Howard lensing is the founder and general partner at Social leverage all opinions expressed by Howard and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of social leverage or stock twits. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for decisions guest May maintain positions and securities discussed in this podcast.
Rare. Oh Scooby Doo. How are you? What up? Have? We had a three-time cast for time guess I think Brad is the most favored guess in that respect and make sense. Yeah, because he's a legend it truly is by the way, which Brad's on today? Yeah, what cause we don't have digital props, you know, just doing a fake drug mean I could do a digital, you know, maybe the worst produced popular.
Cast of all time about that one. Yeah, you just your heads already in Norway where huh? What? Yeah, so you're going I'm going for trip. You're not taking the fam. No, this is why then the Europeans just have this whole Swagger that a Miriam. No American woman's going to let their husband go to Norway during covid without them. Well, my wife is American she special lady. Yeah. So what do you plan on doing? I plan on being in quarantine at my cabin up in the mountains for about
a week to 10 days depending on how long they want to but we don't have any Norwegian. So yeah, and you know smelling the pine trees and eating the snow. All right, you can see some friends in time. Yeah. Oh really? You're really just do not write out to not right off the bat. I mean look at all your money in Norway. No Corner no vaccines. They are behind huh the dorks. Really? Yeah, even the swedes are doing better than those more by the way that guy yesterday is like you guys are the Arabs of Scandinavia with you.
I got oil. Yes you do. There's the speeds. What were they had the swedes are just farting around no and then in the end, it was pretty funny. Yeah. All right. Brad Feld is on the show. What can I say about Brad He's tall handsome. He was up my first investor at wahlstrom that is right. And then he is Foundry as the investor in stocked with. All right, and he
knows where Norway is on a map. He's no dummy today wasn't Colorado doing his thing Foundry group and another on five and sixty seventy at this point. He started messing when he was 11. And so we've done all that the past I want to talk about the future he group of Pals and businessmen to this back and it surprised me when I saw it. So I'm excited to just ask high level what went on there cool and as we get closer to the end of covid here, what's up?
Future look like so I want to keep it really simple it. Is that okay with you? Absolutely. You're sure I can't go back and change it again for the 12 100% All right, let's ring them up. All
right.
Howdy,
how's it going? It's good. And you are in Aspen
Amy and I are in Aspen where it snowed about 6 inches last night. So it looks beautiful outside.
And what is the mood atmosphere and astronauts have been a nice winter there? You think or everybody quarantine and traffic way down.
I have no idea because the only time I leave my house is to go running.
Hmm and when I go running I go for long runs usually an hour to 4 hours and I would like to run in the mountains. So in the in the wintertime, there's not a lot of people where I go running.
Yeah. Well, I don't really know. Okay,
but the mood in the house that Amy and I are in is really good because the two of us love being together 24 hours a day.
Yeah. I'm always worried that if that happened to me a millionaire just be a corner very quickly. Oh what happened?
You know, we spent most of our relationship like the first, you know, 80% of our relationship never together because I was traveling that's true. There has been something. I mean, there's been many many really challenging things about the last year but one of the real joys of the last year has been that the two of us get to spend all our time together.
Yeah. I got my daughter reading your blocks any emails behind my back. Is it okay that she sending you a man? She's a much better writer than yes. There are.
Less typos and apologies in her hair emails of knows she doesn't say as she Sasori as often as I have to sorry. So Amy's the best. I don't know. I have to get her now for podcast to catch up to you what you guys have been reading like catching up on reading or knows it just work. I find myself Brett just working and I'm getting a lot down and it feels like you're just working. So how do you divide up the day if you're not leaving the
house? Yeah, we read a lot.
Both of us are huge readers and love like laying on the couch, you know each with a book in hand interestingly its episodic though because there's definitely days where you know, seven o'clock your brain does not want to read likes got nothing in it. So, you know like many I think we've watched a lot of a lot of TV a lot of Netflix a lot of Amazon Prime, but we've run out of interesting stuff and every time we try something new it's pretty shitty. So we've struggled recently.
To find anything interesting. We watched the other night just as an example Netflix ends the list of the movies that are going off in the next 30 days. And one of them was a bad pit movie. We hadn't seen called killing killing them softly and we're like, yeah, we haven't seen that we kind of like Brad Pitt and it was it was dark and it probably it probably needs to go off Netflix and because we do a lot of reading on the weekends and and it's a you know, it's a broad range because one of the things
That we both historically done is not watch much are not pay much attention to the news. She pays more attention to it than I do and around the election cycle in the u.s. It was impossible not to pay attention to it because it was so insane but that's all turned off the volume of that's gone back down. So that's that's opened up a lot of space it
really have. You know, it really took a lot of head space raise the temperature for I feel no reason.
It's so nice. That sounds nice. I would say so nicely back to the normal bullshit of every day and no one
does more to help out than you. So it's like what's the tone been like even my daughter who read your blog and chimed in on boundless? Like it feels like nothing good could even reach the surface for a while.
Yeah. Look everybody has everybody has their view of how the world works and one of the things that's always.
Instructive to me is to go back in time or go forward in time. Right go back in time and read some history from a long time ago or read some science fiction and what you realize is that you know, we're humans and humans just do what humans do and there's the endless challenges and you get to decide where you want to engage in what you want to do in the finite period of time that we've got on this planet and one of the lessons from the last 12 months at least four would say for me in the end.
Conversations that Amy and I have one of the one of the things we do we asked about our days we start each day off with what we now call morning coffee. So we spend about 30 minutes together first thing in the morning and we have coffee together and we just talked and we don't even talk about anything in particular. It's not you know, the Datacom or what happened. It's wherever it goes and sometimes the conversations get pretty deep and sometimes they're really just Logistics of what's up coming, but one of the things that's been
Forced in that from us is the importance of choosing when you have the ability choosing how you want to spend your time. And I think it is a really hard thing to do, especially against the backdrop of so many things that our struggles.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Alan and I have the exact. I hope she don't listen to this country. I analyze how bad our relationship is, but we wake up have coffee and we trade GameStop and see who
Make the most money by 10 a.m. Is that normal or not? Normal? I mean, you know us I think it's pretty normal. You guys have
this I think she's probably not trading. She's just laughing at you and she literally
hasn't made a trade and she's doing better than me. So we've been out of two weeks. I'm down about six grand and she's beating me but by definitely not doing anything and just drinking her coffee. So yeah, there is a lesson in that I would like to just powered I have
This website follow
this website called stock to it's because they've got a pretty
overrated overrated. Yeah, pretty good thing about once. I got rid of the CEO nothing but headaches for the phone. So I find myself broke because we don't talk that often and now we're on Signal together talking about, you know, dirty things but now that before signal before we picked up our conversation like like grown men whole first. How's your prostate? Because I every time I Pi go well,
About bronze
and well Lois is the surgery I had was very
successful. No, you didn't have surgery but you're fine. Right because I worry about that the f55. I just don't know what's gonna there's a moment of anxiety as I run to the bathroom. So I find it hard and I have to think you do too is I'm working too hard. How do you separate it? Because it's endless work with zoom. I
put parameters around it, and I'm conscious.
S of trying to adhere to those parameters. So the very specific ones that I've adopted our I start the day with coffee with Amy. We have lunch to Everyday scheduled for 30 minutes and I would say four out of five days a week. We have lunch together. So we have a 30-minute break from whatever we're doing.
I try very hard during the week not to schedule anything after 6 p.m. So sometimes I have work to do in the evening. Sometimes I don't but I try not to have anything scheduled after that. I do put regular blocks on my calendar that are not scheduled will time usually mornings and that varies depending on what's going on. But I try to adhere to a couple of hours to three hours at least two or three days a week of just
Joel ball time
I don't schedule anything on Fridays. I do plenty of meetings and things but nothing scheduled and then I do not from Sundown Friday night till Sunday morning. I'm offline. So no email no meetings. No anything I call it digital Sabbath. It's not religious. But obviously it takes its tone from a Sabbath and I find that the most important reset each week for me if I don't do that.
Each week I get worn out pretty quickly. And then Sundays I also don't schedule anything. I am online and and interact but I won't schedule any meeting. So if I look at sort of my Tempo I have this very intense period of time between Monday and Tuesday Thursday, but time-bound it in terms of schedule so that I have plenty of non scheduled time. And then I have three days each week that's unscheduled and I that gives me enough space.
And you know within that I obviously run a lot and exercise and read and I mean I spend time together but interestingly and I think this is a thing that many people for many people. It has been blurred because of covid I I personally used to spend a lot of time getting from point A to point B, and that could be whether I was just in town Boulder going from one meeting to another or you know on a plane going from one city to another and all that time is
Eliminated from the schedule. I'm going to do that right now and interestingly there was a lot of tension release in that movement, even if I was on the phone or even if I was trying to do things in between moving from point A to point B, you were shifting context in a way that allowed you to loosen up a little and I think that time boxing of the interaction which could go I mean, it could go from 7 a.m. To 10 p.m. Every day, and it could go all
Weekend long or it could be at all these other random times like compressing it allows me to then get some of that intellectual and physical release that you need that was otherwise happening in the movement from point A to point B,
as a professional Venture capitalism and one in training still I can see myself never attending. I'm not a big board person. Anyways, I'm only on three or four they don't listen so they won't I don't know. I'm not worried.
If I say I'm never going to board meeting as someone who am I crazy if I say Zoom will work for me for the rest of my life. Is that something that's believable or not? Well,
if you get categorized as crazy then you can just join my my crazy Club if somebody said that to you in jail, if you said it's somebody in January 2020, they would have said you're nuts right at that won't work however now
Obviously that's totally accepted. That's how we're all living Our Lives. I don't think it's crazy at all. I have no personal intention of travelling post covid for all the things that I used to travel for. I've been effectively a remote worker for many many years because I've always invested all across the u.s. So even if I was, you know traveling from point A to point B, I was doing a bunch of other things remotely and you know many times I'd be in CDA and have
Board meetings were one board meeting was in the city. I was in the other board meeting was halfway across the country or across the country. So I've been having to function that way for a long time and I'm very comfortable with it and what we've just demonstrated to you know, the universe of Entrepreneurship is and by the way, a lot of people don't like it so separate like from able to we are certainly able to do all the things we do around Venture Capital entrepreneurship.
And scaling companies for companies that are knowledge based businesses completely in a fully distributed fashion, by the way, not new information, right? There have been companies like automatic and others who are very well known for behaving that way, you know from inception, but we just had that in its entirety and it's not just in the private markets pause also in the public markets, I mean the amount of transactional activity that's being done completely
remotely mind-boggling
is extraordinary.
And you know having been involved in taking, you know, I was involved as a principal and taking a couple of companies public where I was on the road show and you know, like a road show for an IPO. I think the first one I was involved in was 1999 and it was three weeks on private planes flying around the u.s. To meetings where you'd meet with somebody for 30 minutes and maybe they'd look at you after they shook her hand and you'd give your Spiel and then you go to the you go to your black car and get whisked away to the next meeting and do that for three or four times at each City and
and maybe you go to Europe for a couple of days at the beginning of it just to shake the dust off of the presentation and compared to a contemporary Road show that in some cases is is being done in one day.
Yeah, we do our Zone Zoom. I can't wait to hear your story. But instead of puts it back in the Box. The margins are just too good in the experiences to get
you know, when you realize that actually people are not making the decision based on the 30 minutes that they spend with you in person. Why is that 30 minutes physically?
Person the requirement of that motion which was institutionalized and it's like so many other things. I mean you think about the digitization of so many of our activities leading up to the pre covid time period and I'm where investors in and Advocates of and participants in this massive digitization of so many things in business, but yet the overhang of this illusion of the importance of the physical proximity, there's absolutely value to physical interaction in physical proximity around certain
Characteristics of it but there's I don't know 80 90 percent of it where that's actually just incumbency Behavior rather than something that's fundamentally needed. So, I believe we're on the other side of it. I think people will decide whether they want to be with other people or not. And that's up to them. I think the best companies are going to be able to function with people wherever those people are whether they're physically proximate to each other or completely distributed. The best companies are going to be able to adjust for what people want.
And use that as a tool for their businesses rather than something that's either a cost layer that they may or may not want or an inhibition because they want to create a certain type of culture that requires a certain type of behavior.
Yeah. So it's well, I have your I want to go back and just compare some notes about how you're thinking about the world and the big bang and and what we've seen so I'm new to technology and I'm trying to put together my thoughts about the future because I know have Capital to invest
Throughout these of myself and I don't like to trade I love watching the markets, but I want to kind of position myself in the less stressful world. So I'm trying to look at the world in stages and in we had the I'll go back a little bit. We had the railroad bubble which was in essence a great bubble because the tide the country together the move to ship goods the original internet and then we had a nothing wars blah blah blah poverty oil crises yada yada yada, then we had the internet bubble.
Another phenomenal bubble, but really the only thing that we got out of that bubble, which was great was bandwidth then we had the financial crisis. No, sorry, then we had I think the most important moment cuz everybody thought Blackberry would never die. I would say the smartphone so kind of the internet was the internet but it was really all about the bandwidth and you know, you have your stories everybody has their stores view the Bible, but the really the end of the bubble was bandwidth, which was the most important part the second most important part was I say YouTube and
Phone followed by the financial crisis followed obviously now by the idea of fintech and we could say it's trading crypto payments Etc. And then now finally another big moment and this is all now in hindsight. I feel like we didn't really have anything in, you know, you can count so I don't even count social networks. I would say zoom and covid and I'm trying to think
About you know what? I'm missing for like the biggest of Big Bangs because you were there right at the beginning of the internet does any of that make sense here and one of my missing but the internet other than bandwidth that was important from the first
bubble. Well, I have a somewhat different summer different view on the product side than that because I don't think it was only bandwidth and one of the interesting Reflections 20 years later is that many of the ideas that were emerging.
In the late 90s are ideas that are implemented in commonplace today, but the software the device has the infrastructure which I presume you can include bandwidth and didn't exist to affect a true Behavior change. So an example that I would give you would be in 1997. I was an investor in
in a company called I Pro and I Pro have this premise and their entirety of their premise was based on tracking advertising from offline to online from analog to digital the idea that there would be this continual shift to digital advertising and that would create an enormous market and that enormous Market needed to have Analytics.
Or embedded within the web and the metaphor proxy for that company would be for example Nielsen or something like that. If I can get my mind to remember back that long and that was not the only company like that. There were a whole bunch of companies that were created around that the fundamental premise was the acceleration of analog to digital advertising and media and then people's attention and there's a great cliche graph that showed how fast it took, you know to go from, you know zero to a million telephone zero to a million.
EV 0 2 million, you know internet dial-up connections Dada when you time travel back like all that stuff is right and that's woven deeply into the infrastructure that we now use on a daily basis. And if you contemplate how all of that stuff works many of the assertions are premises were correct, but there just wasn't enough of the various pieces in that stack that were needed another example
Which you know we can use video conferencing because you mentioned it like the idea of Zoom is not a new idea. Right? I mean going back in time to the 90s video conferencing over the internet was one of the things that was popular as a completely game-changing thing. If you go back to the 60s, you can watch Jetsons cartoons that had the equivalent of video conferencing and them
And we've been talking about for as long as I can remember as even as a kid about video telephones and that sort of stuff there were many things that had to come into place to cause that to sort of snap into you know, the the Contemporary dominant motion and for videoconferencing frankly in a work context. It was covid it was not the technology. The technology had existed for many years the bandwidth was
They're the software was there maybe it wasn't as easy or convenient or whatever. But what happened is in a matter of about two weeks the entirety of the global in office Workforce that wasn't part of manufacturing or delivery production or delivery of physical Goods had to figure out how to work from their houses. And I remember in the end of March the premonitions that infrastructure couldn't support it the
Offer couldn't support at the companies would fall over. Nobody be able to get through you had to take your Netflix down to lower bandwidth and you could only use it for a little bit of time because it was going to get in the way of your kids going to school and all this sort of stuff and lo and behold, you know, there was a lot of effort put in by a lot of people but all that infrastructure exists all that stuff exists. You could just go down every single one of the things that we use today and go back 20 years and the premonition of many of those things not all of them many of those things were there.
Looking backwards sort of interesting because it gives you a little bit of a roadmap to remember that it's a conversation has been going on for a long time such as oh, wait a second, you know crypto is a totally new thing and nobody's ever talked about digital currency before like bullshit. That was a huge Vector pre-internet
bubble potion, like covid the financial crisis brought it. I was trying to save the moments that it became important. No doubt that this stuff has been the manically going on for
it's not just that there was a moment that kicked into gear, but there was this continual evolution
Lucien of the technology that then intercepted with the moment that created the transformation now this is you know where this goes that I think is interesting is when you're
scrolling we're getting out so now so just since I have you this is where I was trying to get you to so now that we have this potential moment. I had covid almost behind us or not. But the opening ahead of us where does Brad Feld and Foundry with some conviction see things
well.
It's a it's a great question on one level and it's impossible question on the other and I prefer to address it as an impossible question, which is if you look at things in a time period of 1 year 5 years 10 years 20 years.
There's so much uncertainty in the next 12 months that really all you can do with the next 20 years is have a frame of reference on where things could go or a hypothesis about where things could go and from my perspective. I've always approached that as abstract. So for example, when you say, where do you where do you Brad think things go in the next 20 years? I have no idea if our societal structure is
Sustained for the next 20 years in the way that it works and you know, somebody will quickly say, oh well that how could you say that you do you mean you're worried about the future of democracy? No, I'm actually not really even thinking about it from that Dimension. I don't think as humans we have any idea what things will look like in 2040 and I think if we somehow were put in suspended animation and then reappeared in 2040.
I think we'd look around and say I don't understand now you can say well there's going to be flying taxis and there's going to be flying this and there's going to be infinite bandwidth and energy is going to be virtually free and okay, but that's not actually the interesting thing to talk about. How does that then change the way that as humans we interact with each other both locally and globally and when I sort of extrapolate out from that my view is the intersection.
Between human humans and machines is going to radically increase the ability for everything to be distributed. Whatever you want to classify as everything both digital and physical will be dramatically increased.
The artificial boundaries that we have created whether they are Geographic boundaries in cities states countries counties Nations whatever or they are physical boundaries Allah organizations or buildings. Sorry functional boundaries, like organizations are physical boundaries like buildings.
All of the historical way that we've approached them 20 years from now will be obliterated and there might be artifacts and remnants of the way. We approached them in 2019.
But if you think of 2021 versus 2019 just even in the context of physical infrastructure the way we're using our physical infrastructure today is extremely different because of a hundred and twenty nanometers thing. Lots of people will want to go back to using our physical infrastructure the way we used to but there are lots of people who won't there are plenty of people who the way our physical infrastructure has worked puts them at a structural disadvantage.
The whole discussion around Equity especially economic equity for both gender and race has been a very powerful one. And I think we're just beginning to even scratch the surface of reconfiguration of that on a going-forward basis. And so, you know in the next year, okay, maybe there's a conversation to be had but the next 20 years no fucking clue
awesome. And and so what excites you what I mean because you take email like Nicole do mostly your minds open.
Open what is exciting to Brad because I know last time I checked for the first three years crypto was an interesting to you, but I got to think decentralization is the shone's the other thing about this bubble. It rages here right now, which I love is we have a chance to free ourselves whether we like it or not or whether we want it or not from from Facebook Google with decentralization. If there wasn't this bubble, we wouldn't have this other side all this money on the other side right now trying to disrupt them. Have you changed your opinion on on
About
I like the I like the word decentralisation much more than crypto because it applies to many many more things other than just money and I think that the notion of decentralization has been pretty fundamental and a lot of the stuff I've been involved in as an investor and you know, I could even use physical examples of that with Hardware companies. You know that make
The Industrial Products and now fit on a desktop so you can have decentralized manufacturing. So you don't have to have a physical manufacturing facility to make small small things small numbers of things. If you want to do high volume production, you probably still will do that in a centralized facility, but the idea of moving the means of production closer to whoever is the consumer of the thing is, you know, a physical instantiation of decentralization, obviously the whole
Of work and motion of work plays into that where people live I mean I've lived in Colorado for 25 years and I've invested all across the u.s. My view going back to coming out of the financial crisis was very very strong that we were shifting from A hierarchical View to a network view of society and that hierarchies would still exist but networks were going to be the dominant form of Engagement and as part of that. I had a very, you know, strong thesis deeply held views.
That entrepreneurship and Innovation should be democratized globally or decentralized if you want to use that word and the idea that you had to go to Silicon Valley to build a business was ludicrous and even in 2012 when I came out with a book titled startup communities where the fundamental thesis was any City with at least a hundred thousand people should be able to build a vibrant startup Community. There was still the the cliche that if you were really serious about creating a company you needed to go to the Bay Area and I think in 20
one that cliche is gone the Bay Area still an amazing place to build companies and to create new businesses, but there are enormous number of examples of incredible companies throughout the world and many many many it entrepreneurial companies and many examples of startup communities that are extremely vibrant and growing very very quickly where Innovation is at the core of those geographies and then again with covid sort of understanding better how to think about that in a network model versus a
Physical Geographic model so it doesn't have to be placed based. It can be much more about the networks of people and how they interact with each other so that phenomena which we've been forced into because of covid to live in a certain way with it coming out of covid. There's multiple different frames of reference and there's definitely the frame of reference that coming out of it. Everybody's going to snap right back to where they were in 2820 and January. I simply don't believe that I think we have a structure
Change and the word decentralization. Is that the court?
Yeah. I mean, I'm a hundred percent with you because can't wait to travel to certain places with certain people that you're just not going to get me to work in that way again, and I'm almost embarrassed at how much I chased and thought it was important to do certain things and how much extra risk. We all took living that pre covid life last minute trips over night flights.
It's to shake hands to get your face in front of you. How would it be different? Do you think for like Rachel and math or any kid because I think I feel bad for them because I don't know if you as the 25 year-old starting out in business can catch up without the face-to-face. So what would you think about that
historical reference here might be useful. I mean, we're the same age. And so I firmly embrace the notion that I'm an early member of
Generation X. I was born in nineteen end of 1965. So I'm at the front end of it. I'm definitely not part of the boomer generation. And you know, for those of you that don't know anything about Generation X and you want to taste it I encourage you to read Douglas Copeland's upon us both called Generation X. I think it was written 1991
1999 year
1991 and it doesn't describe Generation X. It just tells a story and you get a total feel for what was going on in that time.
I'm period between you know amongst people who are in that age range right in their mid-20s and it was a particularly challenging time to be in your mid-20s because of the macro dynamics that we're going on in the United States. I can't speak about the world because I don't know that I had enough perspective outside the US and during a period of time, you know, the reason that were labeled Slackers, you know, as a generation is because that
Is where that came from like this whole notion of you know, fuck it the world's, you know, the world's not going to get better can't fix anything not nihilistic, but maybe fatalistic, you know, I have a job because I have to have a job because I need to have money to pay for my food, but not because I have any aspiration for anything sort of at the essence of it and I'm describing this as a cultural norm not as a broad characterization and if you look at you know people that are in their mid-40s to mid-50s today and sir.
Of Trace back. There's obviously been many many many many people that went through that and created new things and new ways of being for themselves and for the people around them and for their businesses and I think that phenomenal will happen with with Rachel and her generation and you know, my parents don't understand my generation and I won't and you won't understand your kids generation and part of the changes that happen across those boundaries are
both social changes as well as broad societal changes that are result sometimes of product innovation technology Etc and sometimes aren't and for anybody who's anybody who any of this Rings true to you know, just watch some period pieces go watch a couple episodes of Mad Men and try to put yourself back in that trajectory go watch, you know, think about what Silicon Valley was really like in the 1960s and 1970s and what you know, what Haight-Ashbury
Scented in that period of time are go watch milk or something from you know, a different segment of the time period that go
watch Downton Abbey its technology show relief and everybody. There you go, right
like all these things which is humans like ships going to keep changing and it's going to keep happening and people going to figure it out and there are come back to something I said earlier. They're massive inequities in our society. And when you're in a position of having resources, you can choose what you want to do with those resources in your time and if you choose to try to be in
Alton addressing and supporting Improvement of society from some frame of reference. I'm not going to be more realistic about it. But you can choose to allocate time energy resources to that or you cannot and allocate your time energy to other things and those are always going to be part of the human experiences of species. And where we go is going to be unpredictable as a result. I'm very optimistic for Rachel because she has she has
As you as an example of what not to do and she has Elena as an example of what to do.
Yeah, smartypants the so one of the most exciting things that I've done first of all, I appreciate that because I'm super super I'm a because I'm 55 and have some Freedom. Do you find yourself up Brad? Anytime? I've said, I'm like, hey man, I'm 55. I don't have to do that. Do you use that line, or is it just me?
I don't use that line, but I have actually it's probably not not in use the same way not set the same way but something I'm trying to do a better job on now that I'm 55 verses when I was 35, which is much of my life and much of my choices while they've benefited me have not necessarily been for me. They are choices and things that I've done for others rather than
And choosing to do it for me and that's my own stuff. That's not my therapist gets lots of time with me on that topic and as I'm getting older and I am, you know, you get older almost for me at least the reality of mortality and in realize that was going to rhyme but I like that the reality of mortality starts to become clearer.
One's mortality and you know that has to do with aging people around you. I had a extraordinarily close friend really a second father. Who's the guy who bought my first company guy named Len fassler. Who was my greatest Mentor. I learned the most from Len about kind of everything with regard to business during not just the time when he bought my first company, but then, you know, the two decades after that where we worked together on a number of companies some successful some not
And it wasn't just about business, but it was about how to engage with people on how to really work with people. He passed away in January. He was you know, he was ill for a while and you know, those kinds of things are pretty foundational. So for me, it is in this crisis and it comes back to the question. You asked earlier Howard about how I spend my time and where the boundaries right putting more of that in place for
me
to make sure that there's enough that I'm getting I'm doing enough.
Things that are feeding me versus all the things I'm doing are depleting me or feeding others and you know, really simple example again the ties back to the whole notion of am I crazy and I heard crazy that I would never physically go to a board pretty again. I don't know how many millions of miles I traveled going from thing to thing board meeting the board meeting meeting to meeting City to city that wasn't for me. I mean there was certainly for my professional career that there was an element of that but most of that
Motion was because I felt obligated to do that based on the contextual environment. I was operating it and and that was in you know, I'd say that was an illusion of my own construction like he what I have control over that and I'm fortunate that I have the resources to not just have control over it but to also be able to influence my environment so that I can be effective, you know within that motion. So I guess I just encouraged and I encourage the wrong word. That's how I think about it.
It and I am people want to think about it that way great. If people don't like the way to think about it that way that's fine. Dude. That's maybe I what I encourage those people spend time thinking about what's important to them and I think in our contemporary Society, we do not spend enough people do not spend enough
time on that. Yeah. I'm calling it be better selfish meaning I was doing all these selfish things, but they were so sloppy and time is all I got so I just want to be I want to be mean about it, but I want to be
Selfish but aware like just a better selfish and I think like I said, these are the big bang moments for me and zoom being one of them, even though I like you said it's been around for a hundred years the whole idea that we would do this. But now it I have the tool that allows me to be better selfish and it's a win-win-win I think so. I just have to explain it better and kind of stayed True to this. It's like the new serenity now, so so one of the things that got me
just to end on that Spectrum Howard like
There's a bunch of people who are cut. We're going to be comfortable with those things. And then there's people that aren't and I think one of the challenges for many is the fear that one will miss an opportunity if they don't adapt to what other people want and you know the other end of the Spectrum, which is the reality that when my dad said for many years when you're dead they put you in the ground, although we joke about whether they put you in the ground are they which in an urn and Ashes maybe you know, if
Successful and well-known, they they print your picture in the newspaper and you know two weeks later everybody. Everybody's on with our lives. He would say, that's me when I was a little kid sort of as a focus of pay attention to the moment pay attention to now and I just go back to like the fear of fear of missing the opportunity actually the cliche fomo or fear of missing out and it's just turn it upside down right and and make it the joy of missing out.
All right. It's actually fine with me to miss lots of opportunities because the other person and I didn't necessarily want to engage with each other. That's fine. If they don't want to awesome go do your own thing. I'll do my thing because there's so many things to do and why not do them from a frame of reference of what you really want to be doing versus what you feel obligated to do or that you're chasing
after so in to end it with one thing then on that subject. There were no oddsmakers anywhere in the world that had
Linds and SPAC 2021 first of all for from my angle, it's cool. Like when I saw that you were doing it because I was down that path and I this legitimizes Linds entity. I'm doing it but more importantly It's the Most Fascinating maybe it legitimizes me. Yes, but I can't you should say that I will not say like that would go like that would not be smart Pony but yes, you should joke and say that the it took a year.
Here to get my head around it. And now I think it's you know, it's not decentralized but it is the coolest thing that I've worked on it again. I'm old and not old like, you know, put me to retire but like set in my ways and so it's kind of the funnest newest thing, you know, especially with the band that we put together that I've done since I started social leverage with Tom and Gary and you know, I love working with my partners, but once you've seen the end zone, you know, it's like once The Wizard of Oz once you meet the wizard
Got to change things up. So how did you get suited up to do this? Who the hell had a photo of you doing something that you ended up working on us back?
I've been thinking about it on and off for a while very immaturely and with a premise that wasn't necessarily valid around a particular industry that I thought needed to be Consolidated and so it wasn't a new thought to me, but I didn't really totally understand it then in.
Relatively short order as I started going deeper on it. I realized that there are you know something that I've struggled with as an investor for many years not in a negative way just sort of trying to process in terms of strategy is there's multiple layers of where people engage in the capital stack and one of the things that had been happening in technology and in the universe, I plan which is very different from when I started yeah was the shift of the
Tree between public markets and private markets and you know there have been that that boundary has moved over time up and
down. That's what I've been focused on for 20 years. Yeah, right, but that boundary
moved so far up where up is defined as the entry point for being a public company your market cap being so high because of the desire of a series of forces a bunch of
Jay's some factual assertions, but really fundamentally a number of investors who were very focused on capturing that value privately and then by the time that value increased to a certain level then those companies would be available to the public market and that made no sense to me as an
investor. Correct if they were hoarding and you know, we let him get away with it.
So that that was really the aha moment for me and once I understood that I started thinking about
You know companies in my experience that had gone public that we'd had successful IPOs within market caps that were you know, half a billion dollars to a couple of billion dollars and then what happened to them over time when they were successful were their value accreted but in the public market instead of in the private markets and how those companies as public companies were actually stronger companies than their private company equivalence because the public markets made them get their shit together on a bunch of Dimensions, correct.
And how in a lot of ways because there wasn't Capital piled on top of Capitol pile on top of Capitol. It created a lot more flexibility for everyone in the capital stack everybody that were owners of the company to make their choices about what they wanted to do with their ownership position, whether they wanted to hold it forever or whether they wanted to sell pieces of it at different points in time, which granted there are now efforts in the private markets to make more liquidity.
The private market so the private markets look like private versions of the public market, but fundamentally, I sort of looked at this and said yeah, this is a transposition of that activity. So for me the focal point was finding a partner, you know beyond my partners at Foundry who I felt was purpose-built to do this type of thing as a repeatable business and that person in my world was Jim Leggio who was multi-time see
fo several companies is also a bit of a pause there for several public companies has also been CEO has also been somebody who has sought public companies to other public companies. So sort of very comfortable operator very disciplined and very much a student of all of the elements of what you have to do in a serious way and you know that against the backdrop of our extremely large Network both direct and indirect companies and through our
Basements in other other funds and our Network that we have made it a very very interesting thing to to explore and to go do and it's been it's been very powerful. It's been fascinating and it's been amazing to me to watch how quickly it has evolved. Yeah. So even last summer when you know, we started talking about it, I would say there was a lot of immaturity around all of the discussions between all parties whether those parties.
Were buyers sellers Bankers investors Public Market players pipe investors Venture capitalists. Angel Investors founder like a lawyers. Like there was just there were a few people that really understood what to do, but there was an enormous amount of misunderstanding of what was happening how things worked what the incentives and motivations were and how to how to play it out successfully for a company and even just a description of what guy
That was very obtuse. And I think today there's still huge amounts of lack of understanding but it's much much clearer and more normalized across the system. And whenever I get involved in something, you know, there's always the edge case of things fail like whenever I find a company you always have to accept that a company might fail. Yeah. So that's that's a given in any scenario of what you do is sort of like saying is a human being eventually you're going to die and so for me
I come at this believing this is going to be a long-term part of the capital structure of Entrepreneurship and emerging companies and it'll be a powerful part of the transition from private to public markets. There's a chance that it's that it's a phase and there are restructuring of other activities that cause it to be something that has its time and then moves on
I don't see that but
my general sense in my belief having now been soaking in it for the last nine months is that it's a Capital stock.
Awesome. Well, I'm just so glad that were parallel that I'm smart enough to sense that you would be up for something like that. And there's so many bad takes that I don't I just have no time to listen to him because I can call you and you're going to give
the honesty the other side of this Howard, you know this from from my personality, right? I like to get involved in things that are new in the domain in which I've spent a lot of time so, you know the nose
Ocean of being if you go back to the Web 2.0 time frame when that was starting to emerge the idea of a super Angel right where a Super Angel made lots of Investments and they were successful entrepreneurs who made 20 30 40 Angel Investments, which today we don't even talk about but in two thousand and five six seven was a new thing well between 1994 and 1996. I made 40 Angel Investments with the money that I made from my first company
personal. Yeah. I was one of them so as angel investor rights.
I could go through a series of things like that, which would include by the way text Arts which was you know, II accelerator program that was created. It's one of the couple of global very visible significant ones that have had long runs and lots of impact and it was a fascinating idea. That was very unformed at the very beginning and when we started techstars in 2006 people said, why are you doing that? That's stupid like my piece too.
But could be really cool. I remember when AngelList announced indicates. We were the you know the next day we announced Syndicate on AngelList at Foundry group and we did about 65 investments from our Syndicate and we learned a ton about both the strengths and weaknesses
of that approach if we're going to put the correct you did that I wanted to but damn I'm glad I missed it but I get it. Yeah,
I can give another five examples like that, but it's something I mean my partners and I are one of the if not the first VC.
That made as part of its institutional motion investing in other funds. There are plenty of fund of funds that invest in Venture funds but also do direct Investments. I think we were the first to VC firm that institutionalized majority of our Capital goes into direct investing but 25% of our capital is invested in proceed and seat stage funds and that's part of our our Network in our business. So I like to be involved in these new things and learn from them and be part of
shaping them. Yeah. I feel it's the biggest thing to happen. They'll be a lot of bad.
Behavior but they're always bad behavior. I think it's the most Innovative because it's an old idea was an extraction product will still be used for extraction on the bad side, but it'll lead also to exploring and opportunity on their side. I feel like it just it just feels very decentralized. Obviously. It's impossible for something that you rely on Capital from the centralized system for now to be decentralized, but it's the move towards some decentralization where investors can be the GM again.
And not just be on the outside wondering what Vanguard and black rocker doing. So so kudos to you for doing
it that sneaky decentralized word again.
You gotta know. I know probably used improperly but it's our show no one gets out of changes except Howie. So this was fun. I learned a lot. Well, I think what's cool in our household is there's no two generations of linzinnz reading your blog and if you know for Rachel ever meets a guy post covid, there could be a little a third-generation Linden.
You're just you're influencing potentially three generations of Lindsay and Max rate.
Do never going to happen. Dude - you're not putting any pressure
on he goes, he goes the Guitar Center guy. Max is still stuck on Guitar Center. He gives, you know cred so but you got one lens in on your so what you got to on your side Alan and and and Rachel and then myself but even Max he says hello today when I said I was talking to you IMAX. So all right. Say hi to Amy.
As usual and once will compared he's back notes, hopefully one day soon on the other side, and I appreciate everything you've shared with me over the years as a mentor. So I appreciate it buddy
always fun to spend an hour bullshitting with you on with with knut in the background knud and join our
way. Thank you so much, Dad canute's awake. He enjoyed it. Thanks, buddy. Talk to you soon. See ya.
The old Legend he is a legend. We toned it down you say I want to discuss or twice. Yeah, the way he wrapped it up is right. Like the guy's been is in the mix, you know, you can be in the mix from Aspen. You can mean that's I forgot to talk about the Emerging Markets of America the old flyover stay they started out the Emerging Market. No. Well, this is what you've been writing about for years, you know, if you have a hundred thousand people like Boulder, did you can be a hub so covid just made
His 2012 book more relevant than ever so go pick that up. I'll put it in the post to go with this. You are listening to panic with friends. I was a hey Garth first for timer or three timer Brad Feld can't believe it's been over a year where we're at a year. Yes. We are then a long year man. I don't know. It's been long and it's been fast. I don't know. It said no, it's been long. I've been staring at a 4-year that fell feels like a long year. Yeah. So you're taking a break slacker option or way. I'll still it be
Producing these editing these and posting them so we'll be good. Alright, so safe travels to Norwood this panic, but friends we sit down with obviously friends makes it better. We started out panicking in March of last year. And today we're frolicking in the joy of the reopening and all the new trends that have started but Panic will always be there in the background. And so we'll stick with the name you
And find us on Spotify Apple Google to search Panic with friends or search my name Howard lens and subscribe. You won't have to do anything ever again except get an alert once a week from us that we've got a new show up with an investor entrepreneur founder venture capitalist. Trying to stay just a little bit ahead. Everybody else. You don't have to be too far ahead of people to make fortunes. Have a great week. Talk to you soon.
