Kevin Rose: His $100M/Year Watch Blog, Money From Digg.com, & Web3 Business (#382)

Sam Parr

When I saw you went and did the watch site Hodinkee, first of all, Sean, have you ever read that? When I heard it was a blog, I thought, "I like watches. I have Rolexes. There's a blog for luxury watches? What the hell is this guy thinking?"

Shaan Puri

Did you just say that it went from like $1,000,000 or $2 in revenue and now Sam said it's over $100,000,000?

Kevin Rose

yeah yeah we're over a 100,000,000 in revenue now

Sam Parr

man that is wild that's insane

Shaan Puri

What's up? Alright, in this episode, we are sitting down with **Kevin Rose**. A lot of you know Kevin because he's an internet OG. He created **Digg** back in the day, was a seed investor in **Twitter**, and a bunch of other cool companies. He has been a VC, a founder, and recently launched an NFT project that has done **$100 million** worth of NFT sales. Kevin's just been around for a while. The cool part of the interview is that, if you listen to it, you'll see he's a very chill guy, down to earth, and humble. He’s not the kind of person who’s like, "Oh my god, I'm going to take over the world," bubbling over with ambition and a big chip on his shoulder. He seems like a happy dude who is enjoying himself and has had a ton of success in the process. I like that. I like seeing people who play the game in different ways, and he's definitely someone who's interesting. We talked about a bunch of his projects that you may not know about. For example, he's creating **Watchville**, a niche project for watches that grew from **$1 million** in revenue to now over **$100 million** after it got acquired and merged with **Hodinkee**. We also discussed how he hires writers, how he got into Twitter as an early investor, and what he does with his money. He has a bunch of money, so how does he invest it? Where does he put it? The answer is not what you may have expected. The last thing we did at the end is we had a crypto debate. **Sam** is sort of a crypto skeptic, while Kevin is obviously a crypto believer and one of the most well-known guys in the crypto scene. We had a little debate where we talked about whether it's all bullshit or if there are some use cases. Hope you enjoy this episode with Kevin Rose. I liked it, and I think you will too.

Sam Parr

We should give a brief overview, but like your resume, we don't really talk too much about resumes and stuff. Your resume is like crazy long. I've been following you forever, so I've known about your work. So, you started Dig. When did you start that? In '04?

Kevin Rose

2004 that's right

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

And so, you were one of the original link aggregators. It was like a cultural phenomenon, and that was crazy. You were on the cover of Time magazine, right?

Kevin Rose

business week

Sam Parr

**Business Week** was like, "Here's this young kid taking over Silicon Valley. What's the internet, and who's this kid controlling it?" type of thing. It had all this hype, but Digg didn't turn out maybe as wonderful as we all thought it could have. But then you had your finger on the pulse of all these other things. You've done Digg, you've done... is it... I read it all the time, but is it pronounced Hodinkee [luxury watch website]?

Kevin Rose

yeah hodinkee

Sam Parr

Yeah, Hodinkee is a watch blog that also sells watches. You're a partner at Google Ventures, and you have this app called Zero Fasting that I use and love. You're also a partner at True Ventures, which I still think you're at. Now you've got the Oak Meditation app, and I have a feeling there are like 5 or 10 other things that you just have brewing that most people probably don't even know about. But you're basically my... you're kind of an internet OG, and you are incredibly prolific. I mean, does that kind of summarize it?

Kevin Rose

Yeah, I mean, the most recent thing I started was **Proof**, which is our venture into the world of NFTs. That's the only thing missing from that, and that's about 10 months old now, so that's on the newer side.

Shaan Puri

So, from the outside, if I look at this kind of collection of, or like, the career path, it looks very random. It's like, you know, from venture-backed to angel investing, to venture investing, to kind of like niche communities. These are like apps that are simple, like meditation or fasting. You did a podcast, you did a show, you know, you've done a bunch of content. You did a bunch of different things. Was there a method to the madness? Do you just describe it as random, or is there kind of like some underlying theme to this whole thing?

Kevin Rose

Yeah, there's... I would say that I've always been one, ever since I was a little kid, to just tinker and play. If there's any method to the madness, it is this common thread of exploration and just wanting to create. If I see something that doesn't exist but should exist, I want to go build it. I've done that a handful of times—probably at least 10 to 15 businesses—of which, you know, 90% of them go to zero. Then there are a few that pop and become pretty big. So it's just this idea that I don't want to sit on the sidelines. If there's something exciting that needs to be built, I'd rather just spin up a team and go after it.

Sam Parr

Of all those projects, and I'm actually going to exclude Proof from that because I want to talk all about that in a little while, but of all those projects that I mentioned, which one has been the most financially successful for you personally?

Kevin Rose

That's a good question. Certainly, I would say when I was in the middle of Web 2.0, which was when Digg was at its peak, around 2000 to early 2006, we hit around 38 million people a month using the site. It was, you know, of the Web 2.0 properties, one of the largest. It led me to sitting down for dinners, conversations, and hangouts with the, you know, Jack Dorseys, Evan Williams, and Zuckerbergs— all of the household names that became these big products. They were just friends. So because of that, it was more like, "Hey, do you want to invest in my new thing?" I would say the investment side has definitely been the best financial return. I did start a media company that... well, I would say there are two things that are unrealized in Hodinkee, which is going to be crazy. It'll, you know, generate over $100 million in revenue a year now, which is nuts.

Sam Parr

woah really

Kevin Rose

And then we have, you know, the stuff I'm doing at Proof right now, which has just been another crazy rocket ship. But in terms of true exits of businesses that I've started, Revision 3, where I was the co-founder, is a media company that became Discovery Channel's digital arm. We sold that for **$35,000,000** back in 2008 or something like that. So that was probably the biggest company sale that I've had. But, you know, there are much larger ones on the more angel investment side.

Shaan Puri

And maybe that sale gave you the ammo to do angel investing, or would you have been able to do it without it?

Kevin Rose

A bit, but I was already starting to do small investments prior to that. I didn't have any money; I didn't come from money. But when Dig really took off and we were a couple of years in with Dig investors, this is a very common practice that doesn't get talked about a lot. Investors come around and they're like, "Hey, you know you're doing this round of financing. Can we take a little pressure off of you as an entrepreneur and buy some of your stock personally?" So, I sold a little bit of my Dig stock—enough to give me the ammo to go and do small seed checks. You know, I put $25,000 into Twitter's seed round and more into Facebook, but they were a little bit later stage. It was those little tiny checks that, when they turned into multibillion-dollar businesses, were pretty meaningful.

Sam Parr

How much does $25K into Twitter and Facebook early on actually turn into? It's millions of dollars. I mean, that math is even hard to comprehend. In Twitter's seed round, what was the valuation then?

Kevin Rose

Well, it was difficult because they were a podcast company doing podcast software. Then they did a new round and pivoted into Twitter. Oh gosh, I'm drawing a blank on the name of the podcast... Odeo! That's right, they were Odeo. So, yeah, I didn't invest in Odeo. They had become Twitter, and I asked Ev, who I was the tightest with at the time, because I didn't really know Jack that well yet. I asked Ev, he was the CEO, and I was like, "Can I invest?" There was no round available at that time. But he said, "I got this engineer, Blake, who was leaving and had some stock. Do you just want to buy some of the stock?" I was like, "Yeah, that sounds great! I'll just buy some of it."

Sam Parr

the stock I think gary vaynerchuk said the same story and he bought

Kevin Rose

it from that guy too

Sam Parr

yes oh really yeah

Kevin Rose

So here's the funny thing. I bought in from Blake, and then I told Gary that Blake was selling some. Then Twitter ended up actually having a preemptive round come along that really like 5 or 10 times their valuation. Blake was like, "Oh, whoa, whoa, no, there's a new valuation now," and he charged Gary the new price. So Gary's still pissed at me because I got this really cheap price for Twitter stock, you know? And then Gary had to pay the more expensive price. But that was a funny little... what do you think?

Sam Parr

think blake's saying right now I mean blake probably just lost 5

Kevin Rose

He held on to like half or more, and so, you know, he probably... I don't know. If I had to guess, he made $50 + $75 + $1,000,000 or something on it. He's... I'm sure he's okay.

Shaan Puri

At the time, Twitter kind of had... well, there was Odeo kind of failing, and Twitter, who knows? And then there was this small community of people in Silicon Valley that were using it back when it was like texting your updates out. When you were writing that check, did you feel like this was, you know, the next big thing? Or was this kind of like, "I don't know, my friends are smart, let's see"?

Kevin Rose

Or where was it in that segment? It was the next big thing because I loved, as someone that was building a social graph of sorts at Digg, there was always this idea back prior to... excuse me, prior to Twitter that was bidirectional friendships. So, you know, on MySpace, Friendster, and all the others that came prior to Twitter, you had to actually know the person to see their content. It was like, "Would you like to send a friend request?" Yes. "Do you accept this friend request?" Yes. Right? And it was the same thing with Facebook. When Twitter came out with that model of just this idea of following, it allowed for a different dynamic. There were no celebrities on the platform at the time; it was just me, Leo Laporte, and a couple of others who were the top followed people. I thought to myself, "Wow, if this catches on with the celebrity crowd, it's just going to be insane." Everyone would just want to see what celebrities were doing. Also, the barrier to entry back then was significant. It was impossible to get celebrities to sit down and do technical things because we didn't really have smartphones. But the fact that you could text to that number, that short code, just to share what you were up to—anybody could do that. It didn't require any special software or sitting in front of a computer. It was just so dead simple to use. As I saw the tech crowd catching on, I knew eventually it would spill outside of that small vertical of users into the mainstream. If and when that would happen, that was the bet. And when that happened, it would blow up. And it did! So that was awesome.

Shaan Puri

I've also seen you did a video back in the day when Square was like a prototype. It was a YouTube video, I remember. You were like, "Hey, check this out!" You showed this little Square device that you could plug into your phone to take credit card payments. It wasn't even released yet, and you were promoting it. I think you invested in that too, didn't you? Because that would have been... yeah.

Kevin Rose

So that's a great story. I hit Jack up and I was like, "Hey, I heard you're doing this new credit card thing. I'd like to be an angel investor." He's like, "Oh dude, it's oversubscribed. I'm sorry, we've closed the round," like blah blah. I was like, "Damn it." I thought, "Well, let me see if I can help you in some way." He gave me a prototype, and I just went and recorded the video. It got a lot of traction and excited a lot of people about this new product. It was like an early glimpse of what was to come. It started getting tens of thousands of views on YouTube. He calls me back and he's like, "I had an investor drop out. I've got some room. Do you want to put a check in?" So that's what got me into their seed round, which was awesome.

Sam Parr

What was it like? You know, I lived in San Francisco from 2012 up until somewhat recently. Sean's still there. It's definitely a bit different now because startups are quite popular. Jack Dorsey is basically a celebrity, and Mark Zuckerberg is obviously a celebrity. What was it like back then, in 2004, 2005, 2006, you know, 2010, when these things were just getting going? Did you actually think that a guy like Jack Dorsey was going to be this kind of titan of industry like he kind of is? What was it like being around some of these folks early on when you were just, you know, messing around?

Kevin Rose

Well, it was... you met a lot of entrepreneurs back then, and there was... it was clear there were a few people that stood out as just being wildly creative and deep thinkers. I was really drawn to those folks. I wanted to just pick their brains more and get to know them better. So, you know, one of the things that struck me is just how mature **Mark Zuckerberg** was when he was younger. Like, it was... you know, I'm quite a bit older than he is, and...

Sam Parr

how old is he now he's still only like 38

Kevin Rose

he's younger than that

Sam Parr

oh my god

Kevin Rose

Yeah, so how old is Mark? Oh, yeah, you're right. He is 38. Yeah, I mean, he's 30.

Sam Parr

that's still I mean he's in his 30 so that's pretty wild

Kevin Rose

Yeah, and it's crazy. He was really young. So when I met him was 2005, I want to say, so he was 21.

Sam Parr

wow

Kevin Rose

So, he was 21 years old, and I remember just thinking about how put together he was. He was well-spoken and just such a deep thinker about the space. He wasn't winging it; he was taking it very seriously. That was a big, big shock to me. I remember those conversations being like, "Wow, for 21, I was definitely not as put together as he was at 21."

Shaan Puri

what what's something he said that made you made you think that

Kevin Rose

Well, you know, one of the things that I was always frightened by as an entrepreneur in my youth was this idea of whether people would take me seriously. Could I admit when I didn't know something? Was it okay to do so? I tried to hide my vulnerabilities as an entrepreneur. Then, he just came in and was asking so many pointed questions. I asked him about some of his hiring and firing practices, how he would edit his team, and how he ensured that he made the right hires on the engineering side. That was a very challenging thing to do back then. To scale websites, you were racking your own servers; there weren't the AWSs of the world. We talked a lot about that, and he told me, "It's the obvious stuff. You surround yourself with people smarter than you, and then you ask a lot of questions. You're not afraid to ask those questions." Back then, I had some great investors and board members, but at times I was a little hesitant to say, "Hey, I don't quite understand how this works. Can you help educate me?" I think it was due to my lack of confidence. For some reason, I thought that because I was a college dropout, I had to hide that. I worried that if I asked a question that I should have learned in college, it would make me look foolish. There was a lot of nervousness around that. Just to see Mark be so open and curious was inspiring. It was clear that if he didn't know something, he was going to get to the bottom of it right away.

Shaan Puri

I had an experience just like that when we were selling our last company. I met with all the big companies: Facebook, Google, Amazon, whatever. We also met with Discord. I go in, I meet Jason, who's the CEO of Discord, and I'm pitching him on how, if he bought our thing, it would add this dimension to Discord. It would be awesome. What I was so used to was most founders. If you're just kind of saying how awesome they are and how they can take over all these different areas, how there's so much more they can do, how this is just the beginning, and how there are all these different ways that they can expand, normally they're like, "Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, totally! We can do that too! We can do that too! It all sounds good." But he was just sort of like, "You know, I would acquire you guys because I like you and I like that you came in and you had this whiteboard and you just painted a picture for me. But we won't do any of that." He said, "No, that's not what Discord should do. What we should do is just be this one horizontal utility that does this one thing, and that's our right strategy." He was the first guy that said no when I was kind of giving him some ice cream of, "You can have this too."

Kevin Rose

right

Shaan Puri

Right, and I just thought, "Oh, that's what this is. This is probably what Zuck was like." You know, this is probably what somebody who was focused was like. Because back when Zuck was building Facebook, it was like MySpace was adding music and then TV shows and doing these like brand deals. And he was just like: > "Nope. Real names, simple profiles. We're just gonna let you communicate and add photos and do this stuff." And he said no to a bunch of different things, which is why Facebook was such a cleaner site than MySpace and all the other competitors that were out there.

Kevin Rose

Yeah, I would argue they've lost a lot of that because they say yes to a lot of the cloning of features from other competitors. But yeah, you're right; that relentless focus is so essential. Oftentimes, it's more about what you say no to than what you say yes to on the product side. You know, I totally agree and vibe with that for sure.

Sam Parr

Do you sort of, when you're doing all these projects—back to the projects—do you have like a set of rules? For example, I know a guy who is incredibly successful. I talked to him one time, his name is Kevin Ryan. He started like MongoDB, Business Insider, Guild Group, all these amazing companies. He was like, "Well, I just do back of the envelope math, and then I give each project 6 months. My partner and I typically fund it with $300,000, and we kind of feel it out. It's a little mathematical, but it's also like, let's just see what happens in 6 months and see if this is promising. We'll decide." So he's like, "6 months, $300k, can we make something cool?" I talked to Atomic Labs the other day. You know Atomic Labs? They're like that incubator that's not really an incubator; they start companies. They said something like, "Yeah, well sometimes we'll only spend $50 in 2 months or something like that." Do you have something like that when you're starting a bunch of your projects, like the fasting app or the meditation app? I think you did another one, Milk, or is that the name of the production?

Kevin Rose

company that was the name of the the kinda incubator studio yeah

Sam Parr

like did yeah do you like have like rules for what you're looking for

Kevin Rose

Yeah, I mean, there is... I guess the question really comes down to when you decide to kill something, sell it off, get rid of it, or move on to the next thing. Oftentimes, it's because your original thesis around either the market size or just the concept behind it didn't take hold. I don't have any hard-set number of months. Sometimes you're early. For example, the fasting app. When I launched Xero, it sat at tens of thousands of users for the first 8 months. Then fasting hit, and it became more of a household thing. People started talking about intermittent fasting; it was all over TV, and different places were picking it up. People were just naturally searching for fasting in the app store because that's what they do. That's when it exploded to, you know, 100,000 and then over a million monthly active users doing fasts. But had I shut that down after the first 6 months, it would have been too soon. So, for something like that, if you believe the market is not quite mature enough, I typically put it into a little bit more of a maintenance mode. I got it to that first version where I felt like this is a useful utility for people looking to learn more and get into fasting. Now, let's just let it kind of organically build from here. We were seeing nice, slow, consistent week-over-week and month-over-month growth, but nothing explosive like you're used to seeing in a high-growth startup. So that one in particular was just like, "Let's just wait around." Then other times, you create something and you've clearly missed the mark. It's like we created this app called Tiny, which was a fun little photo-sharing app that was...

Shaan Puri

I loved it I liked it

Kevin Rose

Oh, you did awesome! Yeah, it was these little small postage-stamp size looping videos with no audio. We thought it would be a more quick, intimate way to show how you're traversing throughout your days and weeks, rather than having to take the time to set up and look all perfect in front of your Instagram photos.

Shaan Puri

pressure literally because it was small right exactly exactly actually kinda true

Kevin Rose

Yeah, and that was a crazy one because, you know, we launched and it just caught fire immediately. We had hundreds of thousands of downloads in the first week, and then it just died off completely. Everyone was like, "Ah, that was a fad. That was a fun little fad." We shut that one down pretty quickly after that because it was clear that it was a fun little thing, but there was no depth to it. It was a feature, not a real product. So yeah, it varies from product to product, I guess is the best answer I can give you.

Shaan Puri

Cool, okay. So you talked a little bit about, like, you know, which one was the most lucrative. Okay, obviously, angel investing in Twitter and then getting into, you know, Facebook and others works out well. So, which one was the most fun? Which chapter was the most fun? And kind of with that, I'm on this mission. After selling companies, I got time. So I was like, "Alright, what's the priority now?" I was like, "I want to find out who's having the most fun in their career." Because that's what I want to do now. I just want to have the most fun type of crew. Who's having the most fun with their life right now? So I want to know for you, which of your projects are the most fun? And then, who do you see as a blueprint I could look at? Where you're like, "This person, I've met this person, they're having a blast with what they do."

Kevin Rose

yeah well I would say that the you know there's the the nice thing about starting your own businesses is you're you're doing it because there's a personal drive behind it like I've never created anything because I thought here's an opportunity to make money it's never been that it it's it we were talking about this as we were just you know prior to hitting record or whatever about the little podcast case holder on amazon right and like there's there's there's sometimes there's these little businesses where you see a broken piece of an industry and you're like well gosh if I went out and created this I could sell x number of units per year and it'd be a great little profitable business and like that's never really interest me it's more about the just the creativity of it all and just the exploration of an idea that I'm drawn to and so no startup is fun they're they're all they're all roller coasters loop de loops like there's the chaos of all of those things right especially as you grow your team and there's hr issues and people getting sick and products not getting shipped on time and customers being upset and you know that there's there's it's never gonna be just like this perfect dream but that said as long as it's something that you're just naturally drawn to I'm always having a good time and and I'd I'd say though that said that's kind of a you know a little bit of a dodge in the question but the more recently when I've got a gotten into the art and nft side of things that world and the world of cryptocurrency is probably the most fun because it is so blue ocean and there's just so much to be built there it's not building yet another app and competing on on cac in the app store it's like it's it's really there's there's so many different directions you can go and and very few well there there there's there's a decent amount of of high quality entrepreneurs in the space but not as as much as say you know building something for the app store so I enjoy kinda more the blue ocean aspect of of that world

Sam Parr

Man, I remember when... So basically, I started this company called *The Hustle*. It was like a daily email, and we bootstrapped and sold it for tens of millions of dollars. It kind of sounds a little bit similar to what you were saying about your story. I lived in San Francisco and I started a media company because I was like, "I'm not capable of starting a tech company, but I wish I were." Also, I'm good at writing. When I saw you went and did the watch site *Hodinkee*, first of all, Sean, have you ever read that? When I heard about it, I was like, "A blog? I like watches. I have Rolexes. It's like a blog for luxury watches. What the hell is this guy thinking?" Like, he just... he... he... well, it started...

Shaan Puri

You started it as something else, right? It was like Watchville or it was something else. You got acquired, merged, and you became the CEO of this. I remember looking at that and just thinking, "I have no idea what the hell he's doing." I don't wear watches, so I was completely out of touch with it. It just seemed like a hobby project at the time. Then I started looking into it and I was like, "Oh wow, there's a huge passionate base around this." And this company makes a lot of money and has been around for a while.

Sam Parr

for a

Shaan Puri

long time

Kevin Rose

I

Sam Parr

I don't think it did make a lot of money, did it? I remember I read that and I was like, "I like this business because I'm into it, but... this guy is frankly way above this. What is he thinking?" Like, this seems needlessly hard.

Kevin Rose

well watch phil was so again like just kind of like personal passion stuff so I was into watches mainly because when my father passed away he left me with a single watch and it's something that I I wear every once in a while and it was for him it was like to afford a single rolex in a in a middle class household is a big deal like that's like back in the eighties you know when my dad bought that he was just like I've made it you know I have it and I'm not talking about one of the crazy rolexes I'm talking about just the standard day date kind of like you know simple rolex and like that was like the one thing he was really proud of you know that and his like gmc pickup truck right and so those that was something I was left with and then I started reading some of the content so ben klimmer created hodinkee the actual blog and I created watchfill which was an aggregator in an app that brought together all these different sources so that people can read this stuff on the mobile on their mobile phone because a a lot of as as silly as it sounds back then most of the excuse me most of the watch sites didn't have mobile versions of their site so they were on just like old old software publishing software that what that was just horrible so I I I made it all very readable push notifications like all the stuff just a kind of a wrapper for like all of this great content and it it just started growing and growing and growing and I had a lot of eyeballs like some of the the the biggest collectors were were now using the product and you know I I hodinkee was the most kind of best prominent source of this content that took it very seriously so it was you know they had had a couple full time writers and so I talked to ben and said hey you don't have the tech team here let let's let's merge and and combine forces so we we merged the 2 companies together he was 3 or 4 people and I was 3 or 4 people I moved to new york became ceo at the time he was doing maybe a 1,000,000 and a half to $2,000,000 a year in revenue so just enough to kinda do payroll and we grew it from there and then turned on ecommerce and then started selling and and creating partnerships with the big watch brands and now you know as authorized dealers represent you know several dozen of the big watch brands that are out there and that just became a massive it was still relatively unknown back then whether or not people would actually spend large sums of money over apple pay right and so I remember we had someone from apple that was you know helping us on when you get to a certain size they kinda give you a little bit more concierge help on the apps stuff and they said that they had seen their a $250,000 transaction come through apple pay on an american express and that was like the largest known transaction at that time that had been done over apple pay for a sight unseen vintage rolex which was which was kinda crazy but anyway yeah so that I mean new new new luxury watches are double digit 1,000,000,000 of dollars in a year in in terms of market size so it's it's a big industry that that many people it's not as apparent in the states when you go overseas you'll see how in in in europe their you know watches are so much more kind of a a a type of thing that is is worn versus smartwatches are more normal no no watch at all here in the states

Shaan Puri

Did you just say that it went from like $1,000,000 or $2 in revenue and now Sam said it's over $100,000,000?

Kevin Rose

yeah yeah we're over a 100,000,000 in revenue now

Sam Parr

Man, that is wild! Insane! A lot of it's... I mean, you guys, like when people talk about content and commerce, I think most of the time it's nonsense. Like, BuzzFeed talks about it, and I'm like, "I don't know, man. I don't think people are gonna be buying a lot of branded BuzzFeed pillows and stuff like that." Or like, they had that Tasty thing, and I was like, "I don't think people are gonna buy a BuzzFeed oven." I just don't think that's gonna happen. And you guys did it! I was like, "I don't know, is this like gonna be a thing?" It seems so challenging, but you guys are a perfect example of that. You know what? The other good example... I bet you go to Bring a Trailer. Do you go to bringatrailer.com?

Kevin Rose

I've been to bring a trailer many times yeah it's awesome hodinkee it's one of his favorite sites actually

Sam Parr

They are awesome! So, they've done the same thing but with cars. It's like this perfect tie. I actually bought one car from those websites, and I read it every single day. I'm like, "Let's just see what they're going to write about what cool car is out there." Then you guys did it with watches, and I loved your videos with John Mayer where he talks about his watch collection and all that. It's awesome! But what other verticals or industries have you thought, "Man, maybe I could actually do this model?" I've always thought software, but that's not nearly as sexy and cool as watches and vintage cars. Has there been any moment when you were thinking about this model? I bet you were at night thinking, "I'm not going to do it, but I bet I can apply this here, here, and here."

Kevin Rose

I mean, in some sense, that's kind of what we're doing right now in the world of NFTs. Everyone that's armed with Photoshop can create a digital piece of art on the blockchain. There's this mad rush into the world of NFTs, but there is just a ton of clutter and a ton of projects to sort through. So what we created with Proof was this idea of curation with a point of view. You can have a strong editorial team come in that isn't talking about the flipping side of the industry, that isn't talking about how to make a quick buck in NFTs. Instead, they are really discussing what you would buy and hold for the next decade or more. The playbook that Hodinkee nailed so well was that we took editorials seriously. We hired an absolutely stellar team of writers who had a deep understanding of the world of watches. It wasn't just about announcing, "This is a new watch that was dropped," but rather an understanding of the mechanics and internals of the watches. They could tell you about the different movements and escapements, and why certain complications were harder to pull off technically than others. It was a real geek's blog, and with that technical, hardcore writing, we developed trust. Once you have the trust of your readers, you're able to extend commerce in a meaningful way. It's not asking them to buy a microwave or some inexpensive throw pillow. It's saying, "We have your trust. This is what we believe to be a very important watch or collectible." Because of that, you're willing to pull the trigger on a $20,000, $30,000, or even $50,000 purchase. Trust is so essential.

Sam Parr

Do you think that... well, at The Hustle, we are trying to hire a bunch of writers. Sean hired some writers as well for his crypto thing. I've always debated this in my brain. I'm like, do I hire good writers and teach them about business, or do I hire smart business people and teach them how to write? What did you find was the best way to do that for watches?

Kevin Rose

Yeah, I mean, the best way to do that was to find people that had the natural, organic, built-in love for horology, or, to say, for all things mechanical watches. So, you know, we would have writers that, if you take for example the Speedmaster—the watch that made it to the moon from Omega—they could tell you every single variant and movement change, and the reasons why. They were just super geeky on this stuff. They may have been just B+ writers, but they had the technical knowledge in their brain. That's a lot easier to fix because you get them to put that technical information out in draft form, and then you just apply an editorial layer over the top of it. You have copy editors that come in and help, you know, stitch together a better, more cohesive story before you actually publish it out to the world. Yeah, I love it.

Hubspot

that this data is wrong every freaking time

Hubspot

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Hubspot

Woah! I can see the client's whole history: calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago that I totally missed.

Sam Parr

hubspot grow better

Kevin Rose

you're a

Shaan Puri

Pretty chill guy. When do you get like really fired up? What gets you excited, in a good or bad way? You know, I get really enthusiastic about the most random shit. Like, the most... it'll be like a creative project and I'm like, "I bet I could pull this off," and I just go... I just get too excited about it. Sam has that same thing, but he also has it where if he feels he's wronged, Sam's like... you know, willing to fight to the death about it. And so he gets really pumped up. What gets you really pumped up?

Sam Parr

ray rage is my fuel I I love I love fighting

Kevin Rose

Yeah, so for me, new ideas and working with creative people is the strongest source of fuel. When I get together with an artist or a fellow entrepreneur, it doesn't have to be someone who has created something big. Rather, it's someone who has wild ideas that are potentially new ways of looking at the world. You meet a lot of entrepreneurs who are opportunistic, iterative entrepreneurs. They'll see something and say, "Oh, there are some rough edges on that particular product. I'm going to sand them down, make it easier for consumers, and launch a business." They have great success. I like the ones who are really thinking about entirely new verticals or flipping something completely on its head in new and creative ways. That is what I'm really drawn to from just a straight idea perspective. When I invest in some of these startups, those are my favorites—those crazy, world-changing entrepreneurs. In terms of the rage side of things, you... dude, you've had...

Sam Parr

You've had a bunch of rage-inducing moments. I've followed your career. I've seen you throw the fucking raccoon. Yeah, I saw.

Shaan Puri

you with the raccoon we saw that one

Kevin Rose

don't mess with your dog

Sam Parr

I've seen people protest outside your house. I've seen you get in trouble for, like, I don't know, wanting to demolish a historical building. I don't know the whole story, but you've kind of been a target.

Kevin Rose

yeah I mean those the the those all have their own unique story the the historical building thing was definitely not true that that that was a that was a pretty funny one in that but but that was that was just people wanting to keep an old house up in the neighborhood and they called it historic even though it really wasn't we wanted to take it down because it was filled with asbestos which we didn't wanna live in a house that had asbestos in it but that's a whole another story the rage stuff you know the the the the last 4 to 5 years of of my life has been spent trying to to to kind of master my own mind and and it I I think that if you can't come to grips with your own like personal peace of mind it's it's a horrible place to be and so you know I I remember as a young entrepreneur just kinda being on this 247 hustle to go build build build I gotta win I have to win I have to win and it created a level of anxiety that was not good for me and and so I think that's part probably why you saw me kind of do things like the meditation app and other other things because I it was just a a natural forcing function for my my own self to like take some of that stuff more seriously and so you know I I just want to be able to to be able to sit and not have to have my mind be always on and that that's kind of been my goal and it's something I'm still I'm still working on so that it's not like I remember there was this interview with elon musk and I'm not comparing myself to elon musk but I there's one thing that I I can certainly relate to where he talks about how his mind sometimes just never shuts off and he's always thinking about things problems new ideas like all these things and and it's it's for me it's always been that that has been not a blessing but something that I it's just been has weighed on me and and I've always tried to I guess the the big push in the last few years have been to try and wrangle that

Sam Parr

What kind of things get you all hot and bothered now? When you're thinking about new industries or the things that excite you, what ideas would you pursue?

Shaan Puri

One caveat is that you're not currently pursuing. It's easy to say, "Oh, I'm excited about this project I'm doing." For example, Palmer Luckey was on the last episode, and he was talking about, "Alright, we're like, you're doing Anduril, you did Oculus. What are the ideas that are on your kind of like, 'Oh, that's interesting,' but I only got one me, so I can't go do it?" I think that's the most interesting to the audience and to ourselves. That's actually the origin of the podcast. Me and Sam have more ideas than we have time to do them. So we're like, "Well, if we just say them out loud here, maybe people will take them and run with them or find something interesting in it."

Sam Parr

by the way have you ever talked to palmer kevin that guy is wild

Kevin Rose

No, I've never chatted with him. I have to go back and listen to that episode though. I'm really curious to know... I've seen some written interviews, but never anything in video form.

Sam Parr

It went live yesterday. It's on our YouTube, and most of our listenership is on podcast feeds. He is... he's something, man. That dude, that guy's eclectic. He's just enthusiastic about *everything*. He knows a lot about a lot. He's like biology, but more... but almost... he's as smart but is more common. Do you know what I mean? Like, he's... for some reason I can relate to him even though I know that he's just so much smarter than I am.

Kevin Rose

Yeah, I had read some stuff, and I don't know how much of it is true, but some of his company's work that he was creating around drones for tracking people and some of the controversial... Yeah, I just... it doesn't fit well with my ethos. So I haven't really followed his career as closely, but I'd be curious to listen to the interview for sure.

Shaan Puri

I think it was probably our best guest episode. We've done a bunch of them, and the reason why is he's pretty genuine. He's high energy, but he's also direct. So, it's like, you know, "Why do you do this?" or "How do you think about this?" For example, he said, "I thought about, you know, I'm kind of overweight. Could I solve obesity?" He explained, "But here's what doesn't work: telling me to eat less of foods that I don't like the taste of," and blah blah blah. He continued, "My solution was, and I started prototyping this in my house, to just instead of Beyond Meat and stuff that tries to make a burger out of chickpeas, I wanted to just make fake food out of oil—zero calorie food that tastes amazing. Because oil tastes amazing, and we can manipulate oil into anything. We could turn oil into candles, we could turn it into waxes, we could turn it into this, into that." He said, "I created a grilled cheese sandwich that was zero calorie and tasted delicious using oil." We were like, "Dude, that sounds kind of insane." Then we asked, "Why didn't you do this crazy idea? You sounded pretty passionate; you went pretty far." He replied, "Well, there just simply wasn't going to be enough oil supply to do it. We would have had to take the oil out of the sewage system and centrifuge it to recycle it." He added, "I realized, you know, even I couldn't do that." I was like, "Wow, this guy's like half genius, half crazy." I don't even know where the line is, but I find it fascinating that he A) thinks like this and B) doesn't just think about it. He said, "Yeah, in my house, we converted the dining room into this lab in order to do these sorts of projects." Out of one of them came Anduril, the $8 billion company, and the other one was going to be this crazy, you know, oil-based fake food.

Kevin Rose

That's crazy! That is awesome! I love it. Yeah, see, that's the type of entrepreneurship that I'm really drawn to. It's just like people that are hacking on stuff at night. You know, for me, a lot of the stuff that I think about in that vein, I tend to outsource and get other people to work on it. A lot of the stuff around longevity has been particularly interesting to me, specifically a drug called rapamycin. It has been proven to extend life in various animals and is now being applied to dogs. So, myself, Jack Dorsey, Brian from Coinbase, and a few others have been putting money into funding studies out of the University of Washington to really prove this out in dogs and canines, and then eventually move it into human trials. You know, some of that stuff and the biohacking stuff, I still put a lot of effort, time, and attention into. I try this stuff out on myself as well. I'm trying some of these experimental things, not because I'm one of those people that wants to put young people's blood in them and live forever. I want to die; I just, you know, like the idea of not yet. Since I am an older dad—I didn't have my first kid until I was 40—I would like to be around a little bit longer for them. That's all.

Sam Parr

Well, I've heard of people doing this. I know Tim's doing this with... what's it called? Psilocilam? Like mushrooms? Yeah, psilocybin. And how much does it cost to fund a study? And what do you get out of it other than like the altruistic [benefit] of "Well, we're just contributing to the grand thing"? But is there like a direct outcome that you can get from it? Like, can we use this to fund a company?

Kevin Rose

No, no, not in this particular case. Yeah, Tim also put some money into this one as well. There was nothing you get out of it other than just trying to help further science. You know, a lot of these, in this particular case, the study was funded, but depending on the sample size and how many canines you have involved, you can only detect certain levels of output. You need a larger sample base, and it is called a properly powered study in order to detect smaller nuances in the data. So, we wanted to make sure it was powered enough to detect, I believe, up to a 10% lifespan increase. To power it, we needed to add another $1,000,000 or so into the study to ensure that they could bring on the additional canines required to make that happen. You know, I put my dog on it as well, and he's 12 now. He still runs around like a pup, and I attribute some of that to a cycle of this that he did. But yeah, it's nothing other than just figuring out ways in which you can... There are all these different avenues on the philanthropic side where you're like, "What is meaningful to me personally?" This particular study, you know, I think even if it just worked for dogs, it would be fantastic. Forget humans! If I could have my dog live for an additional 5 years, like, what a win! So, it was kind of a win-win study.

Sam Parr

Dude, I talked to this guy who was building, I think it was called AgelessRx. I forget the name of his company, but he's trying to do longevity stuff—supplements and things like that. Things are going well for him. He was kind of explaining his reasoning. He said, "You know, a lot of people are afraid to take these medicines, but we've been thinking if we told them it's good for their dog, they actually will give it to their dog." He was hypothesizing and brainstorming with me in real time. He said, "Maybe we should just do this for dogs and give it to dogs. Once people see that it makes their dog live longer, then they'll be like, 'Yeah, you know, forget it. Give me that pill. I'll take that thing,' because it's so much easier to commit to giving it to their dog."

Shaan Puri

I'm with kevin oh for sure

Kevin Rose

and and do so much

Shaan Puri

dogs live forever

Kevin Rose

well genome wise there's so much more overlap and and and and connection there between canines and humans and there is a lot of other animals out there so but you know the back to your question though about you know out of curiosity what what would I go pursue right now in terms of startups that I'm not doing I believe and it's very very clear now that ai in the next 5 years is gonna change everything we're seeing open openai and a lot of the projects they put out there recently whether it be creative writing or I believe fiverr as a company it will just be nonexistent it's gonna destroy the low end of the creative market initially and then work its way up the chain and you know just the the outputs that you're getting now from prompt based art you know the future versions of photoshop are are not gonna be about moving mouse and pixels around it's just gonna be telling the computer what to do on your behalf you know you'll highlight an area and say you know change this aspect and and it'll all be done via prompt and and meaning that you type in what you wanna see change and the aol will just make it happen and we're seeing that today and I'm seeing you know advancements on the ai side in in in medicine obviously all the creative side there's probably a half dozen or so tools now that will complete you know write complete paragraphs for you if you're writing sci fi you give it some initial kind of prompts of where you want the story to go and the writing is quite good I have no doubt in the next 5 years we'll see a new york times bestseller that was 90% written by ai so it's it's there's just so much interest and with the interest and excitement flows the engineering talent so I've seen a lot of friends that are these you know a lot of people I worked with at Google and and other places where you know they're they're very insanely amazing engineers you know previously working on distributed systems and some of these hard problems that they were trying to solve and now I said hey I'm I'm actually gonna pivot into this this new world of ai and anytime you watch that kind of flow of high quality engineering talent go move into something you you you pay attention so I'm looking for at a lot of investments in that particular sector and I'm I'm very bullish on it and something I don't have time to work on but I I believe some great businesses are gonna be built there

Shaan Puri

What would be an application you would want to do in that space? So all those kinds of threads where it's like creative work, medicine, you know, writing an AI book... Is there an application that you can think of where you're like, "I feel like AI could solve this"? Because I think that's the... it's a hammer in search of nails at this point. That's what I mean when I talk.

Sam Parr

About it, Sean, you made a joke. I've always teased Sean about Web 3 because I'm not the biggest fan of it. We were joking about how he was coming up with ideas with AI, and he's like, "Finally, a use case! We found it!" With AI, it seems like there are actually way more obvious use cases. But yeah, what application excites you?

Kevin Rose

Oh, I'd love to have that Web 3 debate at some point. But on the AI side, you know, we're already seeing this, right? So, Figma was purchased by Adobe. You probably all saw that; it was a crazy acquisition. It's probably the standard these days for prototyping and creating interfaces for everything from mobile apps to websites, to you name it. We're already seeing built-in plugins to Figma that allow you to prompt-based build anything in just a matter of seconds. You can say, "Hey, give me an interface for a mobile app that has these five options in this color with this futuristic type style," and you know, you get something back in real time in about 25 seconds. It's rough, but it's giving my design team and other designers out there just a great starting point. It saves them a ton of time and effort. But this is like inning one. In two to three years from now, it'll be doing 90% of the work versus, you know, right now it's probably doing 20% of the work. So that is super exciting. The assistance and time to market for new ideas and new projects, I think, is going to be compressed even further. It's the same thing that happened with the late Web 2 when we went from racking our own servers to fully deployed, automated, and managed AWS instances. Some of these databases just auto-scaled as you threw traffic at them. It really compressed the go-to-market time by quite a bit, and I think we'll see the same thing on the design side. So, the speed at which we can develop and deploy new ideas is just going to be, you know, probably an order of magnitude better than it is today. I'm excited for that.

Sam Parr

Where do you... a question that we started asking people, and I've actually learned so much from this. What message boards, Facebook groups, or websites—what corners of the web are you lurking in right now? For me, I love Facebook groups. There's always like a weird Facebook group. A tiny example is overlanding. Do you guys know what overlanding is? It's like... no, it's like I don't know the exact definition, but it's like, you know how you see Toyota 4Runners or F-150s that have campers on them? They look like they can go in the desert for like two weeks. So, I started joining overlanding groups like three years ago because I was like, "Oh, this is kind of an interesting trend that's picking up." Another one that we got really into a couple of years ago was mobility. It was all about stretching, and there were all these grown men not caring about yoga, but they called it mobility. It's like, what's going on with that? There are all these weird Instagram guys doing all this stretching stuff. It's kind of intriguing. And a lot of times...

Shaan Puri

Like, instead of therapy, executive coaching... you know, that's what happened from yoga to mobility.

Sam Parr

Yeah, they just changed like mayo and aioli, and it totally worked. It's awesome. I love mobility now. For example, for the body stuff, Tim Ferriss was always pretty good at that. He'd be talking about all this weird stuff like fasting. It's like, "Dude, what the hell is this fasting thing? What are you talking about?" And that was like a really cool corner of the web to look in on and see how the geeks are behaving now. So I can learn how the rest of the normal... like average Joe is gonna care about in the next 5 or 10 years.

Kevin Rose

yeah there's that chris dixon quote are you familiar with it yeah what what

Sam Parr

the geeks

Kevin Rose

It is what the geeks who are playing with on the weekends will become. Like, what we're all using several years later is some version of that.

Sam Parr

Yeah, so like, what geeky places are you hanging out right now? From Sean and I... we like a lot of Twitter people. So we'll find like specific people on Twitter who are quirky and we're like, "What the hell is this guy talking about? He's talking crazy!" I mean, it's really cool.

Kevin Rose

Yeah, I mean, I follow a ton of people on Crypto Twitter. So, I pay attention to all the happenings in Web 3 via Twitter and also, you know, mostly Discord. It's just a lot of private Discords, a lot of private Telegrams, small groups, and gatherings of peers that get together to discuss new ideas and new projects. These DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, where people come together to discuss, collect, and purchase things. So, it's a lot of... I've never spent so much time in Discord. It's crazy that the conversation has shifted there and on Twitter largely.

Sam Parr

Dude, I hate that by the way. I love the fact that like Digg or Reddit or something exists where you can just... if you googled it and found it, you could participate. Now I'm like, "Oh, what the fuck, man!" Kevin's probably got this crazy-ass Telegram group that... I don't even... I can't get in because I don't even know it exists.

Shaan Puri

no you can join proof it's $50,000 and you're in bro it's easy

Kevin Rose

No, I think it's more like people realize that they wanted a little bit more intimate conversation. I have a feeling that there was a move towards smaller, private Discords and smaller Telegram groups. This shift would lead to not having the masses flooding in and the chaos that you would see on Reddit. That's kind of been the move that I've seen and the reason behind a lot of that. But it's not hard to get into that; you just have to actually show them that you know what you're doing. You have to get in there and embrace Web 3, which it sounds like, Sam, you may not be the biggest fan of. But you have to get in there, talk the talk, and know where to go. People will tell you, "This is the place to be hanging out," or "I'm enjoying this Discord over here." You'll learn about this, and this is where the AI Discords are, or whatever it may be. That's just kind of the new... it's the new Facebook. Facebook is good for some things, but it's dead when it comes to Web 3.

Sam Parr

you want me to tell you my why I'm not a fan of this and you

Kevin Rose

can speak to me

Sam Parr

I'm gonna get you I'm gonna try and get you fired up here and

Kevin Rose

then we can talk about

Sam Parr

Let's try. We can talk about proof. I do... it sounds like I'm making an easy out, which I kind of am. But basically, I am decently educated just by hanging out with Sean. So, I have to admit that some of my beliefs are a little bit loosely held, and I'm not the most educated on the topic. My opinion on Web 3 is basically that it's a bunch of... it's just this kind of circular economy of a bunch of people making products to serve an industry that has yet to truly figure out... or I don't know what you call it, an industry or a movement that has yet to truly figure out what the thing is that they're doing. There are so many examples where people, I think, are fairly egotistical and elitist about it, saying like, "Web 2.0 is old," and "this has to be decentralized," or "this has to be this way." It's like, man, just because you're putting Web 3 in front of something doesn't mean that there's actually a problem here. I think you're just wasting so much time and energy working on something that is just like a circle jerk that doesn't actually solve a problem better than the Web 2.0 version. Also, I find it pretty dogmatic where it's like, "Decentralize everything." It's like, dude, I want some stuff centralized! Can you imagine calling customer service on a decentralized platform? It's like, no, I like there are some things that I want to have centralized. I thought that they were a little bit too dogmatic, and I thought that they were oftentimes... I'm saying "they" like you people, like you guys... didn't always have wonderful solutions. You were just making stuff up in order to get in the game, and I just thought that it kind of bothered me.

Kevin Rose

Yeah, I mean, I feel your frustration there. I, too, am someone that when I look at what's being built in Web 3, if it's just for the sake of calling something decentralized and there's nothing behind it or no structural advantage for that being the case, I think it's silly. You know, I'll give you a great example. We're working on a lot of things in Web 3. Some of them are high value and some of them are low value. When you were talking about working with the community, we have a community of people that come together to do all different types of things. Some of it is what we call token-gated content. It's like a membership model where you have to be a member of something or hold a certain NFT in order to unlock access to videos or content or whatever it may be. Some of those things can be high-value items where you receive an NFT or something that actually has some financial backing. In that case, you want to actually have that hardware wallet, pull it out, and do it in a way that is secure and protected. But the rest of the time, you don't need that. You can use a Google login. It's okay to use a Web 2 login. It's okay to use your email and password with two-factor authentication. We don't have to throw away a lot of the fantastic technology that's been built in Web 2. There are other things, like for example, some decentralized maximalists. I think maximalists is really what we're talking about here because anyone that is a maximalist... what does that mean?

Sam Parr

you just like extreme an extremist

Kevin Rose

It means that you are so into something that you can't see any other way. It's like it's your way or... there's no possible alternative. There are people out there that say, "There is no other cryptocurrency than Bitcoin. That's the only one."

Sam Parr

Is it Pompe? Pompe's our buddy. Is it Pompe? Like, don't they call him online a "Bitcoin maxi"?

Kevin Rose

he I don't think he I think he is a maxi on bitcoin and and you know dorsey's in that camp too where he's like trying to extend bitcoin and says that's that's kind of the only currency and I I think this applies to so many different things like I don't wanna get into to political talk but anytime you get to the fringes of anything where it's like this is the only thing that matters you get into crazy town in my. Of view and so you know I think that is a danger of web 3 where there's a lot of that kind of idea that if if it's not pure web 3 it's not right and I'm with you I a 100% agree but that said like I've seen this idea and a lot of the defi tooling when I say defi I mean decentralized finance a lot of the defi tooling that's being built on the blockchain in a performant way in a cost effective way in a way that when you think about wells fargo as an organization with you know a 150,000 employees I'm just making that up by maybe it's 50,000 or 75,000 or somewhere in between that that range where that is just a lot of bloat and it and because of that bloat and because of that ins insane monthly nut that that company has to cover you know those dollars are are not are not flowing to the right people and so there are examples of more efficient ways of doing finance on the blockchain that that can be done in a trustless way written into smart contract code that will mean for better outcomes for the consumer now those can be paired with centralized solutions right like coinbase is a centralized organization you have a email address you can send it if something goes wrong with your crypto account but they hold and keep decentralized currency right and they and they do things like decentralized staking where you earn 4% on your ethereum but they're a centralized company that gives you that customer support so I'm not I'm I'm a I think that the the ones that really win here yes there are gonna be the people that say self custody is the only way they there's this famous saying that if it's not your keys it's not your crypto like like you have to hold your own private keys I'm not in that camp I do that personally and use safety deposit box and a whole slew of things to safeguard that for some things but there's other solutions where where a hybrid approach makes more sense so know that your argument is completely valid and that a lot of entrepreneurs that are building a web 3 completely agree with you and that let's not throw away the baby with the bathwater here there's a lot of great things but there are also some great advantages that come with being decentralized or a whole slew of other technologies that's being built on web 3 that that I could.

Kevin Rose

To that you'd say like oh that yeah that actually that that does make more sense than the old way of doing things

Shaan Puri

So, let's do this real quick. You've probably seen, just like anybody else, that there are these permanent "perma bulls" for crypto and "perma bears." Their mission in life is to basically find every stupid use case of crypto, highlight every bad investment, or every clip of a pro—like some dude at a16z—who goes on a podcast and says something dumb about crypto when asked about a use case, poking holes in it. But it's also a little embarrassing to spend your whole day poking holes at something, you know? Let's put it this way: on this podcast, I'm the crypto believer. I'm the one who puts a significant portion of my net worth into crypto. I have a crypto media company and a bunch of belief in crypto. But for this use case, for this exercise here, I'm going to point out two things that I think would be strong and valid points against crypto to somebody like you, who is also a crypto believer. So, I want you to kind of argue against these, and I hope that this doesn't get clipped as, like, "famous investor X fumbles the ball when trying to explain crypto things." So, let's try to do better than that. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so the first would be around NFTs, right? You're a big NFT guy, and there's NFT art, which I think is pretty hard to argue against at this point.

Shaan Puri

Like digital art, owning digital art is one use case for NFTs. However, a lot of people who believe in NFTs will also say that this is just the beginning. NFTs are a file format; they are a protocol. There are all these different use cases for NFTs. I saw the founder of OpenSea talking about this yesterday on a podcast. He mentioned that when asked about other use cases, he said, "Oh, another use case is NFT tickets." When they asked, "So why would you want to have an NFT ticket?" he explained, "Well, because then you could plug it into DeFi and take a loan against your ticket." People responded, "Why the heck would I want to take a loan against my $60 concert ticket? Is that really what the hype is about?" It seems like a silly use case. So, I would like you to give me the non-silly NFT use cases that you're excited about. Let's take the ticket example.

Kevin Rose

Let's take the ticket example, and... the art one is easy. It's a new canvas. But let's actually cover that first: The art one is easy - it's a new canvas. You can do things and pull from real-time data to display art in very unique, fun, creative ways. Right? Like...

Sam Parr

It's really not that much different than your Rolexes. I mean, there's no reason why a Rolex is $150,000 other than a lot of people think it's cool.

Kevin Rose

Yeah, well, I would say there's a difference there. Something you may not know about Rolex is that they make over **1,000,000** Rolexes per year. They hide that number because if they didn't have a sense of scarcity around it... They do this specifically when you go into their stores. Next time you walk by an actual true Rolex boutique, notice how there are always some missing spots. When you go inside, that's all part of the play. They're like, "Oh, they're sold out, they're not available, but we can put you on this list." In **3 to 4 months**, you might get a phone call. Guess what? You always get the phone call, and the watch is coming because they're making a million a year. The nice thing about this is that one of the things I was always so confused by is that I was a comic book collector way back in the day. I bought *Wolverine* number 1 because I love Wolverine. It was like my childhood; I always wanted to own one, right? So, I bought *Wolverine* number 1, and it always hovered around **$50**. I was like, "Why is this not going up? It's the very first Wolverine launched in the eighties." It wasn't the first appearance of Wolverine, but it was the first Wolverine comic. I finally got a hold of a really well-known collector, and he goes, "Oh, you don't know..." Well, they knew by that.

Kevin Rose

That Wolverine was a hot character, and so they printed over 300,000 copies of that first edition. I was like, "Oh shit, that's why there's just a flood of these in the market." So, you know, NFTs. The beautiful thing about this is when you have an artist produce a piece, it has **proven provenance**. You know where it's come from. It has **proven scarcity**, so you can't create additional add-ons or duplicates because it's all recorded on the blockchain. Then you have the unique ability to do very creative things, like animation oracles, where the art can change based on the stock market price, time of day, or phase of the moon. There's just so much more extension. It's a new vertical for art. Fine, that's great. Awesome! Digital frames are going to be getting better. It is going to be a thing. In my mind, there is no argument to be had that this won't be a thing. I don't bet against the future or the inevitable, and art is the easy use case for NFTs. The ticket thing is different, right? So, the ticket thing... I'm with you. I understand that people in Web 3 are trying to create these fancy financial instruments to leverage anything that you own. They're like, "Hey, you have a ticket to that upcoming concert that's sold out. Spin it into this DeFi unit and take a loan against it. Then you can buy it back and use the money in the short term." It's like, that's all bullshit, man. Nobody's going to do that, right? Don't get me wrong, there are specific use cases where that does make sense. Like, a loan against NFTs is going to be the same thing that happens when Christie's gives you a loan against your Picasso. These things happen all the time. It's just a parallel for the digital world. There are certain types of digital assets that getting loans against them, if it's something you want, will make sense. The tickets thing for me is very confusing. But what I will tell you is interesting, and I've talked to actual rock stars about this. Like, I had Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park on my show, and he's a huge NFT fan. He creates them, and you know...

Sam Parr

Awesome, awesome flex! By the way, you know, I've talked to some rock stars about this. I'm gonna... that's no.

Kevin Rose

but like

Sam Parr

I don't I'm not making fun of you I'm saying that's cool I think it's cool

Kevin Rose

I think it's important because like you you do you wanna get the artist to buy in on this too because if it's just geek they're saying it's cool yeah yeah he's a he's an awesome guy very approachable very approachable in in the terms of rock star guys but chanel will tell you that like what we talked about which is an obvious one is like okay imagine the tickets well let let me step back one thing I believe to be true 90 +% of people that interact with nfts over the long term I believe won't even know it as they're doing it as an nft it'll just be something where they have a digital wallet an app or something like that and they have a ticket there right they're not gonna know that behind the scenes that is powered by the blockchain and recorded by the blockchain right so I think what's gonna happen is the nice thing about the blockchain is because it is a ledger an an immutable ledger that is that is a way to say improve that you have done something that you either attended an event or you've you know you've actually physically done something there's a ton of possibilities that I can unlock right if I go and I see mike schnota play 5 shows or 10 shows maybe he says okay now according to the blockchain in our app and again the consumer doesn't need to know about this anyone that's attended 10 of my shows gets a vip meet and greet before the show right and there's a 1,000 different things that you can do that you want to have that security of the blockchain behind the scenes so it's not being forged so there's not being copies of it being made so there's not like a way to fake it and that's the nice thing about the blockchain is it provides you a way to have the security and knowledge that something is not being faked and you can imagine that's broadly applicable to a whole slew of different industries I don't think we'll be calling them quote unquote nfts you know it it's just gonna be a great piece of tech it's just another database that's all it is it's it's a distributed immutable database that is decentralized it's that's all this is which unlocks a bunch of fun new use cases

Shaan Puri

Let's caveat it. Alright, so let's say... because I think I get what you're saying, but I also understand the eye rolls that people get when it's like, "Cool, tell me how this is gonna make my life better." It's like, well, the cool thing about a blockchain is that it's provably scarce. It's like, wait, you're telling me about the under-the-hood part. For example, if my mom is like, "If I'm like, Mom, you should set up an email address," and she's like, "What the heck is email? I don't need that." It's like, well, no, check this out. You know, you send letters to your sister who lives across the country. Watch this: if you do it this way, it's free and it'll be instant. And they're like, "Oh wow, that's cool!" And hey, you know what's even better? Because it's all digital, you can just type the word and it'll find that file. You don't have to keep it organized somewhere in a folder in your house.

Kevin Rose

yeah

Shaan Puri

Right, so I don't have to tell her how it works at all. I can literally just say it made your life better by giving you, you know, more time, more money, more... whatever. And so I think the question is: What do NFTs give? What will an NFT give a person that makes their life better without explaining how the tech works at all?

Kevin Rose

I'll I'll give you I'll give you a great example of one that hasn't launched yet but it's something that that I'm personally working on so I I I'm I'm working with a well known like very culty kind of wine producer out there and you know wine at the highest level at the high end it it it's a tricky it's a tricky business because there's you know forgeries there's fake labels there's they're putting holograms on the side of them they're putting chips inside of the labels so that they can be scanned to to prove that they're authentic right that's one piece so the the first question is if I'm buying off the secondary market and not directly from the producer am I getting something that's legit excuse me the the second piece of that is once I receive that bottle you know how do I store it to ensure that if I'm gonna keep something and I want this asset to appreciate over time and I wanna drink it a decade from now or 2 then you know how do I ensure that it is being stored the right way so one thing that is happening in the next 4 months will be the issuance of nfts to people that is gonna be from a major well known winery where it will represent one physical bottle of wine there's a couple advantages here one you don't have to take possession of it right away you can let it sit in its proven perfect storage conditions and age for decades to come you can let it appreciate in that in those storage conditions and you can hold on to the proven ownership of it as an nft let's say that bottle of wine for 4 or 5 x's over the next decade you don't ever have to then pull the wine in out of the cellar take ownership above it find a third party to sell it and then resell it where that person is questioning the authenticity of that wine instead you can just transfer the nft to a buddy you can gift it to them for a special occasion or an anniversary and then when they decided hey I wanna drink this they press 2 buttons and that bottle of wine that has been stored perfectly for a decade shows up at their door that is efficiency that eliminates fraud there is just so much to love in that equation and that'll be applied to the watch industry to the luxury world to all these different verticals and it just makes sense like what about that I'm just curious as you hear me explain it it doesn't sound like a better world like in in terms of fixing a bunch of problems

Shaan Puri

I think if I was going to argue against that, like just to **steel man** the argument, I think it would be cool. Maybe these are certificates for collectibles. Most people, you know, it's not going to impact most people's lives as most people are not collecting high-end bags or wines, where there are huge problems of forgery. That may be one thing: it's not going to impact that many people in that sense. Oh, you're telling me NFTs are this game-changing, world-changing technology, but that's a really niche-specific, you know, 1 percenter type problem. Then the other is, you know, it sounds like an NFT is like a digital certificate. You could have done that with another type of certificate or another type of database, maybe. But maybe this is better. I do agree it's better, but it was possible before. It didn't take the impossible and make it possible; it made the possible maybe more efficient or a little bit more convenient for the consumer. So I think that would be maybe one argument against it, but I don't want to go too far in the weeds.

Kevin Rose

I think the other thing to add on to that is, because you have... well, I'll give you an example. Back to the rock star example of an artist: you're reliant upon... if you did want to do some type of rewards program or something. Actually, let me step back one. You made a point about the "1 percenter" problem and whether this is applicable to those people. You're absolutely right; there are only a certain number of people who are going to collect art at the highest level and wine at the highest level. Granted, these are double-digit millions of dollars a year—big markets to go after—but you're right, these specific use cases that I'm giving are very niche. I think, more broadly, on the idea of just membership and access, we should improve where you've been and what you've done to unlock loyalty and rewards over the long term. Think about replacing the Amex points or other types of reward systems with blockchain. The beautiful thing about it being decentralized is that it's forever on the chain. You're not dependent upon a company being around for that to exist. So, if an artist is engaged with a startup that is working on a loyalty rewards program for them and they run out of capital and go out of business three years later, as long as they stored their information on the blockchain, that artist can then just pick up where they left off. It just continues forward. We've already seen this happen where several startups have stored their information on the blockchain. They go out of business because their idea didn't hit, and then someone fills the void and says, "I have a better take on this." Now, let me tap into that public data and use it going forward so that not all is lost. This is kind of a new concept. Rather than just a database going away, it's always going to be there and could be reused.

Shaan Puri

think is pretty

Kevin Rose

pretty compelling

Shaan Puri

The really simple two-second example of this is: you play a game, you get really into Fortnite. You go buy a bunch of skins, you dress up your character, you got the cool glider, and you bought all that stuff. Then, a year and a half goes by. Your friends have moved on; they're all playing Call of Duty now. You've sunk $350 into Fortnite. You don't own those items, you can't resell those items, and you can't recoup any of that value. Nor could you take those items into any other game. So, in a Web 3 world, another game could come out that says, "Hey, we accept items. We plugged into this protocol so you can bring your cool sword from Game 1 to Game 2." That makes the sword more valuable because now it can be used in multiple games. So maybe I'm working on this.

Kevin Rose

The interoperability between multiple Web 3 platforms is significant. By establishing a defined standard, these items can now digitally move between platforms. It makes a ton of sense.

Shaan Puri

Now, those items are more valuable because they can be used in more places. The other point is that if I'm just done with the game, I could just dump it on to the next person who's really interested in Fortnite. I could recoup some of my investment, which will make more people want to spend in games because it's not just a money pit; it's an asset that they could resell. Alright, so that's like the quicker example, maybe.

Kevin Rose

I love that you joined my side it's you were you were just on

Shaan Puri

your side but I have to argue the other way in order for this to be interesting let me let me give you a second

Kevin Rose

at the end you're like I get it I'm in

Shaan Puri

The other crypto nerd argument would be, "Okay, for years people have been saying that Bitcoin is this inflation hedge or this currency that doesn't inflate." And oh my god, you know how lucky for you guys! The U.S. government starts printing $1,000,000,000,000. Inflation is at record highs; it's in the news every day. Wait, what happened to that awesome inflation hedge asset? Why is it down 50% when inflation is the bigger problem than ever? Shouldn't this be your time to shine, Bitcoin? So, yeah, what say you to that?

Kevin Rose

I mean, it's a real shame that Bitcoin has been so spiky. If it hadn't had this linear growth to $20,000 and then to where it is today, we'd all be like, "This is the most amazing thing ever." If you just take the spikes out and make it look linear, it still looks like an incredible asset. Just go back five years and look where it is now versus five years ago. It's the spiky nature of it that hurts it in the end. I would say that, you know, I’m a fan. I think Bitcoin is a tough one because I don't like that it's not a green currency, and I don't see a clear path for it ever being the case. I know everyone's trying to extend it in new and exciting ways and trying to make it more Ethereum-like so that it can do more than just be this type of digital gold. For me, when I think about those types of assets, I'm responsible in that I'm not betting the farm on this. But is it a small percentage of my portfolio? Absolutely. I just consider it another asset class that provides me a little bit of diversification across the board. So, the majority of my personal holdings is still standard, you know, index funds that are pretty vanilla—low-cost index funds, you know, the Vanguard way, right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, and I was actually going to ask that. What does your liquid portfolio look like? I’ve been waiting to ask you that.

Shaan Puri

sam is like a etf low cost etfs and bonds dude I'm

Sam Parr

80% in the Vanguard index funds, 20% in bonds. That's all. Then I build private businesses. Yeah, so Sean has put everything into...

Kevin Rose

I'm like into investing

Shaan Puri

Crypto and then, you know, 5 companies I believe in and a little bit of index funds. It's like... yeah, zero... it's like 5% or something like that. I keep 10% in cash or something. So, what would your pie chart look like? Obviously, it changes over time.

Kevin Rose

Yeah, so my pie chart would be essentially this: you know, 80%. Well, I think there's an important thing to caveat here. As a venture capital partner at True Ventures, I have a lot of risk on the table there in early-stage investments.

Sam Parr

did you get to put your own money into that or is that just your carrier

Kevin Rose

I do, yeah. I just put my own money into it as an investing partner. You also invest alongside the fund, so that is my bucket of risk. Right, so just setting that aside and saying, "Okay, you know, I have carry in the fund." That's my bucket of high, high risk.

Shaan Puri

Too much capital, right? You put like, I don't know, a quarter of a million dollars or $1,000,000, something like that, into that.

Kevin Rose

It depends on the size of the fund. It's a percentage of the fund. We just closed our latest fund, which is $750,000,000. The partners put in a percentage of that back into the fund. I'd have to look at what the exact numbers are, but it's substantial. They want you to have skin in the game when you're investing. So, you know, I consider that to be like those are the big high-risk buckets. Everything else I do, I want to be just super vanilla. It's that Vanguard index fund—keep it really simple. I don't do bond funds; I'd rather rely on people to buy bonds on my behalf. You know, I am laddering into bills right now because you're getting over 4% in the short term. So, just laddering into those makes a ton of sense right now. Anyone out there that has $10,000 sitting around that doesn't go buy an I-bill right now that's earning over 9% is just insane. That's the most no-brainer scenario for someone that's listening to this podcast, by the way.

Shaan Puri

there's like 1 week left of that right it's like yeah

Kevin Rose

That's right. Obviously, this is not investment advice, but you are getting the full faith of the U.S. government as the backer, and it's over 9%. You can do $10,000 for yourself and $10,000 for your spouse, which is amazing. So anyway, I keep it really simple. The rest is the crypto side of things. Let's call it 50% NFTs and 50% digital assets, and that's probably 10% of my overall pie.

Sam Parr

So, 90% of non-venture stuff is in just an index fund.

Kevin Rose

yeah yeah in in multiple index funds that cover a variety of markets but yeah low cost associated

Shaan Puri

with it at all or no

Kevin Rose

not really other than just you know my own stuff

Sam Parr

do you own or rent

Kevin Rose

I

Sam Parr

We've always had this debate, and I know you gotta go—I mean, I hear your alarm's going off—but we always have this debate. Well, we both agree... I own... I wish I would have rented. Dude, I just wanna rent everything. I don't wanna own a lot of stuff. Do you regret owning, or do you like being an owner?

Kevin Rose

You know, the thing is, when interest rates were low, you could just take a bunch of capital back out of your house and pour it back into the market. Assuming that you're gonna beat that... if you could own a house, take a loan out against that house and get, you know, a couple of points, and earn 5 to 7% in the market? I'll take that delta all day long. So that's kind of the way I play it.

Sam Parr

Cool! Well dude, I'm really happy we got to talk. I used to work out of the Reddit building at 3rd and Bryant, and I remember seeing you walk by. I was like, "Oh shit, that's Kevin!" I wish I would've said hey. That was in 2012, so it's only been 11 years later... 10 years later, but I'm happy that we are able to talk. I've been a big fan of yours, I know Sean has as well, so it's really exciting to be able to meet you.

Kevin Rose

Well, I love that you guys are doing this show. I mean, it reminds me a lot of the kind of fun little hash-out debates that Tim Ferriss and I have when we do our random shows. They're just fun, right? You get a couple of friends together and shoot the shit, and some crazy discussions come out of it. So that's great.

Sam Parr

Dude, those were... I can't believe how big those were back then. I remember the Kevin and Tim shows. I think they called that... he had a funny name for you, like "Tim Tim Top Top."

Kevin Rose

Oh yeah, I call him Tim-Tim still, and he calls me Kev-Kev. But yeah, we just shot one here in person maybe 2 weeks ago, which was fun. It was good to see Tim again. I hadn't seen him in a minute, but you...

Shaan Puri

Made that to me... Little things, you know? I remember you talked about Wim Hof back then, and I was like, "Oh!" And then, you know, the next day I'm on my floor like breathing... you know, hyperventilating on purpose.

Sam Parr

I even remember your wife doctor dara is that her name

Kevin Rose

daria yeah

Sam Parr

Daria, it's funny... It's like that stuff was so... I mean, it still is, but it was particularly when I was 22 and just getting into Silicon Valley. I really looked up to you guys as like, "Just show me how to Silicon Valley," you know what I mean? And it was really cool.

Kevin Rose

Yeah, that was fun. I miss not living in the same city as Tim because we always get into some trouble when we're together. So, yeah, you guys are the blueprint.

Shaan Puri

For us, in terms of like, "Hey, if you could find somebody you have chemistry with and you shoot the shit," what's your content? Your content is just, "Yo, I'm super curious and interested in a bunch of things." This becomes my outlet to summarize my set of experiments and rabbit holes I've been going down. We would have never done a podcast thinking, "Oh, the ad revenue will be enough." It's like, no, that's not really relevant. Seeing you, Tim, and how, "Oh, actually, it's these relationships and these investments." There are these little side projects you kick up, and actually, you can make this whole thing work without having to go the traditional kind of venture path.

Kevin Rose

of

Shaan Puri

Of raising money to go do this thing... So that was pretty inspiring. You know, thank you for that. I think just seeing a blueprint is like that Roger Bannister 4-minute mile, where you're like, "Oh, I can have the lifestyle I want, but on my terms." And if these guys can do it, then we could do it.

Kevin Rose

Oh, I mean, it's congrats to you both! It seems like, from what I heard here at the beginning of this episode, you guys have done quite well. Congrats on your success; it's awesome!

Sam Parr

congrats to you too and thanks for kinda paving the way we appreciate it and thanks for coming

Kevin Rose

thanks for having me