Space reboot by Fred Krueger

And he was the quarterback when I was a fan. Yeah, he was a big deal. And so Van Conway is interviewing, because they're friends. And I don't know if it was Conway who got Montana into Angel investing or what, but this is 11 years ago. So I'm trying to remember. But he said, so now he's starting to write checks in 2015. And he goes, so what's the hardest thing, for what's been the biggest transition going from being a world class athlete to an angel investor? And he said, having less than a winning record, like 500%, still means you're doing well or can mean you're doing well. Because the percentage of wins is so low. But Ron Conway, I believe, is like the only real angel who's had over 500 with like real Facebook and Google and all the crazy shit that he's invested in. Well, it's interesting because I was introduced to Conway. And when I started angel investing back in 1990, I don't know, two, whatever. Back in the two? Holy shit. Yeah. My first was 98, 92, and I was saying, like Conway was viewed as a failure. OK? Like 95, he was viewed as a failure. And what he did, Conway, is he would put, just, he would just put, invest in all kinds of ideas, right? Like just like, and he'd be writing his little sort of like a Y combinator with his own personal money, right? And none of them would hit. So he was sort of viewed as, well, you know, you have this, this guy writing all these checks. And he's just got this really diverse portfolio of crap. And nothing is hitting until he until he invested in Google. That was it. But he, I mean, I want to say he had 300 duds before he had Google, you know what I mean? Like that, that many. And then of course, then for some reason, the quality of his return started skyrocketing. And then, then it became like Y a combinator, then it became, then he had a really good patch, you know, and all of his stuff was hidden. But at the beginning, there was, you know, at the beginning, this stuff was not working. And it seemed like Angel investing was a really bad idea back then, you know. And then there he had Google and everybody was like, well, Angel investing might be a good idea. Well, he did like Facebook and all in Twitter. And I mean, like every major company, this guy was one of the first checks in. And yeah, I mean, you know, like, I can't speak to that long ago, like the early 90s is, I was even in college. Well, what happened, I think, is that, you know, look, he, there was a sort of feedback mechanism where, the guys with the more promising startups started going to Conway and they showed him. Oh, yeah, sure. It's flywheel. Yeah, I mean, that didn't really work. Right. So that's the flywheel, right? But the flywheel hadn't started when I first got in there. In fact, yeah, there was just, it was, it was a very embryonic in the late 90s, you know, in the mid 90s, you know, mid 90s to late 90s. It was very embryonic that, you know, the VCs were doing their very structured thing. And I assume you know, a minor perkins. Yeah. So you want to hear a crazy story about minor. The first ever LP was a guy by the name of John Anderson. He's one of our oldest family friends. I was in Rockford, Illinois. I don't like just, you know, like, Rockford, Illinois was like, I don't like a shitty little town. It's like an hour outside of Chicago. But John is, he's very wealthy. He's done really, really well. But he was their first ever LP. And he's, I think like 10 years ago, they stopped investing because like, Mary Meeker and a bunch of people left. But, but when I was in college in the mid 90s, he would send me perspectives for all the like big, you know, pre-bubble companies like excited home. I village, like, they were just like a ton of these. And he would send them to me. I mean, college, I'm literally like 19 years old. And I'm reviewing perspectives from corner perkins. I got to pile these things in the corner of my room. And the reason is because he wanted to do co-tail follow on investments from, you know, like go overweight in specials. And so he was like asking my opinion. I gave him, so like, I actually think I gave him some pretty good advice. He probably like made some money on some of those. But one of my friends walked into my room, basically it's not quite dorm room, but basically dorm room goes, fuck are you guys stack up? You're like this giant computer. You got a stack of corner perkins perspectives in the corner of your room. Like, oh, my insulin can valley. It was just sort of a funny thing. But yeah, the first LP of corner perkins. You know what? I could tell you what the investment that made corner perkins is. You know what it is? Amazon? No, no, no, wait more. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I mean, they were like in the late 70s. Right. And you know what it was? It was this company called Tandem Computers. Oh, I heard of that. And basically this company, if obviously no longer exists, but basically what they, their entire thing was they duplicated the processor memory. So they basically had two computers at one, right? So the minute one goes down, you flip it flips over automatically to the second one. And therefore achieves a really high reliability. Why did not know that? But I know that they've been around for a long time. Yeah, that's there. That was there. That was their win. You know, one hit. Of course, after that, they did a lot of hits. I, John Doerr was on the board of macro media. So I met him a couple times. He was on one of your boards? Well, they acquired my company. And so I got it. Got to know him. Macromedia acquired. So John Doerr, he, do you ever know him? Well, I know he is. Of course, I know he is. I've never met John Doerr. But, yeah, I mean, he was a very big deal obviously. Yeah. Anyway, it's back to Bitcoin. While we're on the subjective private companies and sales and whatnot and private investing, Chris, is there a minimum? What do you look for when you're looking at a new opportunity? And is there a certain stage of development that you want to see a company add or a small business add? Is it a scale thing? Is it like a profit margin thing? Well, those things don't happen at the stage that I invest in. I'm investing it like literally first check about a quarter of the 100 plus companies I've invested in the word first check. And there's you're 100% betting on the founder. There's like nothing. OK, let me slightly refer you to that. You're basically doing a couple binary questions. Do I believe that this is a real problem that they're trying to solve? Do I buy the hypothesis to the solution to what they think is going to solve the problem? Is it a big enough market? Like those kinds of things as long as it's yes to those, then you're evaluating the founder. And so at those really early stages, this is changing a little bit because AI and the cost of building a company now is like infinitely lower than it was back when we were building in the late 90s, early 2000s and into the teens. But it's still most of that stuff happens later after you write those first checks. So no, I'm really evaluating the founders. OK, in addition to the founder, are there any sectors or business sectors that are do not touch areas for you? Anything that's not venture scale, I mean, if it's not, I don't invest in franchises. What does venture scale mean exactly, Chris? Venture scale just means can it grow exponentially? Like you're not going to grow exponentially by investing in franchises or real estate or something. My father and my family was in real estate. That's a very different, they're different dynamics. There's tons of value in real estate. You get cash flow. And as I would say to my dad, you get to have your cake and eat it too. But that's just a different kind of investment. It's very, very different. The way you finance that and everything is radically different. So the only, like when I make investments, it's literally just an venture scale. But I've invested in crazy shit from like a company that teaches mushrooms, how to eat garbage, to a company that three brings bone material and whatever. What about a super small like food product? I've invested in some food and beverage stuff. It's less. I don't do that as much. Or let me rephrase that. I haven't done that as much. I'm really like not trying to not make new investments right now. But some stuff sneak in, like former founders that I backed that are working on their next thing or like somebody else I know that is working on something. I've thrown in some checks. But I'm trying not to make new investments now. But it's a good time for them. Why not, Chris? Two very big reasons. One, I've got 180 founders to take care of. And the second is I could use some more liquidity. I mean, if you were a financial like a wealth manager, you would throw up on my portfolio to see how much of it is. I know how it is. You what? You're like completely ill-equated. Not completely. But I'm ill-equated enough where it'd be smart for me not to be writing a lot more checks. This is why I don't want to do a lot of it. I don't really want to do these investments because I don't like ill-equated. Dude, you know what? I think I'm not the example. Don't follow my name. It's a phase where you write those checks. And what I've noticed is that people who write a lot of checks write them in a certain five-year phase or ten-year phase, and they stop writing them. Whether it works or not. I'll be writing checks again. It's just, you know, like I'm slowing way, way, way down. I'm not asking anybody for investments, but I am starting a hot-truine business. A hot-truine business. What? What? What? Hot honey. That's not venture scale. You know, like Mike could be. Food and beverage absolutely can be venture scale. Is it hot honey a service industry? I've never heard of a hotel. What the whole house. It's so plentiful. Right, Thomas? Is it located in Carson City, Nevada? It is. It's the least. It's like when they peel the banana with his ass, right? Thomas in my comment. What is the chick? What is the chick, the chick shack or something in Vegas? What's it called? It was on a scale. The banana shack. Ro Paul goes there and he brings his banana out. No, it's the banana. It's the banana. No, but seriously, I might try to pick your brain at some point. I'm actually making the hot honey, but it's not like anything else that's on the market. It's its own thing. I haven't found a single product that. I'm having, let's do it on a scale sometime, unless you like it's proprietary or something, but when I do, when I do a mentoring, it's not with my founders. I try to do it like in a group setting so other people can learn from it, but I'm having a chat about it sometimes. Chris, I want to start a whiskey company. What do you think about that? Fuck no. Chris, let me ask you. You started making a company call. Chris, you have a protocol for writing checks. And I've heard this from other people who do angel investing. That they're attitude around the Bitcoin and becoming aware of Bitcoin, say over the last five years, has raised the bar for baseline investments. Meaning that you're like, why bother? I'll just invest in Bitcoin. You're just making the opportunity cost argument, which is a good argument. I mean, I've heard it said. I would say, Tom, the universe of angel investors and the universe of Bitcoiners are two Venn diagrams that don't intersect. I don't know that's entirely true, but it's not the same. It's not a, there's definitely, I mean, if that were the case, we'd have a lot more of these conversations in these spaces. He's in Christopher, Christopher, an example. Chris, yeah, Chris, someone is in. Yeah, but right. There just aren't that many, you know, and like, you're the only angel investor in our spaces. You are. No, I mean, I mean, you're the only big angel about there. Okay, well, there frankly, there are a lot of people that have written over Jackson to over a hundred companies. So that's no, what about Rob? Fair Fred. Rob, yeah, Rob, well, he's more of a VC actually, but he's done some angel. Yeah. But Rob is one of the guys. Great. What's Rob would show up more in the space? I kind of feel in a lot of what happened to Rob? I feel like Rob more of a hundred K kind of guy. You know what I mean? When Bitcoin comes to a hundred day, we're going to, we're going to see a lot more Rob. Did you feel like he was depressed that it went down? Yeah. Well, look, some people take it differently. I don't know. I think he's got plenty of money. He's got plenty of money. It's just like, if the question is some people take it very emotionally. And some people, they kind of, they don't, they don't, they don't find themselves. This is a hypothetical though, right? You have no idea why he's not around basis, right? No, we don't. I don't know. I do not think that that's the reason. But it coincide right with what we went below a hundred K if you kind of think back. Right. He was one of the ones that mentioned to me this idea that the bar, the bar for marginal investing has been raised because of. Yeah, I remember we talked about that. Yeah. Yeah. But as it should, right? You know, like anything should be measured against opportunity costs. Like that's just a basic premise. If you, if you could invest your cap, it's like in real estate is grants. Yeah, grants up here. Grant knows the, the, the terminology. Ice and best use. Like.