Launching We The Builders
3 years, 53 events and 10,000 signups later we have a podcast
First things first - If you are getting this email, you have signed up for/been approved or have attended more than 1 event I have hosted since I started. Up until now, you mostly got emails via Luma which is great for events but not as much for a newsletter or podcast so here we are, I’d like to officially welcome you to my Substack.
I’m a pre-seed investor in my day job and media wasn’t always obvious to me. Here is a story of how I got here.
Timeline of how it all started
2022: Public events
I started hosting public events in fall 2022, the first one was a killer panel with Doug Leone (Sequoia Capital) and Mar Hershenson (Pear VC). We did it under Chatham House Rules, which means it was off the record. Even though we got a couple of spicy moments out of it, that is where I learned that in a room with 200 strangers, Chatham House Rules aren’t really as effective. They work better in smaller rooms with 10-15 people. In hindsight, I did not have one of Silicon Valley’s most legendary VCs who built and scaled Sequoia Capital as its Steward for 25 years on the record.
2023: Tech stagnation and launch of the series “Building Atoms”
The 2021/22 crypto bubble was driving me insane, on a philosophical level I agree that crypto as a form of currency makes sense. On an application level, I struggled to understand more than 90% of the use cases.
This led me to reading more of the history of venture capital around Christmas time. During this time I also stumbled upon a blog post on technological stagnation in Roots of Progress. Which discusses the theory of stagnation in the world of atoms (the physical world). The likes of Peter Thiel had been ringing the alarm bells on this for over a decade by the time I stumbled upon the theory, if we were still discussing it 10 years later, clearly something wasn’t going in the right direction.
I was already hosting more public events this year, but more so to engage and build the community more than anything but around fall I had renewed sense of mission.
I knew we needed to inspire more technologists to work on hard problems in the world of atoms, the best way I thought I could inspire was through events. So I started a series called “Building Atoms” and hosted an event at a16z’s first NY TechWeek followed by a summit in SF featuring David Friedberg (the sultan of science on All-In podcast), Trevor Martin (Cofounder & CEO of Mammoth Bio) and Alex Filippenko (an award winning astrophysicist who worked on the theory of dark matter), here is a photo below. Some of you might remember it.
Some of these events were smaller dinners, some were bigger events with talks. We recorded some of these talks but aimlessly. I had no intent of publishing or becoming a podcaster.
2024: The realization, just events won’t scale
Fast forward, we got a ton of great guests for events this year but the highlight by far was getting David Sacks (White House AI & Crypto Czar), 6 days before the election. Around the same time, I hosted an event at Radiant Nuclear with John Coogan (TBPN), Will Bruey (Varda Space), Doug Bernauer (Radiant Nuclear) and Jason Dunn (Outpost Space) themed “Future of Industry”. This event I marketed on Twitter/X with a hype video, it ended up getting over 30k views, which is not a lot but relevant views which led to high quality inbound.
That was my first “oh shit..” moment when I realized, I should have published conversations with all those guests.
I hadn’t put effort into getting into the details of our media coverage, so when I checked the records, turned out that the video quality was shit, the audio was shit or unusable in a lot of cases and it just wasn’t something I’d be proud of.
We had royally fucked up the Friedberg recording and had done it again with Sacks. I had never handled a camera or edited videos so assumed anyone we contracted knew what they were doing, rookie error. (I know, I know..)
That is when I decided to do all future stuff under a new events/podcast brand. The name was inspired by the preamble of the constitution and the goal was to highlight agency and progress.
2025: Recording the first season
The mission to inspire people to go after hard problems continues, we need to reach a different scale. 53 events and 10,000 signups later I realized this is only possible through media.
This year I flew all over the country to record interviews with the builders and investors that I find inspiring, most of these are in frontier tech.
Sharing a glimpse of what my year has been like below.
What to expect?
Current conversation theme
I am collecting data on the archetype of the most audacious and ambitious builders and what they looked like very early on. What inspired them, how they compound knowledge, skills and relationships and how they choose what to work on.
This, you will notice as a recurring theme in all conversations. I keep pulling threads based on that theme and usually just follow my curiosity.
For most of this season, you will find me inquiring about the role of education, how breakthrough innovation happens, identifying agency in talent and any other burning questions I might have.
Please do share your feedback on your favorite parts of the interviews and what you’d like to see more of. We try to improve on each iteration. Judge me a 100 episodes in! (that’s what Jason Calacanis said once on what it takes to start becoming even half decent)
Publishing cadence
We will mostly be publishing Fridays and Tuesdays with special weekend launches every now and then.
Up Next
First Podcast Drop
The first interview dropping will be with Shahin Farshchi, General Partner at Lux Capital, a $5 Billion AUM venture fund investing in the sci-fi future we all thought we’d be living in by 2025 when we were growing up watching The Jetsons.
Lineup
Over the next few weeks we will be releasing episodes with:
Omri Drory, General Partner NFX
Christian Garrett, Partner 137 Ventures, Cofounder Hill & Valley Forum
Delian Asparahouv, Partner Founders Fund, Cofounder & President Varda Space, Cofounder Hill & Valley Forum
Qasar Younis, Cofounder & CEO Applied Intuition, Former COO Y Combinator
Mehul Nariyawala, Cofounder & CEO, Matic Robots
I will share upcoming live events via Substack first from now on, we have an event in August with David Cramer, Cofounder of Sentry (Raised $200M at $3B from the likes of NEA and Accel) - you will hear from me when we have confirmation.
We will keep hosting live talks/podcasts, every 2 months or so roughly and any updates on them will be posted here.
In the case of course that you are not interested in yet ANOTHER podcast, the good folks at Gmail made it easier to unsubscribe right at the top.
I am really excited to finally launch and for all of you to get a deeper look into the lives of the most audacious builders and investors.
If you like what we are doing, follow me and help spread the word on X, LinkedIn and Substack.
I’m all in. Let’s see what 100 episodes brings!
This is gonna blow up!