launched a dedicated bio fund after their latest $900m fund announcement building on top of the success of their bio portfolio, Sunil explains on the pod why they are uniquely positioned to operate in the space.

We had a great conversation covering how to train junior investors, the madness of the dot-com era and how it rhymes with some of what we see today in technology bubbles, his investing philosophy, fundraising advice and more.

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
03:20 - What was going on in the Dot-Com bubble?
08:15 - Collapse of the Telecom value chain
09:37 - Why the AI boom is supply-constrained, not demand-constrained
12:37 - OpenAI canceling Sora
17:15 - Why brand and trust are self-reinforcing in enterprise software
19:17 - Shipping frequently as a mechanism to preserve vendor trust
22:58 - Debunking the SaaS apocalypse
30:23 - The Amplify playbook
38:05 - The shift from scale-up servers to agent-first platforms
41:42 - Progression timeline of autonomous agents
49:23 - Investing in Runway and the AI-meets-creativity thesis
52:08 - Why you're an idiot if your early-stage firm has an investment committee
55:00 - The failure of consensus markets and competing for growth deals on price
1:07:00 - Early-stage fundraising is a search problem, not a sales process
1:10:24 - Capping limited partner allocation at 10%
1:14:07 - The necessity of letting people learn from their own failures
1:14:58 - Launching a dedicated bio fund to capture compounding variables
1:17:57 - The art of training junior investors
1:26:05 - Why traditional biotech is a terrible place for returns
1:34:52 - How networks and relationship goodwill compound over decades
1:49:54 - Designing a platform team for recruiting and go-to-market execution
1:52:57 - Closing

Todd Klein is a currently a Managing Partner at Revolution Growth, a VC firm founded by Steve Case. He has been in venture investing for over 25 years, his notable investments include companies like AirBnB, CAVA, Square, Pinterest, CustomInk.

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
01:44 - What have you changed your mind on?
03:19 - How capital has become a commodity?
05:28 -Why truly talented founders are a rare asset?
07:11 - How founders must evolve through personality transformations?
09:56 - The extraordinary velocity of job obsolescence
13:55 - Has the software industry gotten too big?
15:08 - Why AI will never replace human taste and judgment?
19:01 - Higher education: The value of "Camp" vs. credentials
24:16 - College campuses as a laboratory for microcultures
28:11 - Discussing Cava: Building a hospitality-first brand
31:40 - Controlling quality through slower, company-owned growth
36:29 - What makes for a great board member?
40:38 - What makes an effective, future-oriented board meeting?
43:22 - Defining a structural compensation philosophy
45:58 - Communication failures and bad board meetings
49:28 - Storytelling as the ultimate form of peer leadership
52:38 - Jose Andres and changing the world through food
55:54 - Importance of the founders background
59:53 - Hollywood 101: Insights from Anonymous Content
1:06:37 - Relationships as investments
1:11:05 - Identifying and solving for business model conflict
1:15:18 - Book recommendations

I first met Christian Keil over Twitter/X DMs probably 3 years ago or so. He started building the Astranis media function in public, he was the face of it as he figured out Twitter and video in real time. When he joined, they were a team of 50 and by the time he left they were about 500 people.

How to be an elite operator at a startup? Take on more projects. I agree with Christian on this and can relate. Some of them become whole orgs, Christian was hired for a finance job, got looped into recruiting as the company was struggling to find a good recruiter, he was involved in regulatory and building their owned premium media.

He hired Jason Carman (E21 on We The Builders), who he describes as generational video talent to start their owned premium media production at the company and they started doing this before cinematic video went mainstream as a channel for startups, especially frontier tech startups.

In this conversation, we cover:

• Hiring generational talent

• How become good at something you have no experience in?

• How to get good at Twitter/X without rage baiting

• Podcasting and his show 1st Principles

• How to think about what problem to go after?

• Time allocation, digital and physical cleanliness

Tune into the full episode for all the insights.

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
01:57 - Growing Twitter/X
04:37 - Finding the message to fit the audience
06:24 - “Reply Guy” as a growth strategy
08:46 - Building a marketing function from scratch
10:50 - Spotting generational talent
12:47 - Why you should only hire “Standard Deviation” outliers?
15:13 - Curiosity as the core predictor for successful operators at startups
16:52 - From 50 to 500 people
18:46 - When to hire specialists vs. promoting from within?
20:25 - What is the Chief of Staff role?
21:54 - The process of becoming good at something new
23:33 - Lessons in practicality and steady leadership
24:30 - The stress and spectacle of a satellite launch
33:31 - How space regulations work?
35:44 - The “Parking Spots” of space and the ITU
37:21 - Range Safety: Proving you won’t explode the pad
40:15 - Why space-based Internet is easier than fiber?
42:06 - Dedicated satellites vs. shared constellations
44:33 - Why we don’t see many startups challenging telecom giants?
46:09 - Goal of “First Principles”: Getting better at technical video
48:23 - The harder path: Choosing optimism over rage-bait
51:53 - How high school debate channels competitive energy?
54:27 - 180 Mindset shift: Realizing parenting is hard
58:11 - Joining the American Dynamism team at a16z
1:00:06 - Why media and government engagement matter for VCs?
1:01:46 - Advice for early talent: Optimizing for trajectory
1:03:19 - Why you should work in-person early in your career?
1:05:40 - Reducing mental burden through time allocation
1:07:50 - The danger of “Job Hopping” every two years
1:10:18 - Sci-Fi and the best Harry Potter book
1:14:42 - Rebranding the “State Schooler” party with Chipotle
1:17:52 - Closing thoughts

Jonathan Lacoste, is the founder of SpaceVC, a pre-seed frontier tech fund with at least a 20% unicorn hit rate, this is my observation based on publicly reported valuations of the companies listed on their website.

Before starting his fund, Jonathan was an entrepreneur, he dropped out of college to start his company Jebbit for which he raised for $90m and successfully exited to BlueConic. Their product was similar to a better version of SurveyMonkey or Qualtrix, like a Canva and SurveyMonkey fusion. Highlight of the company was that they sold billions of questions in consumer interactions with customers like NFL, NHL, eBay, NBA, P&G.

Jonathan’s company was part of one of the early Techstars cohorts which is pretty successful and a mafia of its own. His cohort includes people like Nikita Bier, the founders of PillPack (TJ Parker & Elliot Cohen) acquired by Amazon for $750m, their MD Katie Rae is the Cofounder of The Engine at MIT, Kash Razzaghi who is now CCO of Circle ($CRCL) a $25B company.

Highlights of what we cover:

• Early investments in Castelion and True Anomaly which just announced a new funding round valuing them at $2.2B alongside friends of the show Colin Greenspon (E9 and E22), Seth Winterroth (E25), Thiel Capital etc

• Why concentrated portfolio is a winning strategy

• When to run away from a category?

• How to identify top-decile founders? (by camping outside SpaceX, Anduril and Pentagon?)

• What makes a great cofounding team?

• Would SpaceVC ever consider getting acquired by a mega fund?

• How the skill of debating is great for cofounding relationships

• The State of Accelerators

• Approaching venture as a craft business and learning from CJ Reim at Amity

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
01:49 - The state of start ups in Austin
05:07 - Why venture capital is concentrating into fewer deals?
07:54 - The founder journey and transitioning to VC
09:59 - Discussing Castalian and True Anomaly
11:17 - How to find top-decile founders at inception?
13:26 - Why small concentrated funds win at pre-seed?
16:17 - What It Takes To Build a Frontier Tech Franchise?
19:42 - Frontier Tech vs. Deep Tech: Engineering execution over science risk
21:14 - Evaluating technical founders without data points
26:11 - The importance of speed and iteration
31:36 - Identifying market forces before they become obvious
36:45 - Finding insights at the edge of the venture lexicon
40:41 - Why now is the time to invest in biotech?
43:25 - Why being a founder is harder than being a VC?
44:54 - The power of a concentrated, hands-on portfolio
47:59 - Talent networks: SpaceX, Tesla, and the cultures of innovation
49:18 - The DNA of a complementary co-founding team
52:20 - The founding journey: From college dropout to multi-hundred million dollar exit
55:37 - Gorilla marketing and the early pivots in his company
1:01:48 - How accelerators have evolved over 15 years?
1:06:27 - Brand degradation in the venture and education ecosystem
1:09:58 - Learning the craft: Mentorship and firm building
1:11:51 - Discipline in deployment: The courage to not do a deal
1:15:15 - Underwriting towards a standard 10-year fund life
1:18:05 - Cross-sector lessons in culture and fundraising
1:22:21 - The role of X and LinkedIn in VC marketing
1:24:42 - Historical influences: From Genghis Khan to Alan Turing
1:28:12 - Book recommendations: Ambition and breakthrough stories
1:32:34 - Closing

Matt Ocko is the Cofounder and Co-Managing Partner of DCVC, a firm he started with Zachary Bogue 16 years ago. Matt started his career at Oracle and then went on to join a $1B AUM fund called Helix Investments in the 90s where he learnt the lesson that venture is 90% people from Ben Webster.

Matt coined the term “deeptech” almost a quarter of a century ago with Steve Jurvetson on a late 1999 winter night when they were talking about quantum computing being an investable category.

DCVC has been investing in deeptech since its inception and has invested in companies like RocketLab, Oklo, Planet, Agility Robotics, SentinelOne, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Confluent, Evolv and many more.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
04:45 - The Oracle Mafia
08:45 - Why venture outcomes are 90% people?
12:45 - The Great Man Theory
16:45 - What It Takes To Build a DeepTech Franchise?
20:45 - Customer trust in deeptech
24:45 - Disucssing Latus Bio
28:45 - How Moore’s Law and open-source enabled modern deeptech
32:45 - Validating nuclear energy on venture dollars
36:45 - The strategic failure of Chinese supply chain dependency
40:45 - What policy changes we need to decouple from China?
48:45 - Protecting energy markets and homeowner Equity
52:45 - How Pivot Bio disrupts global fertilizer monopolies
56:45 - The parallel journeys of Peter Beck and Elon Musk
1:00:45 - It takes a team to execute on vision
1:04:45 - Why every failed investment comes back to people
1:08:45 - First to market vs. first to scale
1:12:45 - You need a 100x better product at seed
1:16:45 - Overcoming the risk aversion of market
1:20:45 - Tidal Metals and the future of critical minerals
1:24:45 - Culture for successful organizations
1:28:45 - Closing

Watch on Youtube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
04:45 - Dual-Use Framework
08:45 - Strategizing for the Indo-Pacific
12:45 - Reinvigorating American Shipbuilding: Addressing the Competitiveness Gap
16:45 - Rhode Island's Maritime Hotbed: Proximity to Talent and Capital
20:45 - Hardware as a Durable Moat

Seth Winterroth is a Partner at Eclipse where he has been investing in the physical world for over a decade. They now have fresh $1.3B in funds taking their AUM (Assets Under Management) to ~$10B to build and invest in critical technologies in the physical world.

His portfolio alone is collectively worth over $13B and includes:

• Wayve - valued at $8.6B as of their last round. Their global team is advancing AV2.0, a next-generation embodied AI system that can learn from real-world experience and large-scale data, and generalize across cities, vehicles, and driving conditions worldwide.

• True Anomaly - valued at $1.5B as of their last round. The only defense technology company focused exclusively on space defense. It designs and builds spacecraft, payloads and software for space superiority

• Mytra - reportedly valued at $2B. It is a software-defined automation platform built around three modular components: The bot, storage, and operator interface. All the intelligence lives in the bot and software layer; the storage structure is commodity steel. That architecture eliminates the lifts, cranes, and conveyors that make traditional automation systems rigid and prone to cascading failures, and replaces fixed workflows with a platform that can be configured and changed in software

• Forsight Robotics - reportedly valued at $500m. The company aims to bridge the worldwide gap in the accessibility to eye surgery and help over one billion people who suffer from preventable vision impairment.

• Ursa Major - reportedly valued at $600m. An aerospace and defense company delivering flight-proven capabilities for hypersonics, solid rocket motors, space mobility and launch.

*The company descriptions are sourced from Eclipsed website and the valuations are sourced from publicly available reporting.

In this conversation we cover:

• The talent density in frontier tech is growing, fueled by leaders and decision-makers trained at organizations like SpaceX, Tesla, and Rivian, alongside software builders “bored” of the “long tail of SaaS”.

• Eclipse’s investment framework prioritizes “market, market, market,” alongside a strong team and a differentiated technology-driven product.

• The firm focuses on taking engineering execution risk—following the Jeff Bezos adage that “hard is our moat”—while actively avoiding science risk or net new invention risk.

• Seth is excited about distributing large foundation models into physical world applications for multi-variable problems, but notes that hard engineering execution challenges must be solved to proliferate this capability.

• He defines Eclipse’s opportunity set as every problem that exists in the physical world, viewing the 80% of global GDP in that domain as an unbelievably large opportunity.

• A key insight for early-stage teams is the willingness to ship, knowing they will get “punched in the face” during the pilot phase. The most important factor for success is how teams incorporate those messy learnings into Gen 2 and attack the next phase with vigor.

• Seth’s most contrarian view is that “physical AI” is currently “a lot of hype,” and that humanoids and general-purpose models for robotics are “ninth-inning robotics,” suggesting the category will unfold through an iterative grind, not a sudden “ChatGPT moment”.

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Watch on Youtube:

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
02:14 - Breaking down techno-optimist Tech Twitter
04:45 - Rediscovering Silicon in Silicon Valley
08:45 - The SpaceX and Tesla Training Grounds
12:45 - Hard is the Moat: Engineering Execution vs. Science Risk
16:45 - Institutionalizing a Thesis-Driven Culture
20:45 - Partnering with Highly Prepared Minds
24:45 - The Wave Series A Case Study
28:45 - The Willingness to Ship: Managing the "Gen 1" Failure
32:45 - Managing Design Partners and Expectations
36:45 - The Hard Reality of Defense Tech Go-To-Market
40:45 - The First Chapter of Company Formation
44:45 - The Mytra Thesis
48:45 - The Build-Co Strategy at Eclipse
52:45 - First Principles Thinking and Avoiding the Small Idea Trap
56:45 - Why General Purpose Robotics is a Ninth-Inning Game
1:00:45 - Breaking the Industrial Food Complex: A Decade-Long Opportunity
1:04:45 - Finding Value After the Hype
1:08:45 - The Rigor of Capital Allocation and Returns
1:12:45 - Reindustrialization: Market Dynamics and National Security
1:16:45 - Sustaining Long-Term Value and Discipline
1:20:45 - History, Podcasting, and the Next Generation of SaaS

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Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz cofounded Chapter with Vivek Ramaswamy. This is his second appearance on the show and is a special format we recorded at the Hill & Valley Forum.

The company is backed by Narya Capital, Generation (Al Gore), XYZ Capital, Addition (Lee Fixel), Peter Thiel, Kivu Ventures and more.

Watch on YouTube

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction
01:08 - The rise and fall of empires, and the arc of history
04:38 - The “spin-off” to the British Empire
06:44 - Stagnation
07:43 - Scientific advances vs. Systemic decline in the American health landscape
09:01 - Why insurance carriers aren’t paid to keep you healthy?
11:06 - Administrative bloat and the “jobs program” reality
13:21 - How Silicon Valley and D.C. began working together?
14:15 - Why the government moves slowly by design?
15:37 - The ongoing fight for private sector procurement
17:24 - Addressing the societal implications of a growing senior population
18:41 - The loss of learned wisdom from elders
19:54 - Finding purpose without a job
20:21 - Helping seniors navigate modern technology and finance
21:06 - Closing thoughts

Rob Leclerc is the Cofounder and General Partner of AgFunder which is $300m AUM venture fund focused on food and agriculture. He also started AgFunder News which has over 100,000 subscribers and is the largest publication and source of news for the world of venture and startups focused on food & ag.

In this conversation we discuss how media and venture have always gone together and how Rob was able to use that as a platform to build the venture business. We also dive into his personal story of why and how he got started in venture capital having no experience in the space.

What people might not know is that AgFunder actually started out as a crowdfunding platform for food & ag startups and was part of the 500 Global accelerator.

Watch on YouTube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction

01:55 - From being un-hirable to a PhD and starting a VC Fund

04:03 - The 2008 financial crisis and exposure to the Agriculture space

07:47 - Going from computer science and philosophy to food and bio

13:36 - The “Miserable Failure” of Rob’s first startup

16:40 - Building the TechCrunch for AgTech

22:28 - Going from media to venture and finding your own voice

27:44 - 500 Global and the million-dollar demo day

31:19 - Transitioning from Broker to Principal

37:50 - “Trust can’t be rushed”, how that applies to fundraising

42:21 - AgFunder’s business model and keeping storytelling alive

51:35 - The evolution of AgFunder’s thesis

1:00:26 - Managing customer relationships

1:04:55 - What builds founder resilience

1:08:58 - The true definition of agency and how do you inculcate that in kids

1:13:48 - What’s more important agency or intelligence?

1:14:56 - Rob’s vision for 2050

1:21:42 - Humanoid Robotics and the “Specialized vs. General” debate

1:26:08 - Rob’s lessons in storytelling

1:30:51 - Reputation through Reps: The intentional practice of the pitch

1:38:04 - Closing questions, how does Rob build relationships