- Duration: 55 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JSJDPHN9G45KBXA6H2WFKHT8 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JSJDPHN9G45KBXA6H2WFKHT8)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Hey Michelle, what’s going on? Wait, how do you say your last name? Is it help or that the you is like a W? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So it’s help, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Everyone gets it wrong. Hey Tim, hey Michael, how are you? I’m good. How are you doing? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Just great. [Michael Houck]: Appreciate you taking some time for this. Prepared some questions that we can run through and just want your off the cuff takes. Obviously we want your POV, so the more we can get from you here, the better. I think we have like eight or nine questions, so unless Michelle has anything on her end or Tim, if you have anything on your end, we can just we can just jump into it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No, we’re good. [Michael Houck]: OK, cool, sounds good. OK, so going to go over sort of range of topics, I think. Let’s see, well, OK, So in the news right now, obviously, Bitcoin seemingly decoupling from tech stocks, tracking maybe more closely to gold, or at least that’s what people are saying. What’s your POV on this? What does this actually signify as a long term thing? And sort of what does it imply for how people are thinking about Bitcoin? [Tim Draper]: Well, it’s pretty interesting. I can’t believe people still are feeling like gold is something that they can hold on to. Be able to use gold to buy Starbucks coffee. Whereas Bitcoin is very, it’s mobile, transparent, global, open, easy to move around, and keeps perfect records. People who hold a lot of gold, or at least on paper, Every once in a while they get, you know, the option wears out and they have to get the gold delivered to the house. They don’t even know what to do with it. So in any case, Bitcoin, hey, it’s a better currency. Gold is old. There, you can use that. [Michelle Kwok]: Gold is old. [Tim Draper]: It’s in fact, we’ve got, we’ve moved away from gold. So I think the safe haven is clearly Bitcoin. When people are concerned, I’ve always said Bitcoin was a hedge against inflation or bad governance, too much government control, and that’s just playing out. Bitcoin is just a better currency. It moves faster. It’s easier. It doesn’t have, there’s no bank friction, no government friction. So, it just works better. And so, it’s natural that now that Bitcoin is well accepted as a hedge against inflation, but it’s also, I mean, the other thing I say a lot is when Silicon Valley Bank went out of business, all these companies called me and said, hey, I can’t pay for my payroll. I can’t cover it. So I had to negotiate deals with them. Well, that’s just that possibly the first domino. And if all the dominoes go, then every company should be holding some Bitcoin so that they can make those payrolls that they are personally responsible for. So the CEO and the board are personally responsible for at least one, maybe two payrolls, and they better have enough money to cover that. The other thing is if you’re a family and your bank, you know, people stop taking the dollar like they did with a Confederate dollar or the drachma or the whatever. You don’t want to be climbing over people’s backs to try to get into a bank to try to get the dollars out and turn them into You want to have enough Bitcoin so that you can keep your family secure for six months or a year, whatever it takes to get back on your feet. And that’s why governments also are looking at it that way, and they’re putting it in their national treasury. So, yeah, so that, I mean, I remember my dad gave me a million dollar bill. And I looked at him, a million dollars. I was 10 years old. A million dollars is awesome. And he said, I said, what can I do with it? And he said, nothing, because it looked weird. And he said, no, that’s Confederate dollars. The Confederates lost the war, and they had huge inflation as they were trying to clamor to buy Union dollars. And it started out as one to one, and then it was a million to one, and then 10 million to one, and then nobody took Confederate dollars anymore. I could easily see the same thing happening with fiat and where people run away from the dollar and they move to Bitcoin. And so people say, what’s Bitcoin going to be worth at the end of whatever, five years or whatever? It might be infinite against the dollar. Right. So, OK, so you get there’s my Bitcoin. Thing. Yeah. Okay. So that’s one. The tariffs, I start by saying I’m a free trader. I like free trade. And I’m a globalist. But if the leaders of countries decide they’re to be nationalistic, then you’ve got to figure out how to set up a fair trade agreement with each country. And I think that’s what Trump has done. He threw out a big tariff and he brings everybody to the table. And eventually, maybe those tariffs go back down to zero or something reasonable that we can all live with. And we get closer to free trade because he’s done this. And so I’m optimistic about how the outcome here. In the meantime, it’s a great time to be a venture capitalist because it’s entrepreneurs that make all the changes. They look and they see a big, or or they see a sea change like this, and then they figure something out. So you’ll see, we just saw a 3D shoe company manufacturing in the US, 3D printed shoes. We’ve seen a lot of companies kind of trying to replace or take a piece of what TSMC has. We’re seeing a lot of people making sure that they can do business across borders. We’re seeing some entrepreneurs try to skirt the tariffs by moving things from China to name the country to the US and have a lower, so smaller tariff from China to say Indonesia and then Indonesia to the US is like only 10%. So that kind of thing can happen. And entrepreneurs, you know, adjust. The other thing is, it’s no secret that people were losing faith in the dollar when Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto. That was when we had the financial crisis financial crisis. And all of a sudden there was a new financial alternative. So here we have a tariff crisis and there will be tariff alternatives. And so you’ll see real innovation happening. We’re seeing a lot of innovation happening in healthcare, which is one of the reasons we like having Michelle on our team. And it’s not the molecules, it’s not like the regular path to drugs. It’s the ones that are starting to change it, like the ones that are personalized to you rather than, you know, most drug companies, it’s one size fits all. But it’s gonna be personalized to you, your genetics, your Fitbit results, the food you eat, where you live, who you’ve met, all that. And those will be very specific and they’ll probably be 3D printed for you. And in addition, they’re looking at longevity. They’re trying to figure out if there’s an aging gene. They’re trying to figure out if you can take your cells, make them younger, shoot them back in. There are all sorts of interesting happening in healthcare. So big part of our efforts moving forward are going to be some healthcare things. And we tend to be early. So we were a year and a half before fintech happened. And we were a year and a half before Bitcoin happened. And a year and a half, we were 20 years before AI happened. And, and now we’re seeing something in healthcare that’s sort of interesting. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, healthcare is interesting, right? Now, my old co-founder just raised 30 million for, he founded a company called Superpower. They do like personalized longevity care, full body scans, and they’re building an AI. [Tim Draper]: Oh, I’ve heard of a lot of people taking those full body scans. Yeah, it’s interesting. To me, those body scans are torture. So I’m just like, you know, biting my tongue and pinching myself to try to make sure I can get through the, whatever MRIs that are 40 minutes long and hearing the magnets go pounding back and forth. Oh God, it’s awful. And recently we’ve had really cool companies that we can definitely post about like Hexenbio. [Michelle Kwok]: They were able to rejuvenate, we just invested in them. They were able to rejuvenate a 55 year old cell back to four to five week old embryonic development. So they can like basically de-age you from or synthetic niche. We invested in Syntax Bio a couple of weeks ago, and they are advancing stem cell therapies. So just like Tim said, you can just inject your personal cells back in, but you can make your own stem cells faster. Right now it takes over three months to make one stem cell line. They have an algorithm that can differentiate the cells every step of the way so that now you can differentiate cells in two to three weeks rather than, Yeah, and how about the one that’s the menstrual blood turning into stem cells? Yeah, we have a lot of stem cells. [Tim Draper]: We’ve got two that are sort of, you know, embarrassing for teenagers. One is stem cells from menstrual blood, and one is sperm cells that get that filtered out, like the bad ones filtered out and you end up with the super sperm going in. Yeah, that’s that’s crazy. [Michael Houck]: That could dramatically increase like, I don’t know, every natural trend, like people getting taller, people being able to do more athletic performance in the long run. Oh, yeah. Fast sperm, baby. [Tim Draper]: It’s going to be really great. [Michael Houck]: But not to get not to get too too deep in the weeds. But this founder that I had backed for his last company, he’s doing a sperm race in L.A. Right now, where they’re they’re making it like a whole ESPN style sporting event. [Tim Draper]: And it’s a sperm race. Yes, it’s a race. Oh, my God. I’ve seen that. You know, I’ve seen the videos of all the sperm fighting to get in. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. No. [Tim Draper]: And then one finally penetrates and that’s it. [Michael Houck]: It’s two different guys. [Tim Draper]: They’re taking both of their sperm and they’re they’re racing. That is so funny. I’ll send it to you. [Michael Houck]: I’ll send it to you. [Tim Draper]: Oh my God. That’s the best. Um, okay. So, so we look for, you know, somebody, I’m still looking at it potentially. You don’t have to print this anywhere, but I’m looking at potentially buying into the Las Vegas A’s because Las Vegas and baseball might be a good combination, but then in my due I found banana ball and I got all excited. Banana ball is like, they’ve changed all the rules to baseball and they’re making it really fun to watch. Like if you’re tied in the ninth inning, it’s just the pitcher and the batter and the pitcher throws it to the batter, the batter hits the ball and the pitcher has to get the ball and bring it to home plate before the batter goes around the bases. [Tim Draper]: That’s hilarious. [Michael Houck]: It’s like a shootout. [Michelle Kwok]: It’s like a soccer shootout. [Tim Draper]: I think I could be a good pitcher. [Tim Draper]: Anyway, so we look more for the banana ball than we do for the MLB. So we’re kind of looking for who’s taking what we all do and know and how we all act and trying to show us something new, change it, make it better. I think that that is kind of a good way to look at us. I mean, my son said, it’s like funding the rebellion. But in some ways, it’s sort of funding the boost, you know, helping boost the energy of any given industry by challenging it. Because when we do a deal, everybody gets better. So you do something in pharma, you start challenging them, all of a sudden they get better. Banks are getting better now. They’re actually going to, they started by denying it, but now they’re actually going to custody both Bitcoin and dollars. And now it’s legal to do, so somehow they figured it out. So then they’ll all get better. And so, you know, Microsoft gets better every time some new software comes out to challenge them. And they improve and they keep, if they don’t, then they’re out of business. So Tesla comes out, all the car companies get better. Right, they have an incentive too, because there’s- None are as valuable as Tesla, but it all got better. And then SpaceX, same thing, you know, all of a sudden people thought, oh, we can do stuff in space now. So I wanted to ask you about space. [Michael Houck]: You know, a lot of people, even in sort of outside of the startup world, obviously know SpaceX and they have feelings about it. Most of them are excited about it, but it’s also just like a broader economic frontier, I think, you know, you have Varda. [Tim Draper]: It’s the final frontier. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Michael Houck]: So you have Varda doing the space factories, and one of my investments figures building the robots to go, you know, man those factories, right? What are you most excited about in that frontier that maybe other people aren’t thinking about as much? [Tim Draper]: Well, long term, I’m pretty excited about Mars being all carbon dioxide, because then we can put plants there, and they can generate oxygen. And then we can live there. So that’ll be robots that probably plan all those things. Maybe our Lord of the Trees guys will end up figuring that. Yeah, we plant trees with it’s a paintball gun. And the balls are made of bird poop and a seed. And they shoot them down and then you get a mangrove tree. That’s But the most interesting company for me in space, we’ve got two space station companies, but one of them shoots a deflated balloon up into space. And then it opens up to the site, you know, ultimately to the size of a football stadium. And I worked, I talked with him and in another conversation with a guy, totally unrelated. In Korea, Dr. Nakamatsu. He, he said, he’s a little crazy. He said, if you have, if you shoot an umbrella up into space, that’s three miles wide, and you move that umbrella, just with the sun against the earth, at the hottest place on the earth, you can lower temperature of the earth by two degrees. So what these guys can do with, you know, football stadiums aren’t three miles wide, but they could put a group of them together and block the sun and cool it off. And then if it got too cool, they could separate. And so they could actually control the heat of the earth ultimately. And meanwhile, they’re using the sun for the energy you to run the space stations. But they came to us just as a space station company. [Michael Houck]: And I brought them that idea from Dr. Nakamas. [Tim Draper]: Wow, that’s talk about a high leverage position to be in. We control how much sun the earth will. Yeah, and then we talked to the guys in Dubai, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Saudi. And they all came to the same conclusion. They said, well, we could position these things just over our country and cool off our country. And what that means is there’s a business model there. So very exciting business model. They’ll be called Max space. Right. Max space. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I can imagine that would play into everything with driving tourism there, building everything up there like they’re doing with the new cities and everything. [Tim Draper]: That plays right into the playbook of what I would see them doing over there. Yeah, we’ve got one that helps manufacture in space. But then I don’t know if it’s the same one, but there’s one that can help re-entry. So apparently, it’s easier to leave and go out into space. And then re-enter. When you re-enter, it burns up. So this is getting back to earth. These guys have some great technology to get back to earth. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Gravitics? [Michelle Kwok]: Or is gravitics the other space station? Wait, I can find it. Outposts. Outposts. Vehicle outpost. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Tim Draper]: And slingshot slingshot is keeps an ongoing chart record of where all the satellites are in space. So at first that was like, so the satellites don’t collide, but down the road, it’s going to be, I mean, now it’s being used for military purposes. It’s like, where are all the Chinese satellites? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Michelle Kwok]: And then one other big one is ICEYE that we invested in. [Tim Draper]: And they can see through clouds. [Michelle Kwok]: So they do persistent monitoring. [Tim Draper]: They’re a satellite that sees through clouds and maps the Earth. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: That was such a blocker for satellites is literally just cloud. Yeah. So it’s a constellation of microsatellites. [Michelle Kwok]: They use it for tracking, maritime surveillance, infrastructure monitoring, defense intelligence. So they’re doing really well right now. [Tim Draper]: And we’ve got a, we’ve got a few, we’ve got a rocket that can get you ultimately for people to get them from San Francisco to Tokyo in two hours, just Venus, that’s Venus aerospace. And then there’s one called fire, our Hawk, puck that is both liquid and solid fuel. And so a missile can go like this, and this, and this, and this, depending on how fast you want that missile to be moving at that time. So very difficult to shoot down. [Michael Houck]: Do you feel like AI is sort of overshadowing the crazy opportunities that are in these other spaces right now? The most exciting thing out there can’t be cursor for X for every industry, right? It’s all these other things that are happening, but AI seems to be overshadowing it a bit. [Tim Draper]: Not completely. As my son Adam says, AI is going to take all our jobs. So you look at that, and what that means is, whoever you are, you should be using AI. You should have adapt your new job. To using AI to do your old job. And at first it was just like, yeah, AI can drive cars and AI can clean your house or whatever. Now it’s going to be AI is a better accountant than the accountant, better lawyer than the lawyer. We have an investment in a, I don’t know what that one’s called either, in a company that can put together the best possible defense, legal defense in a legal battle. And I asked them, well, can you also put together the best offense in a legal battle? And they said, yeah. And I said, well, because AI knows a lot more about the law than any of the lawyers do. And then I said, well, can you get the AI to settle? And so we’re going to eventually, we’re hoping to, these guys aren’t ready yet, but we’re hoping to eventually in our contracts, say first, if there’s a dispute, you have to settle it with AI. Then it goes to arbitration, then it goes to court. So we’re using technology to clear the courts. You know, they’re too busy. And it’s really because of the judges. Judges say, we’re gonna, we have to go to discovery. And as soon as they say that, then it’s just, it’s millions of dollars and months and months of time. So if the AI just goes out and does its own discovery, settlement. [Michael Houck]: Interesting. Okay, last one that we’ll touch on. Oh, and we’re using AI for all our venture stuff. [Tim Draper]: We have big data lake we use for deal sourcing. And we’ve now already done one investment that came from the data lake. And the data lake brings up the company, there are 250,000 companies in the data lake, and they bring me five a week. And then those five, I look and I go, no, no, no. This one, no way. It’s a race to the bottom. No way. This one’s a feature. This doesn’t look like a big enough market, blah, blah, blah. So then the data lake gets smarter. And we use the neural network there too. My expert system with their neural network and their data lake, and we keep getting better. The deals that are coming up through that channel are getting better and better. More aligned. We use that for deal sourcing, we use it for deal evaluation, we use it for diligence, we use it for all sorts of things. That we keep video and transcribed records of all our entrepreneurial meetings, or most of them. And then we have a long history, so the AI can search it all and say, hey, this company was already in here, they did this, they promised this, have they done it, that kind of thing. Then we can take that video and we can send it to, One that tests emotions and then one that tests voice. And they can determine whether this person is well suited to be an entrepreneur or whatever. And then, or they’re lying or whatever. And then after we’ve invested, we use it for PR. I have four digital twins and they, one is for pounding out PR messages. One is for advising entrepreneurs. We’re working on that. I haven’t spent the time to do it. One is, I answered questions for eight hours. And one is this, what do you call it? [Michael Houck]: Hologram of me. [Tim Draper]: And then another one that’s just trying to be me somehow socially. Media, I’m not sure. So we’re using it. We’re way ahead of everybody in the way people are thinking about AI and venture capital. So let’s look at that for founders then, right? [Michael Houck]: So founders obviously are also adopting AI, I think at a higher rate than non-founders in general. I saw a report from Carta where the percentage of new companies that our solo founder has like skyrocketed. And I think that’s because of AI. But the interesting thing was that the majority of the increase was from bootstrap solo founders. And so I wonder from your perspective, do you see VCs still sort of being hesitant to fund solo founders, even if they are sort of more capable than they used to be? [Tim Draper]: No, we’ve never had a problem with that. We’re always the first check or almost always. So we, you know, we lead the deal. We make our decision. We don’t wait around for other people to decide. We make our decision, make the commitment and go. And we stick to our commitments, you know, 99.9% of the time. Knock on wood that we keep doing it. And so we’re unique in that way as venture capitalists. A lot of them go around, talk to other venture capitalists and hope that somebody else has a deal. So we generate all our own deal flow and we get a premium for that. Usually entrepreneurs are more willing to take our money though. And at lower valuations so that they can get us in. I think the solo founder thing is similar to what it was during the dot-com world because any computer scientist could just pound out a website and get going and didn’t require a lot of people around them. And so that did happen then too. Be interesting to know where his data has come from Maybe he’s recently done something that unleashed all his solo founders to sign up for CARTA. There may be something that may be changed as that, but let’s assume that that’s pure data. Um, I could give a lot of reasons for that. Uh, people went through the pandemic and they’re lonely. And so rather than going out now, they’re afraid of each other. Um, and so social events are such a big deal now. Uh, and they didn’t, it used to be fun, but not like, oh my God, I have to be there so I can. And a lot of people are still kind of lonely, left out because of the stupid decision to leave. I mean, you want my opinion on something. That pandemic was the worst handled thing on the earth. So there’s where you get all the politicians together and they all, you know, oh, oh, I know what I’ll do. The guys who left it alone had exactly the same results as the ones who forced everybody to be six feet away. Anyway, the pandemic made everybody a loner. And AI is making it possible for them to start a business. But still, if you start a business with a partner, I don’t know, there’s usually one plus plus one equals three, not always. So it is great because, I mean, with AI, I designed some logos. They were just as good as the professional guys who were designing logos. I just said, hey, put a rocket with a DNA strand around it and somehow decentralize it. I’m looking, I’m going, oh my god, this thing’s beautiful. And these professionals have kind of come up with some swish thing. And I’m kind of going, I don’t know. We got to open it. And we ended up sticking with just our logo. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. No, we got to do the Draper Design Agency. [Tim Draper]: That’s next, right? Yeah. Oh, god. That’s pretty easy. You can turn that around in a week. Um, so I think that’s what’s happening. That’s one of the things. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Um, well, look, I want to be conscious of your time. I know we’re already a couple minutes over. I think we got a lot of good stuff in here. Um, we’ll take this back. I’ll work with Jamie. We’ll put some pieces together. I’ll send those over to Michelle and then, and then to you also just take a look. Um, but yeah, I mean, how, how are you feeling so far? Happy with the, with the content? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I like it. [Tim Draper]: I like it. Closer to my voice and it doesn’t have to be perfect to my voice because I’m flexible on that. My voice can be in different places. But I guess I would, to couch the whole thing, I think I would go after sort of the themes that Michelle has identified, which are gravitational pull toward Bitcoin. Oh, I don’t know if I went through that with you. Bitcoin after the first boom and bust was at 40% market share. Then it was at 50 and now it’s at 61 because all the playground is in Bitcoin. I mean, all the playground is in the altcoins and all of that innovation is now moving to Bitcoin. So smart contracts, you know, blockchain applications, ordinals, whatever, they’re all moving over to Bitcoin. And, you know, people say, what about like, whatever, Ethereum? Bitcoin’s market cap, 1.8 trillion, and Ethereum is 250 billion. So it’s tiny by comparison. So all the programmers, this is very similar to Microsoft when Microsoft was the operating system. And somebody created Lotus 1, 2, 3, which was this spreadsheet. And it took off. And then Microsoft said, OK, we’re going to bring that into the operating system. And they created Excel. Then they saw a word processor called WordPerfect take off. Big, huge success. And then Microsoft said, well, we’re going to create Word. Be a part of the operating system. Then they saw PowerPoint at a pretty early stage and they just bought it. And then games, they were too late to do it with. So game companies were able to become really great. But the same thing’s happening with Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s that platform. And now they’re taking all those experiments and they’re saying, here are the five that really matter. We’re going to put them on Bitcoin. So gravitational pull toward Bitcoin. So we’re funding Bitcoin. We have Maxime has put together an accelerator for Bitcoin. We’ve done two sessions so far and they’ve been very interesting, very successful. So Bitcoin’s one. Another one is space And that’s everything from jet packs to space stations to asteroid mining and whatever. One is longevity, live forever. And other ways of changing the healthcare system. And that may fold into things like insurance, but Bitcoin also, affects insurance. So, and then AI and robotics, where the robot starts getting smarter and smarter and smarter. So those are the places where those are kind of common themes. But, you know, there’s this other category. And the other category includes, you know, bringing back the woolly mammoth, or menstrual blood for stem cells or things that nobody’s really working on. Right, right. Yeah, I think those are good areas and we can focus most of the posts on those for sure. [Michael Houck]: If there’s ever any specific feedback where you’re like, I think with the first post you flagged, there were a couple of words in there that weren’t what you would have said. [Tim Draper]: Yeah, weren’t that kind of thing. It’s more because I’m old. And I want to be consistent with my own personality. And so, you know, you started the conversation with POV, we would say point of view. Just keep that in mind that I tend to want to over explain. I like to teach. And so a lot of what I do is The thing Michelle is adding to this is the promotive thing. And I tend not to self promote much. But I will. So so that part has to be very subtle. Okay. It can’t be like I told you. So can’t be like, so they’re whatever. It’s got to be like, it’s so cool that that this entrepreneur went in there and totally changed healthcare. You know, it’s so cool that this entrepreneur, always think about it as an entrepreneur. Like we love the entrepreneur, we’ll do everything for them and always kind of have that in your head. And don’t be, I have, you know, giving up all my self-consciousness. So don’t worry about what other people are thinking, that kind of thing. Don’t get into other people’s heads. Just like, let’s lay it all out there. And if there’s a big stream of negative something about it, whatever. I mean, it might just increase my following. [Michael Houck]: Notoriety is, what do they say? There’s no bad. There’s no press. Yeah. [Tim Draper]: I just saw something’s funniest thing. Somebody wrote, Tim Draper, it was a comedy thing, like, like a, the onion or whatever. It was one of those funny things. It’s all not factual, says Tim Draper abandoned six Californias and breaks up and works with Don Henley to break up the Eagles, instead of breaking up California. It was a big fight is hilarious. So actually, somehow I’m part of pop culture. So that’s cool. But what they didn’t know was, and I’m not sure. Anyway, you probably have to keep it to yourself. I have worked with Don Henley on a song. [Michael Houck]: What really? [Tim Draper]: And they made that weird connection through breaking up, you know, breaking up California, breaking up the Eagles. They never recognized that we actually collaborated on the song. Really cool. [Tim Draper]: That is super cool. [Michael Houck]: That’s like a little anecdote. We can keep that off the record, but that’s yeah, that’s funny. [Tim Draper]: Yeah. But maybe we repost the thing. That just came out. It’s really funny. [Michelle Kwok]: That would be funny, where the onion article. [Tim Draper]: It’s not the onion, it’s called something else. Let me see where it is. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I found it. [Michelle Kwok]: Did I send it to you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: You drop it in the drop it into the yeah, the chat. [Michelle Kwok]: There you go. In California breakup after Don Henley convinces him it’s easier to dismantle the eagle and stole them for parts. [Tim Draper]: My comment there could be I I’m keeping good company. Is something very simple. Yeah, like a little one liner with the article. So always promoting the people, the other people. It’s always Okay. Okay. And, and we tend not to talk about our competition even mentioned their names. Unless we know they’re, I don’t know, I’m in a pitch meeting, and they’re asking specifically about one of them, then I usually damn them with faint praise. But in general, way in, in public in the press, if I’m talking about my competition, it’s all flowery. It’s all positive. It’s like, they do such an outstanding job. We are really happy to, you know, we’re really thrilled with them. They do great things. So they start talking about, you know, if for some reason we cover Y Combinator or something, we just say that, That group really turned venture capital on its head. It’s been really successful, great for entrepreneurs. It’s that kind of thing. My dad used to say, never say anything you wouldn’t want printed in the New York Times. So keep that in your mind. And when I was at HP, they say, we never mention our competition, unless it’s a planned thing. Like you could, you could create a battle that brings both up Coke and Pepsi. Sure. So that kind of thing can happen. That’s interesting. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Tim Draper]: We had the, we’ve got to make sure that it’s agreed to by both parties so that they understand that we’re not taking shots at anybody. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Tim Draper]: It’s you, it’s a coordinated effort. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, exactly. We had the same rule about the New York Times when I was at Uber in the early days. And then the ironic thing is that the New York Times wrote terrible things about us. [Tim Draper]: That’s how it happens. Oh, also, if we do get attacked, we always need our point of view out there. OK. So, you know, I put down, I lay down some point of view and we get attacked. We want to come back almost immediately with something that says, well, this is the way we, this is why we think the way we think. Right. [Michael Houck]: And it’s, it’s best in those scenarios when it comes from you, because, you know, crisis PR 101, you want to state your case strongly, firmly, and have it be from a singular singular. Yeah. Yeah. [Tim Draper]: You don’t want it to be like a story that takes something horrible happened. You don’t want that to be a story that takes off. You want, even if the headline’s really bad, the last paragraph has to be our defense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. [Michael Houck]: 100 percent. 100 percent. I’ve been down that road. So I’ve seen it go both ways. [Tim Draper]: And oh, yeah. Well, the way I mean, my my biggest lesson learned is Elizabeth Holmes. The lawyers told her, don’t talk to the press. Worst decision she ever made. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we got bad advice at one of my earlier companies too. And it bit us in the butt when we didn’t state our case firmly enough, quickly enough. [Tim Draper]: So, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, great. Okay, we’ll do this once in a while. Yeah, this is great. You start to get who I am and you can start figuring, you know, exactly. And then over time, we’ll build more confidence. You know, hopefully I’ll, I’ll just be able to glance through them, which is what I seem to be doing now. So, so far I’m okay. Cool. [Michael Houck]: If you have, if you have any questions or anything comes up, flag it to me. Um, and yeah, maybe we set this up as like a monthly ish and then, uh, can go from there. It’s great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michelle Kwok]: I’ll let Adi know. Um, Tim, one thing I think, um, Max yesterday, he wanted to see some iterations on the shield. So if you want to make a decision to keep the shield as is or the I think they said that to you. [Tim Draper]: Yeah, because we just found out it’s not a shield. It’s an acorn. It’s not a shield? Wait. It’s an acorn. [Michelle Kwok]: How did you find that out? [Tim Draper]: From who? [Tim Draper]: From Andy. Andy apparently was talking to Billy about that logo 15 years ago or whenever Billy wrote. This is the shield logo? [Michael Houck]: The shield logo? [Tim Draper]: Yeah. It’s apparently an acorn. Which I kind of like more than a shield. A shield is a little defensive. Yeah. [Tim Draper]: I like the acorn. [Michael Houck]: Acorn is cool. [Tim Draper]: It’s like you’re throwing something. I like the acorn. So there were four of them. Number two is basically the same thing. Yeah. Number four is simplified. But number four looks more like a shield than an acorn. I think I’d go with the original. [Michelle Kwok]: So do you want them to do anything with the acorn? Or do you want to just keep it as a ring? [Tim Draper]: Well, I mean, you could. I mean, now you know it’s an acorn. See, number two is very much, that’s basically what we’ve got. [Michelle Kwok]: Yeah, number two is what we’ve got. Number one, honestly, looks more like an acorn. [Tim Draper]: No, acorn comes down to a point. [Michael Houck]: I think number four. [Tim Draper]: to go find an acorn for you? [Michelle Kwok]: I don’t know if I’ve seen an acorn before now. Okay, wait, hold on. An acorn is kind of round. [Michael Houck]: I get acorn for number four, personally. That was my number one acorn there. [Tim Draper]: An acorn is kind of round. Yeah, it’s round. So number four makes it like a sharper shield. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I’m going to pop off, guys. I got to hop on with my team. [Tim Draper]: We’ll talk more soon. OK, I think we’re going to stick with what we’ve got, the acorn, which turns out was a shield. [Michelle Kwok]: OK, so let’s just stick with Logo 2. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I think so, yeah. [Michelle Kwok]: OK, sounds good. OK, thank you. [Tim Draper]: And now that we know it’s an acorn, they can do an animation that grows a tree out of it or something. [Michelle Kwok]: This literally changes everything. [Michelle Kwok]: part of the shield. [Michelle Kwok]: I know I did too. That’s so funny. Okay. Okay.