š§š Kevin Hartz | Backing Teen Founders, Lessons from the PayPal Mafia
Why AI is the "Mother of All Bubbles", Lessons from the Dot Com Crash, how to size an invisible TAM, and having kids with genome screening and surrogates
Kevin Hartz is the Co-founder of A*, Eventbrite, Xoom, and Sauron. Heās been building and investing in technology companies for 30 years.
Our conversation explores how the industryās evolved, why he calls AI the Mother of All Bubbles (but why weāre still early), and what todayās AI companies can learn from those that survived the Dot Com Crash.
Kevin is a big proponent of backing young founders. Over 20% of his latest fund at A* is invested in teenagers, and he shares how he identifies outlier talent so early, from Seed investments in Airbnb, PayPal, and Pinterest, to many of todayās hottest AI companies.
He also shares the insane story of investing 100% of the proceeds from his first startup into PayPalās Seed round, what he learned from the PayPal Mafia, from Peter Thiel, what makes Founders Fund special, how Palantir, Xoom, and Eventbrite all evolved from insights at PayPal, how to size an invisible TAM, and having kids with genome screening and surrogates.
Special thanks to Ramtin Naimi, Bennett Siegel, and Navya Gudimetla who helped me brainstorm topics for this.
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Timestamps to jump in:
4:25 Power shift from VCās to founders since the 90ās
9:08 AI is the mother of all bubbles
12:40 Why AI is still underhyped
14:10 What Kevin and A* are investing in today
16:02 Investing 100% of his first startups proceeds in PayPalās Seed round
21:21 What made the PayPal Mafia special
23:37 Parallels between the 90ās and today
26:40 What makes Founders Fund special
35:07 How Palantir evolved from PayPalās fraud models
39:06 Building Xoom on the PayPal API
43:38 Lessons between Kevinās 1st and 2nd startups
46:52 Starting Eventbrite off early PayPal API app
51:51 Eventbriteās hidden TAM challenge
53:49 Selling Eventbrite to Bending Spoons
54:59 Investing 20% of A* in teenage founders
1:02:33 Incubating Sauron, the home security company
1:08:44 Making breakfast for our kids
1:13:33 Having kids with embryo screening and surrogates
1:20:31 Collecting art, how to get started
Referenced:
Setting the Table by Danny Meyer
Chinese gaming billionaire reportedly sires more than 100 surrogate kids
Find Kevin on X / Twitter and LinkedIn
Related Episodes
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Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Kevin, welcome to the show.
Kevin Hartz:
Thanks. So excited to be here. Thank you, Turner.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, Iām excited to have you. Youāve been investing in and building technology companies for the past 30 years. A lot of stuff we can talk about. I think probably the most interesting thing to me is just how things changed in your opinion over the past couple decades.
Kevin Hartz:
Well, Turner, I mean, I have been mostly building companies over that period of time since the mid, late ā90s. And then itās like, I donāt know, when youāre not as effective building anymore, you invest maybe. No, Iām kidding. But how has it changed over time? The thing that I will certainly say is that everything in the structure of how we do things today is almost identical to long ago. The difference is that it was such a smaller industry. I canāt believe how much of a cottage industry it is in hindsight of now seeing just sheer breadth and growth of this market. The tech industry was this nichey, small little area, and now all of a sudden it just covers so many different things. Then when you think about venture and investing, without a doubt, the power or the authority or so on was in the hands of the venture capitalists. They just had these incredibly aggressive term sheets and terms and could really get away with that. And thatās changed dramatically as well.
Turner Novak:
What do you think caused the change? Is it just thereās more funds? So if you gave me a bad deal, I should go to someone else?
Kevin Hartz:
Exactly. Itās a supply and demand thing. There is much more capital, much more capital sources and somebodies, as you said, will do things to the terms that are much more fair. So you see valuations rise, but also you donāt see these ratcheted terms of 3X liquidation preferences or things that used to be fairly common in the past.
Turner Novak:
So even in a down the fairway seed round, companies raising $5 million, itās like a good product in business, they would still get a 3X liquidation preference from a good fund?
Kevin Hartz:
I guess Iām giving an example of a ratcheted term. It really depends from deal to deal. It was much more bespoke. Here in this day and age, we just do these quick safe notes and theyāre all fairly standard, but everything was cooked up individually to its own situation. And that situation was usually very well controlled by the investor.
Turner Novak:
And it was probably that it was a lot harder. You couldnāt just go on the internet and type in fast seed investors and get a list of a thousand people. And youāre probably connected with some of them. Some of them probably take cold pitches and you get a hundred meetings today. I donāt want to say itās easy, but probably way easier to meet a hundred investors today than back in the ā90s.
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. I donāt even know if you could find a list that long back in that time period. Then there was the oligarchy of venture firms, the Sequoias and Excels and Mayfields and so on.
Turner Novak:
Is there any other ways you feel like the broader venture industry has changed? Do you feel like people behave any different or are we smarter or maybe dumber than we were in the past? I donāt know.
Kevin Hartz:
You just see different behavior primarily motivated by the amount of competition, which by the way, is good. Iām actually an advocate for an environment such as this because itās great for founders. I guess if I put on my AStar hat, it would be nice to have not as much competition out there. But this is where innovation comes is when you have relative plentiful capital available for these businesses to experiment in a lot of ways that in previous eras and periods and so on, the money just wasnāt there. And now you see financings in all these different countries of the world and all these different segments of innovation and technology. And so thatās really, really great.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. One thing you mentioned, you hinted the current environment, and I guess some people would say today, are we in an AI bubble? I saw a tweet from my friend Finn Murphy saying he saw his first 1,000x ARR round close, which is, I think weāre round-tripping back to 2022, the very beginning of 2022 when that happened the last time. Do you think, are we in an AI bubble? How do you feel about the AI bubble if we are in one?
Kevin Hartz:
Well, we are in an AI bubble and I would call it the mother of all bubbles. Itāll be a bubble that makes every other bubble look like a tiny, tiny little bubble. We can call it a super cycle is a good description of it. However, two things. One is weāre still in the very, very, very early stages, whereas the Wall Street Journal and New York Times and everyone else is saying, āOh, itās going to pop any minute,ā and CoreWeaveās down 50% and itās already starting to happen. And two, I think itās really good. When I say bubble, I always see capitalism as like a pendulum. It never just stays right in the middle. Itās either swinging too far towards the bust side or too far towards the boom side. And weāre on the boom side right now. But to the point earlier, weāre in the early stages.
And the reason I say that is that weāre still at the very low layers of the innovation revolution here in AI. And that is, if you go all the way down deep into a system, itās the chip and Nvidiaās still cranking along and selling chips, and that just lays the groundwork for all the great things that happen on top of it. Of course, building data centers around that, but then the foundational models, Anthropic and OpenAI, not to mention all the existing players are building these foundational model platforms. But what Iām most excited about in what weāve been investing in as aggressively as we can is the application layer. And weāre just in the early innings. And so if you can picture things coming up and up and up, weāre now starting to see companies like Cursor and Cognition and the Code Copilots really ramping up as these first enterprise segment.
And youāre also seeing Decagon and Sierra in the customer service world ramping up, but thereās still so much more to be done and thereās still so many categories to happen that again, I think this is going to, or I know this is going to continue for some time.
Turner Novak:
So those are like famous last words though. Itās like, weāre still early, this has more room to run. What makes you so confident? Is it just that not enough people are using it and itās a useful technology and itās clear that this is what the future of all software is going to look like where itās āapplyingā AI to do work for you and weāre only at like 0.1% penetration and itās going to get up to 100% of software? So thereās just like a thousand X room to run or something. Is that basically the argument or is there something more than that?
Kevin Hartz:
Right. I mean, like what are these chips producing? What are these foundational model companies producing? Itās the application layer and you look out at all the companies throughout the country in the world that can lower their OpEx and dramatically decrease things through BPO replacement or just all the other areas of automation. Itās almost embarrassing how far along we are. Weāre just in the first inning or maybe weāll say second inning, not to be too bullish.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, fair. We still got at least 80% of the game yet to play, maybe 70% of the game yet to play. So then when youāre investing today, like you run AStar, we can talk a little bit more maybe about the theses you guys have, where you fit into the market. But how do you separate what is maybe smart to be deploying capital into today versus not deploying capital?
Kevin Hartz:
So AStar is a pre-seed and seed fund primarily, and weāre a $300 million fund, weāre just wrapping up our second fund. And for us, itās really a focus around talent and people, because at those stages, what else do you really have? You donāt have working products and things of that nature. So weāre really making bet on the right people. And so we hope we can continue to deploy capital towards that. We backed Decagon, for example, we seeded Decagon, which is this customer service, AI customer service rep. And itās Ashwin and Jesse, the two co-founders are extraordinary people and thatās really whatās lifted and drives the business.
Turner Novak:
Is the people, the founders and the team?
Kevin Hartz:
Yes. They set the cadence, they find that right talent in the notion that they expect to hire towards like their VP of engineering or their new VP of sales, like all incredibly driven fast builders.
Turner Novak:
So I think if I was talking to pretty much anyone else and they told me this, that it was all about the people and the talent, Iād be like, āEvery VC says that, youāre full of shit.ā But when I look at your track record, itās like you did this with Pinterest, Airbnb, PayPal. Thereās probably a bunch more that Iām forgetting that theyāre in my notes. Youāve done it so many times. So how do you do it? How do you find really good founders super early like that?
Kevin Hartz:
Well, I think I was lucky that fairly early on in my career I invested in the seed round of PayPal, reconnected with Peter Thiel when he came back to the valley. I had known Peter from student politics at Stanford, and he was an extraordinary person. At Stanford, people are smart. And then there was Peter who was like head and shoulders above that.
Turner Novak:
Am I remembering that you guys were opposite sides in the political spectrum? Am I remembering this right?
Kevin Hartz:
I was chair of the Stanford Democrats and he-
Turner Novak:
Okay. And he was... He edited the Stanford Review, right? Yeah.
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Kevin Hartz:
I mean, it was at a time where some of these issues were boiling, but people actually could listen and respect other opinions, which makes me sad today, but thatās an aside. But Peter was just extraordinary at bringing his team together. And so I got this amazing lesson. Iād come off a very modest sale of a company. We were providing high speed internet access to hotels in the mid, late ā90s, and a public company called LodgeNet acquired us and I had no large portion but some cash, and put as much as I could into PayPal.
Turner Novak:
What percentage of the exit proceeds post-tax and everything do you think you invested in PayPal?
Kevin Hartz:
I think it was like 100%. What else would I do with it?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, fair. Were you not thinking like, āOh, I should create a portfolio of angel investments,ā or was it just like, āThis is an incredible team and insight and market and time, and Iām just going to give them all my capital because theyāre going to build something amazingā?
Kevin Hartz:
It was the latter. I was at an age where I could take these shots on goal and the status quo at the time was like, āOh, you should always put aside most of your earned income and maybe put some into mutual funds or something.ā There were all these stock gurus and money managers that would tell you how to save up and that in 50 years you could have enough to retire, and that just wasnāt of interest. And maybe thatās where my early VC self was showing.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I mean, if youāre thinking about, if you look at the data on the asset classes as a whole, venture typically outperforms on average. And then thereās a massive skew too with inside venture. Itās like the highest performing, widest variance. So you either make a lot of money or you lose it all. So I mean, if youāre really thinking about, Iām trying to make a lot of money here, itās probably the smartest bet if you know what youāre doing.
Kevin Hartz:
Yes. I mean, the venture side, you get a number of shots on goal and itās almost better to take those shots. In my case back then, I guess I went for it all at once and it just worked out. But to the point, I think it was like more of seeing this team together and seeing what an incredibly functional and the ingenuity of that team and the things they did to win were just above and beyond. They just outsmarted everyone on every plane when they were expected to not be able to do that. And you see why now today, when you look at the caliber of all those people, theyāre all extraordinary in their own right and what a special period to have them all together.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So I think I was probably six or seven when PayPal was founded. So I do not remember what it was like at that time. Was the PayPal team today, itās the PayPal Mafia? Most people listening to us probably heard of that. Were they not as highly regarded back in the ā90s? Was it just a bunch of random guys and nobody knew what they were going to become?
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. I mean, completely disregarded. In fact, what happened is that you had the .com boom in the late ā90s. PayPal or its predecessor started in, I think it was ā97, and they launched the PayPal product, I think at the end of ā98. Theyād pivoted a few times and then really took off in ā99 and beyond. And then so when they were really cranking, it was ā99, 2000 and the internet economy was like in overdrive and everything looked like it was incredibly great and nobody could do, you could do no wrong in the internet side. And then the bubble burst. And then they were almost seen as anonymous or they werenāt considered, it was just considered like they would go out of business or that they wouldnāt make it or they would count it out when in fact it was a substantial business and it was growing so fast and doing so well.
Turner Novak:
And so are there any parallels between now and today, like when you look back in the same time period? Like I have a friend who thereās a certain category of AI company and heās just like, every single startup in this category is working, like everyone is ripping and all my friends are invested and theyāre like, āOh, blank, you missed out by not investing in this specific category, you got to put some capital to work.ā And his thing is like, āThat is bad. Iām scared that everything in the category is working.ā So I donāt know, that story really resonated with me. I was like, man, thereās definitely something to that of like, does the success of certain categories today mask or hide certain under radar founders? Do you feel like thereās any parallels between now and today?
Kevin Hartz:
The parallels are very strong that these patterns emerge. Maybe the difference is that there were a few different, a couple different PayPal competitors, copycats, and when the .com crash occurred, they mostly went out of business or they all went out of business. But the businesses in that time period, if you recall, you needed, I guess you wouldnāt because you were six or seven years old, but they needed the infrastructure, like you buy your own servers and you fill up your server cage. Youād go down to south of market and go into your cage and rack your servers up. And so things were expensive to manage and maintain and there was high complexity. And so now we can see this hyper growth happen like say on the coding Copilots, you can see this rapid growth happen. And then the markets today are so much larger, like you have such a larger TAM of who you can reach, the number of developers, for example, that you just see a group of players up and to the right.
However, if I were to draw back another analogy that itās maybe more appropriate is there were a number of search engines during the ā90s. There was like two dozen search engines and a few different that had been public or so on. And in the end, it was really just Google, like the almost last to market became the market leader. And the lesson there is that on the coding Copilot space, thereās going to be an enormous number one and then significantly smaller number two, then who knows what happens after that, but thatās about it. And so the important thing is to be the market leader.
Turner Novak:
And so are you thinking about that one when youāre investing or building today, youāre just like, can this be the number one in a category?
Kevin Hartz:
All the time. Thatās so relevant. I mean, in that next generation, it was MySpace and Friendster. I was an angel and Jonathan Abrams. Friendster, MySpace had won the market, and then Facebook. The, say last entrant came along and took everything away. So really ensuring that youāre in that and you donāt want to be in the one thatās not going to be positioned to win the market.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. How do you figure out if theyāre positioned to win? Is there anything youād be dissecting or does it come back to team again?
Kevin Hartz:
You got to invest in the next Peter Thiel. Really comes down to team, how extraordinary, grit, resilience, all these things. But the other side is, what you do want to find is like what we call this N-of-1 effect or N-of-1 factor is you meet a company where youāre the only one doing something that seems pretty far field and really weird. I always felt like Founders Fund was so good at finding companies like that. That if Sequoia, when they make an investment, you would say like, āOh, thatās so smart. Wow, I get it. How cool.ā If Founders Fund would make an investment and youād be like, āWhat are they doing? Thatās so weird. I donāt get it.ā And then three years later, youād be like, āWow.ā And thatās the mindset. I think Cyan Banister, I worked with her at Founders Fund.
I felt she had that great sense of finding these weird things, but could see where it goes. She was a seed investor in Uber, for example. I didnāt get in there until Series A. Or no, sorry, Series B.
Turner Novak:
Did you try before that?
Kevin Hartz:
No, I had spent some time with Lyft and kept looking at the numbers. And I was with Logan and I secretly felt sorry for them. I was like, āOh man, this is going to be a tough business.ā And I was very wrong on that one.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. What do you think you got wrong?
Kevin Hartz:
I should have thought through the capital-light model more appropriately and then certainly the size of market. But I wouldnāt say series B is later, but it was $300 million versus I think the market capās what, 170 billion?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Usually my threshold is 100X post-dilution, et cetera, change in share price. If you can get 100X increase in share price, thatās a venture investment, thatās the target. And you get it all nuanced, maybe 95X counts, but if you get into something and itās up 300X, thatās pretty good. Thatās hard to do that most people, 99.9% of investors will never get that. And one thing you mentioned was, you mentioned Founders Fund, theyāre really good at finding these weird, wonky things. I think you joined early on for, it was maybe like a fund cycle. I think you were there for like two-ish, three-ish years.
Kevin Hartz:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
What was it like back then? Was it pretty much the same or has it changed much?
Kevin Hartz:
I mean, itās such an extraordinary group of investors. It is weird. Itās like I grew up in the East Bay near Berkeley and we used to call it Berzerkley. And Founders Fund was this weird place, it was counterculture and the anti-VC. And that just gave it this coolness around it. And then process and all these things that anal-retentive people, neurotic people like myself like, hey, there was no partner meetings and no organizing your list of deals. It was very much each individual will go out and find that next great company.
Turner Novak:
So how were investment decisions made? Because usually you think your classic venture fund is like a Monday morning partner meeting, maybe thereās a Thursday, everyone talks, going to pitch, the founders come in and present and then you vote or sometimes itās just like a dictatorship. How did it work at Founders Fund?
Kevin Hartz:
There was voting and it was based on number of check size. So the larger the check, the more number of partners needed to get something through. So thereās always some aspect that reels it back in. But the most important part and what Brian Singerman would always say is like, he would always come up to you and berate you like, āAre you sure you have absolute conviction and you would lie down on the train tracks and that this is going to be bigger than Google?ā And I didnāt maybe appreciate the berating as much at the time as I do now. If an individual partner at Founders Fund has that high, high, high conviction, then votes, all that is almost irrelevant to just saying, āOkay, weāll do it.ā
Turner Novak:
And I feel like thatās the point of venture. The point of it is we are putting some capital into this pretty early business or product or team, go up or down the list of how early or late this thing is, and it will become one of the most consequential companies of all time. Itās going to become a generational business and we donāt actually know. The statistics say that it probably wonāt, but if it does, weāre going to make a lot of money. The fund will return itself multiple times over and thatās the point. I feel like a lot of people maybe lose that. Itās more of like, āOh, people are blogging about this certain thing and we know that all these other funds are looking at this. If we can just get in before them, then theyāll mark us up and weāll be able to raise the next fund. And by the way, the product doesnāt even work or they have no customers, but we got markups, but who cares? No one needs to talk about that.ā
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. While I was there, Trae Stephens and Palmer got together and started Anduril inside of Founders Fund. And that was extraordinary. I mean, it was exciting. And watching them go through the process and seeing the company get off the ground was exciting, but now itās extraordinary in light of how far that business has gone in just these few short years.
Turner Novak:
And itās interesting, when you just look back at the time they started the company, Google was signing a deal to basically provide cloud services for the military and employees were protesting it. We will not serve the US military because itās unethical or whatever. It was like the most contrarian possible position you could have. And also selling to the government is like on paper. Weāll talk about VC blog posts historically. Itās like the government moves slow. Donāt sell to the government. They never make decisions. Itās like all corrupt, et cetera, whatever. But then you flip it and you look at today, Palantir has like, I donāt know, Iām sure they have some nine figure customer deals with certain governments around the world. Enterprise software, the beauty of just these massive contracts. So I mean, same thing with Anduril. Iām sure they have some customers where theyāre making nine figures, they have nine figure contracts or probably will eventually. And just like contrast it today and back when they started, itās like so different.
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. Whatās interesting is like both Palantir and Anduril were these contrarian beliefs rolled into companies with Peter very much involved in both. I mean, and now the value, I mean the value of whatās Palantir is is extraordinary of how far itās come. And then in the case of Palantir, it took 20 years to then really inflect because Palantir kept moving along at a good size business and it was almost like lying in weight of transformers and this awareness of this being needed and it had found the perfect audience of government and so on to spend those first 20 years and then exploded as this AI boom has happened.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I remember thereās even maybe like as recent as like six or seven, eight years ago, maybe it was like 2018, someone would do a presentation of like, these are the most overvalued private startups, and Palantir was always on those lists. It was always pretty close to the top of like, this is an example of bubbles in the private markets and these companies are almost zero.
Kevin Hartz:
For deployed engineers weāre called consultants and were a negative thing and itās just a company that does consulting and shouldnāt get any kind of high marks. So yeah, and seeing that from its creation, it was really based on, one of the currents that pushed it forward was the fraud models at PayPal, which could, in a networked way, find similarities amongst say devices or IPs or otherwise, and then identify and find this network fraud. And that was the inspiration with Palantir as well.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. So using just data of broader internet usage, pick up potential threats to a nation or to a democracy or to civilians or the military, et cetera?
Kevin Hartz:
Correct. Like Max Lubsen and the team would see that a whole set of IPs had somewhat similar attributes or some tie and then transfer that over to discovering, okay, thereās a terrorist cell and they used a phone over here and computer in a different country and tie those all together and gain insights was like the original premise.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. So, you think that the premise of Palantir started at PayPal?
Kevin Hartz:
I think so. Yeah. And in fact, the day that PayPal announced the acquisition, I had lunch with Peter and he said like, āIām going to start this company and itās going to be based on similar to how PayPal models are used to find fraudsters, we can use them to catch the bad guys.ā
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Iāve never heard that before. Thatās crazy. I guess, well, you also started a company off of insights from PayPal.
Kevin Hartz:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
Was it the very first company built on the PayPal platform or API? I guess I donāt know the inside full story, but whatās the story with getting that one started? It was called Xoom, right? Is that how you pronounce it?
Kevin Hartz:
Xoom. Not to be confused with the video conferencing, yes. X-O-O-M is a money transfer business, much like a Remitly or Wise or so on. And the business is really about helping immigrants send money back to their family overseas. But how it began, my business partner and I, Alan, who went to UIUC, and so he was in school with folks like Max Levchin and Libor and all these other... Thereās this whole mafia of UIUC folks. And I had had a conversation with Michael Moritz and he said, āThe most successful companies are not just companies. They create industries that theyāre like enormous industries spread out from it.ā And certainly you look at Apple and the iPhone and the App Store, thereās just an enormous universe created of value, which Uber and Airbnb benefited massively from, despite Appleās hefty tax on everything.
And so when I saw the world melting down starting March of 2000, 2001 and so on, everything was collapsing except for Google and PayPal. And PayPal was like rocketing up. And so the thesis was like, āWell, letās build apps on top of PayPal.ā And there was a mutual desire to do this by the PayPal team because at the time they were like 99% relying on the eBay auction markets, marketplace for... And they were concerned that Meg Whitman, the CEO at the time, would shut them off one day, and they wanted to drive non-eBay GMV. So Alan and I, we talked to David Sacks and convinced him to open up an API and became the very first developers on that API.
Turner Novak:
What was that process like? Was this like 2001, Iām assuming?
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah, it was towards the fall of 2001. And in fact, I think we launched Xoom not long after 9/11, which itās like .com plus 9/11, it was like a crazy... But I guess Iāve always found that a time to be very counterintuitively greedy is during these really terrible times because one is like you canāt fall off the floor and itās like this time where you really learn how to be scrappy and build great bones to a company and itās the warmup and the run-up to the next accelerated period. So no doubt there were a lot of great companies that were started or came out of that downturn period as the same as with 2008, 2009, as the same as with that ā22, ā23 period.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So was there anything that you did differently between Xoom and the first company? I think it was called Connect Group, the one that you sold to the... That was the hotel internet. Okay. So what was your approach second time, or maybe thereās multiple companies in between here that Iām missing, but what was the difference between the first time and with Xoom?
Kevin Hartz:
Well, the first time with Connect Group, there were five founders. We had hardly got off the ground. We didnāt really build a business. We had one installation and then a suitor came calling and we went with them. So I donāt know. I honestly didnāt learn that much from it.
Turner Novak:
Why did you sell the company then if it was still so early?
Kevin Hartz:
I think we maybe felt there were greener pastures and they came calling and it seemed like a good option that would... But I donāt know. At that time, you didnāt have all these great podcasts or material substacks to read up on when you should exit your company and when you shouldnāt.
Turner Novak:
So itās basically just like you thought it seemed like a good deal to take, just risk reward seemed good, make some cash?
Kevin Hartz:
Good enough. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So then obviously you didnāt do that with Xoom right away. I think you guys sold it 13 years in?
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. Well, Xoom was... Yeah, we were founded in 2001-ish, into 2001. We went public in 2013 and were acquired by PayPal in 2015. However, in 2005-ish, I moved on to the board out of the CEO role.
Turner Novak:
Youāve done that a couple times. I know weāre going to talk a little bit about Eventbrite. I think you did a similar thing. How did you know it was the right time? How do you think about when you shift away into more of a chairman role?
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. I think in general, the best practice board is really spending time with those that mentors, people you respect to hear through, is this a net positive or net negative for the business? What are the trade-offs one is doing?
Turner Novak:
So itās like, is there somebody else who could actually do this better than I can and letās plug them in?
Kevin Hartz:
Thereās certainly that, yes. But do always be aware that if you have somebody, an outsider come in, itās rare that theyāll have that founder quality. They may have great skills and leadership and building, but that founder variable would be absent. But we got the best of both worlds with Eventbrite because it was my co-founder, Julia, who took the seat.
Turner Novak:
Did you start Eventbrite around the time that you stepped down from Xoom? Iām trying to remember the timelines.
Kevin Hartz:
Yes. In fact, back to that period with Alan, when we were becoming the first to build on PayPalās new API, we built a whole range over a number of weeks or months, we built a number of different payment related applications. And one of them was a very rudimentary ticketing application that when I found myself with more time on my hands was like, took a look at the admin and there was volume and people were publishing events and nobody was touching the thing. It was just running on its own.
Turner Novak:
Oh, so this was just like a little mock-up that you had built?
Kevin Hartz:
More than a mock-up. I mean, it was a functional application.
Turner Novak:
Did you just take it and say, āThis is Eventbrite, letās go,ā or were you like, āLetās rebuild this from scratchā?
Kevin Hartz:
Well, with the two new founders, the founders of Eventbrite, Renaud Visage and Julia Hartz and myself, we took a close look at it and also would debate maybe thereās other things to work on or what do we do, but letās start working on this. And we just started to iterate the product. I mean, it seems like obvious or no big deal, but it was a PLG product at a time that there really wasnāt much, maybe Netflix or something and Gmail out there. And we would have this 24-hour dev cycle because Renaud was over in, and he was based in France for most of the year. Had a flat over there, and so Iād work on product mocks and specs and things and file bugs and throw them over the fence and he would go after it.
Turner Novak:
Heād wake up and heād have it fixed?
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. And we did that for a fairly long amount of time. I had felt like, āOh, we raised too much money for Xoom.ā And so the reaction to that is to go the other direction. And so we worked almost two years on just iterating and optimizing that.
Turner Novak:
And what was or is Eventbrite for people who are not familiar? Iāve done some research over the years, followed it, but Iām sure I donāt even know exactly what the core product and customer base is.
Kevin Hartz:
Got it. Itās really ticketing for the rest of us, not for Madison Square Gardens or the large football stadium. Itās ticketing for everyone else and itās simplicity, ease of use, allows you to really get the word out about oneās event, but also around... We benefited greatly on lowering the cost of acquisition because you would get these Eventbrite invites and you would see these pages, Eventbrite registration pages, and that really helps spread the word.
Turner Novak:
Thereās a significant chunk of people that run businesses on Eventbrite, if Iām remembering right. There are people who just host a lot of events as how they make money and make a living. And I think you guys essentially just take a cut and then thereās maybe some advertising revenue too once you hit scale.
Kevin Hartz:
Thatās right. It was this religion for us to, one, take very low fees as opposed to what you would see from the incumbents in the space, but also just this notion that we only take a fee if you actually make a sale was this religion at the time that was substantially different than most of the services or so on out there.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And I think I remembered, youāve said before in the past that when you did decide to raise money, it was tricky because this wasnāt like a well-known market. You couldnāt Google whatās the TAM of this thing. How did you size this and figure out how big of a company it could be?
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. I hated this part because coming from Xoom, you could just get the central bank figures for remittances in the Philippines and India and Mexico, and you had this very clear enormous TAM and take your percentage of it. But in this case, it was like a SMB audience, I would call them creator. It was an early creator audience and those that made... Theyāre living with this type of craft and this is now just multiplied. Iām on the board and weāre investors in a company called WAP, which is general creator tools. Think of it as like Shopify for services and their volumes are now in the GMV is now in the billions. And this is just the general notion that you donāt do what your parents did, which is go to one company and work your whole career and get a W2. Now you get a 1099 and youāre like your own boss. But you need the infrastructure to do that, but that was like... Eventbrite was very much a early version of that or is.
Turner Novak:
And I know people listening to this are like, āTurner, you got to ask them this.ā I know you guys were recently, there was some news that came out, you had... I forget what the phrasing around this was, but youāre under an LOI or closing an acquisition, youāre getting acquired. Not sure what youāre allowed to say, but what exactly is going on right now with Eventbrite?
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. So Eventbrite announced that it is being acquired by Bending Spoons, a Milan based... I describe Bending Spoons as a new age IAC, so itās a holding company. Itās a number of different companies that are assembled together. And Luca has just done an extraordinary job of building that business. We just announced this happened and because of all the SEC regulation and so on, I canāt go into grand detail until it closes.
Turner Novak:
Well, I did want to ask you a little bit more about... We hit on it a little bit, but we didnāt get too deep into it. So thereās a headline if you look at TechCrunch when itās like a sensationalist headline like, āOh, this fund invested 20% of their fund in teenage founders.ā I think thatās the headline if Iām remembering it right. We hit it a little bit more. So thatās a pretty big thesis for you at AStar right now, is just finding people very, very early in their professional journey and their building journey and just helping them out, giving them some capital, seeing what happens.
Kevin Hartz:
Well, itās funny because we didnāt really seek it out. Itās happening. If youāre in the pre-seed market around universities or the Twitter sphere, so on, youāre seeing like the age has been dropping precipitously, whether itās through YC or whether itās through... I do a lot of work with Cory Levy, known him for years and heās got a program called Z Fellows. And he backs dropouts and it was always dropout from college, but in the last 18 months, the dropout from high school is like extraordinarily high. Then running into and meeting founders that... One of the Z Fellows was the creator of the Cal, the calorie counting app. And I think at the time when I met with him, he had something like 30 million in net revenue.
Turner Novak:
Thatās wild. It was like a bootstrap company, had not raised any capital.
Kevin Hartz:
Correct. He hadnāt raised a dime and had this great business he had assembled.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Itās interesting because thereās like two sides of the coin of this. When you look at Facebook was started, I think Zuck was like 19, 20-ish, something like that when he started it. Now one of the most consequential companies of all time. On the other side, thereās a lot of cases you could say youāre giving this 17 year old or 18 year old $10 million. This could end an absolute disaster. They have no idea what theyāre doing.
Kevin Hartz:
In some cases, like a Facebook or an Apple computer, itās almost like you need that style of, you need that new manner of thinking. I describe it as seeing around corners, like that age segment just knows what the world is going to look like in five and 10 years, whereas we all donāt see the world that way anymore, if that makes sense. But there are certain businesses, like if they were going into enterprise resource planning, ERP systems for the enterprise, thatās probably not the best place for a teenager to try to mess around.
Turner Novak:
So you think it makes the most sense when itās something thatās like, they have an insight for an industry is obviously going to look radically different and youāre like, āHoly shit, this is like the craziest thing Iāve ever heard.ā And it could work. You could be the kid to do this.
Kevin Hartz:
And then look, thereās the reason why Marines are 18 years old is like they charged into battle and that energy and fearlessness is pretty amazing to see.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Yeah. I think when you think about Facebook, like we were talking about earlier, there was 15 other social media companies. Itās like any rational person might say, āI should find a different market with fewer competitors, I guess.ā And so aside from just investing in people dropping out of high school, any other areas youāre really interested in right now at AStar?
Kevin Hartz:
Well, weāre generalists, so we try not to take sides to say. Weāre just like looking for those extraordinary people and that has brought us to everything from like all the AI application layer companies. Decagon is exemplary of that. I mentioned WAP on creator services that isnāt AI oriented, to general biological, which is where Abi graduated from Yale at age 21 and heās a chemist that is really building this industrial biotech company. So instead of using petroleum to make chemicals, he does this with sugars and there was a wipe out in the market about five years ago, 10 years ago with a number of companies that didnāt make it and how the market has changed and how things have evolved, we think this is the right time and heās the right person. So he had just bought out of quasi-bankruptcy, a factory in Louisiana to make his product, which is interesting.
And then weāre on the defense side. Weāre in companies like Mach Industries, which is like propulsion-based drones that was started by an 18-year-old dropout of MIT or Neros, which is a military drone business.
Turner Novak:
And I think you also have incubated some companies too, maybe more than I know of. Is that also a part of the strategy or is that more of itās been a one-off thing?
Kevin Hartz:
Yes. Weāve incubated three companies in the five years that weāve been around and we try to be very thoughtful and deliberate about the incubations so weāre not churning them out every week.
Turner Novak:
Thereās some people that do.
Kevin Hartz:
I guess, what is it? I guess you have more chances of success with higher numbers perhaps. But our first is a company called Multiply, which is AI mortgages and thatās backed by Mamoon and Kleiner. The second is a company called Fifteenth, and that is a AI-powered tax accountant. So you get your tax return done.
Turner Novak:
On the 15th of the month? Is that what it is?
Kevin Hartz:
That is, yes.
Turner Novak:
Oh, okay. Nice. Thatās a nice name.
Kevin Hartz:
And then my little darling incubation has been Sauron, which is home security.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I wanted to ask you about that. So whatās the thesis there? Because that sounds... Some people might say, āThat sounds super boring. Market might not be that big.ā I donāt know. What makes it interesting?
Kevin Hartz:
Well, the notion behind Sauron and the home security market is just, we havenāt seen innovation there and maybe it was maybe Ring 10 years ago. Thereās just not a lot of change. The companies that were in the space, theyāve been gobbled up by the big players there. And the big players, the oligarchs have this third rail of privacy where they canāt do aggressive things like face recognition and so on. And of course we can and we are, but really what we saw was that over the last two decades, you have had a hundred billion plus dollars put into self-driving. So all the different sensors have come down dramatically in price, the perception stack, a lot of innovation has happened there. And so take the self-driving stack and move it over to home security and we think thatās pretty exciting.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because I guess I think about, I did have a home security system for about two years. We lived in the not greatest neighborhood and we had a baby. So we were like, āWe should probably get a system.ā I think we used a company called SimpliSafe. I donāt know if theyāre still around, but I think it was like most affordable/seemed like the best option. And then it seemed like, I think Comcast had a home security, but it was basically like a bundle with your cable bill. I donāt know, product never seemed that great to me. I think AT&T maybe had one. ADT maybe was a big player. They were really expensive and didnāt seem that great. Kind of your classic big conglomerate, price increases, et cetera. And it was all like no tech. It was like youād have like a box on the wall right next to the door and then there would be a motion sensor on the door.
And if the door opened, you had 30 seconds to press a button and then the alarm wouldnāt go off or would. And I think maybe there was an app, if Iām remembering right. Yeah, you could maybe control it remotely from an app, but it just didnāt seem like people were doing that much with it, to your point.
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. Itās interesting. In some cases, maybe the innovation failed as it settled into, as a number of the assets you mentioned settled into private equity or again, into the big tech oligarchs. But all of them, what they donāt share is the real time nature is that whoās really like, is somebody going to come if thereās truly an emergency? And you described the sensors at ADT. Well, that alerts their help center, but it doesnāt mean the police are going to be dispatched because 90% of the time itās a false positive. Somebodyās set the alarm off by accident and they call to confirm and go through this. So what weāre trying to do is have that situational awareness, be able to see what is happening in real time and have high resolution sensors to know if thereās an urgent situation.
Turner Novak:
Wow. So depending on what you sense, you might just call the fire department and so it doesnāt even go to the Sauron help center, it just goes straight to calling 911 and saying, āThereās a fire, we need someone in the houseā?
Kevin Hartz:
Well, itāll always be confirmed by people, the help center. Itās like self-driving where you had humans in the loop. So we have humans in the loop and ours are very well-trained. Actually, I think all of them are military veterans and a lot of them had exec protection and so on. And theyāre there that youāre not paying 20 grand a month to have a security person on site. You have this virtual security. And over time, as we train the system, the computer vision will allow us to scale many more homes and not have 10,000 virtual guards.
Turner Novak:
I know we were talking about this before we started recording, but itās like a way to get into someoneās home, right? Itās almost like land and expand. People spend, the average person, their biggest line item on their monthly budget is their home and it might be like rent, mortgage. If your home is paid off, youāre just buying shit for it basically, like youāre making your upgrade and stuff. So itās like an interesting way to just get into that budget of a high percentage of someoneās income, honestly.
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. We like to even think, as we would trust, what would it look like to have Sauron sensors in the home? Itād be something like, āWhere did I leave my keys?ā Or, āWhereās my blue sweater?ā
Turner Novak:
That would be amazing. I run into that problem daily.
Kevin Hartz:
Yes. Or catch your childās first steps, your babyās first steps.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, thatād be awesome. The thing I canāt wait for is... So I make my kids breakfast every morning, and thereās so many mornings where weāre out of peanut butter or out of oatmeal or yogurt and it just turns into a disaster in the morning because they donāt get the yogurt they thought they were going to get and youāre trying to figure out what to make them for breakfast. Itād be awesome if itās just like, āHey, we placed an Instacart or Amazon order and just thereās going to be peanut butter that shows up tomorrow.ā Thatād be amazing.
Kevin Hartz:
Whatās your go to breakfast in the morning?
Turner Novak:
For me personally or for the kids?
Kevin Hartz:
For the kids.
Turner Novak:
For the kids, I have one that likes oatmeal and I have one that likes yogurt and specifically vanilla yogurt. So the oatmeal one, sheāll have strawberry yogurt, sheāll have oatmeal, whatever. But the one that only likes yogurt, she will only have vanilla yogurt. So if you give her anything, any other flavor, she completely loses it.
Kevin Hartz:
Well, can you put fruit in the yogurt or like nuts or anything?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, you can, but it has to be vanilla flavored. So if itās vanilla yogurt with cut up blueberries and strawberries, sheās fine. But if itās strawberry flavored yogurt that has whatever else in it, she wonāt eat it.
Kevin Hartz:
Is that the nine-year-old or the five-year-old?
Turner Novak:
Itās the five-year-old. Sheās gotten so much better over the past year trying different foods. And I mean, huge credit to my wife of being super patient and strategically introducing different foods. And we always encourage her, we make it a big deal of like, āOh, you tried beef or you tried green beans or something.ā And we make it a big event and celebrate it and we make it... Because I donāt know, for some kids, like she used to be really good at eating and then suddenly she just decided she doesnāt like anything thatās green, which is basically no vegetables, which is not good.
Kevin Hartz:
Is it an age thing and just all of a sudden? Yeah, you know what they say is that thereās... I think they say at a certain age, you become very picky about food because you donāt want the four or five year old to walk out in the woods and just pick a mushroom and eat it and drop dead. And so itās actually a Darwinistic thing because our 16 and 11 month old daughters, we were feeding them broccoli and salmon and just best food. They were eating everything. Theyāre just taking down stuff and now Iām thinking forward like, oh God, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Probably the funniest thing was both my kids really loved sushi when they were babies and it got really expensive. They wanted sushi every night and itās like... And still, when Iām like, āHey, letās go out for dinner.ā And they always want to go to the most expensive sushi restaurant. Iām like, āWe canāt go out to get sushi every night.ā Thatās like a six figure run rate on the dinner meal for the family. We canāt do that.
Kevin Hartz:
Itās like a conundrum because you want to get the high end sushi too. You want to get the nicest fish for the kids, but you canāt go every night.
Turner Novak:
And weāve evolved. So when we used to do date night, when we were first married, youāre scrapping every penny and weād go to a place where we could split a meal. You could pay 20 bucks and get a really nice dinner. But itās super fascinating. The past couple years, I think itās like we make a little bit more money, but also the price of everything has gone up. So thereās almost this relative difference of like before family meal was like 50 bucks and a really nice meal was a hundred. And the difference in price was like 2X and now the family meal low quality is like a hundred bucks and the really nice meal is like 150. And on a relative basis, just getting the better food, it actually seems cheaper.
So what weāve been doing is weāve just been like, āYou know what? If weāre going to go out to eat, weāre just going to go to a nice place and weāre going to enjoy it,ā because itās actually not that much more expensive than go into the... Weāll go to Shake Shack and itās like a hundred bucks for the family. And Iām like, āWhat? This is insane. Letās just go to the fancy fine dining and pay 150 for the family.ā And itās way better and the kids like it a little bit more.
Kevin Hartz:
That makes perfect sense. Shake Shack probably has 17 MBAs figuring out how to keep pushing the price up.
Turner Novak:
And Shake Shack is good. I love Shake Shack. Itās like a family favorite.
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. Whoās the famous chef thatās behind it?
Turner Novak:
I donāt remember his name, but heās got the book. Itās like tabletop manners or something, or itās like how to treat your employees really well, and that leads to a good business, I think. But I actually wanted to ask you, so you have two older daughters, but you mentioned you have two younger daughters. So how did that come about? I think you described it as like your second cohort of children.
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. Second cohort, nice antiseptic term for our child rearing.
Turner Novak:
Cohort analysis, youāre running spaghetti charts and analyzing the kids.
Kevin Hartz:
Cohort one, cohort two, keep up on their growth curves. So we have four daughters, 17 years old, 13 years old, and then 16 months and 11 months, which is the most confusing thing to most people.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Five months difference. Youāre like, how did that happen?
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. Julie and I decided we werenāt done and we were exposed to all this different tech. And so we decided to have two more babies or should I say cook up or grow two more babies, to create with science two more babies. Iām an angel in a company called Orchid. Noor is an amazing founder and thatās like a full genomic test for embryos, something that just hadnāt existed before. So we were able to see this fine grain resolution of all the embryos that we chose from. So I donāt know, I think itās a little bit costly, but I would imagine in 10 years time that as the prices of all this, cost of all these go down, that youāll have a lot of different families having later in life children.
Turner Novak:
So how does this work practically? If I was going to go through this process, do I... So what was it like from the beginning to end? Can you just explain how it works for somebody? Because Iām curious, but Iāve never done it.
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. Well, first, one would create the embryos, you need sperm and egg, combine them.
Turner Novak:
In like a lab environment of some kind?
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah, like IVF style, combine them, and then freeze them and keep them on ice. And then you have optionality. And that was relatively inexpensive versus some of the other areas. The next component there is that you do need a surrogate to carry the baby to term, and that seems to be growing in popularity. In the US, the Wall Street Journal reported that I guess there was some foreign national who was trying to have something like a hundred babies with surrogates, and so-
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I saw the headline.
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. I foresee regulation coming in the area, and itās probably a good idea because thereās scary things that can happen on both sides. And once that happens, then itās the surrogate that is going through the different checkups and making sure everything is healthy. And so, I mean, I described a relatively simple process, but ours took quite a long time to get everything together properly.
Turner Novak:
So you mentioned you get to see the embryos, and does it simulate what might happen to the baby in terms of like, I donāt know, how they grow, health things? What all do you get to see when youāre getting all the data around it?
Kevin Hartz:
Itās really describing traits, and I should probably pull the report back, but thereās this dystopian concern that youāll choose babies based on IQ, and honestly, that can be done to a certain extent, or these traits can now be... You could pick embryos that have certain traits versus the other, but youāre looking for a healthy embryo that thereās not some significant disease or the like.
Turner Novak:
So the main thing that you get from this is it says thereās a percentage chance of like this thing, this thing, this thing, and youāre looking for the lowest percentage of there being some life-threatening or very debilitating issue that will come up throughout the course of the baby or the childās life?
Kevin Hartz:
Correct. And one thing, if an embryo has a BRCA2 gene, thereās that very high likelihood of breast cancer occurrence.
Turner Novak:
So then you would say like, okay, letās try to select one of the embryos that just has lowest likelihood of probably as many things as possible?
Kevin Hartz:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because I think, I mean, if you donāt have kids and youāre listening to this, me and my wife were just talking about this the other day, literally our worst fear is something happens to the kids, like something that we canāt control. And so I mean, I feel like itās most parents. Itās just like you really just want a healthy kid. Itās not even like I want my kid to be the smartest in the world. Itās just like, I want them to have all the opportunities of everyone. And the worst thing you want to do is you have a child who struggles with something thatās outside of their control. So I donāt know. Weāve thought about that a lot. Itās like our worst fear, just like your kid is hit with something that is uncontrollable, so I donāt know.
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. I recommend any couple just also create and freeze a bunch of embryos and then be able to have some degree of preventing these bad things from happening by being able to have this higher fidelity look at the embryo.
Turner Novak:
Our mutual friend, Navia, who works for you at the moment mentioned youāve been getting really into art lately. I was like, āWhatās something I got to talk to him about that might be interesting to get into?ā So tell me, whatās your favorite art piece of everything that you own?
Kevin Hartz:
Well, I mean, first I have a mentor, Michael Ovitz, who is just this incredible collector. Heās collected since the late ā70s. He was the founder of CAA. And so I have him and heās very shrewd in how he collects and how he conducts business and so on. And so itās been great to have him help me or provide insights. And then I also collect alongside with Ramtin Naimi from Abstract, whose fund is just a block away. And so we get this fun little competitive element to collecting, although I donāt know, I have to admit, I think he has an incredible eye and heās done a great job. But I would say Iām into this, thereās this group of artists that have come out of, they came out of Yale in the mid ā80s, like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage and others. And theyāve been out of Vogue in some regards from... Art goes through this in and out sort of thing, and I just love their work and see it as an opportunity to build the collection more.
Turner Novak:
So when youāre investing in art, or do you see it as investing? Like youāre trying to buy things that the value will appreciate, or is it like, this just looks cool, I want to put this in my house, I think it would look nice on the vase on the table or picture on the wall. How do you think about it?
Kevin Hartz:
It has to be both. So I have to love it and I want to believe that the artist, him or herself is something very, very special like those very few entrepreneurs that in this case is producing something thatās going to stand the test of time and thatās represented by the appreciation over time. Interestingly, over the last five years, weāve had this terrible market where everything has... Like art has been overlooked, hit rock bottom relative prices. And so I donāt know, Ramtin and I think itās a great time to-
Turner Novak:
Scooping up new pieces.
Kevin Hartz:
But it looks like just as expected with the super cycle that weāve entered, the art marketās starting to pick up and just in the last couple quarters, youāre seeing pretty astounding records happening in the auction houses and elsewhere.
Turner Novak:
So how do you get into art? Do you have to have a broker or do you email the contact email in one of the auction houses? How do you get started?
Kevin Hartz:
Itās a very particular space. So the best thing to do is to go to the major art fairs. Art Basel in Switzerland is like the major one over the summer. And there, all the galleries gather together and bring works from their represented artists. And then thereās Basel Miami just happened and they tend to be a scene and a lot of parties and things of that nature. And then you build relationships with the galleries. So like Gagosian is a very well-known gallery. Larry Gagosian has been running his gallery for what, three or four decades and he is, they probably sell a couple billion dollars worth of art a year, which he takes a nice cut of that.
Turner Novak:
A nice cut. Yeah. Itās got to be a good business.
Kevin Hartz:
Yeah. But I have got a representative over at Gagosian that will help me or if something comes into the gallery, theyāll share a PDF of a particular artist. They represent John Currin, for example. And then the other piece is Christieās and Phillips and on the auction house side. So thatās interesting to see where prices are happening and itās great to have friends at the auction house that also can give you insights at the same time.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Iām probably not quite there yet where I can start acquiring art, but I mean, I want to. Hopefully soon. Need some liquidity on the venture portfolio first.
Kevin Hartz:
But you could start local artist or some of the... Like you try to get somebody coming out of art school.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, thatās true. Maybe plus itās like pre-seed investing in art, buy something for a hundred bucks versus 10,000, like investing early.
Kevin Hartz:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it. Where can people find you? Do you tweet, LinkedIn, you donāt have a podcast? How can people follow you?
Kevin Hartz:
Twitter and LinkedIn are fantastic and DM me. But love doing this and thank you so much, Turner.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, this was a lot of fun.
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