This is my first conversation with Chris Buskirk, Cofounder and Chief Investment Officer at 1789 Capital and author of America and the Art of the Possible. We explore his investment thesis for American renewal: backing technological innovation, rebuilding industry, and creating the conditions for a thriving middle class. We discuss defense tech, China, political conviction, charter cities, and what the people at the top of society owe the country.

What we cover:

• Inside 1789 Capital: the ambition to build a multi-strategy asset manager and why Chris backed defense technology before it became a popular investment category.
• Reindustrializing America: critical minerals, dependence on China, and why rebuilding manufacturing requires capital and supportive policy.
• Politics and investing: whether alignment with an administration creates risk, and why Chris believes key parts of reindustrialization have bipartisan support.
• Charter cities, aristocracy, and oligarchy: why Chris thinks building a new city may not be ambitious enough, and what distinguishes public-minded leadership from extraction.
• The cultural conditions for progress: resisting excessive risk aversion, preserving the freedom to fail, and bringing people together around a meaningful purpose.

Follow on X/Twitter:

Chris Buskirk: https://x.com/thechrisbuskirk
Suffiyan Malik: https://x.com/suffiyanmalikk
We The Builders: https://x.com/WeThe_Builders

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Timestamps

00:00 Introducing Chris Buskirk
00:52 One project: renewing America
02:55 Why the middle class is the measure of national health
05:08 The master plan for 1789 Capital
06:35 A generational shift in asset management
08:45 Technological stagnation and the search for fundamental innovation
12:46 Investing in defense tech before it was popular
15:07 Rebuilding America’s manufacturing capacity
16:10 China, trade, and American industrial policy
19:12 Tariffs, critical minerals, and forcing China’s hand
20:32 Why reindustrialization needs more than venture capital
22:23 The risks of mixing politics and investing
25:38 Political conviction versus hedging your bets
26:15 Can reindustrialization survive a change in administration?
30:20 Deregulation and letting builders build
32:13 The case for charter cities
33:56 Why charter cities may not be ambitious enough
36:06 Brasília and the challenges of building new cities
39:05 Why cities need an economic reason to exist
41:34 Singapore and the modern city-state
42:25 Aristocracy versus oligarchy: who should lead?
45:28 Identifying talent and encouraging public responsibility
47:40 How stagnation creates a scarcity mindset
49:11 Exporting the American dream
53:26 Innovation, concentrated power, and national decline
56:25 Meritocracy, gatekeeping, and the cities that attract talent
58:44 How AI brought talent back to San Francisco
59:49 “Sociopathic risk aversion” and the freedom to fail
1:03:20 Rockbridge and the art of convening people
1:06:00 Why a gathering needs a meaningful purpose
1:08:14 Rituals, community, and serving the people you bring together
1:10:43 Chris’s favorite meal and fasting routine

Brought to you by

Intangible: One of the missions of the show is to highlight frontier technologies and the builders, investors and policymakers at the heart of technological progress. Our sponsor Intangible lets you show it before you build it. Intangible is an AI 3D studio. Frontier technology builders turn ideas into scenes they can edit and film, in minutes. No VFX shop, no six-week render queue. Visualize your moonshot product at intangible.ai

The material presented by We The Builders & Suffiyan Malik, including on its website, podcast, social media channels, newsletters, events, and other content, reflects the opinions of the hosts, guests, and contributors and is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing presented by We The Builders should be construed as investment, financial, legal, tax, or other professional advice, nor as a recommendation, offer to sell, or solicitation of an offer to buy any security, investment product, company, strategy, or asset. Discussions of companies, investments, industries, technologies, markets, or other subjects may rely on information from public sources or information provided by guests and other third parties that we believe to be reliable. We The Builders does not represent or warrant that such information is accurate, complete, or current and should not be relied upon as such. Views and opinions expressed are those of the individual speaker at the time of publication and may change without notice. Guest appearances, discussions of companies, or references to investors or investments should not be interpreted as endorsements by We The Builders. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

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This is my first conversation with Ali Tamaseb, General Partner at DCVC, a $5B AUM fund and author of Super Founders. Ali spent years studying billion dollar startups to understand what separates their founders from the rest. We discuss the myths around age, education, cofounders, and industry experience and what the data reveals about building exceptional companies.

What we cover:

• The young founder myth: why age alone doesn’t predict success, and what Ali’s research reveals about billion-dollar founders.

• Why repeat founders have an advantage and the early signs of ambition, resourcefulness, and a drive to build.

• Inside the Super Founders Club: a network of 750 founders who become each other’s customers, cofounders, and investors.

• How successful startups enter crowded markets, differentiate their products, and start with a small niche before expanding.

• The myths around cofounders, technical backgrounds, and industry experience and why trust, customer understanding, and knowing when to pivot matter.

Follow the guest and host on X:

Ali Tamaseb: https://x.com/alitamaseb
Suffiyan Malik: https://x.com/suffiyanmalikk
We The Builders: https://x.com/WeThe_Builders

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Timestamps

00:00 Highlights
00:40 Introducing Ali Tamaseb
01:34 The young founder myth
06:57 Why your investors matter
10:34 Peter Thiel, competition, and crowded markets
13:36 Start small, think big
15:16 What creates a startup moat?
18:58 Customer relationships as an advantage
22:14 What makes a “Super Founder”?
24:20 Why startup success isn’t random
27:59 Venture capital is a network business
33:07 Inside the Super Founders Club
37:29 Building a community of exceptional founders
45:57 How VCs compete for the best founders
49:54 Do degrees and university brands matter?
57:19 Do you really need a cofounder?
1:00:00 Super founders in AI, defense, and deep tech
1:03:02 Great founders versus great markets
1:06:46 Finding your wedge in a massive market
1:09:25 Technical versus nontechnical founders
1:12:00 Does industry experience matter?
1:16:56 Customer discovery and knowing when to pivot
1:18:28 The risks of backing repeat founders
1:23:38 Researching and writing Super Founders
1:27:21 Selling a book through networks
1:31:35 What bestseller lists get wrong
1:34:49 Will AI change the founder playbook?
1:36:13 Why quantum is a defense bet
1:37:50 Book recommendation and Persian food

Brought to you by

Intangible: One of the missions of the show is to highlight frontier technologies and the builders, investors and policymakers at the heart of technological progress. Our sponsor Intangible lets you show it before you build it. Intangible is an AI 3D studio. Frontier technology builders turn ideas into scenes they can edit and film, in minutes. No VFX shop, no six-week render queue. Visualize your moonshot product at intangible.ai

The material presented by We The Builders & Suffiyan Malik, including on its website, podcast, social media channels, newsletters, events, and other content, reflects the opinions of the hosts, guests, and contributors and is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing presented by We The Builders should be construed as investment, financial, legal, tax, or other professional advice, nor as a recommendation, offer to sell, or solicitation of an offer to buy any security, investment product, company, strategy, or asset. Discussions of companies, investments, industries, technologies, markets, or other subjects may rely on information from public sources or information provided by guests and other third parties that we believe to be reliable. We The Builders does not represent or warrant that such information is accurate, complete, or current and should not be relied upon as such. Views and opinions expressed are those of the individual speaker at the time of publication and may change without notice. Guest appearances, discussions of companies, or references to investors or investments should not be interpreted as endorsements by We The Builders. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

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My first conversation with Bryon Hargis, Cofounder and CEO of Castelion. This is a special edition of our show recorded at Reindustrialize. Since then, Castelion has announced a $1 billion Series C funding valuing the company at $13 billion making it one of the most valuable defense technology companies in the ecosystem.

What we cover:

• Why Bryon sold his SpaceX stock to bootstrap Castelion and bet two-thirds of his savings on the mission.

• Why affordable, mass-produced hypersonic missiles are central to his vision of American deterrence.

• Building Blackbeard, winning the first Navy order, and scaling production to thousands of missiles a year.

• The SpaceX lessons behind faster hardware development: rapid testing, questioning convention, and knowing when to change course.

• Hiring for mission over money and why company culture is built one person at a time.

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Timestamps

00:00 Intro
01:00 Bootstrapping with SpaceX stock and crypto mining
07:00 Why Bryon started a defense company
11:00 Building deterrence and landing the first Navy order
14:00 Scaling missile manufacturing in New Mexico
18:00 Meet Blackbeard: Castelion’s hypersonic missile
20:00 Hypersonic vs. ballistic vs. cruise missiles
23:00 Golden Dome and the future of missile defense
25:00 How SpaceX enables America’s national security
27:00 Elon Musk, ambitious deadlines, and moving faster
30:00 Why rapid testing beats over-engineering
33:00 Lessons from SpaceX: Question convention, follow the data
38:00 Hiring for the mission and building company culture
45:00 Growing as a founder and being willing to be wrong

Brought to you by

Intangible: One of the missions of the show is to highlight frontier technologies and the builders, investors and policymakers at the heart of technological progress. Our sponsor Intangible lets you show it before you build it. Intangible is an AI 3D studio. Frontier technology builders turn ideas into scenes they can edit and film, in minutes. No VFX shop, no six-week render queue. Visualize your moonshot product at intangible.ai

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The material presented by We The Builders & Suffiyan Malik, including on its website, podcast, social media channels, newsletters, events, and other content, reflects the opinions of the hosts, guests, and contributors and is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing presented by We The Builders should be construed as investment, financial, legal, tax, or other professional advice, nor as a recommendation, offer to sell, or solicitation of an offer to buy any security, investment product, company, strategy, or asset. Discussions of companies, investments, industries, technologies, markets, or other subjects may rely on information from public sources or information provided by guests and other third parties that we believe to be reliable. We The Builders does not represent or warrant that such information is accurate, complete, or current and should not be relied upon as such. Views and opinions expressed are those of the individual speaker at the time of publication and may change without notice. Guest appearances, discussions of companies, or references to investors or investments should not be interpreted as endorsements by We The Builders. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

My first conversation with Michael Thompson who is on the board of Joby Aviation ($JOBY) and Oklo ($OKLO). He previously started Reinvent Capital with Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman where he was Managing Partner and made early investments in the physical economy through Joby, SpaceX, Nimble Robotics, Oklo and many other companies. This is a special edition of We The Builders conversation from Reindustrialize.

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Timestamps

00:00 Intro
02:35 From hedge fund to physical-world techonolgies
03:45 "Where is all this power gonna come from?" The case for nuclear
04:50 Why nuclear stalled
07:05 Where AI value will accrue: physical-world technologies
07:55 "Recursive industrialization": SpaceX, Cursor & frontier models
09:15 Joby: amplifying world-class engineers with AI
10:50 Does eVTOL need a charging network like Teslas?
11:30 Breaking down the Joby aircraft: airframe, controls, powertrain
18:55 Why these companies need vertical integration and technical founders
20:25 How to value SpaceX and Joby (it's not next year's EBITDA)
22:25 Why Joby went public through a SPAC
23:50 "Henry Ford never built a mile of road": financing the infrastructure
25:15 FAA certification is like FDA approval
27:35 Reinvent Capital and the "1870s thesis"
28:55 Nimble: specialized robots and forward-deployed training data
30:25 What he's changed his mind on

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DISCLOSURES

The material presented by We The Builders, including on its website, podcast, social media channels, newsletters, events, and other content, reflects the opinions of the hosts, guests, and contributors and is provided for informational and educational purposes only.

Nothing presented by We The Builders should be construed as investment, financial, legal, tax, or other professional advice, nor as a recommendation, offer to sell, or solicitation of an offer to buy any security, investment product, company, strategy, or asset.

Discussions of companies, investments, industries, technologies, markets, or other subjects may rely on information from public sources or information provided by guests and other third parties that we believe to be reliable. We The Builders does not represent or warrant that such information is accurate, complete, or current and should not be relied upon as such.

Views and opinions expressed are those of the individual speaker at the time of publication and may change without notice. Guest appearances, discussions of companies, or references to investors or investments should not be interpreted as endorsements by We The Builders.

Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Somesh Dash has been investing in startups for over 20 years at IVP where he is a General Partner. IVP is one of the most prominent venture firms in growth stage investing founded in 1980. In the last almost five decades, they have invested in over 400 companies, with over 135 of them going public.

IVP is an investor in generational companies like Anthropic, Uber, Snap, Twitter, CrowdStrike, Snap, Robinhood, Figma, Discord, Coinbase.

I had a wide ranging conversation with Somesh about his thoughts on the craft of investing itself, immigration, IVP’s firm structure, his role as a leader in the firm now, thoughts on the unprecedented era of AI and how he thinks about investing in this era and more.

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Timestamps

00:00:00 - Introduction
00:00:55 - What 20 Years in VC Teaches You About the Job
00:02:00 - Risk-Taking, Contrarianism, and Dealing with Failure
00:02:45 - The Importance of LP Relationships
00:03:30 - Building and Sustaining a Strong VC Partnership
00:06:05 - Index / Spray-and-Pray vs. High-Conviction Investing
00:08:10 - What Does "Contrarian" Mean at the Growth Stage?
00:11:25 - Investing in Twitter in 2009
00:13:00 - Early Bet on Snapchat in 2013
00:14:45 - How Growth Stage Investing Has Evolved at IVP
00:16:15 - Investing in Anthropic
00:17:55 - How IVP Adds Value
00:20:00 - Founder Mental Health & The VC as Counselor
00:21:15 - Customer Introductions & The Day-to-Day VC Grind
00:26:37 - The IVP Partnership Model & Shared Decision-Making
00:28:05 - Depth vs. Breadth of Networks & Being In-Person
00:29:40 - Cross-Pollination Across Sports, Culture, and other Industries
00:33:33 - Favorite Podcasts, Comedy
00:35:50 - Expanding into New Sectors: Healthcare, Defense Tech & Space
00:37:45 - The Resurgence of Hardware & Semiconductors (Seagate, LSI Logic)
00:41:05 - Silicon Valley, Immigration, and Global Talent
00:45:15 - The Immigrant DNA of Unicorn Founders
00:47:23 - Geopolitics, Soft Power, and Media Narratives
00:52:16 - Immigrant Values, Capitalism, and Democracy as a Startup
00:57:35 - Labor Market Matching and Skilled Immigration
01:02:42 - How IVP Selects 8–10 High-Conviction Investments a Year
01:05:05 - Capital Allocation Lessons from the Clean Tech Boom
01:06:40 - Hot Take: Why Traditional Software/SaaS is Making a Comeback
01:08:45 - VC Firm Governance: CEO Model vs. Pure Partnership Model
01:11:50 - Generational Transition & Internal Mentorship at IVP
01:13:55 - Navigating Market Cycles & Taking $4B in Liquidity in 2021
01:15:15 - How the Investment Committee Works at IVP
01:19:25 - Apprenticeship in Venture Capital & Key Industry Mentors
01:22:42 - Cooperation in VC
01:24:48 - Somesh's Media Diet and High-Signal Information Sources
01:27:25 - The Resurgence of Print Media & Top Book Recommendations

This is my first conversation with Adam Grosser, a Silicon Valley OG. Adam has had a front row seat to what Silicon Valley is today from being at the centre of personal computing in the early days of Apple in the 1980s as Director of Engineering to directing products at LucasFilm in 1990s and investing in the still early internet days in the 2000s at Foundation Capital. Adam went on to be a Managing Director at prominent technology focused private equity firm SilverLake and co-created the Up Summit, an exclusive annual event for the future of transportation. He was also a part of building and scaling two multibillion dollar companies in the 1990s. He is also a 4x Forbes Midas list investor.

He now runs Up Partners which he founded six years ago around the thesis of future of transportation enabled by software. Up Partners has been an investor in companies like Hermeus (founded by AJ Piplica), Reliable Robotics, Axiom Space, Skydio, Westmag, Pacific Fusion and Beta to name a few. What makes him unique and extremely hard to bullshit to is the fact that he builds cars, airplanes and boats in his workshop in San Carlos which I had the chance to check out, this is where the technical knowhow of founders gets tested. It is not a team of 10 technicians working on these projects, it is a team of just Adam plus a couple of contractors here and there. For investors in frontier tech, this would be the equivalent of touching grass.

Adam is one of the kindest and most generous humans I have come across in the industry, still a student at heart who is insatiably curious and genuinely interested in other people. Perhaps one of the reasons he has been so successful.

In this wide ranging conversation we cover a bit of Silicon Valley history, what it was like working with Steve Jobs, his time in media through LucasFilm and Sony, how venture capital has changed, how Adam keeps up and how to build a successful lasting venture firm.

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Timestamps

00:00 – Intro
02:52 – Early Days at Apple and Meeting Steve Jobs
03:29 – Innovation and the History of Printing at Apple
05:37 – Early User Interfaces and Working at Xerox PARC
07:29 – Technological Breakthroughs at LucasFilm
11:56 – Corporate Acquisitions and Maintaining Founding DNA
14:43 – "Stake vs. Rank" in Corporate Structures
17:19 – The Ephemeral Nature of Success in the Film Industry
21:15 – Two Approaches to Creating Great Products
22:22 – Spotting Breakthrough Innovations Early
27:35 – How the Venture Capital Industry Has Changed
31:56 – Rebuilding the Cottage Model with Up Partners
38:19 – The Mobility Thesis and Stagnation in the Physical World
42:18 – His San Carlos Workshop
48:48 – Why Hardware Innovation Took Decades to Evolve
54:36 – The True Job of a Venture Capitalist
57:28 – Basic Research and the Return of the Polymath
01:04:12 – The Chasm Between Tech and Business and the Value of Finishing Things
01:10:53 – The "996" Work Culture
01:17:34 – Choosing to Stay Nimble in Business and Investment
01:23:00 – Building Alignment and Generational Stability in a VC Firm
01:45:00 – Decision-Making Processes and Governance
01:49:41 – Building Brand Equity Through Community Ecosystems
02:02:42 – Archetypes of Successful Venture Partners
02:11:15 – The Case for Investment Committees and Conviction-Driven Bets
02:24:33 – Closing Questions

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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
01:59 - Finding Business Alpha Outside Major Media Hubs
03:25 - The Origins of the Finnish Long Drink
10:44 - Launching a Drink in the US and Lessons in Policy Navigation
18:33 - Reclaiming Truth and Objectivity in Modern News Media
21:27 - The Stagnation and Future of Education Policy
24:44 - Unpacking the Negative Incentive Structures in Politics
26:59 - What Are Policy Markets? The Core Thesis of State Affairs
30:50 - Building a Real-Time Knowledge Graph for Western Democracy
33:01 - Business Model
37:32 - Practical AI and Data Use Cases for Public Servants and Corporations
41:49 - The Strategic Impact of Events Like the Hill & Valley Forum
45:13 - Moats of a Monopoly Business
47:43 - Why Objective Journalism Is Mathematically More Valuable Than Ever
55:29 - Why Startups Must Win America Before Going International
58:05 - Building Deeper Ontologies and Flywheels Over Time
01:02:22 - Using AI Models to Settle a Moon Landing Debate
01:07:05 - Evan’s Take on MBAs in the Startup Ecosystem
01:08:24 - Overcoming Early VC Skepticism
01:10:51 - 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