Micky Malka, Founder of Ribbit Capital

[crash] Thanks for doing this, Mickey. David, it's a pleasure to be here with you. There's so many times on our previous conversations we're listening to you speak, and I'm like, "Shit, Mickey really does think and act." A lot, very similar to a lot of history-scales entrepreneurs that I read all these biographies about for Founders Podcast. And one thing that I think you have in common with them and that you said before to me is that you hate being labeled. Can you say more about that? I think it's a way of always growing up in Venezuela and all my life. You never had people being labeled. I never learned what that was about. And every time somebody tried to put me on a label, I thought really hard to get out of it. From, "Hey, are you tall? So you must be playing good basketball?" And my first answer is, "No, I suck at basketball." Just trying to get myself out of any particular label all the way to our union investor, our union entrepreneur, and so what about if I'm both? What about if I'm not any? Why do I need a label? And the more you walk through life, allowing things to have label, the more difficult life is because then you cannot see through it. You just see what you've been told to see. So I think it's part of my level cost to never accept labels. Yeah, I think if you're labeled, it means you're kind of conforming to like an existing mold. And I think the great founders there are inherently non-conformists. Yes, and you have to be non-conformist because the world can always be better. So why accept whatever is there today? So when you just said, "Hey, are you an entrepreneur or your investor?" "Maybe I'm both, maybe I'm neither." Like today, how do you do yourself? So I describe myself as an entrepreneur at heart and investor by design. Such a general line that allows me to do anything, right? Some days I can wake up and be entrepreneur, some days I can be an investor, some day I can be bold, some day I can be something completely different. But a hard means that it comes from a place from inside, that if I change my heart, I can just change it. And by design means that if I learn and I keep learning how to do something, I can only get better at it. So I just allow myself to keep learning. So there's really no, like you are completely fluid. You don't really, I put it like a label on yourself. Correct, I don't. I try and I avoid it. The only label I want to get in life is that people say, "I'm a great friend, I'm a great partner, and I'm a good father." And if I can get that label, that label I would love to have. Other ones? I don't care. Yeah, I'm always interested in how people think about their own perception of their work, because I just had this great conversation with Rick Rubin. And I had to interrupt him one time, because he's like, "Yeah, I kind of think of myself as a researcher." And I'm like, "What?" Because people think, "Music producer, and now he's a podcaster, and he's a consiglier, he's still like some of the top artists in the world." And he's just like, "All day, I'm just like finding what I'm intensely curious about, and just researching that as far as I can." And I think that's what it takes, and that's what entrepreneurs do every day, and that's what I read in vessels every day. But you don't get a label like that, but yes, I will agree with you. Question, I went to your website. I've read a bunch of these, like, what do you call them? They're not even manifestos. Are they essays? They're essays. Okay, so I'm very curious. You've only done a handful. Yes. I'm very curious, like, how you're writing shapes, not only your thinking, but also what you want to build through a ribbit. Writing is everything, because we can sit here and talk about ideas for hours. But if you're not willing to put them in writing, you will never learn what truly they are, how deep they are. And what I find is, typically those essays that you read, they start by being probably 20 pages long. But I can actually get an Appkin and explain to you each one in an Appkin. And if I can do that, if anybody can explain anything complex to you in an Appkin, it means that they have studied enough that they know how to articulate it. So what we do there is we start by writing our essays. And our essays, what they are allowing us to do is to not conform to what the world thinks today. It's to allow us to confront what the world looks like in 10 years, 15 years. Just imagine. And let it flow. Let it go. Let that energy get out there. Let that energy be taken from our brains and our Q&A's and our diligence and our calls. Just put it out there and see what happens. Why do you think that's beneficial? Because it gives you conviction. If you cannot have conviction, then you're going to be going in mood swings with the markets. Up and down, if something changes, you've got to be able to only way to really have a joyful investment life or life in general, is to try to play this very long infinite game. And the only way to do that well is to have to unique conviction in whatever you do. You've got to be willing to be run for a long time. But if I write it and we put it in writing and we share it with the world and we get feedback, it allows us to make sure that the compass is in the right direction. How long did they take the right? Some of them can take us a year. Some of them can take us four or five months. But the whole process to get a thesis that we like, see down, think about it, articulate it, test it, share it, come back, work it probably like a year, year and a half. I know you were a fan of Buffett. You've been a shareholder for. Oh my life. Yeah, like more than that game. That's crazy. I saw one of your tweets. I think it was from like 2015. And you were like, think you were holding for like 25 years or something like that at that point. So even more now. And I know you write all his shareholder letters. And I know you were a huge fan of. Did that influence your decision to start writing these essays? Completely. So I bought my first share of Berkshire when I was 13 years old. In Venezuela. It was November of 1987. How? It was my. Why would a 13 year old be interested in Berkshire? I don't know. I had read a few articles in Fortune magazine about him, about American Express, about Coca-Cola, about a certain branch. And I loved the branch he had in his portfolio. I didn't know anything about flow or insurance. I was not very familiar with that. I know the business. I would hope not at the time. And back then, what he used to say was buy it and get it shipped mail to you in physical form. Don't leave it in a broker house so people can not margin against it. And there I was. I was 13. I had my bar mitzvah in November of 1987. The crash had happened a month before the October '87 crash. The stock went down a lot. And I didn't collect enough money to buy one share. So I asked my grandfather for a loan. Asked for a loan, which he charged me interest as a way to teach me. And bought one share and had it mail in the mail. It showed up in Venezuela. Luckily, I don't know how I didn't lose it. And so since then, every year I got the annual letters by mail. And I will read them and I will highlight them. And then I will go and learn that maybe you have to buy the little book from the Wall Street Journal called Understanding Money and Markets because there were terms that you didn't understand in the letter. And myself learning came from doing all of that since I was 13. Imagine what a 13-year-old could do now with AI. But if he wanted to, he or she wanted to go through Buffett's letters. And then I was just this like thought partner and companion. Compared to you having it by book and hand-looking. It's insane. And I was thinking about it and I was saying, if I were to do it again at 13 now, with all of this I will go away. And right, do me take those letters, find me the Buffett Partnership letters from before, which are very hard to find. But you can find them. Read them, analyze them, come back to me. Give me the. Like it will be insane what you can do. Now I think you will lose a little bit of the nuance because part of it, if you read them carefully enough and you've done it, you know that there's the pattern repeats. And what you learn from it is not the decisions he makes. It's how in any environment he repeats the same pattern of decision-making process. And that's the most important thing that you get from reading. I don't know if AI can. Say more about that. So it doesn't matter if you were in the 1970s when there was a little bit of inflation or high inflation in America compared to standards. And he talked there about how he treated float and how float of insurance worked. Or in the era of zero interest rates on. And then how he talked about float and the cost of float. He didn't matter what was the micro-economic conditions of the world or the micro-economic conditions of the interest rates. He used the same pattern every single time to define how to think about money. Why do you think that's so special that he used the same pattern? Because I think it's the discipline that he built. And just the fine was amazing at taking all the noise away, canceling noise, and focusing on the three things that matter the most. And that only you can do if you study enough. What I learned, and I went to the other meetings for a number of years, and I got to meet him and hang out with him afterwards and all of that for a number of years, to me going there was not learning anything new. It was just seeing how he applied those principles to the new conditions that every year were around. I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world. And one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the Ramp data too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp and you should to go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. This is really special to me right now because have you spent any time with Daniel Eck in person? No. Okay. He's one of the wisest people I know. I just did that right a couple days after I filmed that episode of Ramp.com. Who again? I've been making episodes on Ramp.com forever. I grew up loving hip hop. He found a deaf jam in his dorm room which was one of the most iconic hip hop record labels. For probably a decade and a half I was a fan of Ramp.com from afar before he got to meet him. Then I had probably a couple days maybe a week later I was having a drink with Daniel and he goes, "How was it hanging out with Rick?" I was just like, "What was fascinating to me?" It was just like the aura is still there but if you actually analyze Rick and his career, recruitment and his career, it's like he had like basically when he was 19 when he started a deaf jam and now I think he's 63, he had like four ideas and these ideas are not fucking complicated. It's like the adherence to the love of simplicity, reduction instead of production. Always working with the very best people you possibly can. Building the product for yourself first. He's just making literally. He is the patient zero. I'm just building stuff that I want to see and I was like, "Yeah, and that's it." I was like, "It's remarkable that those are the components of that." He doesn't seem that special because they're just so some ideas. He's like, "Yeah, but who adheres to the same four ideas for 40 years?" I was like, "Shit, that is what's special." It's very similar to when you just said about buffet. That's what's special. That's why they're writing it special for us. We have to add the ear to that. So you want to talk about the one that you wrote recently on tokens. So I love what you said. You read it very long and there's charts and everything else. But you're like, "I can distill it down to a napkin. I think compression is understanding." Let's start with the napkin version of the token essay and then you can expand on it from there. The concept is very simple. The word token means something different to anybody. If we start with Ryan from Visa, the word he defines token is different than the word that Sundar has for token at Google or the different word that OpenAI has for token or a topic. They're all different, but they all mean the same. It's machine-reliable information. So if you think about the companies, we call them token factories because just think about the industrial revolution example in this token revolution era where every company needs a supply of tokens of information, money and knowledge, and then they do something and they deliver something new. And you need basically three components to deliver any service, any promise, or any product. You're going to need to understand identity. You're going to need to understand value and you need to understand the intelligence that goes into it. And right now, we're in the early in what we're starting to see first is the frontier labs being the token factories. They're taking all information from the web, from videos from the world, and they're finding a way to ingest it and create a different set of tokens that somebody else can consume. So they are the raw materials providers to these factories. Now in the next few years we're going to see that evolution go deeper and deeper and deeper. And it will be much more personalized and it will be much more complete to vertigo so we haven't even touched like today. Token factories don't touch money that much. Money's been outside of AI and we're on year four or five. It's funny because money should supposed to be one of the first most fungible things that should be playing the game and it's not. Why do you think it should be one of the first things to play in the game? Because it's one of the things that flows the most in the world, everything flows to money. Like my whole life, the thing about what keeps my learning going is I follow flows. I believe that nothing static, right? Money is never static. Money is like gravity. It always falls. It always moves. It always goes in somewhere. It's like water. It's never stuck. Energy is flowing everywhere. On the lights that we're in here but also our own energies. Right now we're creating over energies and we're sharing that energy. And so I find that for something that is as dynamic as money, it is not attached to AI yet on anything. So how does it get attached? I think it's going to be that intersection between probably what blockchains will do and AI will do because you will need to have intelligence, smart contracts that will do stuff on your behalf and you can start to see great entrepreneurs and great founders working on it. You can talk about Patrick at Stripe and how they're building all this. Literally when you were saying that, I just heard John Coleson talk about this and basically he said that that's the only thing he's working on. It's like payments for agents. Yeah. And that's a future where you can talk to anybody in that space or Vladimir Romihoo doing the same for the equities and you can see how they're tokenizing assets. And we're in this early innings but we're behind compared to knowledge, knowledge when much faster. Money is behind, which is fine. So explain because I don't know anything about this and you study this night and day. So explain what you think is going to happen with this and like the next year or two. I don't know the next year or two. It's hard to know because with the speed of AI what happens in the next four months. Or next year, next two months or whatever. But what I will say is that what we should start seeing very soon is agents that are designed for specific functions that will take care of your financial life in ways that you have never been taken care of. And some of the best founders have articulated this really well. David from New Bank, David Velesselle. You know, mobile was the way to put a bank in your pocket. Now AI is going to be the way to get you the banker. So I expect to see very, very soon is an AI agent that can go and do all kinds of investment decisions recommendations. He can go to all kinds of commerce decisions and recommendations and he can start to do any kind of payment decisions on recommendations on your behalf. And you are going to start to see how that's going to free time and ideas that you don't have today. We're just starting. The signals that this is going the right way signals prediction markets. Prediction markets, it's an interesting market. People are called it some people call it gambling. Some people call it a place where you can better than anything 24/7. But here's the thing, it's 24/7. And what agents need is 24/7 rails. So all of this is building the rails to allow all of this to happen. And what we expect is that we're going to see a bunch of new companies or incumbents that are going to be shipping these features in ways that we have not experienced before. That was going to be an excursion to you. Who do you think actually wins this? Because you just named three pretty big, well, established companies, Stripe, Robinhood, new bank. You think it comes from them or you think it comes from a startup? I think it comes from them. Because first they're still funded led or revolute also. They're still funded led. Those funders are pushing the boundaries of all of this. They are at an age and they are at a place. And if you talk to them, they're still as hungry as they were on day one. They're still in that day one mentality. And they're just going faster than the incumbents. For a while, I thought the incumbents were going to catch up in 2021-22-23. I thought they were pairing up. There was not much difference between a financial product offer from an incumbent or from one of these new brands. That's different to the. Again. Which has become a nitro rocket for these breed of technology companies to just accelerate even faster and separate themselves again. Which is the beauty of the infinite game. In the beauty of the infinite game, you never get to win or you never get to lose. You're simply ahead or behind. And they were ahead for a long, long time. And then the other ones were catching up. But the rules changed. What happens? You're ahead again. And the other ones fall behind. But the game never ends. That's the way I live my life. That's the way I think about everything I do. That's the way I make decisions. I don't think about winning or losing ever on anything I do. I just think about will this put me ahead or put me behind in the game? And then just keep playing the game. So I know you play the infinite game. You want to play forever, but are you. Do you consider yourself a competitive person now? Define competitive. I guess the way I think about this internally is just like, I'm in a very positive some industry. If you listen to my podcast today and another podcast tomorrow, I don't lose on that. But I still wake up every day trying to do the best job I possibly can. Yes. So if that's a competitive, yes. I try to do the best. But it's not relative to other people. No. I don't look at other people. I don't. Each one is playing their own game. I have. I try really hard to not have fear of missing out. I try really hard to just make sure that I'm playing the best game I can to play this game until the last day I am alive. That's a matter if I win or lose because you will. That's not the game. You fall behind. Actually, I will tell you that I, if you learn about myself, I rather be behind. I'm a much better person being behind when I head. When I'm ahead, it means, oh, you guys are doing well. This is going right direction. You were right. This happened. This played out. And immediately, immediately, my spider senses get all activated and said, okay, that means that whatever, I got to change the rules because it's not good to be ahead. You want to be ahead for a while, but you want to change the rules to fall behind so you can innovate again. This is why I said that there are so many times when we're talking like Goddamn it. Mickey sounds just like the people I read, books about. I just met James Dyson, who was like a person of hero of mine. And he said the exact same thing on this podcast, he's just like losing is so much more interesting. He's like, you just learn so much, he likes being behind. Yeah, he just has that chip on his shoulder. Well, really just the desire to constantly improve. He just feels you're gonna improve a lot more when you're like losing or you're behind. 100% I'm much better when I'm behind. I learn more. Everything I've ordered, this just keeps you much more energy. Wanna go back 'cause I interrupted you. Wanna go back to your idea of like every company's becoming a token factory. The only token factories that you see right now are the labs? No, so you're starting to see application layers that are starting to show up, that are building token factories. Think about on the voice AI, think about 11 labs or decagon or Sierra, they're all companies that are understanding how they're creating their token factories. They're creating a service that the NXS before, in a way that was not possible. We're going to a world where every single piece of information needs to be riddled by the machine. And that's how the world will go to the next generation. So you finished writing the letter, what do you do next? We share it with our founders, people that we work with closely, and we allow them to, and our OPs and investors. Why? Because we want them to hold us accountable. This is our thinking. You have a chance, you can walk out or you can keep believing in our in our thesis. So we put it out there, and then we go out. And we started talking about it with the founders that we met while we wrote it. And what happened? Founders you've not yet invested in? Most of them are founders that we have not yet invested in. Because as we write the thesis, we have not invested into them yet. We're learning from them. Maybe on the way we make an investment or two, maybe. But most of the time we don't. And then after that, and what happens is, some of the best founders will read it and say, "Oh wow, you guys really understand it. This is deep. Let's talk about it." And that's how we build those relationships that take a long time to build. So I know you spend a lot of time with people in the early 20s. Do you feel that this is the way they're thinking about building companies? Good question. I think some of them are. I think some others are not like any other generation. What I believe the people in their 20s have right now is that they are the smartest, fastest learner generation we've ever had in history. They learn the fastest. And it's because they get used to this into podcasts that one have to X. They don't have to wait for the mail to arrive with an annual letter a month later. They can read it in real time, right? So they're already into process information. It's so much faster than our brains ever had been trained for. So you can see it in the way they can process. What I think the best ones can do also is that they can articulate a vision and a story and bring people to follow them. But not all of them have those skills yet. They haven't developed them. Because that generation, as much as they're super smart learning, they're also not trying to be great communicators on the other side. So the few that are great communicators, I think they haven't embedded in them. How do you think they view company building differently than somebody that's a 10 years old or not? I think they look at org charts very differently. I think they look at functions very differently. They don't think the org chart structure that we inherited and that we grew up with, I don't think it applies anymore in the same way they did. Humans are key centers and they will be for as long as we're alive in our generation, in our life's time. But org charts, in the way they organize people, completely different. And you can see it. They are self-organizing. And I love studying this because one of my mentors is DeHawk, the founder of Issa. And I spend with him almost 10 or 12 years visiting him and talking to him. And he's a creator of the chaotic organization. He is the believer that you should never organize the best expression of humans are in the intersection between chaos and order. If you're too orderly, you don't innovate. If you're too chaotic, you don't communicate and you break. So chaotic is the right place to be. They're actually doing, these kids are doing a great job by pure nature of how they were trained and wired with this era of technology to be in the epicenter of chaotic. So that's how they're working and that's what's different about them. What else did you learn from Deep? The fascinating thing a couple of people have asked me before because I've done like two or three episodes on DeHawk. He wrote this great autobiography, which tells the story of Issa. But then when he was a much older man, he also has these two books of Maximus called The Autobiography of a Restless Mind, Volume 1 and Volume 2. Again, somebody can compress the language and give you a lot of ideas and like, you know, a sentence or two. A lot of people have asked me, it was like, why do you think Issa is one of the most successful companies of all time? I think one of the most profitable per employee companies in history. And yet not a lot of people talk about it. And somebody asked me one time, or a few people have actually asked me this, like why do you think that it is? Like, because it's still very confusing on how he actually built it. I've read his book two times, and I still don't really understand. So like, what else do you think you learn from DeHawk? Did he influence the way you built Ribbon at all? Yes. OK, I don't know how it was this. And not only Ribbon, my previous startups too, because he taught me so much about how to get people to be the best version of themselves in the kind of organizations that you have to have. Even my go-to question on interviews, it's a question he taught me on how to ask. So I've learned so much from him. What is that question? I give people six words, and I tell them to organize them in a certain order. And then the way they walk to that order says a lot about the person. And it was a letter that they wrote to his team in 1972, I think, where he articulates all of this. So I learned that from him. So spending time with the-- what you get is that he understood human psychology better than anybody in that era, in that particular space. He understood that to get bankers who by their sheer DNA are people that are tend to be risk-adverse. And people that care too much about the reputation, he found a way through this model of association. His biggest success was the legal model he used. No one had ever done a company in that structure. An association model allowed everybody to say face but at the same time take the credit. And that's how he won. Because it doesn't matter who you were, which bank committed it with the other one. It didn't take care. Because each one can compete by themselves at the same time, when is the brand won? That was the beauty of the-- when you spend time with him, he will say, it was the model. And people don't get it. So I find that his restless mind was alive, even in his early 90s. Because I would have swear that he could have been Satoshi Nakamoto if he had been 40 years younger. He had explained to me blockchain and what. For him, VISA was a failure if you talk to him because he only got to release the simple version of it, which was payments. He wanted to do a lot more, which looked a lot like blockchains and smart contracts are today. But he was probably 60 years ahead of his time. Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand they're recruiting and hiring. The very best talent is your most important priority. A, players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of 11 Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, we built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers with Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere. We can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories and ideas to every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to Deal.com/Cenra. That is Deal.com/Cenra. Let's go back to the young kids that you've been with and the way they think about company building compared to some of your older founders. From what sense? I think the founders moving forward, obviously they're going to be way more capital efficient. I think they're going to own larger percentages of their companies because they're going to need to raise less money. I think you use the analogy of one time if you go back and look at some of the rubber bands who have hand-rewarded on 100% of his company. Some of them would go public and they don't 70 or 80% of the company. Yeah, I'm just very curious how you think they're going to be building companies. Again, a 21 or 22-year-old compared to even like a 35-year-old. So the first thing about this generation, they understand that if they play by the rules of the game, they will not win. The rules of society right now. They will be stuck in student debt. They will be stuck in a bunch of problems that they've been watching this through YouTube. They've been really about it on social media. They've been seen that we have a sparring era of of elons, of innovation, of Edison people, mindsets, that are allowing the mind to really flow. And surprisingly, capital is right now historically levels of almost unlimited capital access. And especially if you're younger, there's even more capital than before. It's a perfect scenario for this generation to really create and take risks in ways that you can't imagine. Funny enough, when you talk to them the most, you will find that a lot of them feel that working on software alone is boring. It's not fun. It's not challenging enough. They want to build physical objects. They want to touch materials. They want to get their hands dirty in building stuff that will actually matter and get to our hands one way or the other, which is super interesting because that was not the generation of the last 15, 20 years. Anybody was trying to go come with a light. Anybody was trying to build software only and try to go to the psychosis as fast as you can. This generation is not afraid of getting their hands dirty. So it's super interesting to see the behaviors. What's the difference? Why? I don't know. Maybe they just find that they grew up with a phone, they grew up with a tablet, they grew up with a computer. So it's not interesting enough to limit the world to just bits and bytes. But the more time I spend with them, the biggest thing and the biggest question that I find asking them is because the older social generation are probably 25, 26, the younger are 18. You ask them, what were you doing during COVID? And that is the most fascinating question. The most successful ones right now were the ones that were in COVID were learning. And were on YouTube, sucking information about anything and learning about everything in life. So when they go and build companies, they find that in first or ninth, so anything's possible, second technology is there, so anything's possible. Third, if you're older, you can knowledge and you get wisdom, but you may not have the motivation. So they need to find out how to bring that from people. And so what you're starting to see is that the best ones are attracting some of the best older people to come join them because they feel that magnet. And so the younger people are recruiting older ones. Yes. And they're making them work in little halves of two or three with two young ones. They're pairing them to 22-year-old kids with somebody much later working in teams together. And that's where they're judging between their knowledge of the new ways of operating systems with the knowledge that you need from 20 years of experience. If you place that over in five, 10 years, don't think they can have a massive technical advantage too. Because, me and you, you say a lot, but we have other stuff going on in our lives, where they can live and breathe at 24/7. Yes, and they will. And we just got this year, high school, sorry, college class, it's the first one that actually went to college and had AI the four years. We just started. The senior class, the rising senior of college, it's the first class ever that probably used to try to be the right an essay to get to college. I keep asking questions about the young people you hang out with because I've had founders literally in the mid-30s and they're the technical leaders of these really successful companies. They're like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. I'm too old. I'm like, what are you two old? You're 35 years old. And you're like, yeah, I think I'm going to get smoked by a 24-year-old. I don't think you're too old, to be honest. And I don't feel old. And I feel I can still play the game. But you got to understand that you got to play a different game. You can not keep playing the same game that you were playing in your 20s or in your 30s. You got to understand that the way these dynamics work and what you can bring to them is very different. What can you bring to them? Wisdom, knowledge, human experiences, stuff that they don't understand. By the way, the best ones, they still like and they have to refine its taste. They got to be able to articulate how to build something beautiful. That's not easy. And it's something that we've lost in society is available to build beautiful stuff. Silicon Valley has lost that ability a long time ago. And we have to bring it back. I'm hoping this generation is the one that spends time thinking how to deliver beautiful experiences. Same more about Silicon Valley losing the building. Build beautiful things. So if you think about the last 15 years, the incentive systems and every material success was wired on scale, grow, grow bigger, have more nuance, more work. But it wasn't about building beautiful products. We have, when was the last time you bought something such a technology product that you loved? Then you were like, wow, this is beautiful. - I don't even want to tell you it's embarrassing the answer. It was a Dyson backing cleaner. - That's great. But in a way, Dyson comes up a lot when I ask this question. Also the-- - Air out, yes. If you have a daughter or any women in the house, like-- - Yes. - And somebody has a Dyson surprise. - And somebody in your team here was showing us the stucary of the iPhone, the SC. - Right, the small life on why? Because it's beautiful. It was one of the first ones to sign in a different way. So we have lost that ability. And because we have given a prize in a reward for efficiency, algorithm, compounding of those things and we have put aside how it makes you feel. In this world where technology is taking over a lot of our lives in the way we're going, more than any time in history, we're gonna need that feeling back again. How it makes you feel. And it's not just the brand with a TV commercial, that's the point I'm less worried about. It's more about what's authentic, what's beautifully signed, and what doesn't make you feel when you are around it. - It's the perfect time that you're bringing this up because right now, literally a few hours this morning and the last few days have been rereading this biography of Johnny Ife. I think it's called like Johnny Ife, the genius behind Apple's greatest product or something like that. All he talks about is feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling. He didn't think computers were for him. He thought they were ugly and tacky. He started using a Mac. This is years before he even working at Apple and he's just like, oh, there's a human behind this. You can tell there's a actual human that cares behind this and he all he talks about. He's talking about redesigning hair brushes and about how it makes him feel to your point. - And I think that if we don't bring that back, the founders that will do that will win. And the founders that don't have that ability, they don't have a chance. - Right before you came over, I was on the phone with my mutual friend, Neumetta, and he keeps telling me about Nick from Revolute. Right? And we were talking about some unrelated stuff and I go, oh, I'm about to see Mickey Malca. He's like, you gotta ask him the conversation we had if he remembers because he said, you invested way before he did. I think he's done now the last two or three rounds. But I think he remembers calling you and passing on Nick. Can you tell, like, why do I keep hearing about Nick and like, what do you think makes him so special? - You can understand Nick for how he grew up and who he is to understand who he was. Funny enough, I was in London a few weeks ago because they finally gathered by license approved and there was a chancellor there and some public official speaking and Nick was there with Vlad the co-founder. And I was looking at my phone and I was remembering we was the first time that we had handshaked our series A and it was literally that same day 10 years before. - Oh wow. - And so I went to them and I showed on the phone and said, listen, 10 years ago we were drinking vodka shots we didn't know much to do our A round. And what was it about him from day one? First, the name, Revolut, Stanford, who he was. He wanted to truly create a revolution in money. Like, there was nothing in the middle about it. He had come to London, he had left Moscow, he was a trader, he was frustrated with how complex he was to move money, how difficult and how expensive and how unfair it was for everybody in the system. And he says, "Fuck it, I gotta change this." So that core DNA was there from day one. And then when he lifted every single day, he will wake up every day and go swimming. He will work in the office, we will the first one to arrive, the last one to leave. And the first one to arrive the next day again. And he will swim and stay fit and just read戀lessly focus on getting this mission moving forward. And people just either competed with him at that level because he was a performance at a level that an execution that he was just a machine. There was no stop. I just have this mission and I have to do it in my lifetime. I'm glad you said the machine 'cause I think that's what Neil described me. It's like he's like a fucking terminator. - But that was naked in his late 20s. That was who he was in in the late 20s. Now, the nick of today, 10 years later, he's gotten better. He's gotten better because now he can lead. He can lead by example, he can lead by mission. He's a missionary also now. He can lead by taste. He has very strong opinions on how things need to go. He still has 20 people direct report to him. and he will work seven days a week. And then every number of weeks, they do weeks off. Like you can see his behavior of work, he's fine tuned to who he is now, compared to who he was before. So consistency, what I like to do is, when we back these teams, we tried to understand the DNA of the founder and we tried to understand what drives them and how do they work. But more importantly, we wanna see if that DNA reflects in the offices, in the team, in the people, in the way they talk, in the way they move. And you still got all the railroad offices, which is like now in, I don't know, 15, 20 countries. And I went to the one in the Middle East, in Barcelona, in London in the last year and a half. You still breathe that DNA still there. So that's what keeps it going. It's a very special way that you got understand the founder really well to know, because each or is very different. - So when you say you wanna understand the founders DNA, how do you go about understanding that? - You gotta spend time with them. And you gotta ask them all the questions and you gotta build a level of trust where, honestly, you don't have to talk about business that much. What kind of level of trust you gotta, how do you build a trust to talk to them in a way where they feel that they can trust you back, that they can call you when they can not sleep at night? Those are the things that you gotta, I spend most of my time in the team and I spend most of the time doing, which is building that level of understanding and relationship, so we know how they behave. Once you know how people behave, then everything's fine because you will see consistency or they will break it. - Explain why it's important to you to be the person that they call and when they have problems. Like you just use the example of like when they can't sleep at night. - Because all of us have something that wakes us up on like, from time to time. And that particular mind problem that you're trying to solve, it's the biggest thing that you have to get on lock to keep being the best version of yourself. And when you're there, sometimes it's really hard to trust. If it's a vulnerable question, sometimes it's really deep and has a lot of strategic consequences and you wanna be really, you're going to your mind a lot. And if we get that phone call, it means that we did a hundred things right to deserve the right to be there to help this person think through it. Never answer the question. Just help him or her answer the question. And that means that you were able to talk about life and family, you were able to talk about society and politics and you were able to talk about everything because that's the only way you're gonna get to really help this person answer the question. - So you have, in many cases, you know, decade plus relationships with a lot of the founders that you back, how does like, can you compare like Nick to the other ones? Like what are the traits that you think they share among the people that you spend most time with? - Well, they all want to win in their own way of being. They care about if they're true to themselves, they steal the mission that they wrote on the first day, they still present today. And when you find that authenticity, they win. So the ones that are authentic are the ones that you can keep seeing, the ones that fake it to make it and then they change and then they move and then those are the ones that over time, you just don't have the appetite to spend time with. - You do reflect it in the performance of their company too. - Sometimes you have people that fake it and then they build massively successful companies. - Yes, they are for sure. But sometimes somewhere somehow down the line, authenticity matters. And as long as you're authentic to yourself and you keep your values authentic and you remember yourself, why are you doing what you're doing and you can wake up every day with that energy, you'll be fine. - So if we go back to that idea that Rick Rubin has like these four handful of ideas, could be four, could be five, could be six ideas that he just used for multiple decades, what would like be the list of traits that you would, if I said, hey, list out the four or five things that you want the founders, that you wanna build long-term relationships within partner with over long-term half, what would your answer be? - We have this thing called the aisle of the tiger. It's our way of thinking about the people that we wanna back and how we wanna partner with them. And as everything I said before, it needs to feel in an ad-king. So if we were running an ad-king, it means that we thought about it long enough that we have it, right? And it's basically the energy of a scientist, the conviction of a missionary, the heart of a partner, the dreams of an athlete, the obsession of an owner. When we meet them and we spend time with them, we wanna make sure those things are present. And if they are, that's gonna be what we wanna partner with. - How long did it take you to develop, like how many, it's over several years, where you guys figured out these recurring traits? - This is several years. This is probably a decade to launch. We probably put it into an ad-king five years ago. So you took us almost 10 years. - Do you consider yourself a patient person? - Yes. - Several of the questions I've actually said is like, oh yeah, that took a couple years, and that took a couple of years. You started your first company when you were like 17? - 17. - And you didn't found, you found a multiple companies, but you found it a ribbit 20 years later. - I found a ribbit much later. If I had a ribbit almost 20 years later. 21 years later. - 21 years later, you've been doing it for almost 14 years now. - 14 years. - Yes. - And I heard you say before, it's like, well, you guys had this fantastic record, you've done all this, you're like, yeah, it's super early. - We got a long way to go. - Yeah. - We found amazing people to partner. We got great ideas. We're still building. I mean, we build a company with Walmart. I mean, think about it. It's just the first time I ever that that has happened. - Okay, I just heard about this. Or we have a neutral friend, Sebastian, founder of a former founder of Rappi. And he's like, ask him about the deal he did with Walmart. - He just speaks to a little bit of this value system of ours. David, we had a chance to meet, I've been a fan of some Walton all my life, right? And I had read every book. I had never been to Bentonville until a few years ago. But I had read everything about him. And I had a follow and I remember Buffett on the stock for a particular period of time until he sold it. And that was when I first learned about Walmart back in the day. And in 2019, through Sarah Fryer, who's now open AI, but she was in the board, she's on the board of Walmart. She organized a dinner where I had a chance to meet Doc Mark Midden, the CEO at the time. And we had a lovely dinner in San Francisco a few months before COVID. And Doc says, "Listen, if you ever find yourself in Bentonville, "convison me." And I'm like, I don't know what I'm gonna do in Bentonville. So I left the dinner. I was so impressed by Doc, his way of speaking, his understanding about macro, the world, the values of Walmart. Everything was so present in him at that dinner. It was a small dinner. So he could have been something different, but it was authentic to him. That we went as a team to cover Walmart stores. We tried every financial product we can buy. We cooled with the remittances, pre-pay cardio. And we found bugs and we found all these things that looked like 1990s. Fintech. Were they selling them themselves? So there's like vendors inside. They had vendors, and they had partners, and they had their own Walmart cardio, it was a whatever card. So I wrote them in January before COVID, I said, "Listen, if you're in Bentonville, "I'd love to go see you." And Logan B. Holley said, "Yes, show up, see them with Doc." And he introduced me to John Frenner, who's now the CEO of Walmart, who's a Lonsa with Doc, they were there for almost 30 years at Walmart, both of them since they were 17. And John is my age, so we started at the same time in two different continents, so we were still in the same room talking about this. And I said, "Listen, you guys can build "something much better with an Azure services here." This is now your priority number one, two or three. It is for us, let's figure it out. And they did something that they have never done. They created a JV, a company that we both co-owned, and we went together and built a rock starting with a new brand, we bought two companies and to build the infrastructure run by Omar Ismail today, and it's called One Pay, and it's one of the biggest financial brands that you've never heard of. Operating out of all the Walmart, you will see it online on every shopping card, experience on Walmart, you will see the retail everywhere. If you wanna pay with your phone today, the only way to pay a Walmart is with One Pay. If you wanna have a debit card, it's the only way you wanna loan from Clarna, it goes through One Pay, if you wanna install Manloon, you wanna credit card, it goes through One Pay, every single financial product, two millions and millions and millions of American consumers. And the beauty of that is that with John, and this is the beauty of the Walmart culture, John, had been in China for a number of years, they had learned how we pay work and how Alipay did business, they were investors in Indian flip card and phone pay, so they ended up saw what could happen with mall money, they have been the greatest partners to have. And so together between the founder team, Riveel and Walmart, we have built this amazing journey together, that is quite unique for a big corporation like that. - I found one of my all time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what Apple have done with their average. AppLovent connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. AppLovent allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovent ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds, that is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovent in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovent achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovent scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovent. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. Tell me if I'm connecting things that are unrelated or not, but I don't think I am. What was the business that it was either you or your partner built? It was like this branchless bank in convenience stores or some shit like that in South America in Brazil. Okay. What was the name of that? It was called Lemon Bank. Okay. Lemon Bank. It sounds like you almost took like an idea that worked in Lemon because you guys, you were the founder of that, or? Yes. Okay. And then we'll explain what Lemon Bank is. But then you sell it to the biggest bank in Brazil, right? Is this not the same idea, but kind of with Walmart? Yes. So why keep, I would ask you if you're a patient, ask you what are the traits that you notice in the greatest founders because I noticed them in you. So like patients, long-term thinking, reputation which I want to get to in a minute, which is how me and you actually met. Because you helped me, like I had a big decision to make in my career and like your reputation and procedure. And I was like, actually need to meet this guy because I have some questions for him. So this is what I mean. It's like you, you talked about in the infinite game earlier. It's like I'm going to do this to like die, which you just said, which I fucking love by the way. And I'm hearing you talk and I knew the rough shape of the Walmart thing. I didn't know what it was called. And I'm like, wait a minute. This sounds like Lemon Bank. Yes. Okay. So explain the connection between the two. That's the infinite game right there. You just said it yourself really well. When you're playing this live game and it's infinite, being ahead or behind in 2003 when we started a business in Brazil and I lived there for three years and grind it a few times almost died trying this business and we almost killed the business twice along the way. I must have lost all the money I have ever made. How do we get a pause there? Where do you get to what it does? How did you almost lose all the money you ever made? Because when we had sold our first that con company and then we used all the proceeds to start this banking proceed. I moved with my wife to Brazil. We were leaving there. Do you have no investors or you just know? No, we had no investors. It was just my business partner when says Casares and myself and Mike. You took all your shows back on the table. All the shows back on the table. We were 25, 26. And almost lost everything because the economy didn't take off. No matter what we did, we just couldn't, which is how you learned that macro matters. And I learned I grew in every Venezuela with hyperinflation and the evaluation. But then another thing is to leave it also when all your money's on the table. So wait a minute. You're a 25 year old kid wanting to build essentially like a branchless bank. Is that how you describe it? Your idea at the time is to set these little like kiosk where they were three models. We had inside existing stores at checkout. We had kiosk inside stores, which was a hybrid model. And we had French IC little stores that only did our payment systems. Because this is before the smartphone, right? But it was mobile. So we had to, it was a hybrid of 2003 to 2007 era. So we had to build all of this and run all of this. We had a peak. We had 7,000 of these physical spaces all over Brazil. We were serving 15 million customers. Half of our feedback then was unbanked. Unbanked. So that was the opportunity. That was the opportunity to bank that we were the first to bank them to 15 million people. So essentially you did like the legwork for the largest bank or a second. Now we've attacked this customer segment that you haven't succeeded with. We succeeded. Essentially rounded up a bunch of now customers for them. They want to buy you. That's a great unit. So you sell in what year? 2008. So 2008, that insight then comes into play. What is that 12 years later? 12 years later. Well, we were starting to talk to Walmart in 2020. Yes. And that's the long game. That's the infinite game. And by the way, you can tie every single one of our decisions that we've made. Like we're big decisions like that in the real life to something that happened to me 20 years before. This is really important for especially for young ranchpreneurs because you said earlier like there's just something wrong about you know like we're optimizing for just like start scale sell, right? Of course. Of course. You know, some of your partners you've been partners with for 20 years. Yes. Some of the people you've backed, you met Vlad and Robin Hood when I don't even think they had a product yet. There was not an app, right? No, there was. There was a public facing app. It was not a customer. No customers. So your relationship with them was for like 15 years. Yes. At least like I always say it's like when I've read you know all these biographies for the other partners I have, it's like just staying the game long enough to get lucky. It's like so much of stuff is not predictable. And I think that maximum. So it just like saying the game long enough to get lucky. So you build a massive business 12, 12 years after you built you know a very successful business in South America now think about the scale of Walmart. This is like not comparable to anything else. And that's the power of compounding. Yes. So compounding relationships and ethics and work and principles and love and passion and time and just don't care about the winning or losing. Just let it be because the power of compounding is the most important equation in society and everything on friendships, on family just be consistent work every day. It's like a very buffet monger kind of thing. Like monger has that line where he's like you know you need to learn the big, the few big ideas in each discipline. They carry most of the freight. I think it's the way he describes that. And through all this reading I was like my version is like, oh time carries most of the weight. Like if you're in a good business like just stay there and time will actually carry most of the weight. So what you want to do. And so that leads if you're going to play the infinite game then and you want to do things over a long term, you have to protect your reputation, which is another thing that both food and food and sugar holders like hey, we can lose money. We can lose a lot of money actually. We can't lose a shred of reputation. I want to know how you think about reputation and then I want to know and I'll talk about why it's so important how it led me to you. I started to go to the Bercia Anumidins when I was 18 and back then they were much smaller than when I friday afternoon and I holly the in a couple hundred people. And as soon as they moved to the to the bigger convention center a few years later, they had this movie clip playing in the beginning of the Anumidin with a bunch of TV commercials or or buffal interviews over the years. And every time since I was a young that age they were playing the buffal getting deposed when he was a German of Solomon Brothers saying that line that you just said, he got sticky in my brain. So they replayed it every and every meeting. Every and every meeting. It was there that the position that was that he said that line on a deposition at Congress for something that Solomon Brothers was doing with the treasuries are retrashing the or taking advantage of the treasuries issuing market. And they played it every single year. And I remembered every single year. And part of the reasons why I wanted to leave that line is because it was natural to me. It was the way you wanted to live life. So yes, reputation matters more than anything. There's a handful of people that I really trust and admire and then the people I trust and admire, I want to know who they trust and admire. And I had a decision I had to make and I wasn't sure how to make it. It was there's a lot of uncertainty. I didn't have the information I needed. And realize that you were actually in possession of this information. We won't talk about like the details of this. And actually never almost ever asked me people. And I asked two separate people. I was like, do you mind making this like introduction for me? And then the first time we met, we actually went and talking for like several hours. And then we like became like fast friends. And I made a big decision in my career based on how fantastic your reputation was. And so therefore almost like Charlie Mugger has a great line where like trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world. And it's like the level of trust that you have built up a very excessive long time with people I trust made me be able to build a relationship and trust your judgment really fast that I could make a decision based on your reputation. And I think this is super important. It's also something that comes up over and over again. Like I did this episode on Jensen. There's this book called The NVIDIA Way which is kind of like half biography of Jensen, half company history. And it talks about he pitched down Valentine. Down Valentine's still alive. Still making the investment decision of Sequoia. And Don's like, that was the shittiest pitch I've ever heard. I'm still going to give you money because your reputation precedes you in it. So excellent. So valuable. It is the most valuable asset. It's the only asset we have. It's a reputation. Anyone else can come and go, but that's one thing that we have that it will always stick to us. Even when we're there. You know who else will shape my thinking on this? It's like your very palm or lucky talk about reputation, have you? No, I haven't talked about it. So he says the exact same thing. He's like, anytime he thinks this idea where like if people tried to destroy reputation, like you should just rise above the phrase like, no, this is bullshit. He has just a fight back because the problem is it forecloses opportunities. If this person's damaging reputation and it's not true, it's going to foreclose future opportunities. And it's not like if somebody, he's so pleased like this is invisible. And I thought it was really. interesting insight. He's like, if somebody, I listen to you just show him my reputation and unfairly, and two years later, I asked for a meeting with a guy who took that story and believes it, he's not gonna tell me I'm not taking the meeting 'cause your reputation sucks. He's gonna make up some other story. So he's like, you have to protect it and fight against it. I thought it was interesting. It's very like a Ben Franklin kind of idea. Because Franklin would nurture and then also protect and fight back against his reputation 250 years ago. It's very fascinating. - I love it. I didn't know that about Ben Franklin. I'm gonna read more about that. - So I told you right before we started recording that I got the art piece that I ordered at node. I don't even know how to describe the fact like I spend about an hour there with you. Can you just describe what the hell node is and why you're doing it? - Yes. So I think it's in the spirit of being a rebel. So my wife and I, we love art. We find that art is beautiful. And when you find stuff that speaks to you, it has an immense value. It's been around all of us since the caves, right? It's always been there. And five years ago, we stumbled upon the little art for the first time I was on Twitter, scrolling and I saw an art piece that looks something very similar to a physical art piece we have for the 70s. And then we got into it and started to find other artists in the little art that were doing beautiful stuff that matched something beautiful in history. So we started to pair them together. And that journey took us like any journey to get to know the artists. Because what's the difference of these artists? They're alive. And they're all here and they're all using the all study computer science one way or the other and they just decided to be artists and tell a story in a different way. Once you start to meet them, they were rebels in the complete expression of the world. The same way we were describing some of the rebels in companies. Like think about right now we're gonna show on people. Think about the one I saw. That's when you show. So think about people. Think about entrepreneur who decided for 5,000 days to do an art piece every single day, posted online so he can only get better. His goal was he read a book that said, "If you do something every day, you will only get better at it." And he started in 2007 sketching. 2011 started to use Photoshop. 2014 cinema for the, and so the software evolves. And every single day posted an image online. That no one bought people paid attention and just made fun of it or converted it or jump against it. Until in 21, he sells the first 5,000 days. What is it? 14 years for 69 million dollars. And suddenly it's like an IPO moment. No one pays attention for a long time. You sell it. What does a real rebel do? He said, "Fuck it, we're gonna double down. I'm gonna build a studio. I'm gonna start building a lot more stuff that I couldn't do before." And now he's one of the most prolific artists alive. All he does is work his digital. And he's not the only one. People see cryptopunks and they see a JPEG. Actually, I see a movement. I see a cultural artifact. The first art on chain ever created and it happens to be portraits. Guess what? Every single art movement in history starts with portraits. They always evolve the portrait. So the story is we went to the museums and we said, "This art should be seen." Because at home, we posted, we put it around our house and all my kids, when they were teenagers and brother friends, guess where their attention went? Not that you have a hangout on a wall. It went to this. 15, 20 minutes in front of it, talking to it, interacting, asking questions, the one you don't understand. We got a museum and I said, "Yes, we can do this, "2008, five years from now, four years from now, "and we'll have to find a curator who's gonna curate "what the artist wants to do." And my wife and I looked at each other and said, "No, fuck you, why?" This needs to happen today. So, node, it's the first digital art studio, design for the idol artist. It is a space where the artist is his own curator because that's what rebels do. You design how you wanna show your art. You don't let somebody else tell you how you don't wanna put your art. And it's a place where you come and you get your hands on with the art that speaks to the future. And we put this place in downtown Palo Alto for a particular reason, because Silicon Valley needs creativity. We need to bring it back. So, our contribution to society is put it in a place where people can actually walk in and see it. And we've opened it five months ago. We had close to 60,000 people show up already. Every weekend we're breaking records. It's free, it's open. And people are interacting at the most beautiful things. Kids are bringing their parents. So, you told me that last time you went to a museum where the kids are telling, "Dad, let's go in." Exactly. So, that is the difference. So, I think we needed going back to beauty, to taste, to create an authentic stuff. And these artists are the most authentic people right now using the little tools. So, let's show them, let people interact with them, and let that be the driver for entrepreneurs to use it in their own practices. But this is what I meant about your way more entrepreneur than your investor, because you just like, when you start bang for the unbanked in Brazil, you're like, "Well, I'm not gonna open up branches." I'm like, "What opportunity? What's the white space that these incumbents are not? I'm a rebel. What is the white space that these incumbents are not attacking?" Well, you just said, the museums were like, they didn't have the infrastructure to display digital art. And I went to know it with you. The walls are customizable. The next, how the people's in there for what? Two months, something like that? Yes. And then the next one comes in. The infrastructure's still there, but now the artist gets to, essentially, use the infrastructure as a canvas for his or her art. We think the world will have a lot of these places. You see, ones will change. They will evolve. It won't take a while. The location that you picked speaks to again. Like, you're kind of just identifying what's the way they did it, and like, "Look, what's the way I should do it now?" We're like, you can walk into it. It's like in a very small, downtown area. Yes. It's not like a destination in and of itself. It's something you could just, it's like part of the neighborhood if that makes any sense. If you read history, which is part of the beauty of playing infinite games where you have to live in the future, but also understand the past, this is not very different that what happened in Paris and with the rebels in their art movement when they were not accepted in the museums. And this is how the impressionism came to be. And all the art that was a revolution that changed the way we look at art in the last 100 years. We're living to that same moment. Funny enough, it's not in Paris. Maybe it's starting in Palo Alto. And so you look at the first node in Palo Alto, almost like a prototype? Yes, because the name node is meant to be a node in the network. So we will be learning here for the next year to perfection art technology, improve our UI. There's a bunch of engineers working at this. This is on the foundation with engineers, like think of how different it is to traditional art and then expand it and open it many, many more to other places. Another thing they want to talk to you about, what's with your fascination with rebels? It's all of your website. People will know you talk about this all the time. Well, first, I'm a Star Wars generation, right? And I grew up with Star Wars and a big fan of Star Wars. And to me, growing up in Venezuela, the only way to survive in that environment is you have to be a rebel. The system, the dark side was all over. The chaos was present. You had to raise above that. And the rebel mindset is one where you know, authentically and genuinely, that something can be better. And you're willing to give your life for it. So maybe in a rebel, it's just a way of being. It's a way of looking at the world. And when you see something, you can always look at it and accept, how do you make it better? How do you make it more beautiful? How can what's missing? Like just a mindset of always being willing to know that better means it can still be better. I mean, just 17-year-old service company. Yes. That would lead me to believe that you had this rebel. You're essentially a born rebel. Yes. How did you apply that? Because people prefer ensures one of the greatest venture capitalist. I'm like, that's not how I think of Mickey. I don't think of him as a venture capitalist. So when you're building a ribbit, how did you apply your rebel, like your inherent rebel nature to your essentially-- almost like an artist, in the sense of this is the canvas that I'm building. This is how you think I should do it. But this is how I'm going to do it. How did you think about it when you started it? If I end up being labeled as a picture, I'm the first I hate labels. And second, I will be very depressed. Because that's not a label. I want no labels. All I want in my tombstone is to say, he was a rebel. That's all I want to be said there. And that will say everything about me. The way I raise my kids, the way my relationship with my wife, the way I treat my friends, the way I make business decisions, the way I change my mind. I'm willing to change my mind if I learn something that is different. That's the rebel mindset. Everything that is the opposite is a mindset that I know too well. My kids are perfect. I'm the best at what I do. And I run away from any of those things. Actually, I find that the rebel mindset is one that you are always asking questions. You're a rebel. You are non-stop asking questions. You want to learn. You want to keep, but you and I know a lot of people that get to a point in life when they stuff to ask questions and they start to preach. That's past the rebel time. Everybody has that breaking point. Somewhere in their lives, I want that to be the last time I'm alive. So I need to live by that principle on everything that I do, on every behavior, on like I'm reveling now against the traditional art world. I'm trying to allow artists to show art in a different way. We revel at Rivet the way we designed it. People were asking, "What are you? Are you a venture guy? You know, early stage guys?" I'm like, "Yes. Are you a late stage guy? Yes. Are you a fintech guy? Yes. But are you doing now? Defends or yes? Like, yes. What's wrong? Like, I'm not going to let anyone allow that. You are a founder, but you think so much like a founder. So like this decision in 2012 to start an investment firm. Like, why? I don't think of it as an investment firm. You have to say more about this. It's a startup, it's a company. We build our own technology stack and we have a small team and we consider ourselves rebels and our meetings are called Tatooine and we have Jedi's and we behave. I didn't know this. So you're really into Star Wars. Oh, it's completely. Are you backing Jedi's or you have Jedi's? We back Jedi's. We have Wukies and we had Jedi's. We have the whole thematic, truly alive in the way we think because it has to be authentic and people that work with us at Ruby, the whole team feels that ownership, that teamwork. There's investment firms are very silo in many ways and I don't love that. We want to overcommunicate it even internally. Like, right now the entire team knows that we're sitting together. Everybody can see my camera in my inbox. They can see my emails and I can see anybody's emails. We share all the information so we can actually become better as a team. That mindset is very rebel in this environment and how we make decisions. We don't make individual decisions. We make group decisions and there's no, like, somebody asks, who's the partner responsible for that company? It's like, what partner? And you ask the founder, he said, I don't know. I call it Mickey for something. I call Nick for something. I call Justin for something. We are just a team that works together in very different ways. So that is the joy of going to the office every day. I love being there and spending time with the team because we just have fun together. What was the insight though that calls you to do this instead of because you started how many companies before this? It's your six company. Yes. Some like that. So like, but your six company looks vastly different from your first five, correct? Yes. So like, what was the insight between five and six, though? I had to, in the infinite game, I had just have to learn how to do it right in this time. I do it right because I consider myself, even though they were successful and they created a lot of impact and changed a lot of people's life around the world, I consider myself a fellow entrepreneur. That's absurd. That's what you got to say. Like why? Because the best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company. Okay, not a fist bump on that. There you go. And so I had to learn for 20 years how to get to the point to design the structure, the culture, the team, the knowledge, the aperture, the brand compound all those values to a place where we can do something for forever. This is the infinite game. Nick Sleep has one of my favorite lines ever. And he goes, the best investors aren't investors or entrepreneurs who never sold. 100% agree. So that's fascinating. Look, okay. The fact is, I'm a failed entrepreneur because I had to exit. You had crazy successful exits just for my first five because I didn't find the vehicle in which I can do forever, which is again, when again, like, I'm like new to being relatively known in like this community in the last five years for a podcast. And I didn't understand because I sat in a room by myself for a decade and just talked into a microphone and read books. And I didn't think about the outside world at all. And then everything kind of came to me. And so now I have to like constantly vet everybody around me. And I get a lot of advice from like, especially like older, more successful entrepreneurs, like, man, you have to be so fucking careful with like, because there's, it goes back to Charlie Mugher. It's like most people are rat poison, right? And it's like, and you just like, you have to like vet them in all different directions. But when I, and even people I want to have dinner with or talk to you, like you, you ask a bunch of people and they're just like, he's obsessed with this infinite game. This infinite game, he's like, he doesn't need more money and he doesn't need to do another deal in his life, but he just can't stop. But it's this joy. It's this thing that every day you get better and you just are improving. And you know, I sat with Charlie Mugher once and one of the after-an-an-on meeting at the Hopi Hollow Golf Club where Warren had this thing afterwards. And I saw myself and I only had one stock of pressure. I was probably 24 years old and 25. And I said next to him, well, he said next to me. I'm sitting and he says, he says, take him. He said, no, come on, sit here Charlie. And we started to talk. And and that room was everybody. Bill Gates was there. All these big C also, all these companies. And I was like the youngest guy by an order of magnitude. And he looks at me and says, you must be very wealthy to be here. And I said, actually, no, I only own one share. He says, you don't get it. You are the wealthiest guy in the room. And I said, you're wrong Charlie. No, no, you are. Why? You have the power of time. All of us here are in our last chapter. You just start in your time. You will compound for the next 70 years of your life. So never forget the rule I'm about to tell you. You only need to get rich once. And then that was it. And now I'm going to eat and just have a minute. Although that time is the only true currency. I appreciate you spending your time giving it to us today. Thank you for having me. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade. I have obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.