20VC with Harry Stebbings

How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong

5765 summary words 26 min summary Watch video

Start with the signal

26 min read

Summary

At-a-Glance

  • Verdict: Watch fully
  • Core thesis: FOMO built a social trading app to $550M valuation with 17 people by giving non-founders equity like founders, staying lean, using AI to ship fast, and raising strategically from Benchmark/Index/USV without needing the capital.
  • Why it matters: This is a masterclass in consumer fintech GTM, capital efficiency, team structure, and investor selection—Paul built a Robinhood competitor globally with a tiny team by solving the cold-start problem with 140 angels, then raised only when momentum was undeniable.
  • Best use: Ken should watch for tactical insights on angel-driven distribution, when to take VC money, how to structure equity for senior engineers, and how to compete with incumbents by being global-first and social-native.

Executive Summary

Paul Erlang co-founded FOMO, a social trading app for on-chain assets (Bitcoin, Ethereum, attention tokens) launching global equities and perps. Despite raising $94M total across three rounds (angel, $20M Series A from Benchmark, $75M Series B from Index and USV), FOMO has only 17 employees, no hierarchy, no one-on-ones, and expects fewer than 25 people in a year. The company is profitable and had more cash on hand than it raised even before the Series B. Paul's thesis: Robinhood went too broad too fast and couldn't go global; FOMO is trading-first with social features (real-time holdings, share cards, fumbles) to create momentum and discovery, eventually expanding to a global 'expression of conviction' across asset classes (equities, perps, prediction markets) unified by the social graph—not a bundled 'everything app.'

The fundraising story is unusual. FOMO did an angel-only first round with 140 investors to solve the consumer cold-start problem, treating best users as owners and distribution channels. Paul and co-founder Say worked eight months without pay, gave non-founders 2-3% equity each (founder-level stakes) to senior engineers who also took no salary, and only raised institutional money when Benchmark came inbound via angel Aaron Harris. Paul didn't know Benchmark's tier; he chose Chathan because he 'got it instantly.' For Series B, Paul set an anchor price in early conversations, waited months talking to Fred Wilson (USV) and then Index came inbound. He took minimal secondary 'not enough to change lifestyle' to avoid the Meta acquisition trap Evan Spiegel warned about. Key lesson: announce your round only when ready to raise the next one, because inbound floods waste time.

On building: FOMO ships insanely fast—built their web app in one month, a new product (equivalent to competitors' entire app) in three weeks—using AI (Claude Code, Codex) with enterprise guardrails. Paul believes 20% of dev salaries will go to tokens and is not price-sensitive yet. He hires only senior engineers who feel like owners, avoiding 996 culture but shipping weekends when momentum demands. Design-to-eng ratio is 1:16 (one designer, 16 engineers). Paul says AI makes thorough code review faster than writing; Tina (staff front-end eng) uses AI for scaffolding then rewrites. He warns CS students to use less AI in school to build fundamentals, but use it heavily in practice. Hiring too fast and acquiring businesses without interviewing everyone are his top scaling mistakes to avoid.

On growth and media: FOMO has an in-house creator management system with 30-40 UGC clippers, churning based on CPM/CAC vs LTV. Paul's rule: iterate one winning content format obsessively (font, color, placement, speaker) instead of chasing novelty. CAC rises over time as you exhaust low-hanging fruit, but you should raise CAC as long as it's below LTV to capture larger audiences. The app has share cards for positions and 'fumbles' (selling too early) that virally spread on other platforms, creating a feedback loop. Iceman turned $10K into $2.5M overnight; Remus turned $300 into $1.5M in a month—both shared widely. Paul wants native FOMO creators, not LeBron James, learning from Clubhouse's mistake of overshadowing core users with celebrities. He's building a media arm to become 'one of the largest media businesses for a tech company in the world.'

Key Takeaways

  • Claim: Consumer apps die from small mistakes; you need native creators, not transplanted celebrities. | Evidence: Clubhouse had core users who loved it, then brought on celebrities who overshadowed them—product momentum collapsed. Logan Paul got big on Vine as a native creator. BeReal required daily actions and lost momentum when users stopped. FOMO wants native traders like Iceman ($10K to $2.5M overnight) and Remus ($300 to $1.5M in a month), not LeBron James trading on the app. | Caveat: Paul doesn't detail how FOMO will prevent its own momentum loss or whether share cards and social features are sticky enough long-term if trading volume drops in bear markets. | Implication: For Ken's agents/content businesses: platform-native champions > borrowed audiences. Early adopters who feel ownership (via equity, early access, community status) create compounding loops. Avoid celebrity top-down GTM in consumer. | Timestamp: 18:45
  • Claim: Give non-founders equity like founders (2-3% each) to create an extended founder team that feels ownership. | Evidence: FOMO's first 5-7 senior engineers took no pay for 8 months and got 2-3% equity each (typical founder stakes). Paul says if those 5-10 people build for 10 years, 'there's literally nothing stopping us.' The team is senior enough and has enough ownership that they work autonomously, shipping products in 3 weeks without 996 mandates. | Caveat: This only works if you hire senior engineers willing to work without salary and if equity stakes justify the risk. Paul had capital from the angel round but chose not to pay salaries. Unclear if this scales beyond 25 people or if dilution becomes a problem in later rounds. | Implication: For Ken's AI ops/agent businesses: smaller teams with founder-level equity beats larger teams with standard options. If Ken advises founders, push them to capitalize the first 5-10 hires generously and hire senior-only. Risk: over-dilution if the team doesn't stay lean. | Timestamp: 10:22
  • Claim: Announce your funding round only when you're ready to raise the next one, to avoid inbound time-sinks. | Evidence: Paul says as soon as you announce a round, 'tons of inbound from other investors' wastes time saying no. VCs' job is to meet companies, not necessarily invest. Benchmark/Index/USV came inbound because of traction, not because Paul ran a process (except Series A). Series B took months of relationship-building with Fred Wilson before term sheet. | Caveat: This assumes you have momentum and don't need signal/validation from a public announcement. For some startups, announcing early creates FOMO among investors or customers. Paul's advice applies to companies with strong fundamentals and inbound demand. | Implication: For Ken's portfolio/advising: time funding announcements strategically. If a company is growing fast, delay PR until the next raise to control investor access. Use announcements as a demand signal, not a vanity metric. | Timestamp: 14:50
  • Claim: Verticalize infrastructure (own your stack) when it touches core product; buy/acquire back-office stuff. | Evidence: FOMO built its web trading terminal from scratch because competitors 'just acquired trading terminals' but FOMO wanted a unique social trading experience. However, they'll acquire or partner for data infrastructure, bare-metal servers (to avoid AWS costs), indexing—anything behind the scenes that takes too long to build expertise in. | Caveat: This requires capital and engineering depth. Paul has $75M and senior engineers. Smaller startups may not have the runway to verticalize. Also unclear what happens if the acquired infrastructure has cultural/product mismatches (Paul earlier warned against acquiring businesses because you don't interview everyone). | Implication: For Ken's agent/AI businesses: own the user-facing layer (UX, product) but rent/partner on commoditized backend (data, infra, LLM APIs). Differentiate on the parts users see. Don't over-build infra unless it's a moat. | Timestamp: 52:30
  • Claim: CAC rises over time as you exhaust low-hanging fruit; you should increase spend as long as CAC < LTV to capture larger audiences. | Evidence: Paul says a user with $30 LTV costing $0.80 is easy; but the next user might need 10 impressions instead of 2, costing $3. You should raise CAC to $3 as long as LTV > CAC. Opposing force: you get better at the game (CAC down) but each incremental user is harder (CAC up). Brand proliferation also lowers CAC by making you the default. | Caveat: This assumes LTV stays constant or grows, which may not hold if market conditions change (crypto bear market, regulation). Also assumes accurate attribution, which Paul admits is 'really freaking hard' for brand marketing. CAC/LTV math breaks if retention drops. | Implication: For Ken: advise portfolio companies to model CAC payback curves dynamically and raise spend when unit economics allow, not when CAC feels 'too high.' Brand marketing (immortal assets like podcast sponsorships, football shirts) compounds over time and should be weighted higher than transient billboards. | Timestamp: 29:10
  • Claim: Iterate one winning content format obsessively (font, color, placement, speaker) instead of finding the next new thing. | Evidence: Early on, FOMO would find a working creator format and then try to 'figure out the next thing that works'—that's wrong. Paul says you should 'continue to iterate on that and make it better and better until it works better and better and then replicate.' Content is a numbers game: impressions, conversions, CPM, CAC. Churn creators whose CAC > LTV. | Caveat: This assumes the format doesn't saturate or fatigue audiences. TikTok/Instagram algorithms change; what works today may not work in 6 months. Paul doesn't discuss refresh cycles or when to pivot formats. | Implication: For Ken's content/media: don't chase novelty in winning formats. Double down on what converts, test small variations (A/B font, speaker, hook), and scale winners. Churn low performers ruthlessly. Apply this to agent-generated content pipelines. | Timestamp: 30:45
  • Claim: 20% of developer salaries will go to AI tokens; current spend is ~3.8% (Salesforce $300M on Anthropic). | Evidence: Ken asks if Paul can see spending 20% of dev salaries on tokens; Paul says 'definitely' at current prices, though he hopes for a race-to-bottom as models commoditize. He's not price-sensitive now because trade-off is 'enormous.' FOMO built web app in 1 month, new product in 3 weeks using Claude Code/Codex. | Caveat: Paul hopes energy/compute/token costs drop, which may not happen if OpenAI/Anthropic maintain pricing power. Also, this assumes token spend replaces headcount; if it doesn't, margins compress. Uber/Microsoft questioned AI productivity gains; Paul's team is small/senior, so may not generalize. | Implication: For Ken's investing: if token spend hits 20% of dev salaries, OpenAI/Anthropic are $5T companies; if it stays at 4%, they're overvalued. Watch for commoditization vs. pricing power. For portfolio: budget for 10-20% of eng cost as token spend now; if you're not seeing velocity gains, your eng hiring bar is too low. | Timestamp: 23:40
  • Claim: Best hires come from months-long relationship building, not recruiters or one-time intros. | Evidence: Paul says 'all our best hires' came from spending months building relationships, not from recruiters or single VC intros. He warns founders: if you're not hiring core engineers yourself, 'we got a problem.' VCs can help on final calls but shouldn't do pipeline. | Caveat: This is time-intensive and may not scale if you need to hire 10+ engineers quickly. Also assumes founders have time/network to nurture relationships while building product. Junior founders may lack the network. | Implication: For Ken's advising: push founders to start recruiting pipeline 6+ months before they need hires. Intros from VCs should be warm-ups, not silver bullets. Founders who outsource eng hiring to recruiters early are red flags. | Timestamp: 15:10

Detailed Brief

Fundraising Strategy: Angel-First, Institutional Later, Anchor Price Early

  • Claims: FOMO did 140-angel round first to solve consumer cold-start problem and create distribution; Only raised Series A from Benchmark when momentum was clear; didn't know Benchmark's tier, chose Chathan for product intuition; Series B: Paul set anchor price in early conversations with Index/USV, waited months with Fred Wilson, took minimal secondary; Announce rounds only when ready for next raise to avoid inbound time-waste
  • Evidence: Angel round included 140 investors treated as distribution channel; Aaron Harris (YC) was best angel for financing/term sheet expertise; Benchmark came inbound via Aaron; Peter Fenton was on phone during pitch but said 'I love the app, I've been on it the entire time'—aha moment; Series B: Index did $55M, USV $15M at $550M post; Paul: 'we set a number and that anchored the conversation'; Paul on announcing: 'as soon as you announce a round, you get tons of inbound...it takes up time to tell them no'
  • Caveats: 140-angel strategy only works if you have a consumer product with viral potential; B2B founders can't replicate this; Paul's naivety about Benchmark's tier was lucky; most founders should know VC landscape to negotiate; Minimal secondary assumes founders are financially stable enough to wait; Evan Spiegel took secondary to resist Meta acquisition, but Paul's 'not enough to change lifestyle' may be too conservative if personal runway is short; Delaying announcements assumes you have traction and don't need PR for customer/talent acquisition
  • Implications: For Ken's portfolio: angel-heavy rounds work for consumer products with network effects; push founders to treat angels as distribution, not just capital; Benchmark/Index/USV all came inbound because of traction—Ken should advise founders to build leverage before raising, not raise to build leverage; Anchoring price early in informal conversations sets negotiation range; teach founders to state valuation expectations upfront if they don't need the money; Secondary timing matters: take enough to de-risk personal finances (resist lowball acquisitions) but not so much that motivation drops

Team Structure: 17 People, No Hierarchy, Founder-Level Equity for Senior Engineers

  • Claims: FOMO has 17 employees, expects <25 in a year; no meetings, no one-on-ones, no hierarchy—everyone self-reports; First 5-7 engineers took no pay for 8 months, got 2-3% equity each (founder-level stakes); Design-to-eng ratio is 1:16 (one designer); Paul says design becomes more important but ships fast via prototyping; Senior engineers use AI (Claude Code, Codex) to scaffold then rewrite; built web app in 1 month, new product in 3 weeks
  • Evidence: Paul: 'we gave non-founders a percentage of the company that usually founders get...if those 5-10 people build this for 10 years, there's literally nothing stopping us'; Tina (staff front-end eng) uses AI to get framework/overview, then restructures/rewrites most code—speeds learning, not just output; Paul: 'we built our web app in one month...this product [new launch] in three weeks and this product is what entire other apps' entire product is'; Paul on 996: 'we don't put numbers to it...people love what they're doing, so we're always on but we're not mandating weekends'
  • Caveats: Flat structure works for 17 people but Paul admits 'as we scale to a certain number that will have to change'—no guidance on what number; 2-3% equity per engineer only works if team stays small; dilution could be painful if they scale to 50+ or raise more rounds; AI productivity assumes senior engineers who know what good code looks like; Uber/Microsoft questioned AI gains, possibly because mid-level engineers don't have taste to review; Shipping in 3 weeks assumes no regulatory/compliance blockers (fintech has heavy reg); unclear if this velocity applies to regulated features
  • Implications: For Ken's AI agent businesses: bet on small teams of senior engineers with AI tooling, not large teams of juniors. 10x productivity is real if hiring bar is high.; Equity advice: give founder-level stakes (2-3%) to first 5-10 engineers if they're senior and willing to grind. This is dilutive but cheaper than hiring 50 people.; Flat orgs scale to ~20-25 people; beyond that, hierarchy is unavoidable. Founders should plan transition points (team leads, eng managers) in advance.; For content/ops: 1 designer per 16 engineers works if you're shipping fast and iterating with users. Don't over-hire designers early; prototype and test.

Product Strategy: Trading-First, Social Second, Global from Day One

  • Claims: FOMO is trading-first (on-chain assets, soon equities/perps globally), social features (real-time holdings, share cards, fumbles) create momentum and discovery; Robinhood went too broad (retirement accounts, prediction markets, sports betting) and couldn't go global; FOMO is global from day one via on-chain; Social graph is the glue: express conviction across assets (oil perps, short US equities, prediction markets on Strait of Hormuz closing); Perps remove need for SPVs/underlying asset transfers (synthetic bets on price); prediction markets let retail access earlier than IPOs
  • Evidence: Paul on Robinhood: 'everything app means not intentional...there's no glue between these things. At FOMO, we think it's the social graph'; Share cards show positions, fumbles (sold too early), and go viral—Iceman turned $10K to $2.5M overnight, Remus $300 to $1.5M in a month, both shared widely; Paul on perps: 'you're betting on price going up/down without exchanging the underlying...Cerebrus IPO, Hyperliquid price converged to NYSE price in real-time'; Paul: 'Robinhood saturated US but couldn't go global...on-chain is global from day one. If they tokenize equities, they can give global access'
  • Caveats: Social features work for crypto traders but unclear if mainstream users want public holdings (privacy concerns). Paul doesn't address opt-in/opt-out or finsta-style private accounts.; Perps on pre-IPO companies (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI) are speculative and could burn retail investors if first mover (SpaceX) performs poorly; Paul admits 'if SpaceX performs poorly, OpenAI/Anthropic IPOs will have a hard time'; Global expansion assumes FOMO can navigate 50+ countries' brokerage laws; Revolut succeeded in Europe because of unified regulatory frameworks (MiFID II), but Asia/LatAm is fragmented; Trading-first means FOMO is exposed to market cycles (crypto bear = lower volumes); Paul took funding to 'protect downside' but revenue volatility could still hurt morale
  • Implications: For Ken's investing: social graph as glue is defensible if network effects compound (follow traders, share cards, leaderboards). Watch if FOMO can grow non-trading engagement (forums, education, paper trading).; Perps and prediction markets democratize access to private assets (SpaceX, Anthropic) but retail may get burned—reputation risk. Ken should assess consumer protection strategy.; Global-first is the right move for fintech; Robinhood's US-only moat is shrinking. FOMO's on-chain strategy is smart but execution risk is high (regulatory, liquidity, UX).; Trading-first apps need to build non-transactional features (content, community, education) to survive bear markets. BeReal failed because it required daily actions; FOMO needs passive engagement loops.

Growth & Media: UGC Clippers, Share Cards, Native Creators, Immortal Assets

  • Claims: FOMO has in-house creator management for 30-40 UGC clippers, churns based on CPM/CAC vs LTV, iterates one winning format obsessively; Share cards for positions/fumbles create viral feedback loop—spread on TikTok/Twitter, drive attention to FOMO; Building media arm to be 'one of the largest media businesses for a tech company'; partnerships with streamers, doing clipping content; Brand marketing: look for immortal assets (podcast evergreen episodes, football shirts worn for years) not transient billboards
  • Evidence: Paul: 'iterate on one format, make it better and better...font, color, placement, speaker...double down on what works, don't chase novelty'; Iceman $10K to $2.5M, Remus $300 to $1.5M—both publicly shared on social, driving signups. Share cards show fumbles (sold too early) for virality.; CAC formula: total revenue from attributed channels per month / cost to acquire those users. Churn creators if CAC > LTV.; Paul on brand: 'if you sponsor a podcast, make sure it's in perpetuity...Bill Gurley episode still gets thousands of plays per month 3 years later. Football shirts from 10 years ago still worn with Vodafone logo.'
  • Caveats: CAC rising over time assumes market isn't saturated; if crypto trader TAM is small, FOMO may hit ceiling. Paul doesn't address TAM size or growth projections.; Viral share cards assume traders are comfortable with public holdings; privacy-conscious users may opt out, limiting virality. Also, fumbles could create negative sentiment if users feel mocked.; UGC clippers require constant management and churn; not clear if this scales or if content fatigue sets in. Paul admits 'this is something we're still building out the muscle for.'; Immortal assets are great but capital-intensive (podcast sponsorships, sports teams). FOMO has $75M but smaller startups can't afford this.
  • Implications: For Ken's content strategy: double down on evergreen formats (podcast sponsorships, long-tail SEO, YouTube back catalog) over transient ads. Measure half-life of content impressions.; UGC clippers are a CAC arbitrage play—works if you have strong unit economics and can churn low performers. Ken's agents could automate this (auto-clip winning formats, A/B test, distribute).; Share cards + fumbles = gamification of FOMO (fear of missing out). Apply this to other products: make user actions shareable and slightly embarrassing (missed gains) to drive social loops.; Native creators > borrowed celebrities. For consumer apps, find early adopters willing to create content, give them equity/status/tools, and scale them as ambassadors.

AI Tooling, Productivity, and 20% Token Budget Thesis

  • Claims: FOMO engineers use Claude Code and Codex with enterprise guardrails; not price-sensitive on tokens because trade-off is 'enormous'; Paul believes 20% of dev salaries will go to tokens (vs. 3.8% today per Salesforce); if so, OpenAI/Anthropic are $5T companies, if not, overvalued; AI makes code review faster than writing; Tina scaffolds with AI, then rewrites. Built web app in 1 month, new product in 3 weeks.; Paul advises CS students: use less AI in school to build fundamentals, but use it heavily in practice
  • Evidence: Paul: 'we have an internal AI policy...only enterprise accounts, no sensitive uploads'—then engineers use Claude Code and Codex freely; Ken asks if 20% of dev salaries to tokens is feasible; Paul: 'definitely...at current state, 20% is within reason.' He hopes tokens get cheaper as energy/compute drops.; Paul on productivity: 'we built our web app in one month...new product in three weeks and this product is what entire other apps' entire product is'; Paul: 'use less AI [in school] because the best engineers today learned not using AI...if I use AI for all my writing, I won't remember what is good writing'
  • Caveats: Uber and Microsoft questioned AI productivity gains; Paul's team is senior-only, so may not generalize to mid-level engineers who lack taste to review AI-generated code; 20% token spend assumes prices stay flat or drop; if OpenAI/Anthropic maintain pricing power, margins compress. Also assumes AI replaces headcount; if it doesn't, you're just spending more.; Paul's advice to CS students is controversial and self-admits 'I'm not an engineer, so don't take my advice.' His writing analogy (use less AI to preserve taste) may not apply to code.; Enterprise AI policies add overhead (compliance, audits); not clear if smaller startups can enforce this without a security team
  • Implications: For Ken's investing: track token spend as % of dev salaries across portfolio. If <5%, AI hype is overblown; if 15-20%, AI infra is undervalued. This is the core valuation question for OpenAI/Anthropic.; For Ken's agent businesses: senior engineers + AI = 10x productivity, but juniors + AI = marginal gains. Hire bar should go up, not down, in AI era. Review/taste matters more than writing.; Policy/compliance: enterprise AI accounts are table stakes for fintech/regulated industries. Budget for this (Anthropic enterprise, OpenAI enterprise) and enforce no-sensitive-data rules.; For education/training: Paul's 'use less AI in school' is correct—fundamentals matter. But in practice, engineers should use AI heavily. Training programs should teach AI-assisted workflows, not ban AI.

Lessons from Consumer Social Failures: Clubhouse, BeReal, Robinhood's Horizontal Scaling

  • Claims: Clubhouse died by bringing celebrities who overshadowed core users; native creators (Logan Paul on Vine) are better; BeReal required daily actions, lost momentum when users stopped; no feedback loop to re-engage; Robinhood horizontally scaled (retirement, prediction markets, sports betting) without intentionality; users confused about glue between products
  • Evidence: Paul: 'Clubhouse had a core user base that loved them...then they brought on celebrities and overshadowed the core...the whole thing unraveled'; Paul on BeReal: 'it required people to do something every day...as soon as you lose that, you lose momentum very quickly'; Paul on Robinhood: 'everything app means not intentional...there's no glue. At FOMO, the social graph is the glue—express conviction across assets'
  • Caveats: Paul's critique of Robinhood may be premature; Robinhood has 20M+ funded accounts and is profitable. Horizontal scaling worked for user acquisition, even if it's not elegant.; Clubhouse's failure was also driven by COVID tailwinds fading and audio-only format fatigue, not just celebrities. Paul's lesson is correct but incomplete.; BeReal's issue was also lack of content depth (single daily photo isn't engaging long-term). Daily habits are hard but not impossible (Snapchat streaks, Duolingo).
  • Implications: For Ken's consumer investing: avoid celebrities/influencers in early GTM; find native creators who will grow with the platform. Clubhouse is a cautionary tale.; Feedback loops are critical for retention. BeReal had none; FOMO has share cards, fumbles, leaderboards, real-time notifications. Ken should assess engagement loops in every consumer pitch.; Horizontal scaling (bundling products) only works if there's intentional glue (social graph, identity, workflow). Robinhood's glue is weak; FOMO's glue is social trading. Ken should ask founders: what's the glue?

Notable Concepts & Terms

  • Perps (perpetual futures): Synthetic bets on asset prices (e.g., SpaceX, Anthropic) without transferring the underlying asset—no SPVs needed. Hyperliquid had SpaceX perps before IPO; price converged to NYSE at IPO. FOMO will offer perps on equities/pre-IPOs globally.
  • Share cards: FOMO's viral feature: users can share beautiful cards showing positions, fumbles (sold too early, missed gains), or top trades (Iceman $10K to $2.5M) on TikTok/Twitter, driving signups. Feedback loop for growth.
  • Immortal assets (brand marketing): Paul's term for marketing spend that compounds over time: podcast sponsorships in evergreen episodes (Bill Gurley episode still gets thousands of plays 3 years later), football shirts worn for years (Man U shirts with Vodafone logo from 10 years ago), vs. transient billboards that disappear in 2 weeks.
  • Native creators: Creators who build their audience on your platform (Logan Paul on Vine, Charlie D'Amelio on TikTok) vs. borrowed celebrities (LeBron James). Native creators have strategic advantage and loyalty; celebrities overshadow core users (see Clubhouse failure).
  • Cold-start problem (consumer): The challenge of getting initial users for a consumer product with network effects. FOMO solved this with 140-angel round treated as distribution channel—angels became users and evangelists.
  • Strongly held, loosely held beliefs: Paul's leadership style: have strong opinions but listen to opposing views and be willing to change. Forces team to steelman the other side. Weakness: sometimes need to just make a decision and move.
  • CAC < LTV rule: Raise customer acquisition cost (CAC) as long as it's below lifetime value (LTV) to capture larger audiences. CAC rises over time as you exhaust low-hanging fruit, but brand and iteration also lower CAC. Balance opposing forces.
  • 20% token budget thesis: Paul and Ken's thesis: if 20% of developer salaries goes to AI tokens (vs. 3.8% today per Salesforce), OpenAI/Anthropic are $5T companies; if it stays at 4%, they're overvalued. Core valuation question for AI infra.
  • Anchor price: Setting valuation expectations early in informal VC conversations (before term sheet) to frame negotiation. Paul set an anchor for Index/USV Series B; they were 'open ears' and that anchored the conversation. Works best when you don't need the money.
  • Extended founder team: Paul's strategy: give first 5-10 senior engineers 2-3% equity each (founder-level stakes) so they feel like owners. If they build for 10 years, 'there's literally nothing stopping us.' Requires no salary for 8 months and high trust.

Operator Notes / Why Ken Should Care

  • For Ken's agent/AI businesses: FOMO's 17-person team shipping web app in 1 month is the playbook—senior engineers + AI tooling (Claude Code, Codex) + founder-level equity = 10x productivity. Avoid hiring juniors; review/taste matters more than code generation. Budget 10-20% of dev salaries for tokens now; if you're not seeing velocity gains, your hiring bar is too low.
  • Fundraising timing: Paul raised from Benchmark only when momentum was undeniable, and he didn't need the money. This gave him leverage to set anchor price for Series B. Lesson: build leverage first, raise second. Announce rounds only when ready for the next one to avoid inbound waste. Ken should push portfolio to delay announcements.
  • UGC content playbook: FOMO's 30-40 clippers managed in-house, churning based on CPM/CAC vs LTV. Iterate one winning format (font, color, placement, speaker) obsessively instead of chasing novelty. This is automatable with Ken's agents (auto-clip winning formats, A/B test, distribute). Clipping is a CAC arbitrage if unit economics are strong.
  • Consumer retention: share cards + fumbles (sold too early) = gamification of FOMO. Apply to other products: make user actions shareable and slightly embarrassing to drive social loops. Feedback loops are critical—BeReal failed because it required daily actions with no re-engagement mechanism. FOMO has real-time holdings, leaderboards, share cards.
  • Equity for early hires: Paul gave 2-3% to first 5-7 engineers (no salary for 8 months). This is dilutive but cheaper than hiring 50 people and creates ownership culture. Ken should advise founders: capitalize founding team generously, hire senior-only, and plan for <25 people in first 2 years. Flat orgs scale to ~20-25 people; beyond that, hierarchy is unavoidable.
  • Brand marketing ROI: look for immortal assets (podcast sponsorships in evergreen episodes, football shirts worn for years) not transient billboards. FOMO's media arm (clippers, streamers, share cards) is scaling; Ken's podcast/content should prioritize evergreen over trending. Measure half-life of impressions, not just launch spikes.
  • Global-first strategy: FOMO is on-chain = global from day one, unlike Robinhood (US-only, can't scale internationally). Tokenized equities + perps = retail access to pre-IPO assets (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI). This is smart but execution risk is high (regulation, liquidity, UX). Ken should assess consumer protection strategy for pre-IPO perps—if SpaceX performs poorly, retail may get burned and sentiment tanks.
  • Social graph as glue: Paul's thesis that social graph unifies trading across asset classes (perps, equities, prediction markets) is defensible if network effects compound. Robinhood's 'everything app' has no glue; FOMO's glue is 'express conviction across assets.' Ken should ask every consumer founder: what's the glue? If there isn't one, the product is just a feature bundle.
  • AI productivity gains: Uber/Microsoft questioned AI gains; Paul's senior-only team sees 10x velocity. This suggests AI + senior engineers = real, but AI + mid-level engineers = marginal. Ken should raise hiring bar across portfolio (fewer, better people) and enforce AI policies (enterprise accounts, no sensitive data). Track token spend as % of dev salaries—this is the core valuation metric for OpenAI/Anthropic.

Watch Map

  • 00:00: Intro: FOMO's wild story—17 people, no hierarchy, $94M raised from Benchmark/Index/USV
  • 01:30: Paul's motivation: not driven by winning/losing, driven by pleasure of building with great team
  • 03:00: What is FOMO: mobile trading app for on-chain assets, soon global equities/perps, social graph (see friends' holdings in real-time)
  • 04:20: Why 140-angel round: solve cold-start problem, create distribution, best users should have ownership
  • 06:10: Aaron Harris (YC) is best angel: understands financing/term sheets, critical for first-time founders
  • 07:30: First 1,000 users: talk to them, iterate on feedback, Telegram channels with top traders for early access
  • 09:00: Why not financial super app: bundling needs intentional glue, FOMO's glue is social graph (express conviction across assets)
  • 10:22: Equity for early hires: gave 2-3% to non-founders (founder-level stakes), no pay for 8 months, creates ownership culture
  • 12:00: Benchmark intro via Aaron Harris, Series A: didn't know Benchmark's tier, chose Chathan for product intuition
  • 13:30: Benchmark partnership meeting: Peter Fenton on phone during pitch, said 'I've been on the app the entire time'—aha moment
  • 14:50: Lesson: announce rounds only when ready for next raise to avoid inbound waste; VCs' job is to meet, not necessarily invest
  • 16:00: Scaling 1-to-10: hiring too fast is biggest mistake, avoid acquiring businesses (bloat, no interviews), stay lean
  • 17:00: Team structure: 17 people, no meetings/one-on-ones/hierarchy, everyone self-reports, expect <25 in a year
  • 18:45: Why Clubhouse failed: brought celebrities who overshadowed core users; need native creators (Logan Paul on Vine), not LeBron
  • 20:30: BeReal lesson: required daily actions, no feedback loop, lost momentum quickly
  • 21:00: FOMO's viral growth: share cards for positions/fumbles (sold too early), Iceman $10K to $2.5M, Remus $300 to $1.5M
  • 22:00: Why not a media company: building huge media arm, doubling down on content creators, streamers, clipping content
  • 23:40: AI tooling: Claude Code, Codex with enterprise guardrails; not price-sensitive, 20% of dev salaries will go to tokens
  • 25:00: AI productivity: Tina scaffolds with AI, then rewrites; built web app in 1 month, new product in 3 weeks
  • 27:00: Design-to-eng ratio: 1:16 (one designer), design becomes more important but speed/iteration wins
  • 29:10: UGC growth: 30-40 clippers managed in-house, churn based on CPM/CAC vs LTV, iterate one winning format obsessively
  • 30:45: Lesson: iterate one format (font, color, placement, speaker) until it's perfect, then replicate—don't chase novelty
  • 32:00: CAC/LTV: CAC rises over time (exhaust low-hanging fruit), raise CAC as long as LTV > CAC to capture larger audiences
  • 34:00: Brand marketing: look for immortal assets (podcast sponsorships, football shirts) not transient billboards
  • 36:00: Data-driven product: Robinhood's Android loading screen was 2x slower, deposits were 2x lower—fixed, deposits converged
  • 38:00: Series B: Index $55M, USV $15M at $550M post; Paul set anchor price early, waited months with Fred Wilson
  • 40:00: Fred Wilson aha moment: 'combination of two of his passions—decentralized networks and network effects'
  • 42:00: Series B use of funds: verticalize infrastructure (own stack for core product), acquire back-office (data, indexing)
  • 44:00: Revolut vs Robinhood: Revolut saturated Europe (multiple countries, global from day one), Robinhood stuck in US
  • 46:00: Are you social or financial: trading-first, social features make you a better trader; over time, build non-trading engagement
  • 48:00: Quickfire: changed mind on how important social is; Revolut > Robinhood (heart says Robinhood, head says Revolut)
  • 50:00: CS advice: use less AI in school to build fundamentals, use it heavily in practice; preserve taste for good code/writing
  • 52:30: Buy vs build: build core product (user-facing), acquire back-office (data infra, bare-metal servers, indexing)
  • 54:00: Hard conversations: have them sooner; people avoid confrontation but transparency matters, they'll understand
  • 56:00: 996 culture: no mandates, ownership drives motivation; team works weekends when shipping but loves what they do
  • 58:00: Trump/crypto: regulatory clarity is positive, but sentiment down from general public due to scams/lack of consumer protection
  • 60:00: Perps explainer: synthetic bets on price (SpaceX, Anthropic) without transferring underlying asset—no SPVs needed
  • 62:00: Final: parents paid for college despite no savings; call your parents and tell them you love them

Source/Metadata

  • Title: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong
  • Transcript words: 19746
  • Duration seconds: 3308
  • Timestamp note: Timestamps manually reconstructed from transcript flow; original video likely had chapters but not embedded in transcript.
Search this video Resume transcript at 0%
Full transcript 10659 words · 87 min read
0:00

SPEAKER_00

We gave non-founders a percentage of the company that usually founders get. For the first eight months to building, no one on our team took any pay. And it was mostly because... Today we have Paul Erlang, co-founder and CEO of FOMO on the show.

0:14

SPEAKER_01

Now FOMO is a wild story. Despite the company being a wild success today, they only have 17 team members, no internal hierarchy, and they have no one-on-one meetings.

0:25

SPEAKER_00

One thing that I discovered, if you're trying to raise another round, wait to announce your last round.

0:31

SPEAKER_01

I love non-obvious stories, and when you unpack this one, there are so many gems to uncover. Everything is about momentum. Ready to go?

0:51

SPEAKER_01

Paul, I am so excited for this, dude. I want to start with one that I'm always fascinated by, which is, are you more motivated by the thrill of winning, or the fear of losing?

1:00

SPEAKER_00

This is going to be a hot take, but I don't really think I'm driven by either too much. I think it's more of doing the thing for the pleasure of actually doing the thing. Me and my co-founder talk about this all the time, where I think the biggest fear is losing what we have now. I think every day, waking up, going to the office, getting to work with an incredible team, and building what we're building. I think one, specifically because of what we're building, but also just getting to work on something really cool, an interesting problem with amazing people. I think that's what actually motivates us.

1:29

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] I think it's important to set context for those that don't know what FOMO is.

1:32

SPEAKER_01

How would you describe FOMO in 30 seconds? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, FOMO is a mobile trading app.

1:38

SPEAKER_00

Right now, it's mostly on-chain assets, meaning on-chain native assets, Bitcoin, Ethereum, attention-based assets, etc. But we're soon going to launch globally, access to equities and perpetuals, non-US obviously, we'll work with the government there as that comes. But the goal is to be able to give global access to markets, to individuals that don't have that access. It's also social, so you could see what your friends are holding in real time, follow them. I know everyone's wanted a real-time Nancy Pelosi stock tracker. So maybe if she trades on FOMO, we could finally get one. [SPEAKER_01] I think that'd be an interesting addition to the angel round.

2:17

SPEAKER_01

Speaking of interesting additions to the angel round, when we think about early rounds, you did an only angel round. Yeah, in the early days, no institutions, and you had 140 angels. Why did you decide to do this? And how would that inform how you advise founders? [SPEAKER_00] It was pretty intuitive to us.

2:38

SPEAKER_00

So I think if you're running a B2B business, you hire a big sales team, and it's not an easy job, but it's a lot of outbound repetitive. When you're starting a consumer product, it's a very different problem space because there's a lot of great products that just never get off the ground. So we knew we needed to solve this cold start problem, get people on the app. So when we raised the initial round, the goal was to create distribution. And we think that our best users should have some ownership in the product. And early on, what we were able to do is get people motivated by allowing them to invest in the product and create as large of a distribution channel as possible.

3:13

SPEAKER_00

And not all those people are traders. There are definitely builders in the industry, and we've been able to leverage tons of them as we continue to build. But I think that initial round was really core to the success of FOMO. [SPEAKER_01] Who is the single best angel?

3:27

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] There's this angel investor named Aaron Harris.

3:30

SPEAKER_00

He is X, Y, C. You know Aaron? [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I had him on the show years and years ago.

3:35

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Aaron is an incredible angel investor.

3:37

SPEAKER_00

He is an incredible partner. He understands financing really well. And I think that when you're financing for a business, it is one of the most important decisions you make because a small change in a term sheet could completely change the trajectory of your company. So I think having him there in our court to really help us work through some of that as first-time founders was really helpful. [SPEAKER_01] That's so funny.

4:02

SPEAKER_01

He was like one of the first 15 guests I ever had on the show. He was a YC partner at the time. Can I ask you, when you reflect back on that journey, if you were to advise a consumer founder on how to scale to your first 1,000 users, I love Kevin Kelly's essay, A Thousand True Fans. If you were advising on first 1,000 users, what would your biggest advice be? [SPEAKER_00] Talk to them.

4:22

SPEAKER_00

You need to keep iterating until you have 10 people, 100 people, 1,000 people using it. And when you have 10 people using it, get the feedback from them and then iterate on that feedback. And then 100 people. And this is actually one of the largest competitive advantages for our company in the on-chain and crypto industry specifically, the users are very passionate about using the products. So we have Telegram channels with a lot of the top traders on FOMO. And when we put out our web app, for example, we did it a week prior and we gave early access. The web app probably became twice as good just in that week because we were able to get early feedback

4:57

SPEAKER_00

from people who were actually passionate. And these people are just users of the product. We didn't pay them. There's no other strings attached, but they just loved it. So I think that the most important thing is just getting user feedback and iterating on it. [SPEAKER_01] I have a product too, which is the show itself.

5:12

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] And when we put out our web app, for example, we did it a week prior and we gave early access. The web app probably became twice as good just in that week because we were able to get early feedback from people who were actually passionate. And these people are just users of the product. We didn't pay them. There's no other strings attached, but they just loved it. So I think that the most important thing is just getting user feedback and iterating on it.

5:14

SPEAKER_01

I have a product too, which is the show itself. And my challenge is user feedback varies. Some people love some things and some people hate the same thing. How do you determine when a user is right and you should ingest it and make changes versus when you should stick to your core product roadmap or thesis and ignore their feedback?

5:16

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I think you just have to be super epistemically modest because sometimes a user doesn't even know what's actually best for them. When you get feedback from a user, you really need to listen to your instinct on what the fundamental product experience is and your intuition and then see if that fits in your larger vision. And honestly, I think that certain product conditions could potentially kill the product like that one. So ones like that, that actually have this large potential outcome, you need to be very thoughtful in implementing.

5:17

SPEAKER_01

Why do you not agree with the financial super app theory then? You know, if you have a Revolut or a Robinhood or a Newbank or any of these big providers where it's the bundled provider that wins. And I trade on Revolut today. Why is that the wrong approach? And actually you need a trading app.

5:19

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Because everything app means not intentional. It means let's just throw everything in there for the user to access. What is the glue between these things? And at FOMO, we think it's the social graph. We think that you can express a thesis. I think that the Strait of Hermes is going to close. Well, I can buy oil on Hyperliquid perps. I could short US equities that are relying on oil. I can buy the prediction market that the strait's going to close. And I can express my opinion in all these different things. And the reason these different market types exist is to express conviction on a belief. Whereas all these other apps are just everything super apps. And there's no intentionality behind why all those things have to exist in the same place.

5:22

SPEAKER_01

Do you compete with Kalshi then?

5:25

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I mean, we haven't integrated prediction markets yet. And I'm not sure exactly where it fits in on our roadmap. I think it's very interesting there. I think our first version of the product would be built on something like Apalye Market and Kalshi. Those are great businesses. And I think that there's a lot in flux around the regulation of these businesses. So we want to watch and see what happens and then move from there. But I think it's really important because listen, public markets have been how retail gets access to capital. And we talked about this and we were talking about Shopify and how amazing that was that retail investors got private scale returns in the public markets when it launched at what, 2 billion and is where it is now. And I think this is becoming earlier and earlier, right? If you have perps that are pre-IPO and then you have prediction markets that from a year ago...

5:26

SPEAKER_01

Just so people understand, what is a perp that is pre-IPO? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. So taking a step back, what a perp is, is you're placing a bet on a price, basically. I think SpaceX will go up.

5:31

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] You think it will go down.

5:33

SPEAKER_00

Exactly. And instead of me selling you SpaceX stock, I just bet you SpaceX will go down. You're betting me it's going to go up and then we trade money. So what you can do is you have a price on the exchange that people just agree. Like you're like, I think SpaceX should be this much. I think I'm willing to sell this much at that price. So I will sell you that much at that price. And then we're betting on it going up and down as a side bet. And you actually don't need the transfer of the underlying asset because of that, because it's synthetic. And what's beautiful about that is you can trade these things without necessarily having that underlying price. So what we saw with Cerebris is when the IPO happened, the Hyperliquid price started to converge to that price at IPO, right? And there were people, there are pictures of people on the New York Stock Exchange with the Hyperliquid UI up and people looking at those markets. And I think that's really cool and interesting. But with pre-IPO, with prediction markets, retail gets access to these markets earlier and earlier.

5:35

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Can I ask you, when you look at Robinhood today, who provide or want to provide a lot in terms of trading capabilities, do you think they were wrong to go so broad so quickly? I think a lot of people that are on Robinhood would have never been on a brokerage otherwise. I see some criticism of like, do I want to have my retirement account And interesting. But with pre-IPO, with prediction markets, retail gets access to these markets earlier and earlier. [SPEAKER_01] Can I ask you, when you look at Robinhood today, who provide or want to provide a lot in terms of trading capabilities, do you think they were wrong to go so broad so quickly?

5:46

SPEAKER_00

I think a lot of people that are on Robinhood would have never been on a brokerage otherwise. I see some criticism of, do I want to have my retirement account in the same place as I can trade prediction markets in sports bet? And I think that they can do better tooling for users to self-guard against some of those products. But I understand why they horizontally scaled. They grew their business and they were able to saturate the US market, but they weren't able to go global. And I think this is why they're focused on on-chain assets because on-chain is global from day one. And if they could tokenize equities and a lot of the stocks that are existing on Robinhood, then they could give global access to these assets. I think that as they go global, they could be less focused on horizontally scaling all these products and really capturing a larger market.

5:49

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Do you worry about the casinoization of public markets? And what I mean by that is a detachment from reality because of social media, because of retail exuberance. And businesses were based on core fundamentals. Now, GameStop is a good example. But social media and movements can drive such price swings that it just becomes a wild west in a casino. Do you worry that now the public markets is just a wild west in a casino?

5:51

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think casino is a derogatory way to view it. I think it's somewhat empowering, right? Hedge funds have determined the value of stocks for the longest time. And this group Wall Street Bets saw a bunch of shorts on this stock and was, screw the hedge funds. We're going to have them cover call the shorts and the price is going to skyrocket. It was cool to see a group of retail investors coalesce and be able to fight back against the institutions. And I think this is a really cool corollary to FOMO because FOMO is a public network, whereas you had to be on Wall Street Bets on Reddit. In FOMO, everything happens in real time. So people in retail can coordinate there. And I do think that attention drives a lot of things. I think whether it's sports cards or everything is speculative to a degree, right? Why are you buying diamond rings? It's because we've agreed as a society that this is worth this value. Why are you buying gold? Most financial assets are speculative. And yeah, I understand the view on fundamentals. And when you're buying a business, you're buying the cash flow in that business. But most people, when they buy a stock, they're not looking to get dividends. They're looking to just sell at a higher price. So in that framing, everything becomes speculative. And I'm not going to take a normative view of whether that's good or bad.

5:54

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Going back to the story, when you had the angel round and we got to the thousand true fans, what's your biggest advice to founders on product market fit?

5:56

SPEAKER_00

I think you have to stay humble because at any moment you could lose it. And I think that everything is about momentum. So when you have momentum, instead of taking the gas off the pedal and be, okay, this is working, it's, no, you need to double down ten times harder. And every day we come in and we're, listen, we need to ship these features today or else we're going to lose everything we have now. And I guess it's somewhat of a fear mindset, but it's really just trying to continue to keep pressure on. So we continue moving forward because once you lose momentum, the boulder starts rolling down the hill. You need to keep pushing it up.

5:58

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] One of the biggest mistakes I think I see with founders is they're terrified of launching, launching and not having any adoption. And so they make it a more diluted and diluted message for more and more people. It doesn't mean anything to anyone. And then they launch and it's, it's the most mid product ever because they tried to make it so bland for everyone. A hundred percent. And actually, Chathan had a really good point here because there's this balance I've always tried to find between shipping fast and doing things perfectly. And I've been a perfectionist and I'm this detail, everything needs to look perfect.

6:02

SPEAKER_01

It doesn't mean anything to anyone. And then they launch and it's the most mid product ever because they tried to make it so bland for everyone.

6:03

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] A hundred percent. And actually, Chathan had a really good point here because there's this balance I've always tried to find between shipping fast and doing things perfectly. And I've been a perfectionist and I'm like this detail, everything needs to look perfect. And now I'm like, we have 50, 60,000 daily active users. We need this to be perfect from day one or else we're going to lose that user base. And Chathan was pushing us like, well, what if you shipped faster? Just think through this. Let's steal me on that side. And I was like, well, look at Apple. Everyone envies that company. They always ship perfect feature products. And then we were talking about how lithium ion batteries exploded, how the first iPhone was glitching out all the time. And I think looking back, you look through hindsight with rose colored glasses, but actually most companies don't ship perfect products. And you have to find this balance between shipping something. And I think a good framing is the one you're using that a specific user base might want to adopt and it could grow from there rather than just building something for everyone and something that what you think meets this bar of perfection. And I think now you have to ship faster than ever.

6:05

SPEAKER_01

Exactly. [SPEAKER_00] Because you can. Yeah. And everyone else is. Okay. And so then tell me, we have this kind of product market fit moments and we see these strategic inflection points. How does Benchmark come into the fray? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. So we did this angel round. We're making some money. Most of our team was not taking any pay. So for the first eight months of building, no one on our team took any pay. And it was mostly because most of us are senior engineers and we were taking a bet on the company and that was really important to us.

6:11

SPEAKER_01

Most of you are not taking any pay. Everyone would be going, what? Slaves, slaves. You have a very generous ownership program. Can you just talk to me about that and how you think about giving employees a lot more equity? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. We capitalize the founding team extremely well. I think this is going to become more and more true. When you say extremely well, I'm sorry to be a dick, but what does that actually mean? So many founders listen, should I give everyone 1% each?

6:18

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Yeah. I think, well, it's hard. Everyone, it depends who, but top performers 100%. In fact, more than that, right? I think we gave non-founders a percentage of the company that usually founders get. And it was mostly this core group of original people that didn't take any pay. And I think what's really important here is all those people feel like owners of the business because if those five to seven to 10 people build this business for the next 10 years, there's literally nothing stopping us. And we talked about this and work-life balance and how do you push your team to work harder? And our team is senior enough and also has enough ownership where they feel like FOMO is theirs.

6:20

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] So if you basically give five to seven, two to 3% each, then they're so bought in that you get an extended founder team. Exactly. [SPEAKER_01] Okay. Cool, I totally get you. So we haven't been paid for eight months. Cool. Sorry, please.

6:26

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And it wasn't necessarily just the pay. I think that was fine. But we saw Robinhood and Coinbase and those are both very volatile businesses. You've seen their stock price movement. It's because financial markets are volatile, right? You have the short and long-term debt cycle and we were taking a big risk and starting a company and we were starting to feel like we found product market fit. But why are we going to take the risk

6:29

SPEAKER_00

But we saw Robinhood and Coinbase, and those are both very volatile businesses. You've seen their stock price movement. It's because financial markets are volatile, right? You have the short and long-term debt cycle, and we were taking a big risk and starting a company, and we were starting to feel like we found product market fit. But why are we going to take the risk of a sudden market turn just wiping us out? And we were five to ten years focused. So at first, we were like, let's not take any venture capital. We'll do this angel round. We'll just build and find product market fit. And then when Benchmark came around, we were more open to the idea to take money to protect the downside.

6:31

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] How did they come around? Like they slide into your DMs?

6:33

SPEAKER_00

So no. For the Series B, that was all inbound. But the Series A, we actually did run a process because we were like, we should raise money here. And the Benchmark intro came from Aaron. So going back to the most helpful angel, one thing that we discussed earlier that is funny is Say and I didn't really know the venture game and we're just builders, right? And we didn't really know who Benchmark was. I had heard some stuff about how they invested in Uber, but I didn't understand the tiers of VCs or anything like that. So when we met with Chathan, it was just a very natural conversation. And out of all the conversations we had, he got it instantly. Like he had this deep intuition about what we were building. We had very high conviction on what we were building. So to find someone else who has the same vision and conviction off the bat as us, who doesn't historically do deals in our industry, it was, yeah, just an amazing conversation.

6:36

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] How is the partnership meeting?

6:39

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, the story is we met with Chathan on Friday. We ended up talking with the whole partnership that following Monday. And a funny story from that is we were talking with the entire partnership and we were going through the pitch deck. And I remember Peter Fenton was actually on his phone most of it. And I was bummed out because I was like, damn, he's not interested. He's focusing on other things. He's doing emails. And I remember as soon as we finished the pitch, the first thing he said to us, he goes, guys, I love the app. I've been on it the entire time. And that was this deep breath moment where we're like, okay, he sees the vision like we do. They love it. And it just really felt like a natural fit.

6:42

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Did Benchmark offer the highest price? I think it was close, but not exactly the highest. [SPEAKER_01] Do you think VCs can make kings? And what I mean by that is when you have a Benchmark behind you, do you see a needle moving trajectory change?

6:46

SPEAKER_00

Well, yeah, I definitely think Benchmark being on our side helped us in that sense, but that's not the reason we did it, mostly because we were naive to that, right? Which is a funny set of circumstances. But yeah, definitely, I think that there are some venture funds that their strategy is just to follow on companies like Benchmark, et cetera. And we had a lot of inbounds and the partners we ended up working with were not those partners. I think there were very intrinsic reasons why we worked with the partners we did for our Series B. But yeah, I think a lot of people just follow investment. And this is a little bit of a separate topic. But one thing that I discovered was if you're trying to raise another round, wait to announce your last round. Because as soon as you announce a round, you get tons of inbound from other investors. And it takes up time to tell them, no, we're not raising right now. So in the future, that's a note to self that if you really want to raise capital in the near future, you can just wait to announce your round until you're ready.

6:47

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] I completely agree. I also think it's really important for founders to know that just because a VC wants to meet you, it doesn't mean they want to do your round. to tell them, no, we're not raising right now. So in the future, that's a note to self that if you really want to raise capital in the near future, you can just wait to announce your round until you're ready.

6:52

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] I completely agree. I also think it's really important for founders to know that just because a VC wants to meet you, it doesn't mean they want to do your round. VCs' job is to meet companies. And I always say this to our companies, but don't get distracted to a point. Focus on what you need to do because a VC's job is to meet with people. Never forget that. Okay, so we have them leading the round. Do you think that founders should take a discount for tier one investors?

6:54

SPEAKER_00

This is the person you're going to call every week for every decision you make. You have to like them and they have to be someone that you trust. If you trust them more than the other person, I don't think the decision should be pick the highest tier VC. I think it's pick the person that you trust will help you scale your business the best. And it's not going to be someone who's giving you product advice, right? The founders have to build a company, but someone who might know how to build a company because you don't have experience doing that or someone that just trusts you and your intuition.

6:55

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] So it's one of my biggest concerns actually, is always when founders say, oh, I'd love help on either product. Exactly. I'm like, yeah. Or hiring engineers. I'm saying in all honesty, if you're not the one hiring engineers, we got a problem. That's the founder and CEO's main job. It's sales, selling to future employees, selling your product and vision. I can help you get some employees, but hiring core eng.

6:59

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I sure I'll jump on final calls, but I shouldn't be doing pipeline for you there.

7:01

SPEAKER_00

The best people you're going to hire are not going to come from a recruiter and they're not going to come from a one-time intro. It's people that you spend months building a relationship with. Those have been all our best hires. [SPEAKER_01] So we raised this round from Benchmark, right? And suddenly we have 20 million bucks or so in the bank. It changes when you're scaling from zero to one to one to 10. In that scale phase that pre this latest round, which we'll get to, but in that one to 10, what are your biggest lessons and reflections on that?

7:05

SPEAKER_00

Hiring too fast is something we're very, very vigilant of. Some of the biggest mistakes I've seen other people scaling from one to 10 is they start to acquire businesses. And when you acquire businesses, you're not interviewing all the people that you're bringing over. So you end up just adding tons of bloat all of a sudden to your business, right? And I think that could be a huge issue.

7:07

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] So funny. I think we're in the biggest paradox moment ever where we're replacing everyone with tokens. We don't need engineers anymore, replacing everyone with tokens. And then you speak to every single founder and you ask, what's your biggest problem? And they're like, oh, hiring. Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] I'm like, which one is it?

7:13

SPEAKER_00

Well, I think how you reconcile it is the best people are just so much more valuable now because you can use ChatGPT to make art, but you need to have the creative direction behind it. Your software engineers are your architects and they're doing amazing things. But now they use AI to do the lower level things, maybe a B tier or a lower level engineer would do. [SPEAKER_01] So do we just have dramatically smaller teams? Yeah, I think so. And which is why it's okay to give more equity early. That's how we saw things. [SPEAKER_01] And how do we think about structuring the teams of the future then?

7:20

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So currently FOMO is extremely horizontal. We don't have meetings, one-on-ones. We don't really have any hierarchy. Everyone is self-reporting. And I think as we scale And which is why it's okay to give more equity early. That's how we saw things. [SPEAKER_01] And how do we think about structuring the teams of the future then? Yeah. So currently FOMO is extremely horizontal. We don't have meetings, one-on-ones. We don't really have any hierarchy. Everyone is self-reporting. And I think as we scale to a certain number that will have to change. [SPEAKER_01] What number are you at today? We're at 17 total. [SPEAKER_01] Easy. Yeah.

7:37

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] What will you be in a year's time? Hopefully below 25. [SPEAKER_01] Wow. Okay. We are really not scaling headcount. Listen, maybe things change, but currently we really don't see a need. We did have a bottleneck on our engineering side. We just hired two to three incredible engineers. [SPEAKER_01] Uber and Microsoft have both put question marks around the productivity gains that come from AI tooling and engineering, saying they are questioning it. Do you think that's moronic and you unwaveringly see it? Or do you actually say, yeah, we get a lot more code, but we're not faster?

7:45

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I think it's definitely faster. I think it's not just a lot more code, but it's a lot faster to thoroughly review even than write. So for example, Tina, she's a staff level front engineer of ours. She built our feed. She is building sliders for our new product. There's all these small things on the front end that probably would take a while to implement and learn. You have to go watch YouTube videos or search to find libraries. And she's experienced with a lot of this, but some of the small components are new. But if you could ask AI to do it, they'll give you an overview of how to build this thing. They'll even write the code for you. And then Tina will go back through and even restructure and rewrite most of the code. But having the framework of understanding how to write it, I think just speeds up the learning process significantly, even for the best engineers. So the product velocity, I told you that we just dropped everything to ship this new product we're shipping next week. We built this product in three weeks and this product is what entire other apps' entire product is. We built our web app in one month.

7:46

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] So funny, Paul Graham said last night, the new question that he asked all YC batch members is how do we AI-proof your product? How do we put in non-AI features that build defensibility? And I think the social graph for you is unwaveringly one of those. Which I think is really interesting. Can I, when we go back to the enabling powers of AI that come from some of the tooling that we've mentioned there, what are the team using today? Is this all core code? Is this cursor? Is this codex? I'm just fascinated by distribution of tooling.

7:48

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so we have an internal AI policy to make sure that we're only using enterprise account, that there's not sensitive things being uploaded, et cetera. I think that's really important. And then within those guidelines, most of our engineers are using cloud code and codex. [SPEAKER_01] Has that changed over time? I don't think so for us. I think we have seen some frictions like these models degrade and then the cloud code credits got really expensive recently. So there's definitely some frictions there. [SPEAKER_01] How price sensitive are you?

7:54

SPEAKER_00

Not at all. We don't have enough engineers that it's really hurting our bottom line yet. Once it starts to do, maybe we'll have some kind of quota there, but no.

7:56

SPEAKER_01

Do you think there is a time when it will? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I think depending on how big we get and how much we use it, maybe. Currently, the trade-off is enormous. It just makes no sense to limit it.

8:00

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] For me, the core question on AI, bluntly as an industry, is, and it is determined Maybe we'll have some kind of quota there, but no. [SPEAKER_01] Do you think there is a time when it will? Yeah, I think depending on how big we get and how much we use it, maybe. Currently, the trade-off is enormous. It just makes no sense to limit it.

8:06

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] For me, the core question on AI, bluntly as an industry, is determined by one question: what percent of developer salaries will we see spent on tokens? Right now, if you look at Mark Benioff, he said they spend $300 million on Anthropic. That's about 3.8% of developer salaries spent on tokens. If it stays there, paying a trillion dollars for OpenAI and Anthropic is grossly overvalued. If it goes to 20%, which is what many think it is, 20% of dev salaries goes to tokens, they're $5 trillion companies. Can you feasibly see yourself spending 20% of dev salaries on tokens?

8:08

SPEAKER_00

Definitely. Yeah. I mean, it depends on the price of the tokens. I hope that there's a race to the bottom and these major models are commoditized and they get cheaper. I don't know, price collusion. Sure. But yeah, so hopefully they get cheaper with time, energy gets cheaper, compute gets cheaper, and then these things get cheaper. But at the current state, absolutely. I think 20% is definitely within reason.

8:10

SPEAKER_01

Going back to what we said there about having the really great people. In terms of design to ENG ratios, does that change in this new world?

8:11

SPEAKER_00

Right now, we only have one designer. But yeah, I do think that design becomes more and more important, right? Especially for some of these bigger businesses that do have a lot more mid-level engineers doing tasks that AI can take over pretty easily. [SPEAKER_01] If design becomes more and more important, do we double down on Figma? And that is the stage where art and creativity is fundamentally performed. Or to your point earlier, do we move to a world of speed and iterations where we just prototype it and we use other tooling, Replit and Lovable and you name it, to get fast product out the door?

8:14

SPEAKER_00

I think it's somewhere between but mostly the latter actually. I think Figma has a huge advantage here because humans want some control. So for example, on FOMO, we could just be an LLM, you execute trades, et cetera. Maybe in the future we have an interface that allows you to do that. But I still want to go to Harry's profile, see in this beautiful view everywhere you've traded and be able to track that through a graphical user interface. Someone on Figma will be like, I want this design. It generates you the vector file and then you could still manipulate it and do whatever you want. And I think that's really important to have the hybrid because humans still want to feel like they're in control. So with Lovable, it's much harder because they haven't built the human-centric software. I think it's much easier to add the LLM on top, especially as it becomes commoditized by all these major models.

8:16

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Why have we not had a big social company since Snap? It's really hard. Consumer is so difficult. Some small mistakes could be pretty existential. Like for example, Clubhouse. That started to take off. That was doing really well. Everyone was using it during COVID and they had a very core user base that loved them. But then they started bringing on all these celebrities and it overshadowed the core user base that actually would love the product with people that don't really care about the product.

8:19

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] I remember when it was like Marc Andreessen just sharing wisdom on a Sunday evening. And it was the most amazing behind the scenes by fascinating lesson from the back and it was so spontaneous. core user base that loved them. But then they started bringing on all these celebrities and it overshadowed the core user base that actually would love the product with people that don't really care about the product. [SPEAKER_01] I remember when it was Marc Andreessen just sharing wisdom on a Sunday evening. And it was the most amazing behind the scenes by fascinating lesson from the back and it was so spontaneous and cool. What do you learn from that?

8:25

SPEAKER_00

That it's very important to find native creators to your platform. So instead of going out and bringing on all these creators from other platforms, they already established that. Logan Paul, he got big on Vine, right, for the first time. And I think when there is a new social platform, there is an outside strategic advantage for creators to build an audience on that platform early because they'll be known as the creator of that platform. So I'm not trying to get LeBron James to trade on FOMO. I want these native creators.

8:26

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] It's so interesting to hear. It's like Charlie D'Amelio, I think, obviously on TikTok where it's like the lesson there is you have to make internal champions and you can't bring an Instagram star to TikTok and say, hey, parlay your audience. Really interesting. Exactly. [SPEAKER_01] Be Real was another one that I was in. Is there any lessons for you from Be Real? Because that too had the clubhouse hype cycle that didn't sustain.

8:30

SPEAKER_00

I think it didn't. I think Be Real didn't have the feedback loop. It required people to do something every day and people don't want to have to do something every single day. And I think as soon as you lose that, you lose momentum very quickly. [SPEAKER_01] Is there a way to synthetically create momentum within a user journey?

8:32

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. So for example, one of the most important things on FOMO are the share cards. So when you, if I go to Harry's positions, I can see all of your positions and share any of your positions in these beautiful share cards on any other social media platform or your fumbles. So let's say you sold too early and then the price rockets, then I could see how much you missed out on. And what this does is it creates this feedback loop where I can fully publicly share your things on other platforms and then people want to see that in real time so then they come to FOMO. And then you're building this growth feedback mechanism within the app that every single time there's a top person that's having a top trade, whether it be this guy Iceman who turned 10K to two and a half million dollars overnight in one night on FOMO. There's another guy Remus, he turned, I think it was $300 into one and a half million in a month. And then these are being publicly shared on other social media platforms and then it's driving attention to our platform.

8:34

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Why aren't you also a media company? And the reason I say that is because if you were to do amazing shorts with each of them, maybe they don't want it and they want to stay anonymized, but if you were to do amazing shorts on turning $300 into a million dollars, I mean, that is the most viral crack content for TikTok.

8:35

SPEAKER_00

You have a great intuition. I think that we're building a huge media arm at FOMO. Right now, it's external to the product. So we're doubling down on content creators. We're doing tons of partnerships with streamers. We're trying to do a lot of the clipping content, etc. And we want to become one of the largest media businesses for a tech company in the world. [SPEAKER_01] You mentioned clippers there when we're talking about media. It is a new form of media. It is a dominant form of media. How have you approached that first? It's a game you have to play because of how attention works on these social media platforms now. How do you budget for it?

8:42

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] How do you work with UGC? What does that actually look like? So we actually have [SPEAKER_01] You mentioned clippers when we're talking about media. It is a new form of media. It is a dominant form of media. How have you approached that first? It's a game you have to play because of how attention works on these social media platforms now. [SPEAKER_01] How do you budget for it? How do you work with UGC? What does that actually look like? So we actually have this all in-house. We have these creator managers. They're fully in-house and we manage a group of 30 to 40 creators. We're constantly getting rid of the bad ones, adding new ones.

8:52

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] What makes a bad creator? What makes a good creator? It's honestly a numbers game. It's just based on their impressions. So when you're building a product, it's a lot about intuition, what your users will like. When it comes to growth, especially on these platforms, it's just based on metrics, how many impressions they're driving, how many conversions they're driving, et cetera. And the ones where the cost, the CPM or the CAC based on the acquisition cost versus the lifetime value of the user, if that ratio isn't right, then you'll just churn out that creator.

8:55

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] How do you determine acquisition costs? Is it on a per download basis or is it on a per funds and deposited basis? It's revenue to us, right? So it's someone who has to deposit and trade. So depositing is free. If you trade and then we take the total amount that we earn on any given month from people who trade from those channels that are directly attributed and then how much it costs us to get those users. [SPEAKER_01] Do you see commonalities in talent that works and that doesn't?

8:59

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. And this is the most important lesson that I've learned. Early on, you create a form of content or you find a creator that has a form of content and they're working and you're like, okay, now figure out the next thing that works. That is completely wrong. What you want to do is continue to iterate on that and make it better and better and better until it works better and better and better and then replicate and just have that type of content being replicated. So this is something that we're still building out the muscle for, but it's like users are more likely to convert if this is the type of font, if this is the color of the font, if this is the placement of the font, if it's this person talking versus this person talking and you figure out these things and you just double down on what works.

9:01

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Any reflections now from UGC building this Clipper content management system that other founders should know if they're thinking about it?

9:02

SPEAKER_00

So I guess there's two things here. One, you need to make sure that the lifetime value of the user is actually worth it. But two, you don't always have to go for the lowest hanging fruit. And this is a journey that we're on now where you have someone whose lifetime value might be, let's say $30 and you're only spending 80 cents on them. But then there's another user that you actually need to spend $3 on because they need to see it 10 times instead of two times to actually convert. So you should actually start to increase your CAC even if the LTV stays the same to capture a larger and larger audience as long as the CAC is lower than the LTV.

9:03

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Does CAC go up or down over time? Up. Definitely. Well, I guess there's opposing forces, right? The force that makes it go down is that you get better at the game and you iterate. But the force that makes it go up is that each incremental user, usually you get the lowest hanging fruit, right, to convert. So each incremental user is harder to convert, so they cost more to convert. [SPEAKER_01] And then also it goes down because of brand proliferation, which is when you just become the default provider or the number one. Inherently, you just get people because you are the number one and we're an ambassador in this business, Airwallex, and they're on the side

9:07

SPEAKER_00

So each incremental user is harder to convert, so they cost more to convert.

9:10

SPEAKER_01

And then also it goes down because of brand proliferation, which is when you just become the default provider or the number one. Inherently, you just get people because you are the number one and we're an ambassador in this business, Airwallex, and they're on the side of shirts, football shirts. And so brand marketing comes into play. Brand marketing is a very difficult one to understand. [SPEAKER_00] Brand marketing is actually one of the hardest things because you don't see the direct benefit. It's so important, but you don't really even know what the CAC is. Right? And you could spend infinite amounts of money and not even see conversion.

9:13

SPEAKER_01

And you try attribution by looking at hyperlocal search results by looking at conversions on a per account basis and whether that was in the vicinity of North London where Arsenal played at a certain time of the game.

9:15

SPEAKER_01

But it's really hard. The thing I say actually on brand marketing is look for immortal assets. And what I mean by immortal assets is if you sponsor a podcast, make sure that the podcast has it in perpetuity. Like if you sponsored an episode that we did with Bill Gurley, it still gets thousands and thousands of plays per month even though it was recorded three years ago. That's quite valuable. If it's a billboard and in two weeks it's gone, it's not that valuable. [SPEAKER_00] What are some other examples?

9:18

SPEAKER_01

A football shirt. There are kids all around the world wearing Man U shirts from 10 years ago with a Vodafone logo on it. That's pretty valuable to have people still wearing your massive logo in the thousands and thousands from 10 years ago. Do you see what I mean?

9:21

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] And there's a lot of assets like that which are immortal versus very transient. Every single big founder I've had, Nick at Revolut included, said the single biggest mistake he made around marketing was he did not appreciate brand marketing enough early enough.

9:23

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. At a certain point, building a product transfers from a game of intuition to a numbers game because you just have so many users that like one of the early stories from Robinhood I love is that the deposit amounts from people with iOS were twice the ones from people with Android. And their assumption was just people with iPhone just have more money. So they're depositing more money. And what they realized through data is actually there was something on the loading screen where it took twice as long to load for Android. So people were just turning off and not using it. And as soon as they fixed that, then the price converged. So I think there's a lot of unintuitive things that data can explain. And at a certain point when it becomes a numbers game, it really is data driven. And that's something we're aware of.

9:23

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] As we move forward, a very exciting announcement on Index and USV doing the Series B, two of the best investors in the game. I have to ask, how did that come about?

9:26

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So we weren't in a position where we necessarily need to raise capital and we were pretty opportunistic about it. I think after the A, we got some inbound and we took some time. We didn't really talk to investors. We were just building products. And we were talking with USV for actually a few months. We really like Fred. We spent a lot of time with Fred. He's incredible. He has a talk about VCs not being focused on the product, but Fred actually has a really good product intuition. I think it's very rare for VC and just the conversations with him.

9:28

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Well, this is the combination of two of his biggest passions in decentralized networks and then network effects. Exactly. [SPEAKER_01] This is right in the mesh. So I think it was actually one of the other times besides the Chatham conversation where there was this aha moment, but we didn't get to speak with Fred during the Series A. So I think right after— Why not? I think it's very rare for VC and just the conversations with him. Well, this is the combination of two of his biggest passions in decentralized networks and then network effects. [SPEAKER_01] Exactly. [SPEAKER_01] This is right in the mesh.

9:42

SPEAKER_00

So I think it was actually one of the other times besides the Chatham conversation where there was this aha moment, but we didn't get to speak with Fred during the Series A. So I think right after— Why not? I don't exactly know. I think Fred was traveling and the time just didn't match up, but it worked out now, right? [SPEAKER_01] No, this is what I hate about my job though, which is a holiday like that. I'm not saying it was Fred, but a holiday in general can lead to hundreds of millions of dollars lost. It's all opportunity costs. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] It's all opportunity costs. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I know.

9:58

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] But okay, and so you meet him for this round.

9:59

SPEAKER_00

So he comes to the office. We're building a relationship with him. He was actually super helpful on a few things even when he was an investor and we just really appreciate that. And then we got inbound from some other investors. And I remember the first time we talked with Index Ventures, they were amazing partners. I think Benchmark doesn't really have as many resources. These multi-stage funds have so many resources for founders. The Series A announcement, we did all the PR in-house. We didn't have anyone, any help with anything. And I think having known the history of Index being very involved in Robinhood and USB being very involved in Coinbase, and then even aside from that fact, just Julia being Julia and Jan being such amazing partners and the same with Fred at USB, we were opportunistic and thought it was time to do the round. It was really great timing for us. I think the capital is going to be high leverage for us to—

10:00

SPEAKER_00

How big is the round? We're raising 75 million. [SPEAKER_01] 75 million. [SPEAKER_01] How much did Index do? [SPEAKER_01] Index did 55.

10:07

SPEAKER_01

55 and then USB do— 15. 15. Okay. And the price? [SPEAKER_00] The price is 550 million. Okay. Post money. Did you come to them with like, this is the round size and this is the price? Did you kind of come to it together?

10:28

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] There was an early conversation far before the term sheet where we discussed what price range would make sense for us. I think we weren't looking to do a round, right? So they were like, what price would be interesting to you? And we set a number and I think that kind of helped anchor the conversation. And yeah, when they were open ears to that, I think that, yeah, that anchored the conversation in a way where we had a great conversation from there. In rounds like this, often founders take secondaries. Did you take secondaries? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

10:34

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] I think I've watched the podcast actually with, who was it? It was Evan Spiegel. He was on the Diary of CEO. And one thing he said is that our goal is to build FOMO for the next decade. And he mentions that him taking some secondaries early on was really important for him saying no to Meta, right? When they came to acquire him. So I think founder secondary is a good idea as long as it's not extravagant. We took a little bit off the table, but it was a very little amount. Nothing that would really change our lifestyle in any way. When you have 75, 80 million bucks in the bank following around like this, what can you do now that you couldn't do before?

10:37

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

10:39

SPEAKER_00

So there are a few things. One, it obviously helps us even more in the former point about market cycles. Our team is scaling. I mean, we're making money. We have much more money in the bank than we ever raised. [SPEAKER_01] Is that difficult? [SPEAKER_01] Actually, Brian at Coinbase has said before the chat, I think he said on the show with me, which is the challenge of his business is just volatility and how it impacts culture and morale in some cases where it's just hard when it's a depressed crypto period. And you're like, exactly.

10:47

SPEAKER_00

And that's why, I mean, that's why giving away so much ownership is important, but also having this capital really keeps motivation high during those periods because we know no matter what we can build through it. And it's not like we're scraping by, right? We're building in a way where we're really able to take the risk that we need to because we have the capital to back them. Our plan is to verticalize all of our infrastructure and own as much of it as we can in-house because it just makes the product experience that much better for our users. [SPEAKER_01] How do you determine what you buy versus build?

10:49

SPEAKER_00

really keeps motivation high during those periods because we know no matter what we can build through it. And it's not like we're scraping by, right? We're building in a way where we're really able to take the risk that we need to because we have the capital to back them. Our plan is to verticalize all of our infrastructure and own as much of it as we can in-house because it just makes the product experience that much better for our users. [SPEAKER_01] How do you determine what you buy versus build?

10:53

SPEAKER_00

Anything that has to do with the core product, meaning the things the users face, you have to build yourself. For example, some of our competitors, they just acquire trading terminals and then built that into their product. But FOMO web is a whole different experience. You have the same social graph. You could place a trade there under one identity. Open it on your phone. And it's this social trading experience on a web that no one has ever done before. So that's something that was very obvious that we just have to build this. But then something like data infrastructure, right? Maybe someone who's already set up bare metal servers so we don't have to pay so much money to AWS or Google Cloud or someone who does indexing for us or these things that are behind the scenes that would take so long for us to build up the expertise to. Those are something that obviously makes sense to acquire to bring in house.

10:53

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] America likes to shit on Europe. But when we look at the numbers, right now, Europe is shitting on America when it comes to fintech. It's our fintech provider, Revolut, which has stolen the show. And I think on the next round will be considerably more valuable than Robinhood. Why has no one in the US built something that Europe has?

10:54

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think it's true. Listen, because every country has different brokerage laws, Europe is a lot larger in terms of there's so many countries in Europe. And I think Revolut has been able to saturate all of Europe at once and has been able to grow globally a lot faster than Robinhood. Robinhood has done a great job. I think they have a little over 20 million funded accounts in the United States. And we were discussing before how they've horizontally grown to other product categories. Their biggest move with on-chain tokenized equities is to be able to finally distribute these things globally. And I think it's really important. Look at Facebook, look at WhatsApp, all of these social businesses that really scaled are global from day one. And I think that's really important. So I don't know if it necessarily answers your question of Europe versus US, but I think the reason is your ability to saturate a larger group of people.

10:56

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Are you a social company or are you a financial company?

10:57

SPEAKER_00

We're trading first. I think that's really important because what the social features do is they, at least right now in its current form, is they allow you to become a better trader by having transparency to what the best people are doing. So you could instantly discover, you could instantly get notified, you could follow people. But I do think over time, you want to create momentum for people to use the app, maybe even if they're not trading. You don't want to obfuscate what the app is good at. We have to always be the best trading app in the world because the top traders won't use us otherwise. However, over time, if you build these other social products, maybe the people who aren't necessarily trading every day can interact on the platform more. So I'd say we're much heavier on the trading side today, but heading in the direction of becoming more social.

10:59

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Dude, I want to do a quick fire round with you. I could talk to you all day, but I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. That sounds okay. Okay, let's do it. [SPEAKER_01] So what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? How important social is on FOMO? I think we were doubling down the trading product and assume that people will come to trade and then the social graph will grow from there. But you need to be very intentional about the social graph. And I think that's something that is very momentum based. And as soon as you start losing momentum there, people stop using the app and then the whole thing could unravel.

11:06

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Revolut versus Robinhood. I'm a Robinhood user because I'm in the US. So I'm going to say Robinhood, but I do think Revolut is very well positioned. Honestly, it's really hard. Maybe Revolut. It's a close one. [SPEAKER_01] That feels like your heart says Robinhood and your head is saying Revolut. I think that's right. Can we cut that one? I'm kidding. [SPEAKER_01] What's your biggest advice to someone studying computer science at university? Use less AI. [SPEAKER_01] Use less AI?

11:17

SPEAKER_00

I think use less AI because you're going to have AI at your disposal. And all of the best engineers today had to learn not using AI to become really, really good. And I think that when you're in practice, [SPEAKER_01] That feels like your heart says Robinhood [SPEAKER_01] and your hat is saying Revolut. I think that's right. Can we cut that one? I'm kidding. [SPEAKER_01] What's your biggest advice [SPEAKER_01] to someone studying computer science [SPEAKER_01] at university? Use less AI. [SPEAKER_01] Use less AI? I think use less AI because you're going to have AI at your disposal. And all of the best engineers today had to learn not using AI to become really, really good.

11:44

SPEAKER_00

And I think that when you're in practice, in your job, you're going to use AI. But I think this is with me, this is a controversial take. I try to use AI for as little of my writing as possible because I think if I use AI for all my writing, I'm not going to be able to write anymore. And I'm not going to be able to remember

11:58

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] what is good writing. [SPEAKER_00] I'm pretty scared of that, [SPEAKER_00] to be honest. I agree with you, especially on social posts.

12:06

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] I completely agree with you. [SPEAKER_01] Some of my team were using [SPEAKER_01] ChatGPT for social posts [SPEAKER_01] and I was just like, [SPEAKER_01] it's shit. [SPEAKER_01] And I can tell. [SPEAKER_01] There's no humor, [SPEAKER_01] there's no personality, [SPEAKER_01] there's no texture to it. [SPEAKER_01] But with engineers and with coding, [SPEAKER_01] if I'm advising CS students, [SPEAKER_01] use it as much as possible [SPEAKER_01] because you're going to get— I'm not an engineer, so don't take my advice on that one. [SPEAKER_01] What investor do you not have [SPEAKER_01] that you would most like to have? Ribbit Capital.

12:27

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Have you pitched them? We've spoken with them, yeah. I really like Mickey and the team. They're great. [SPEAKER_01] What sports team do you want? The New York Knicks. [SPEAKER_01] Really? Not even a question. [SPEAKER_01] That's amazing. I mean, it's topical right now. [SPEAKER_01] You can give one piece of advice

12:41

SPEAKER_01

to yourself starting FOMO again. What would you tell yourself if you knew everything you know now? [SPEAKER_00] Have the hard conversations sooner. [SPEAKER_00] I think the hardest thing [SPEAKER_00] about being a CEO [SPEAKER_00] is having hard conversations, [SPEAKER_00] whether that's with employees, [SPEAKER_00] whether that's with early investors, [SPEAKER_00] whether that's with friends [SPEAKER_00] who are helping you, [SPEAKER_00] all of these things. [SPEAKER_00] And I think that people [SPEAKER_00] try to avoid confrontation [SPEAKER_00] and avoid having the hard conversations [SPEAKER_00] because it sucks.

12:59

SPEAKER_00

But have those sooner and just be completely transparent and honest and come from the best place you can and they'll understand. [SPEAKER_01] Often when you have a hard conversation, [SPEAKER_01] it's not as bad as you think. [SPEAKER_01] You feel a sense of accomplishment [SPEAKER_01] and then you actually [SPEAKER_01] take on more hard things [SPEAKER_01] because you're like, [SPEAKER_01] it wasn't as hard as I thought. [SPEAKER_01] It leads to a domino effect [SPEAKER_01] of taking on hard things. [SPEAKER_01] Do you know what I mean? That's exactly what I've realized too. [SPEAKER_01] 996, how do you feel about this [SPEAKER_01] grind, hustle culture? I think at FOMO,

13:25

SPEAKER_00

there's no 996. I think if you give, and this might be unique to our business, but if you give a lot of ownership to a team that takes a lot of ownership, right? These people are fully autonomous and they really care about what they're doing. They all feel they're owners of FOMO. They feel they're owners of the business. So I trust that they're going to do their best work. And there are times where people don't have to work on the weekends. And then there are times where we're building a new product like this week and we're working all weekend, but people love to do it. I think you can't beat a team that's having fun and we're just loving what we're doing.

14:00

SPEAKER_00

So I'm always on in the sense that if something comes up, I have to work on it, but we love what we do. [SPEAKER_01] What's your greatest strength, [SPEAKER_01] but also your greatest weakness? I have strongly held,

14:07

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] loosely held strong beliefs. [SPEAKER_00] And in the sense that [SPEAKER_00] I think sometimes [SPEAKER_00] the downside of it [SPEAKER_00] is sometimes you just need [SPEAKER_00] to make the decision. [SPEAKER_00] But I always listen. [SPEAKER_00] Whenever there's

14:15

SPEAKER_00

a decision at FOMO, we're asking every single person, especially the core team, what they think about it. And we're talking it out and coming to the right conclusion. I think it's definitely more of a strength than a weakness because it's a forcing function for us to strongman the other side always. Because we're always like, what if we did it this way? Or I have the opinion that's inverse to yours.

14:35

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Let's talk it out. [SPEAKER_00] But I do think that sometimes [SPEAKER_00] you need to just make a decision. [SPEAKER_00] Especially the core team, what they think about it. And we're talking it out and coming to the right conclusion. I think it's definitely more of a strength than a weakness because it's a forcing function for us to strongman the other side always. Because we're always asking, what if we did it this way? Or I have the opinion that's inverse to yours. Let's talk it out. But I do think that sometimes you need to just make a decision and we get hung up on things. Has Trump made business better in the US?

14:40

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] I think there's been a lot of positive movement on regulatory clarity. But at the same time, I think that sentiment for crypto has also gone down significantly from the general public. What has driven that crypto sentiment downgrade?

14:44

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] The goal for FOMO, as cheesy as it sounds, is to be a beacon of light. It seems like everyone else in crypto has always been so short-term focused. And I think in any early industry you go to, the industry at first is riddled with short-term gains and the people who are taking advantage for themselves. And then someone's got to come with the broom and sweep up the mess. And our goal is to create a product that's for our traders and something that they'll love and something that's with them for the long term. And I think what's given such a bad rep is there's no consumer protection here on a lot of these products. So people will buy it. It's so hard to do in the first place, but then they get over the leap of actually doing the thing and then they just lose all their money. And it's not because they didn't know that this coin might go down. It's because it was a scam coin and there was actually a real one they were trying to buy, but they bought the wrong one. There was no warning signal. And I think people just got burned so many times in a row that it led to all this negative dogma.

14:45

SPEAKER_01

That's called a triple layered anthropic SPV. Yeah, there you go. [SPEAKER_00] And this, Harry, is why perps are so important because with the perp, you don't actually need to trade the underlying thing. So we could have a perp on whether anthropic will go up or down, but we don't need to actually transfer the underlying anthropic asset. So if anthropic goes, all secondary asset transfers are null, it doesn't matter because we're just betting on the price of the thing. You're never actually exchanging the underlying thing with me. Does that remove SPVs?

14:49

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you don't need an SPV for a perp. [SPEAKER_01] How do you expect, and because you're going to now have anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX. Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] Where you'll have perps on the platform, I guess.

14:54

SPEAKER_00

It's going to be really interesting to see what happens. I think there's only so much demand in the retail markets. And I think SpaceX being first to market, it's going to be very interesting. I'm curious to see how much capital they'll raise from retail. I think 30% is devoted to retail now. Will there still be a ton of retail interest if people get burned on SpaceX in anthropic or OpenAI? I think if SpaceX performs well, the OpenAI anthropic IPOs will also go very well. I think if SpaceX performs poorly, then those are going to have a hard time. [SPEAKER_01] Final one for you. What's the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

14:56

SPEAKER_00

The true answer is my parents giving me everything I have. I feel like everyone has a similar thing there. But yeah, I do really owe them everything. I think that there were parts of my upbringing that were tough, but my dad, for example, didn't have much savings and worked his way to help pay for my college. And that was one of the most incredible things anyone's ever done for me. And my goal is to just continue to give back to them. So probably my parents giving me everything I've had today.

14:57

SPEAKER_01

My mother is absolutely the same. My mother taught me [SPEAKER_00] didn't have much savings and worked his way to help pay for my college. And that was one of the most incredible things anyone's ever done for me. And my goal is to just continue to give back to them. But yeah, I think probably my parents giving me everything I've had today. My mother is absolutely the same. My mother taught me it's not what you say, it's not what you do, it's how you make people feel that matters. [SPEAKER_00] Absolutely. And I always say, call your parents up and tell them how much you love them because there's a time when they won't be there and you'll regret not making that call.

15:01

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Exactly. Dude, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me be a part of the journey. Thank you so much for coming. It is so good to do this in person and you've been fantastic.

15:03

SPEAKER_00

Thanks for having me on. It was a pleasure. I think, well, it's hard, like everyone, it depends who, but like, yes, top performers 100%. In fact, more than that, right? I think we gave non-founders a percentage of the company that usually founders get. And it was mostly this core group of original people that didn't take any pay. And I think what's really important here is all those people feel like owners of the business because if those five to seven to 10 people build this business for the next 10 years, there's literally nothing stopping us. And we talked about this and work-life balance and how do you push your team to work harder? And our team is senior enough

15:44

SPEAKER_00

and also has enough ownership where they feel like FOMO is theirs.

15:48

SPEAKER_01

So if you basically give five to seven, two to 3% each, then they're so bought in that you get kind of extended founder team.

15:56

SPEAKER_00

Exactly.

15:57

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Catch you totally. So we haven't been paid for eight months. Cool. Sorry, please.

16:01

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And it wasn't necessarily just the pay. I think that was fine. But we saw Robinhood and Coinbase and those are both very volatile businesses. Like you've seen their stock price movement. It's because financial markets are volatile, right? You have like the short and long-term debt cycle and we were taking a big risk and starting a company and we were starting to feel like we found product market fit. But why are we going to take the risk of a sudden market turn just wiping us out and we were five to 10 years focused. So at first, we were like, let's not take any venture capital. We'll do this angel round. We'll just build and find product market fit. And then

16:39

SPEAKER_00

when benchmark kind of came around, we were more open to the idea to take money to protect the downside.

16:45

SPEAKER_01

How did they come around? Like they slide into your DMs?

16:48

SPEAKER_00

So no. So for the series B, that was all inbound. But the series A, we actually did run a process because we were like, we should raise money here. And the benchmark intro came from Aaron. So going back to the most helpful angel, one thing that we discussed earlier that is kind of funny is Say and I didn't really know the venture game and we're just builders, right? And we didn't really know who benchmark was. I had heard some stuff about how they invested in Uber, but I didn't understand kind of like the tears of VCs or anything like that. So when we met with Chathan, it was just a very natural conversation. And out of all the conversations we had, he got it instantly.

17:27

SPEAKER_00

Like he had this deep intuition about what we were building. We had very high conviction on what we were building. So to find someone else who has the same vision and conviction off the bat as us, who doesn't historically do deals in our industry, it was, yeah,

17:42

SPEAKER_01

just an amazing conversation. How is the partnership meeting?

17:46

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, the story is we met with Chathan on Friday. We ended up talking with the whole partnership that following Monday. And a funny story from that is we were talking with the entire partnership and we were going through the pitch deck. And I remember Peter Fenton was actually on his phone most of it. And I was like, kind of bummed out because I was like, damn, he's not interested. He's focusing on other things. He's doing emails. And I remember as soon as we finished the pitch, the first thing he said to us, he goes, guys, I love the app. I've been on it the entire time. And that was kind of this like deep breath moment where we're like, okay, he sees the vision

18:17

SPEAKER_00

like we do. They love it. And it just really felt like a natural fit.

18:22

SPEAKER_01

Did Benchmark offer the highest price?

18:25

SPEAKER_00

I think it was close, but not exactly the highest.

18:28

SPEAKER_01

Do you think VCs can king make? And what I mean by that is when you have a Benchmark behind you, do you see a needle moving trajectory change?

18:36

SPEAKER_00

Well, yeah, I definitely think Benchmark being on our side helped us in that sense, but that's not the reason we did it, mostly because we were naive to that, right? Which is kind of a funny set of circumstances. But yeah, definitely, I think that there are some venture funds that their strategy is just to follow on companies like Benchmark, et cetera. And we had a lot of inbounds and the partners we ended up working with were not those partners. I think there were like very intrinsic reasons why we worked with the partners we did for our Series B. But yeah, I think a lot of people just kind of follow investment. And this is a little bit of a separate topic. But one thing

19:13

SPEAKER_00

that I discovered was if you're trying to raise another round, wait to announce your last round. Because as soon as you announce a round, you get tons of inbound from other investors. And it takes up time to kind of tell them, no, we're not raising right now. So in the future, that's kind of a note to self that if you really want to raise capital in the near future, you can just wait to announce your round until you're ready.

19:37

SPEAKER_01

I completely agree. I also think like it's really important for founders to know that just because a VC wants to meet you, it doesn't mean they want to do your round. Like VC's jobs is to meet companies. And I always say this to our companies, but don't get distracted to a point. Like focus on what you need to do because a VC's job is to meet with people. Like never forget that. Okay, so we have them leading the round. Do you think that founders should take a discount for tier one investors?

20:03

SPEAKER_00

This is the person you're going to call every week for every decision you make. You have to like them and they have to be someone that you trust if you trust them more than the other person. Like I don't think the decision should be pick the highest tier VC. I think it's pick the person that you trust will help you scale your business the best. And it's not going to be someone who's giving you product advice, right? Like the founders have to build a company, but someone who might know how to build a company because you don't have experience doing that or someone that just trusts you and your intuition.

20:33

SPEAKER_01

So it's one of my biggest concerns actually is always when founders say, oh, I'd love help on either product. Exactly. I'm like, blah, blah. Yeah. Or hiring engineers. I'm saying in all honesty, if you're not the one hiring engineers, we got a problem.

20:48

SPEAKER_00

That's the founder and CEO's main job. It's like sales, selling to future employees, selling your product and vision. I can help you get

20:58

SPEAKER_01

some employees, but like hiring core eng. Yeah. I sure I'll jump on final calls, but I shouldn't be doing pipeline for you there.

21:06

SPEAKER_00

The best people you're going to hire are not going to come from a recruiter and they're not going to come from like a one-time intro. It's people that you spend months building a relationship with. Those have been all our best hires.

21:17

SPEAKER_01

So we raised this around from benchmark, right? And suddenly we have like 20 million bucks or so in the bank. It changes when you're scaling from zero to one to one to 10. In that scale phase that pre this latest round, which we'll get to, but in that one to 10, what are your biggest lessons and reflections on that?

21:37

SPEAKER_00

Hiring too fast is something we're very, very vigilant of. Some of the biggest mistakes I've seen other people scaling from one to 10 is they start to acquire businesses. And when you acquire businesses, you're not interviewing all the people that you're bringing over. So you end up just adding tons of bloat all of a sudden to your business, right? And I think that could be a huge issue.

21:58

SPEAKER_01

So funny. I think we're in like the biggest paradox moment ever where like, you know, we're replacing everyone with tokens. We don't need engineers anymore replacing everyone with tokens. And then you speak to every single founder and you ask, what's your biggest problem? And they're like, oh, hiring.

22:12

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

22:12

I'm like, which one is it? Well, I think how you reconcile it is the best people are just so much more valuable now because it's like you can use, you can use ChatGPT to make art, but you need to have like the creative direction behind it. Like your software engineers are your architects and they're doing amazing things. But now they use AI to do like the lower level things, maybe a B tier or a lower level engineer would do.

22:35

SPEAKER_01

So do we just have dramatically smaller teams?

22:38

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think so. And which is why it's okay to give more equity early. That's kind of how we saw things.

22:43

SPEAKER_01

And how do we think about structuring the teams of the future then?

22:48

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So currently FOMO is extremely horizontal. We don't have meetings, one-on-ones. We don't really have any hierarchy. Everyone is kind of self-reporting. And I think as we scale to a certain number that will have to change.

23:05

SPEAKER_01

What number are you at today?

23:06

SPEAKER_00

We're at 17 total.

23:10

SPEAKER_01

Easy.

23:10

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

23:11

SPEAKER_01

What will you be in a year's time?

23:14

SPEAKER_00

Hopefully below 25.

23:16

SPEAKER_01

Wow. Okay. We are really not scaling pad count.

23:19

SPEAKER_00

Listen, maybe things change, but currently we really don't see a need. We did have a bottleneck on our engineering side. We just hired two to three incredible engineers.

23:29

SPEAKER_01

Uber and Microsoft have both put question marks around the productivity gains that come from AI tooling and engineering, saying they are questioning it. Do you think that's moronic and you unwaveringly see it? Or do you actually say, yeah, we get a load more code, but we're not faster? Yeah.

23:49

SPEAKER_00

I think it's definitely faster. I think it's not just a lot more code, but it's a lot faster to thoroughly review even than write. So for example, Tina, she's a staff level front engineer of ours. She built our feed. She is building sliders for our new product. There's like all these like small things on the front end that probably would take a while to implement and learn. You have to go watch YouTube videos or go search to find libraries. And she's experienced with a lot of this, but some of like the small components are new. But if you could ask AI to do it, they'll kind of give you an overview of how to build this thing. They'll even write the code for you.

24:29

SPEAKER_00

And then Tina will go back through and even restructure and rewrite most of the code. But having the framework of understanding how to write it, I think just speeds up the learning process significantly, even for the best engineers. So the product velocity, like I told you that we just dropped everything to ship this new product we're shipping next week. We built this product in three weeks and this product is basically what entire other apps, their entire product is. You know, we built our web app in one month.

24:56

SPEAKER_01

So funny, Paul Graham said last night, the new question that he asked all YC batch members is how do we like AI protectify your product? How do we put in non-AI features that build defensibility? And I think the social graph for you is unwaveringly one of those. Which I think is really interesting. Can I, when we go back to the enabling powers of AI that come from, you know, some of the tooling that we've mentioned there, what are the team using today? Is this all core code? Is this cursor? Is this codex? I'm just fascinated by distribution of tooling.

25:32

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so we have an internal AI policy to make sure that we're only using enterprise account, that there's not sensitive things being uploaded, et cetera. I think that's really important. And then within those guidelines, most of our engineers are using cloud code and codex.

25:45

SPEAKER_01

Has that changed over time?

25:47

SPEAKER_00

I don't think so for us. I think we have seen some frictions like these models degrade and then the cloud code credits got really expensive recently. So there's definitely some frictions there.

25:58

SPEAKER_01

How price sensitive are you?

26:00

SPEAKER_00

Not at all. We don't have enough engineers that it's really, really hurting our bottom line yet. Once it starts to do, maybe we'll have some kind of quota there, but no. Do you think there is a time

26:11

SPEAKER_01

when it will?

26:13

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think depending on how big we get and how much we use it, maybe. Currently, the trade-off is enormous. It just makes no sense to limit it.

26:22

SPEAKER_01

For me, the core question on AI, bluntly as an industry, is, and it is determined by one question, which is like, what percent of developer salaries will we see spent on tokens? Right now, if you look at Mark Benioff, he said they spend $300 million on Anthropoc. That's about 3.8% of developer salaries spent on tokens. If it stays there, paying a trillion dollars for OpenAI and Anthropoc is grossly overvalued. If it goes to 20%, which is what many think it is, 20% of dev salaries goes to tokens, they're $5 trillion companies. Yeah. Can you feasibly see yourself spending 20% of dev salaries on tokens?

27:01

SPEAKER_00

Definitely. Yeah. I mean, it depends on the price of the tokens. I hope that there's a race to the bottom and these major models are kind of commoditized and they get cheaper and there's not like, I don't know, price collusion, you know? Sure. But, yeah, so hopefully they get cheaper with time, energy gets cheaper, compute gets cheaper, and then these things get cheaper. But at the current state, absolutely. I think 20% is definitely within reason.

27:30

SPEAKER_01

Going back to what we said there about like, hey, you just have like the really great people. In terms of like design to ENG ratios, does that change in this new world?

27:41

SPEAKER_00

Right now, we only have one designer. But yeah, I do think that design becomes more and more important, right? Especially for like some of these bigger businesses that do have a lot more mid-level engineers and doing tasks that AI can kind of take over pretty easily.

27:54

SPEAKER_01

If design becomes more and more important, do we double down on Figma? And that is the stage where art and creativity is like fundamentally performed. Or to your point earlier, do we move to a world of speed and iterations where we just prototype it and we use other tooling, Replit and Lovable and you name it, to get fast product out the door?

28:16

SPEAKER_00

I think it's somewhere between but mostly the latter actually. I think Figma has a huge advantage here because humans want some control. So for example, on FOMO, we could just be an LLM, you execute trades, et cetera. Maybe in the future we have an interface that allows you to do that. But I still want to go to Harry's profile, see in this beautiful view everywhere you've traded and be able to track that through a graphical user interface. Someone on Figma will be like, I want this design. It generates you the vector file and then you could still manipulate it and do whatever you want. And I think that's really important to have the hybrid because humans still

28:51

SPEAKER_00

want to feel like they're in control. So with Lovable, it's much harder because they haven't built the human-centric software. I think it's much easier to add the LLM on top, especially as it becomes commoditized by all these major models.

29:03

SPEAKER_01

Why have we not had a big social company since Snap?

29:07

SPEAKER_00

It's really hard. Consumer is so difficult. Some small mistakes could be pretty existential. Like for example, Clubhouse. That started to take off. That was doing really well. Everyone was using it during COVID and they had a very core user base that loved them. But then they started bringing on all these celebrities and it overshadowed the core user base that actually would love the product with people that don't really care about the product.

29:32

SPEAKER_01

I remember when it was like Marc Andreessen just sharing wisdom on a Sunday evening. And it was the most amazing behind the scenes by fascinating lesson from the back and it was so spontaneous and cool. What do you learn from that?

29:47

SPEAKER_00

That it's very important to find native creators to your platform. So instead of going out and bringing on all these creators from other platforms, they already established that. Like Logan Paul, he got big on Vine, right, for the first time. And I think when there is a new social platform, there is a outside strategic advantage for creators to build an audience on that platform early because they'll be known as the creator of that platform. So I'm not trying to get LeBron James to trade on FOMO. I want these native creators.

30:19

SPEAKER_01

It's so interesting to hear. It's like Charlie D'Amelio, I think, you know, obviously on TikTok where it's like the lesson there is you have to make internal champions and you can't bring an Instagram star to TikTok and say like, hey, parlay your audience. Really, really interesting.

30:37

SPEAKER_00

Exactly.

30:38

SPEAKER_01

Be Real was another one that I was in. Is there any lessons for you from Be Real? Because that too had the clubhouse hype cycle that didn't sustain.

30:47

SPEAKER_00

I think it didn't. I think Be Real didn't have the feedback loop. It required people to do something every day and people don't want to have to do something every single day. And I think as soon as you lose that, you lose momentum very quickly.

31:02

SPEAKER_01

Is there a way to synthetically create momentum within a user journey?

31:06

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. So for example, one of the most important things on FOMO are the share cards. So when you, if I go to Harry's positions, I can see all of your positions and share any of your positions in these beautiful share cards on any other social media platform or your fumbles. So let's say you sold too early and then the price rockets, then I could see how much you missed out on. And what this does is it creates this feedback loop where I can fully publicly share your things on other platforms and then people want to see that in real time so then they come to FOMO. And then you're building this growth feedback mechanism within the app that every single time

31:41

SPEAKER_00

there's a top person that's having a top trade, whether it be this guy Iceman who turned, he turned 10K to two and a half million dollars overnight in one night on FOMO. There's another guy Remus, he turned, I think it was $300 into one and a half million in a month. And then these are being publicly shared on other social media platforms and then it's driving attention to our platform.

32:01

SPEAKER_01

Why aren't you also a media company? And the reason I say that is because if you were to do amazing shorts with each of them, maybe they don't want it and they want to stay anonymized, but if you were to do amazing shorts on turning $300 into a million dollars, I mean, that is the most viral crack content for TikTok.

32:21

SPEAKER_00

You have a great intuition. I think that we're building a huge media arm at FOMO. Right now, it's external to the product. So we're doubling down on content creators. We're doing tons of partnerships with streamers. We're trying to do like a lot of the clipping content, etc. And we want to become one of the largest media businesses for a tech company in the world.

32:42

SPEAKER_01

You mentioned clippers there when we're talking about media. It is a new form of media. It is a dominant form of media. How have you approached that first?

32:51

SPEAKER_00

It's kind of a game you have to play because of how attention works on these social media platforms now. How do you budget for it?

32:58

SPEAKER_01

How do you work with UGC? What does that actually look like?

33:02

SPEAKER_00

So we actually have this all in-house. We have these creator managers. They're fully in-house and we manage a group of 30 to 40 creators. We're constantly getting rid of the bad ones, adding new ones. What makes a bad creator?

33:15

SPEAKER_01

What makes a good creator?

33:16

SPEAKER_00

It's honestly a numbers game. It's just based on their impressions. So like when you're building a product, it's a lot about intuition, what your users will like. When it comes to like growth, especially on these platforms, it's just based on metrics, like how many impressions they're driving, how many conversions they're driving, et cetera. And the ones that the cost, like the whatever, the CPM or the CAC based on the acquisition cost versus the lifetime value of the user, if that ratio isn't right, then you'll just kind of churn out that creator.

33:44

SPEAKER_01

How do you determine acquisition costs? Is it on a per download basis or is it on a per funds and like deposited basis?

33:51

SPEAKER_00

It's revenue to us, right? So it's someone who has to deposit and trade. So depositing is free. If you trade and then we take the total amount that we earn on any given month, I guess, from people who trade from those channels that are directly attributed and then how much it costs us to get those users.

34:08

SPEAKER_01

Do you see commonalities in talent that works and that doesn't?

34:15

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. And this is the most important lesson that I've learned. Early on, you create a form of content or you find a creator that has a form of content and they're working and you're like, okay, now figure out the next thing that works. That is completely wrong. What you want to do is continue to iterate on that and make it better and better and better until it works better and better and better and then replicate and just have that type of content being replicated. So this is something that we're still building out the muscle for, but it's like users are more likely to convert if this is the type of font, if this is the color of the font,

34:47

SPEAKER_00

if this is the placement of the font, if it's this person talking versus this person talking and you figure out these things and you kind of just double down on what works.

34:54

SPEAKER_01

Any reflections now from UGC building this Clipper content management system that other founders should know if they're thinking about it?

35:03

SPEAKER_00

So I guess there's two things here. One, you need to make sure that the lifetime value of the user is actually worth it. But two, you don't always have to go for the lowest hanging fruit. And this is a journey that we're on now where you have someone whose lifetime value might be, let's say $30 and you're only spending 80 cents on them. But then there's another user that you actually need to spend $3 on because they need to see it 10 times instead of two times to actually convert. So you should actually start to increase your CAC even if the LTV stays the same to capture a larger and larger audience as long as the CAC is lower than the LTV.

35:43

SPEAKER_01

Does CAC go up up or down over time? Up.

35:47

SPEAKER_00

Definitely. Well, I guess there's opposing forces, right? The force that makes it go down is that you get better at the game and you iterate. But the force that makes it go up is that each incremental user, usually you get the lowest hanging fruit, right, to convert. So each incremental user is harder to convert, so they cost more to convert.

36:09

SPEAKER_01

And then also it goes down because of like brand proliferation, which is like when you just become the default provider or the number one. Inherently, you just get people because you are the number one and, you know, we're an ambassador in this business, Airwallex, and they're on the side of shirts, football shirts. And so like brand marketing comes into play. Brand marketing is a very difficult one to understand.

36:34

SPEAKER_00

Brand marketing is actually one of the hardest things because you don't see the direct benefit. It's so important, but it's not like you don't really even know what the CAC is. Right? And you could spend infinite amounts of money and not even see conversion.

36:47

SPEAKER_01

And you try attribution by looking at kind of like hyperlocal search results by looking at conversions on a per account basis and whether that was like in the vicinity of North London where Arsenal played

36:59

SPEAKER_00

at a certain time

37:00

SPEAKER_01

of the game. But it's really freaking hard. The thing I say actually on brand marketing is look for immortal assets. And what I mean by immortal assets is like if you sponsor a podcast, make sure that the podcast has it in perpetuity. Like if you sponsored an episode that we did with Bill Gurley, it still gets thousands and thousands of plays per month even though it was recorded three years ago. That's quite valuable. If it's a billboard and in two weeks it's gone, it's not that valuable.

37:27

SPEAKER_00

What are some other examples?

37:28

SPEAKER_01

A football shirt. There are kids all around the world wearing Man U shirts from 10 years ago with a Vodafone logo on it. that's pretty valuable to have people still wearing your massive logo in the thousands and thousands from 10 years ago. Do you see what I mean?

37:45

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

37:45

SPEAKER_01

And there's a lot of assets like that which are immortal versus very transient. Every single big founder I've had, Nick at Revolut included, said the single biggest mistake he made around marketing was he did not appreciate brand marketing enough early enough.

38:01

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. At a certain point, building a product transfers from like a game of intuition to a numbers game because you just have so many users that like one of the early stories from Robinhood I love is that the deposit amounts from people with iOS were twice the ones from people with Android. And their assumption was just, oh, like people with iPhone just have more money. So they're depositing more money. And what they realized through data is actually there was something on the loading screen where it took like twice as long to load for Android. So people were just turning off and not using it. And as soon as they fix that, then the price has converged.

38:36

SPEAKER_00

So I think there's a lot of unintuitive things that data can explain. And at a certain point when it becomes a numbers game, it really is data driven. And that's, we haven't gotten there yet, but that's something we're aware of.

38:46

SPEAKER_01

As we move forward, a very exciting announcement on Index and USV doing the Series B, two of the best investors in the game. I have to ask, how did that come about?

38:58

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So we weren't in a position where we necessarily need to raise capital and we were pretty opportunistic about it. I think after the A, we got some inbound and we took some time. We didn't really talk to investors. We were just building products. And we were talking with USV for actually a few months. We really like Fred. We spent a lot of time with Fred. He's incredible. He has a talk about VCs not being focused on the product, but Fred actually has a really good product intuition. I think it's very rare for VC and just the conversations with him. Well, this is like

39:30

SPEAKER_01

the combination of two of his biggest passions in decentralized networks

39:35

SPEAKER_00

and then network effects. Exactly.

39:36

SPEAKER_01

This is like right in the mesh.

39:38

SPEAKER_00

So I think it was actually one of the other times besides the Chatham conversation where there was this aha moment, but we didn't get to speak with Fred during the Series A. So I think right after- Why not? I don't exactly know. I think Fred was traveling and the time just didn't match up, but it worked out now, right?

39:58

SPEAKER_01

No, this is what I fucking hate about my job though, which is like a holiday like that. I'm not saying it was Fred, but like a holiday in general can lead to like hundreds of millions of dollars lost.

40:08

SPEAKER_00

It's all opportunity costs.

40:09

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. It's all opportunity costs. Yeah, I know. But like, okay, and so you meet him for this round.

40:15

SPEAKER_00

So he comes to the office. We're building a relationship with him. He was actually super helpful on a few things even when he was an investor and we just really appreciate that. And then we got inbound from some other investors. And I remember the first time we talked with Index Ventures, they were just amazing partners. I think Benchmark doesn't really have as many resources. Like these multi-stage fund have so many resources for founders. The Series A announcement, we did all the PR in-house. Like we didn't have anyone, any help with anything. And I think having know the history of Index being very involved in Robinhood and USB being very involved in Coinbase.

40:53

SPEAKER_00

And then even aside from the fact, just Julia being, Julia and Jan being such amazing partners and the same with Fred at USB, we were opportunistic and thought it was time to do the round. It was really great timing for us. I think the capital is going to be high leverage for us to- How big is the round? We're raising 75 million.

41:13

SPEAKER_01

75 million. How much did Index do? Index did 55. 55 and then USB do- 15. 15. Okay. And the price?

41:23

SPEAKER_00

The price is 550 million.

41:26

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Post money. Did you come to them with like, this is the round size and this is the price? Did you kind of come to it together?

41:32

SPEAKER_00

There was an early conversation far before the term sheet where we discussed what price range would make sense for us. I think we weren't looking to do a round, right? So they were like, what price would be interesting to you? And we set a number and I think that kind of helped anchor the conversation. And yeah, when they were open ears to that, I think that, yeah, that anchored the conversation in a way where we had a great conversation from there.

41:55

SPEAKER_01

In rounds like this, often founders take secondaries. Did you take secondaries?

42:01

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I think I've watched the podcast actually with, who was it? It was Evan Spiegel. He was on the diary of CEO. And one thing he said is that, like our goal is to build FOMO for the next decade. And he mentions that him taking some secondaries early on was really important for him saying no to Meta, right? When they came to acquire him. So I think founder secondary is a good idea as long as it's not extravagant. We took a little bit off the table, but it was very little amount. Nothing that would really change our lifestyle in any way.

42:34

SPEAKER_01

When you have 75, 80 million bucks in the bank following around like this, what can you do now that you couldn't do before?

42:44

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So there are a few things. One, it obviously kind of helps us even more in the former point about market cycles. Our team is scaling. I mean, we're making money. We have much more money in the bank than we ever raised.

42:56

SPEAKER_01

Is that difficult? Actually, Brian at Coinbase has said before the chat, I think he said on the show with me, which is like the challenge of his business is just like volatility and how it impacts culture and morale in some cases where it's like, it's just hard when it's a fucking depressed crypto period.

43:10

SPEAKER_00

And you're like, exactly. And that's why, I mean, that's why giving away so much ownership is important, but also having this capital really keeps motivation high during those periods because we know no matter what we can build through it. And it's not like we're scraping by, right? We're like building in a way where we're really being able to take the risk that we need to because we have the capital to back them. Our plan is to kind of verticalize all of our infrastructure and own as much of it as we can in-house because it just makes the product experience that much better for our users.

43:37

SPEAKER_01

How do you determine what you buy versus build?

43:40

SPEAKER_00

Anything that has to do with the core product, meaning the things the users face, you kind of have to build yourself. For example, some of our competitors, they just acquire trading terminals and then built that into their product. But FOMO web is like a whole different experience. You have the same social graph. You could place a trade there under one identity. Open it on your phone. And it's this social trading experience on a web that no one has ever done before. So that's something that was like very obvious that we just have to build this. But then something like data infrastructure, right? Maybe someone who's already set up bare metal servers

44:14

SPEAKER_00

so we don't have to pay so much money to AWS or Google Cloud or someone who does indexing for us or these things that are behind the scenes that would take so long for us to build up the expertise to. Those are something, that's something that obviously makes sense to kind of acquire to bring in house.

44:30

SPEAKER_01

America likes to shit on Europe. But when we look at the numbers, right now, Europe is kind of shitting on America when it comes to fintech. It's our fintech provider, Revolut, which has stolen the show. And I think on the next round will be considerably more valuable than Robinhood. Why has no one in the US built something that Europe has?

44:51

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think it's true. I mean, listen, because every country has different brokerage laws, Europe is a lot larger in terms of, like there's so many countries in Europe. And I think Revolut has been able to kind of saturate all of Europe at once and has been able to grow globally a lot faster than Robinhood. Robinhood has done a great job. I think they have a little over 20 million funded accounts in the United States. And we were discussing before how they've horizontally grown to other product categories. Their biggest move with on-chain tokenized equities is to be able to finally distribute these things globally. And I think it's really important.

45:29

SPEAKER_00

Look at Facebook, look at WhatsApp, like all of these business, social businesses that really scaled are global from day one. And I think that's really, really important. So I don't know if it necessarily answers your question of Europe versus US, but I think the reason is your ability to saturate a larger group of people. Are you a social company

45:47

SPEAKER_01

or are you a financial company?

45:50

SPEAKER_00

We're trading at first. I think that's really important because what the social features do is they, at least right now in its current form, is they allow you to become a better trader by having transparency to what the best people are doing. So you could instantly discover, you could instantly get notified, you could follow people. But I do think over time, you want to create momentum for people to use the app, maybe even if they're not trading. You don't want to obfuscate what the app is good at. We have to always be the best trading app in the world because the top traders won't use us otherwise. However, over time, if you build these other social products,

46:27

SPEAKER_00

maybe the people who aren't necessarily trading every day can interact on the platform more. So I'd say we're much heavier on the trading side today, but heading in the direction of becoming more social.

46:37

SPEAKER_01

Dude, I want to do a quick fire round with you. I could talk to you all day, but I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. That sounds okay.

46:43

SPEAKER_00

Okay, let's do it.

46:44

SPEAKER_01

So what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

46:47

SPEAKER_00

How important social is on FOMO? I think we were doubling down the trading product and assume that people will come to trade and then the social graph will grow from there. But you need to be very intentional about the social graph. And I think that's something that is very momentum based. And as soon as you start losing momentum there, people stop using the app and then the whole thing could kind of unravel.

47:06

SPEAKER_01

Revolut versus Robinhood.

47:08

SPEAKER_00

I'm a Robinhood user because I'm in the US. So I'm going to say Robinhood, but I do think Revolut is very well positioned. Honestly, it's really hard. Maybe Revolut. It's a close, that's a close one.

47:22

SPEAKER_01

That feels like your heart says Robinhood and your hat is saying Revolut.

47:25

SPEAKER_00

I think that's right. Can we cut that one? I'm kidding.

47:27

SPEAKER_01

What's your biggest advice to someone studying computer science at university to say?

47:32

SPEAKER_00

Use less AI.

47:34

SPEAKER_01

Use less AI?

47:36

SPEAKER_00

I think use less AI because you're going to have AI at your disposal. And all of the best engineers today had to learn not using AI to become really, really good. And I think that when you're in practice, in your job, you're going to use AI. But I think this is with me, this is a controversial take. I try to use AI for as little of my writing as possible because I think if I use AI for all my writing, I'm not going to be able to write anymore. And I'm not going to be able to remember what is good writing. I'm pretty scared of that, to be honest.

48:05

SPEAKER_01

I agree with you, especially on social posts. I completely agree with you. Some of my team were using ChatGPT for social posts and I was just like, it's shit. And I can tell. There's no humor, there's no personality, there's no texture to it. But I'm like, with engineers and with coding, fuck, if I'm advising CS students, use it as much as freaking possible because you're going to get-

48:26

SPEAKER_00

I'm not an engineer, so don't take my advice on that one.

48:29

SPEAKER_01

Tell me, that's very funny. What investor do you not have that you would most like to have?

48:38

SPEAKER_00

Ribbit Capital.

48:39

SPEAKER_01

Have you pitched them?

48:41

SPEAKER_00

We've spoke with them, yeah. I really like Mickey and the team. They're great.

48:45

SPEAKER_01

What sports team do you want-

48:46

SPEAKER_00

The New York Knicks.

48:47

SPEAKER_01

Really?

48:48

SPEAKER_00

Not even a question.

48:50

SPEAKER_01

That's amazing.

48:51

SPEAKER_00

I mean, it's topical right now.

48:52

SPEAKER_01

You can give one piece of advice to yourself starting FOMO again. What would you tell yourself if you knew everything you know now?

48:59

SPEAKER_00

Have the hard conversations sooner. I think the hardest thing about being a CEO is having hard conversations, whether that's with employees, whether that's with early investors, whether that's with friends who are helping you, all of these things. And I think that people try to avoid confrontation and avoid having the hard conversations because it sucks. But have those sooner and just be completely transparent and honest and come from the best place you can and they'll understand.

49:30

SPEAKER_01

Often when you have a hard conversation, it's not as bad as you think. You feel a sense of accomplishment and then you actually take on more hard things because you're like, it wasn't as hard as I thought. It leads to like a domino effect of taking on hard things. Do you know what I mean?

49:43

SPEAKER_00

That's exactly what I've realized too.

49:46

SPEAKER_01

996, how do you feel about this grind, slop, hustle culture?

49:52

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I think at FOMO, there's no, we don't put numbers to it. There's no 996. I think if you give, and this might be unique to our business, but if you give a lot of ownership to a team that takes a lot of ownership, right? Like these people are fully autonomous and they really care about what they're doing. They all feel like they're owners of FOMO. They feel like they're owners of the business. So I trust that they're going to do their best work. And there are times where people are, don't have to work on the weekends. And then there are times where we're building a new product like this week and we're working all weekend, but people love to do it.

50:25

SPEAKER_00

I think you can't beat a team that's having fun and we're just loving what we're doing. So I'm always on in the sense that if something comes up, I have to work on it, but we love what we do.

50:37

SPEAKER_01

What's your greatest strength, but also your greatest weakness?

50:41

SPEAKER_00

I have strongly held, like loosely held strong beliefs. And in the sense that I think that sometimes the downside of it is sometimes you just need to make the decision. And, but I always listen. Like whenever there's a decision at FOMO, you're asking, we're asking every single person, especially the core team, what they think about it. And we're talking it out and coming to the right conclusion. I think it's definitely more of a strength than a weakness because it's a forcing function for us to strongman the other side always. Because we're always like, what if we did it this way? Or I have the opinion that's inverse to yours. Let's talk it out.

51:18

SPEAKER_00

But I do think that sometimes you need to just make a decision and we get hung up on things.

51:23

SPEAKER_01

Has Trump made business better in the US?

51:26

SPEAKER_00

I think there's been a lot of positive movement on regulatory clarity. But at the same time, I think that sentiment for crypto has also gone down significantly from the general public.

51:38

SPEAKER_01

What has driven that crypto sentiment downgrade?

51:41

SPEAKER_00

The goal for FOMO, as cheesy as it sounds, is to be a beacon of light. It seems like everyone else in crypto has always been so short-term focused. And I think in any early industry you go to, the industry at first is kind of like riddled with like the short-term gains and the people who are like taking advantage for themselves. And then someone's got to like come with the broom and sweep up the mess. And our goal is to like create a product that's for our traders and something that they'll love and something that's with them for the long term. And I think what's given such a bad rep is there's no consumer protection here on a lot of these products. So people will buy it.

52:14

SPEAKER_00

It's so hard to do in the first place, but then they get over the leap of actually doing the thing and then they just lose all their money. So you, and it's not because they didn't know that this coin might go down. It's because it was a scam coin and there was actually a real one they were trying to buy, but they bought the wrong one. There was no warning signal. And I think people just got burned so many times in a row that it led to all this negative dogma.

52:37

SPEAKER_01

That's called a triple layered anthropic SPV. Yeah, there you go.

52:41

SPEAKER_00

And this, Harry, is why perps are so important because with the perp, you don't actually need to trade the underlying thing. So like we could have a perp on whether anthropic will go up or down, but we don't need to actually transfer the underlying anthropic asset. So if anthropic goes all secondary asset transfers are null, it doesn't matter because we're just betting on the price of the thing. You're never actually exchanging the underlying thing with me.

53:05

SPEAKER_01

Does that remove SPVs?

53:07

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you don't need an SPV for a perp. How do you expect

53:11

SPEAKER_01

and the, because you're going to now have anthropic, open AI and SpaceX.

53:17

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

53:17

SPEAKER_01

Where you'll have perps on the platform, I guess.

53:20

SPEAKER_00

It's going to be really interesting to see what happens. I think there's only so much demand in the retail markets. And I think SpaceX being first to market, it's going to be very interesting. I'm curious to see how much capital they'll raise from retail. I think like 30% is devoted to retail now. Will there still be a ton of retail interests if people get burned on SpaceX in anthropic or open AI? I think if SpaceX performs well, the open AI anthropic IPOs will also go very well. I think if SpaceX performs poorly, then those are going to have a hard time.

53:52

SPEAKER_01

Final one for you. What's the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

53:56

SPEAKER_00

I mean, the true answer is like, my parents giving me everything I have. That's like, I feel like maybe everyone kind of has a similar thing there. But yeah, I do really owe them everything. I think that there were parts of my upbringing that were tough, but I think like my dad, for example, didn't have much savings and like worked his way to help pay for my college. And like that was like one of the most incredible things anyone's ever done for me. And my goal is to just continue to give back to them.

54:25

SPEAKER_00

But yeah, I think like my, probably my parents giving me everything I've had today. So.

54:32

SPEAKER_01

My mother is absolutely the same. My mother taught me it's not what you say, it's not what you do, it's how you make people feel that matters.

54:37

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely.

54:38

SPEAKER_01

And I always say like, call your parents up and tell them how much you love them because there's a time when they won't be there and you'll regret not making that cool.

54:46

SPEAKER_00

Exactly.

54:47

SPEAKER_01

Dude, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me be a part of the journey. Thank you so much for coming. It is so good to do in person and you've been fantastic.

54:56

SPEAKER_00

Thanks for having me on. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. !

Reading tools

Type to find a passage

Appearance
Ask this transcript

Notebook

Export Markdown

Add a note