Investment Theses 43:29

All right, David, you want to talk about some investment theses or really theses in general about...

what is going to happen in the world and, uh, you know, what companies we should, uh, start invest in, do whatever to, to sort of surf that wave. Yeah. I like what you did there. I like what you did there. Um, well, dude, you named your venture capital firm after like a very common trope in the industry. It's not like, well, so actually the name, um, we took the

the name specifically from Greg McAdoo, who I've probably talked about a bunch on the show. And his advisor to us was a longtime partner at Sequoia. He, um, among other things, he did Sequoia's investment in Y Combinator. And I think this was at like either the very first startup school that YC did or,

first or second um he gave a talk it's online on youtube we'll see i'll find the link i'll put it in the show notes uh where he has this whole analogy about how starting a company is um uh is is like you know riding a wave as a surfer and uh so that's where we that's where we were inspired from took our name

It is an excellent, excellent talk. All right. LPs, welcome to the show. Dave and I were talking last night about what we wanted to cover today, and I thought it'd be interesting...

you know, David threw out the idea, why don't we talk a little bit about sort of what the process is at PSL? And I was like, yeah, the process is interesting. And I think there'll be lots of opportunities to get to that in different LP shows. But I think one of the questions we sort of get a lot is like, how do you come up with startup ideas? And I think the question that David gets a lot is sort of how do you pick

what startup ideas you should invest in and how do you, you know, you'll see oftentimes on a lot of venture firms websites, uh, here's the categories that we invest in or the theses that we have. Um, and I think it's interesting for folks that are thinking about starting companies or joining early stage companies, um, to take the lens of like, what do you have to believe to be true that the world is turning into for this new concept to be interesting? And, uh, um,

we're going to spend some time on the show today kind of discussing and really BSing about, uh, uh, things we think that, that, that could become true waves. We think we're in the middle of now. Um, and then, uh, maybe a more meta conversation about all that. Great. Is all that true, David? Is all that true? Yes, of course. That's true. Um, actually, and probably later in the episode per usual, we'll get into, you know, meta stuff here, but, um,

you know, I think it's so important as an investor and really as a like founder and employee at startups too, to, you know, you gotta, you can't just be focused on opportunities as they present themselves to you. You have to also have theses that you're pursuing. Um, and like the best investors, the best VCs do both of those things. Like, um, and, uh, I think so do, so do the best founders and operators, um,

Yeah. And even at a more meta level in life, it feels like one of these things, it's been my New Year's resolution for like four or five years now, be more intentional and less reactive. And I feel like if left unchecked, you wake up every morning, you see what's in all your feeds, be it email or social media, and then like,

and what ended up on your calendar. And then you just like go in robotically, uh, let that, that steer you. And it's sort of like, uh, you know, getting in a, in a river with no motor and you're just like, sweet, like the currents will just land me somewhere. Um, and you know, of course that's going to land it where, uh, it's probably not the optimal place for, for you to land. And so with a little bit more, uh,

You know, forethought about like, what would success look like? What do I actually want to do? I think we all have a little bit more control than than we think. Actually, there's an LP whose grandmother I'm ripping off when I say the that we all have more, more control over our lives than we think.

I love it. Man, the LP show has taken us deeper than we ever would have thought. Suddenly very existential. Yeah.

Yeah.

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Yeah, yeah. And I've got one that I want to throw out as sort of a question. I have some opinions on it, but...

Is the era of the app just completely dead? Like, I've talked about this in other episodes before, but people don't download apps anymore. Like, you just don't download new apps that become a stable... A stable. A staple of your life. And there are ways in which I'm wrong here, and there are counterexamples, of course, but, like, I'm just remembering back... Yeah, I'm just remembering back to, like, the...

The opportunity that I had when I was 21 and shipped an app to the App Store and it was getting millions of downloads and it was this like...

Anybody who writes code can produce something of value and the mobile adoption is growing so quickly and the players aren't set yet that, you know, we use the term Wild West a lot, but like you really could just have a land grab opportunity there and you could find success if you were able to provide value. And now it's just it feels like all the chess pieces are in place.

And it's so hard to, you know, shoot any of the gaps and that you require some incredible flanking that, um, you know, you need to figure out how to attack someone from the side or do something they haven't thought of. Um, I like, do you see any sort of consumer app being successful or are we in this era now where the platforms are set and like you, you got to figure something else out? Interesting. Well, it's funny. I mean, it's,

Certainly lots of people have talked about this. I think everything you're saying is probably...

at least directionally correct. Um, it reminds me a lot though of like Mark Andreessen talks a lot about if you go read, um, you know, some of the books written about him and Netscape and just read his writings and interviews. Um, how, when he showed out, showed up, um, in the Valley, he was, he was, um, he was undergrad CS at Illinois Urbana Champaign. Right. And, uh, and that he showed up in Silicon Valley, uh,

He started working on Mosaic while he was in college. That's right. And then came out, showed up in Silicon Valley to start, turn that into Netscape. He felt like he'd missed everything. Like, you know, the platforms were already set. The door was already shut. You know, it was like, oh man, the people who got here like five years before me, they were the real pioneers. I feel like kind of one of the beauties about tech in Silicon Valley is that like,

Like, all of these things are true. You both look back and you're like, oh, man, a couple years ago, the Wild West days of the App Store, those were the real gold rush days. But, like, there is another wave coming, you know, to use the wave analogy again, that, like... Yeah. You may not see it yet, but, like, it's probably already here. Right. Right. And I think...

Yeah, that's that interesting question. Is at what point... So sort of canonically, there's been three sort of major technology waves in the last several decades. There was the PC, which created a trillion dollars of value in the ecosystem. There was the internet that created a trillion dollars of value in the ecosystem. And then there was mobile. Same sort of thing. And if you look at how much money has Apple paid out to app developers now, it's in the hundreds of billions, isn't it? Oh, yeah. Well, it's...

I've lost track, but yeah, many, many, many billions. Yeah. So we're, cause I feel like they're like a, they're like at a more than $10 billion annual revenue run rate to them from their 30% cut. So yeah, it's a lot. Yeah.

Yeah, so at what point... This is kind of an interesting research project. At what point did sort of like the belief and certainty that mobile was the third wave start showing up? Because surely it wasn't 2007 when the iPhone launched or 2008 when the App Store launched. It was some number of years into that. Actually, you know, I think it was, well...

My lens on my frame on this was it was when I started in VC and it was fall 2010. I started at Madrona as an associate. I remember people just starting to talk about then like mobile, like, and there was all this debate, like when you were building a product, should you build a,

you know, in addition to desktop, do desktop only, or should you do mobile first and then desktop? And then just over the next couple of years, it became mobile only. And then like, why is this even a question anymore? You know? Right. Yeah. It's funny. Like I, I,

Yeah. So that, this really begs the question of, uh, so I think, you know, the, the mobile landscape is settled. I guess what I was getting to with all this is, uh, if you believe that you're going to build a better app, uh, and just get better penetration, um, than, than some existing app, it has to have something meaningfully different, like a real world component to it, or, you know, actually that's, that's probably the best thing I can think of is some real world component. Um,

So if there is no land grab opportunity on mobile, what is the next paradigm? I think the thing that everyone's asking, and I'm sure we have listeners that are saying it's totally crypto, it's totally blockchain, and we just had the first crash of the hype cycle, and now we're going to start building real slow value. People believe the same thing about VR, AR. You know, I think I'm...

I have moderate confidence in VR, AR, low confidence, confidence in the blockchain. Um, but I still, I don't, I feel like we're in a lull right now where we haven't, we're at the end of a cycle, but we haven't yet seen the emergence of the next cycle yet. Yeah. I think, I think again, that that's probably directionally correct. And, um,

you know, the, certainly there are breakthrough apps and consumer apps that haven't like tech talk, but like it's nowhere near, you know, I remember even as recently as a couple of years ago, I would check the app store on my iPhone and iPad every day just to see what was, like, I haven't done that in years, you know? I, yeah. In fact, when I was working on office for iPad, I remember like every day making it, let's say every week checking all the top charts because I

I viewed it as my job to understand sort of what new things people were inventing and what new, you know, UX paradigms people were employing. And I just don't, I don't feel that way anymore. You know, and I think it's interesting, like I totally agree. Like I was doing it partly because I was a VC and like looking for new thing, but even more so just like, that's where the cool stuff was happening. Like I wanted to use new stuff and I'm not doing that. I haven't done that for years. I do think, you know, yeah, crypto, uh,

you know, AR and VR. Um, one thing that I think is, is pretty interesting. And we talked about, uh, on, um, the prediction show at the holiday special, um,

one of our portfolio companies, Steady Health. Like I think actually like health biometric sensors, like, you know, again, this is another one that's been a slow burn for so long, you know, quantified cell and blah, blah, blah, and IOT and like, yeah, sure. Right. But like quietly, like, you know, a lot of people have an Apple watch now, you know? And I'm like very interested what new, you know,

I can get on my watch and what new sensors Apple's going to build into it. And like, um, you know, and I think we're seeing like every major hardware sort of like member with the iPhone. Like there was probably five to seven years where every major hardware rev, maybe with the exception of the S cycles, like they were introducing landmark new hardware stuff that enabled a ton of new apps. And I feel like that's kind of where the watch is right now. Uh,

Um, yeah, it's just not paid as much attention to. Yeah. It is amazing how it's, it's like the, until the GPS APIs were opened, it would be impossible to have the ride share revolution, which is now a multi a hundred billion dollar, if not trillion dollar income in total market cap. That's probably, it's probably a multi a hundred million dollar, um,

change in the world that wouldn't be possible without opening of that sort of one API. And like, I mean, I can see it like was, it was steady. Like the minute that CGM continuous glucose monitoring gets added to the Apple watch, which, you know,

all the industry press says they're working on, like who knows when it will happen, but the minute it does, well, the TAM, you know, the addressable portion of the market for steady for, for anyone else who's, um, you know, doing interesting things with blood sugar levels, you know, just grew exponentially. Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting. So maybe like the wave of digital health, the way that these things create a lot of value is by being a platform. So all three of those waves were a platform upon which people could unleash a ton of creativity and innovation. And I guess the innovation formally defined as both invention plus ability to capitalize on invention is...

And, yeah, it's almost like, is wearables the platform upon which this next wave of computing will, you know, maybe a trillion dollars of value of computing will be created. And it's, the groundwork has been laid by, you know, tons and tons of Apple Watches and AirPods, but they're not yet platforms, meaningful platforms anyway. They're currently just sort of, I mean, it's like, it's,

It's like the 2007 iPhone, except we're in a five to eight year version of that one year before the true platformization was opened up in a real meaningful way. Now, the counter argument against this, too, is exactly that, right? Like the pace of innovation on the hardware side is pretty slow comparatively. And probably the level of...

You know, you could argue whether it's a chicken and an egg, but the level of consumer excitement about it is also much lower. You know, on the other hand, like, I think it's pretty compelling to be like, you mean I can, if I have a family history of heart attacks or, you know, a fib or whatever, and I can buy an Apple watch and then like I can track and monitor that and like not die, you know, that's pretty compelling. Yeah.

Or like, you know, even already, right? Like I use Strava for every run I go on now because I have a cellular Apple Watch and I don't need to bring my phone with me. Right. But I guess what I'm saying is to create this just, you know, the bar is high at a trillion dollars of value. Yeah.

Those are great use cases, but these things were waves of computing. And with computing, you can do everything. You unlock business scenarios. Of course, there's health scenarios. There's all the consumer tech stuff. Is wearable technology enough of a platform that it will unlock all these scenarios that computing can enable broadly? Yeah.

It's not obvious to me yet. Not obvious one way or the other. Yep, totally. So yeah, I agree with that. But what's interesting too is like maybe this is also just a point in Silicon Valley and tech maturation where like there's...

like the the tech industry has matured so much like there are still so many great companies being built you know um across yeah enterprise and you know and consumer well you can build great companies in a in a mature market you're just building you know they're they're different they're different types of companies yep yep well good point all right so that's one uh what what else is on your list

So I touched on this a little bit, I think, in the 2019 predictions, but I want to take some time for you and I to pick this apart a little bit.

So speaking of wearables, I've noticed, and if you are listening to this, you have probably noticed too, the rise of not only podcasts, but if you have AirPods or very convenient headphones or a phone that you're willing to let yammer on at you on your counter while you're doing something around your house or Alexa or there's like...

audio everywhere and it's an extremely easy bite-sized chunks now to stop and start like it's more convenient than ever to uh to consume audio content in a way that works for your life and

And in an on-demand way. So importantly, more than just sort of turning the radio on and off. And reminds me a lot of five-ish years ago when that became true with phones. So you could get social media updates, LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook or check your email or whatever when you had two floors to ride on an elevator. And I think broadly, it's sort of the same thing where...

your brain has idle processing capacity and you're filling it with whatever you possibly can. So in the elevator scenario, you have your complete attention to give to something so it can be visual and you can hold it in your hand. You know, if you're in the bathroom or driving or walking, you don't have the ability to use your eyes. So you use your ears. And I just wonder like what,

what else is going to happen in this world where we're filling every, I'm not, and I don't want to extol the virtue here. You could sort of look at the, let's say the Hamlet quote from the Shakespearean bit of nothing is either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so that like, I'm not saying this is one thing or another, but I'm saying it is what, what is happening is we're, we're filling every nook and cranny of, of idle time with, um,

you know, using our brains and specifically like processing information. And so I'm curious, like what other opportunities there could be in there if we're going to see more than just sight and sound? Yeah.

I don't know. What is all that? What do you make of this? Yeah, it's interesting. Well, on the, you know, the, uh, dark side, uh, of that ledger, uh, or, or, um, uh, argument here is, uh, um, Cal Newport, uh, the computer scientist who's, uh, you know, had this concept of deep work. I think he had written a book about it, uh, in the last year or two. Um, anyway, he has a new book coming out. Uh,

uh, and he was just on the Ezra Klein show again. Um, and he was talking about this, uh, this very, um, uh, concept of like, yes, we've always been super distracted by our phones. Um, but we've also sort of reached or always over the last few years, we've reached this point where like, you're always distracted, even when you think you're doing something like, you know, good for you, like listening to a podcast, like consuming healthy digital categories, uh, calories. Um,

you still have something that is, you know, asking for your attention. And it's super rare in today's world. Like, it's extremely rare and fleeting where nothing is, like, asking for your attention, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I wonder, the question is, will we see a pushback? Like, is the eventuality here or not that, you know...

we'll find more ways to fill the nooks and crannies, but that there's some sort of overload where we say, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. Like we're, it's hard to imagine what the actual catalyst for that would be. It feels, it feels a little idealistic. Yeah. It, it does feel like something that, um, you know, super techies are like going to wring their hands about, uh, but most people are going to go on listening to podcasts and like checking Instagram. If you operate your own email server, uh,

you probably think about yes yes that is the diagram people getting off facebook is becoming more common uh i'm not sure that it means that they're necessarily always more present but it does yeah you may be getting off facebook and just moving to something else yeah i i mean personally i find uh

Well, I don't know if it's correct. I find these arguments very compelling. Like, I would like to be more in control of my attention. You know, it's very aspirational. It's funny how we started this episode saying that, you know, there's all these benefits to being more intentional and yet. Yeah, yeah, right.

So, yeah, you know, this is another one like so the real question, you know, to stop us from devolving into a into a Klein show episode here, which, you know, you can go listen to his show. He does a better job of this than us. The real question is what. So what to do about it? You know, like what to invest in, what companies to build, what like, you know, right. If this is true about the world, then what, you know?

Yeah. It's interesting kind of thinking about like the Andrew Mason company detour, which takes you on museum tours, um, or kind of tours of anything. And it tells you, you know, basically somebody records it while doing that tour and, and then tells you, um, you know, it knows exactly where you're going to be and says turn left and, um, yeah.

It'd be interesting to think about that in a dynamically generated hyper contextual way about the world where sort of as you, as you move throughout it, there's sort of an audio, uh, not necessarily like the building you're walking by is like the original vision for Google glass, except like, you know, audio, not, not wearing something on your face. That's interesting. Yeah. Like why isn't, how come nobody has done AR audio? Like we all have these AirPods that we wear all the time. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

I wonder if there's something there. Yeah. Could you get enough? Like, I mean, your phone is also with you, so you could be getting, you know, the GPS data and everything you need from the phone. And then if, yeah, the question is just like dynamically generating the audio.

Right. Like, why is it that when I, you know, so I came upstairs the hour before this for a meeting that I had completely forgotten about and I'm riding the elevator up and I'm like furiously checking my phone to like see the calendar invite and then click it and then search that person on LinkedIn and then search my email to remember what the context was of it being teed up. And like, of course, there have been people over the years that have tried to solve this with like an email digest thing or a push notification thing because

Can you imagine if the API surface of the AirPods was opened up more so that as I'm getting that elevator, I should pop my AirPods in. It knows why I'm popping them in. And it's like your next meeting is with this person who you emailed on this day. There's a lot of these things that have been done in text over time that could be audio. Back to the old Gold Rush era of apps. I remember using this in business school. What was it called? LinkedIn bought it. It was called...

yeah shoot anyway yeah it would look at your calendar and like 10 minutes before your meeting it would give you a little dossier on the person that uh you were about to go meet um yep anyway clarity no company sort of does this uh no no no no anyway uh i'm gonna blank on the name it was super cool uh but yeah like that would be great like ambiently just like you have your airpods plugged in or whatever you know wireless headphone of choice you're using um

Hmm. That would be pretty interesting. I guess the wave may be ambient computing. Like, you can think about it as health, you can think about it as... Yep. I think...

Microsoft actually talks about this a fair bit of like even backstep. It used to be client server, then it was cloud and edge, and now it's just sort of like computing is happening all around us. And ambient computing allows for new scenarios where you weren't smart enough using sort of top-down rules-based stuff to do it before. So I wonder if that's how this will eventually end up getting defined as a platform or as a wave. Yeah.

All right. Well, those were a couple. Those were a couple. I've got one. I've been thinking about this one for a while. And it's just taking a step back to the conversation we had just before about waves and what's next. I wonder if you could almost...

you could almost categorize types of waves into like, there are technology waves, which are like super clear and, and like well-defined, like, uh, enabled by a new technology, the internet, uh, browser, mobile, like enables all this stuff. Like there is a, now this technology, then there are also like cultural waves, um, or economic, uh, economic, cultural waves too. Um, and I think, uh, like,

Like a cultural wave probably did more to enable the rise of social than like the internet, right? The internet had been around for a while. You mean social media? Yeah. So yeah, like Facebook and Twitter and the like. Oh, that's interesting to think about what drove that.

Yep. Now, like all of a sudden it became okay to post information and pictures about yourself online. You know, I remember growing up like my parents always saying like, don't ever, you know, post anything about yourself online. Like that's like, you know, you would never do that.

But I think the technology availability drove the early adopters to make that okay before it crossed the chasm. I think you first need technology showing people that it's possible, and then...

You can create social norms around it. Well, okay. Maybe a better example, an economic one. This is also going to get into what my theme is that I've been thinking about for a while now. Uh, Airbnb, um, there was no real technology that enabled Airbnb. What enabled Airbnb was the 2008 recession. Like,

Uh, the company existed before then, but like it was when the recession happened, people were underwater on their mortgages. They needed to make more monthly income so they wouldn't lose their homes. That was on the, the, the driver on the host side. And then on the guest side, like,

people didn't have as much disposable income, but of course people still love to travel. Like, especially if they've been laid off or a job searching or whatever, um, they need to travel cheaper. And so that, those were the forces, those were like economic forces that drove Airbnb. Um, uh, really in total contrast to like Uber where it was technological forces that like now you could like, there was an API for GPS on your phone. Um, so, uh,

What I've been thinking about here is I think a massive...

societal wave probably across all countries in the economy is like the concept of a traditional job is slowly fading um and it's being replaced by now there are all sorts of like positive and negative externalities about this you know i don't want to opine one way or the other but i think this is like happening um and it's being replaced by a collection uh like either um

you know, entrepreneurialism writ large, people are becoming, uh, small scale, small business entrepreneurs, uh, either, um, on their own, uh, as solo practitioners of whatever they do or in small companies, they start, um, uh, or, uh, like a collection of, you know, side hustles, uh, to, to use, um,

a lingo term. Um, and so I think a really interesting, uh,

potential like investment or company starting thesis around this is what, if you believe that, what are tools and platforms you can build to enable and encourage more of this? Um, and I think like square is such like one of the very, very, very best examples of this. Um, so is Etsy. So is Shopify. Um, you know, so are in some sense, so is Uber. Um,

Although I would put that in a little bit of a different category. I'm thinking more like, what are the picks and shovels and platforms that can enable this to happen? So I definitely very, very, very strongly believe this about Square. Before Square, to accept credit card payments, the bar was so high. They lowered that bar and then enabled tons of more businesses to get started. Stripe is a really...

another excellent, excellent example of this on the, you know, purely digital side, right? Like, um, accepting payments online was hard. They made that easy. Then they started Atlas, like starting a business was hard. They made that easier, you know, like keep lowering the bar to entrepreneurship. Hmm. Hmm.

So I agree anecdotally. And I completely, I love this notion of sort of like lowering the bar of entrepreneurship. And I think that's absolutely true. I was just pulling up, like I had read this Vox Media article recently.

It's from July of 2018. It says, the myth of the job-hopping, rootless millennial is just that, a myth. A myth, yep. And it points out a lot of really interesting facts, and we'll put this in the show notes. And to be honest, I need to take another read over it because a lot of the stats are so nuanced that I think you are both right in that being a wave, but also a lot of these trends are true, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the share of workers...

Interesting. Interesting.

And the average employee, so millennials aren't switching jobs more often that the average employee tenure for people under 35 is 2.8 years, which is pretty much the same as it's been since 2006 and also pretty much the same as it was in 1983. And so like, I think one interesting thing is like we get a lot of this romanticized notion of like,

Well, grandpa got his job at the factory and stayed for 60 years or, you know, at his firm and stayed for 60 years. Like, I think we see a lot of that on TV. We hear some of it passed down from family stories, but there's definitely a, right, right. And so, you know.

You're listening to a podcast where a guy's talking about an article that he hasn't read in eight months. But, you know, I think it's worth... This is a super interesting trend that is something that is widely sort of believed at this point. And of course, we should believe it because we continue to see multi-billion dollar companies started on the back of this belief and it's working. But I'm not sure that it's actually a transition away from people like who would...

the archetype of people who would go and get a full-time job and stay switching to more sort of dynamic work versus maybe like, I'm not actually sure what it is. Like people who would have dynamic work anyway, just using technology platforms to do it now instead of not or something. And I think that I want to do some more thinking about this topic because I think both things are true. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

Well, that's been a big one for me. We already touched on kind of digital health that I've thought about then. And then, of course, there's, you know, at a slightly higher level, there's marketplaces, you know, what Wave focuses on. And of course, I'm a big believer in that. I would almost put that as like.

a higher level than what we're talking about here. Like, um, uh, for a wave, like we, and I really believe in the power of the business model for our marketplace, but like that, that can ride lots of different tech waves that can ride, you know, lots of different economic and cultural waves. Um, you know, Uber is a marketplace and Airbnb is a marketplace. And, you know, with the framework we were just talking about, they both came from very different places. Uh,

I think the interesting thing, and I'm sure you guys have written much a word about this in a perspective and decks to LPs, but the thing that is amazing about the marketplace businesses that we see today and why we see them is that technology has been an incredible accelerant to marketplace efficiency. Right.

And things that couldn't be marketplaces in the past because you couldn't achieve marketplace liquidity with the advent of technology where you either can have global supply and global demand, such as eBay, suddenly you can have a marketplace where you didn't have enough supply and enough demand who could meet before in order to create that. Or if you're hyper-localized like Uber, suddenly you can dramatically increase the speed and convenience to the transaction. And so...

Like on almost every vector, technology enables you to create either new marketplaces or more valuable marketplaces. And sort of as technology continues to get better, I think we'll only continue to see that sort of like magical moment where the car shows up at your house or, oh my gosh, I found the perfect place to stay or like...

the magic of technology and marketplaces is that perfect things sort of can happen and appear in front of you in ways that you never dreamed because if you demand something, that supply was always there, but you had no way to efficiently bring it to you. Yep. A hundred percent. Well, I mean, even, uh, maybe to wrap all of this up, uh, our investment steady health is just like a perfect example of this, right? Like your endocrine with, if, with steady, if you are a steady user, uh,

uh and you're a diabetic your endocrinologist now is an app on your phone that has constant access to your blood sugar levels like and it actually is a real endocrinologist on the other you know side of the phone um too but like compare that experience versus like the old marketplace for endocrinologists where you got a referral and you went to see them four times a year and they asked you how you were feeling yep yeah that's a great great point um yeah

Cool. All right. Well, I have one that I just want to like throw out there that I, I've, I think it's a little shocking that like I've been doing a bunch of research into and I'm really, really excited about, um, flying cars are totally going to happen and they're not that far away. And, uh, anyone who's interested in this topic, the, the space is called, uh, EVTOL electronic vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. Um, and sort of the leading, um,

group that's putting research into this and bringing people together is called uber elevate or uber air um and they've published this awesome white paper that basically lays out like here's the 10 risk factors and here's what different groups in the ecosystem are doing about each one and how we're closer than you think and we're you know five six years out from something and if you're interested in this topic uh going to that that uber air uber elevate website um

It's just this awesome, awesome read. I spent kind of my whole Christmas break diving into it. And the broad concept is like...

It's not going to be flying cars. It's more like a tiny electric-powered airplane meets sort of quadcopter or drone and has sort of the vertical takeoff and landing, but actually is propelled forward by wing-borne lift. So it's much more efficient than a helicopter. But we're totally going to have airport runs by these vehicles or...

sort of hour and a half commutes compressed to 15 minutes. I think there's going to be some really cool use cases that emerge for this. And, um, it's hard and super capital intensive and it's difficult to get the timing right on investments here. So it's sort of a place to tread really lightly. Um, but I, I do think that it's like one of the most exciting technology frontiers right now. Wow. Interesting. What, um, I'll have to go read that. Another thing we'll have to link to in the show notes, but, um,

The first thing I'm just curious for, like, how are, like, regulations going to evolve with, like, are governments going to allow this to happen? It's probably the most difficult. So fortunately, the FAA is a national body. So all of these things will be in FAA regulated airspace. And so it's a matter of sort of coordinating with, you know, who owns the airspace that you're in. The tricky bit is going to be about getting all the municipalities on board.

Because, you know, right now in most cities in the U.S., you're basically not allowed to fly a helicopter no matter what. And then they carve out special exceptions. So like you're, you know, a hospital is kind of the main one or occasionally a news or a traffic thing. But like basically you can't do that in cities. And so...

figuring out how to make the case that it's net positive for cities and that...

they should invest in, in allowing this. I think we're going to see some Guinea pig cities first and, uh, San Francisco is a likely candidate. I think Dallas has been talked about as a potential candidate. I think we'll see a lot of it outside the U S uh, Dubai or, or elsewhere. Um, but you know, there's a bunch of these technology waves that sort of combine into making this possible. And one is like better vehicle design. People have been working on this for a while. Um, and, and have really put a lot of energy into, into doing it recently. Uh,

big one is battery life. It gets like 15% better every year. Uh, that may not get us all the way there, but it's, it's certainly gotten us to this point for sort of these, you know, single digit minute trips. Um,

science is dramatically better. Um, we understand how to, how to do the physics of, uh, uh, of, uh, noise dampening a little bit better. Um, where there's been tremendous leaps forward in autonomy. So like in a world where we never would have dreamed of piloted the piloting these things, you know, your Tesla drives itself on the freeway now. So actually it's probably easier for, for this thing to drive itself through the air than it is for, uh, your Tesla to drive around on the highway. So, um,

There's just a lot of like each little thing that you bite off is surprisingly not as challenging as, as you, you would think. And so, um, of course it's still eating an elephant, but how do you eat the elephant? Reminds me of the way, uh, you know, Elon Musk thought about, um, well, he thought about, um, you know, rockets, uh, and then together with, with, uh, the Tesla founders thought about electric cars. Um, yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

Yep. It's a, it's a gigantic series of difficult, but solvable problems. Um, yeah. Well, there it is. Theses. Theses. Um, listeners, let us know, uh, let us know, you know, how, how you feel about this. If you have particular theses or areas you want us to dive into, um,

And also that I think this episode we were intentionally trying to be a little less structured and see how that goes in our continuing experiments on the LP show. So as always, please send your feedback.

Indeed. Thanks so much for being a limited partner and going on the journey with us. We were very excited. We passed a million lifetime downloads of the acquired show earlier this week and launched ESPN and season four. So if you like acquired, tell your friends and thanks so much for coming on the journey. Indeed.