The Alliance of Entrepreneurs and Scientists with Arkady Kulik of RPV

Meet new friend, entrepreneur, and deeptech investor Arkady Kulik. I met Arkady a few months ago, and was blown away by his unique thoughtfulness, mix of skills and his young firm, RPV.

Arkady has a background in business and physics, working in different roles all around the world. He now settles in San Francisco to fund early teams of scientists and entrepreneurs.

Here’s what we explored in the episode:

  • "friend" in many languages stems from "free person," emphasizing the deep connection and trust in true friendships.

  • Different friends serve different roles – some for snowboarding, others for deep philosophical talks, and some for life's toughest moments.

  • Arkady reminisced about the early days of venture capital, where it was about money and meaning. He aims to bring back that focus.

  • It’s important to return to the roots of venture capital – systematically tackling technical issues and de-risking them efficiently to create breakthrough technologies.

  • RPV focuses on very early-stage physics-based investments, often backing deep tech and hardware startups with proprietary scientific advancements.

  • The alliance between entrepreneurs and scientists is the key to unlocking humanity's transition to an advanced civilization.

  • Humanity Neurotech and BIOS are two startups Arkady is particularly excited about – one for reducing inflammation non-invasively and the other for advanced implanted prosthetics.

  • Technology is the only source of never-ending growth. Our ability to reshape what we have with a small amount of resources into something fantastic is a never-ending source of creativity.

  • Huge opportunities in non-invasive diagnostics and treatments, which will revolutionize healthcare by making it safer, cheaper, and more accessible.

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Episode Transcript:

Arkady Kulik: If you're not a VC, even if you're not an entrepreneur, and you're listening to this podcast and you're going to a paid job day to day, find a job through the same lens. Try to find people with whom you want to have genuine human relationships and work with those people and you will be happy, you will make more money, and you will not have to go and see a therapist or pop a pill of Xanex every morning. You will be a happier, healthier human being, and people around you will flourish. It is critical. 

Eric Jorgenson: Hello again and welcome. I'm Eric Jorgenson and I don't know much, but I have some very smart friends. And if you listen to this podcast, then you do too. Around here, we use technology, capitalism, and friendship to build a brighter, more abundant future. And today it is my pleasure to introduce you to my friend Arkady Kulik. Arkady is a deep tech venture capitalist building RPV. He has a fascinating background in physics and business around the world in a ton of different roles. And he has now settled in San Francisco to build an exceptional firm funding early teams of scientists and entrepreneurs. In this episode, we have a conversation, a deep conversation, as most are with Arkady, about his experience as a founder of several startups, how he found his way to venture capital and deep tech in particular. And we spend a while on this phrase of his that I love, an alliance between entrepreneurs and scientists and how that can advance civilization. And then at the end, we get into a few companies he's excited about in particular and how they could impact our lives. 

As usual, I do not do outside sponsors for this podcast, but I will invite you to consider investing alongside us through Rolling Fun. We make it our mission to provide capital to the obsessive geniuses building utopian technologies for all of us. And if you want to support us in supporting them, please open your browser right now and type in rolling.fun. In the past few years, we've invested in about 30 companies, including Aalo Atomics, who builds nuclear fission micro-reactors. It's a very hot space right now. Atom Limbs, who's building non-invasive, mind-controlled robotic prosthetics, which is an incredible path towards advancing human capabilities and lifespan. And very recently, a next generation battery company that might just change the whole damn world, enable electric jets and electric cars you can drive across the country and let your laptop last for a week. It's wild out there. I'm honored that dozens of listeners like you now invest alongside me in these startups. Accredited investors can invest with us through AngelList today. And with a rolling fund, the sooner you invest, the more of our deals you get to participate in. So, if you want to put your money to work right alongside ours, click on rolling.fun, which is linked in the show notes below or reach out through Twitter or email. I would love to chat with you about this, answer any questions you have. Now, I invite you to take a deep breath, relax, and enjoy Smart Friends, your favorite podcast, arriving at your ears in three, two, one. 

So, I think from our very first conversation, we had really deep alignment on the thing that we were trying to achieve with our work and having had both a variety of weird careers, but just sort of aligning on we are really at this pivotal moment where if we play our cards right as a species, we can get to this incredible, abundant utopia. And we excitedly chatted about it the whole time and it's just clear we are cut from the same cloth on that and it's very fun to like meet an ally in the battle so I think I cannot wait to like dig into you and your vision and the work that you're doing and just share that with people, broadcast the good vibes that we have between us.

Arkady Kulik: Sure, before I jump into that, it's just the pitch is too good to pass on that opportunity. So the word friend in English and in all the German languages, Germanic languages, comes from the word free, free person. So a friend is a person who I recognize as a free person. That's a good one, right? Good explanation, puts a lot of context. The word ‘друг’ in Russian, which is translated as friend, the actual meaning is your ally in the battle. The person with whom you stand shoulder to shoulder in the fray. So it is very interesting that you mentioned that, but that's how you started this conversation today. 

Eric Jorgenson: That is. And it fits that the podcast is called Smart Friends. And is this a universal, like every Russian person that I know who I'd like to call a friend, I've had this conversation a number of times with multiple Russians who are like, no, we're not friends yet. Like a friend is a short list of people that you call when you can call no one else, that like culturally the definition of a friend is just like so much more extreme than what we might refer to. 

Arkady Kulik: What you would call a best friend even doesn't cut- basically a friend when you're brought up in Russia means that it's somebody that you can call at 3am to go and dig up a hole for somebody else's body or something of that sort. So, I don't know. To go into a less extreme example, somebody you can call when you had a fight with your wife, for example, and you can just call and pour your soul. It's not something that a friend in an American version of culture would convey. It would be weird to call all the people who call themselves friends and start mourning out of nowhere. So, it's a little bit of a different grade, I would say, yes. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I like that. I mean, I appreciate when people are up front and like, here's my bar. Like, when I say this word, this is what it means. Oh, yeah. 

Arkady Kulik: I would say like the words mean less than what they actually are trying to convey. I would say there are many different types of friends. There is somebody with whom I would go snowboarding, somebody with whom I would talk about philosophy, acceleration, values, and stuff like that. And then there are people with whom I would share the most sacred things about my life. And then there are people who I will call if I need to actually get into a fistfight with somebody else. So, it's a different type of relationship with different types of people. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, we don't have clear nomenclature for that, but I think we'd all benefit from it. You have not called me to fight anyone for you yet, but we certainly found alignment on principles and something that I feel like the momentum is building on. There's a lot more people identifying with these values of acceleration-ism, techno-utopianism, advancement, progress studies, whatever you want to call it. I feel like a bunch of things are sort of merging and people are raising their hands and finding partnership and camaraderie in something that wasn't really there before. 

Arkady Kulik: 100%. I agree. I think that more and more people start to realize that original venture capital was as much about money as about meaning. And then we as an industry lost our ways in a sense when it was all geared towards the most performing marketing campaigns and channeling more money into the same advertising channels and all of that stuff. I remember loud and clear how it was very early days of my fund, and I was talking to Dave McClure and I had maybe three minutes in which I explained what I'm trying to do. He's like, oh, so you're actually building a venture fund like it used to be in the 70s or 80s. I'm like, well, yes. He's like, cool, I'm in. And that was it. It was the shortest ever from the first conversation to the decision path. And I think you're doing the same. We try to bring new technologies into the world that will inevitably make this world a better place. We're not trying to play in competing games of network effects or who gets this market first. Just today, I had a conversation with one of my LPs about an SPV that we're running, and his team was asking me some questions and I called him up and I'm like, hey, this is irrelevant, this is irrelevant, this is irrelevant because it's not a software driven business at Series B, it's a pre-seed deep tech. He's like, ah, that makes sense. What kind of questions should we ask? And I was like, you should probably ask about this and that. So yeah, I'm with you. We're all trying to accelerate what... Accelerate is such an overused word. We're all trying to get closer to this state of civilization when there is less conflict, when there is more productive activities. I do hope that you and I will see it when we're alive, like in our hundreds, maybe 120, 130 years old. I don't see it happening much sooner than that, unfortunately.

Eric Jorgenson: Oh, but I feel like we're making progress. It's not flying yet, but we're getting there. 

Arkady Kulik: Should I be like optimistic/marketing-y or shall I be real? I think I should be real, right? 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean, be real. What are you seeing that's got you pessimistic? 

Arkady Kulik: Oh, nothing is getting me pessimistic per se. I think that we can get there technologically very fast. I think that societal and general psychological friction would be much higher than we expect. We’ll take much longer to adopt to these technologies. It will take quite a bit of time for people to get used to all of those novelties. I've heard that, I'm not sure about the statistics, but I've heard that around 50% of Americans haven't even heard about chatGPT, which will sound insane to you. Again, I'm just regurgitating a rumor here, but it does sound just about right. A lot of people don't even know about that, and how many people know about novel focused ultrasound therapy for brain health, or about artificial limbs that have two-way feedback systems. You and I are so much on the edge of what's going on. We see the pre-seed startups of what is essentially a promise of how the world might look like in five to seven years. And from the moment of the earliest inception of those technologies, it'll take decades for those technologies to be widely used, and it will take generations for those technologies to find their way into daily lives of people. 

Eric Jorgenson: So, it's just a recognition of the true cycle length here. 

Arkady Kulik: There was this whole, I love it dearly, I'm not sure I know the name of it, the whole philosophy of different layers, so the fashion at the very top, there's economies and politics, I think you saw that kind of a picture. So, there are certain things that really move fast, but then there are cultural and civilizational layers and people don't change their behavior very fast. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it was a wheel, wasn't it? From the Whole Earth Catalog or Stewart Brand or something. 

Arkady Kulik: I don't recall the source. I just like the concept so much.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that was a very interesting thing. And that sort of puts technology at a very fundamental level, like an enabling level. And that was something I picked up from Balaji that is partly what drives this, like the technology-centric view of history. Like whatever becomes technologically possible changes the political order and the social order and the fashions of the day sort of on top of it. You've got an amazing quote that I think sums this up that's like at the top of your LinkedIn: The alliance between entrepreneurs and scientists is the key to unlocking humanity's transition to an advanced civilization. 

Arkady Kulik: Because scientists imagine stuff and entrepreneurs do that stuff. And both of them are a little bit flawed in the department of seeing obstacles. And none of them really understand how difficult it is to imagine stuff or how difficult it is to build that stuff. And both you and me would be in the same camp of entrepreneurs who are trying to do something meaningful, and both you and I are delusional about how difficult it is. Don't you get this feeling sometimes when you like had a very long week and you're like, oh God, I thought it's much easier. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is difficult and sometimes it's longer hours. And people who think that venture capital is a simple thing to do, I mean, sure, you can be a very laid-back VC who works 10 hours a week, but then your results will be the same. You will not be able to show any meaningful traction. But if you want to really be successful, you will have to put in work as much as in any other industry. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think alliance is a good word and science and entrepreneurs are good disciplines to sort of bring together. And from the capital allocators point of view, there's a lot of opportunities, but you're not capital constrained. We are constrained by the number of high quality alliances that we can create between entrepreneurs and scientists. Do you see it that way, or do you see the constraint as living somewhere else? 

Arkady Kulik: I see the constraint as living in the communication realm between entrepreneurs, scientists, and capitalists, three groups of people together. While entrepreneurs can be a good bridge between those two groups, scientists and VCs, very often, scientists are not necessarily ideal in selling what they have created or even explaining what they have created to laymen, to a layperson. While VCs are not necessarily always deep thinking people and many of us are just skimming on the surface of certain items and don't dig deeper in everything that we see, which makes sense. If you see hundreds of opportunities every month, you will only dig into that many. However, there is a whole philosophy of just move fast, and if you believe in something, just give it money and all of that. So they're not incentivized to be a deep expert in certain technology or science. So you have a person who cannot explain what he's doing on one hand, and a person who cannot understand what is being done without better explanation, and they naturally don't understand each other. And I think that this is where a lot of problems stem from. The same is true a little bit between scientists and entrepreneurs, but to a smaller degree. And while it does lay in a very human side of things, in communication between people, effectively it results in lack of funding for really good startups, and it effectively results in misattribution of funding to people who are a good salesperson rather than people who are real scientists and real technologists. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, which goes back to the doing real venture capital. The roots of venture capital were about systematically, in a very efficient way, step function-wise attacking technical issues and de-risking them in as capital efficient a way as possible, sort of one at a time, until you have this breakthrough technology for which a market is a given and a business is actually a given. We've seen, I don't know if you want to call it the MBAification or the softwareification. You put it as the industry lost its way. I think there's a bunch of things that muddled it up along the way. But I certainly appreciate in you a deep technical expertise and a deep dedication to the very fundamentals of venture capital in terms of creating those alliances between entrepreneurs and scientists and funding them and financing them methodically so that we add capabilities to ourselves as a species. That's the ultimate purpose of this whole thing. 

Arkady Kulik: Yeah. I mean, I guess both you and me have a very similar philosophy of life. Technology is the only source of never-ending growth. There can only be so many people. There can only be so many natural resources. Our ability to reshape what we have, a very small amount of resources to something fantastic, something miraculous, this is a never-ending source of creativity, and that's what I love about it. That's the reason I've talked about this whole book, by the way. Do you know who Rick Rubin is? 

Eric Jorgenson: Yes, as a big 90s hip-hop fan, I'm a Rick Rubin devotee. But you were holding up The Creative Act there, his new book. What did you see in that? 

Arkady Kulik: The amount of notes on its own, we're going to spend the next two hours talking about this book. I think that it's a book written by the best of class. What Rick Rubin does with music is beyond normal. If you ever had a chance to listen to the original Californication demo, it's available online, you can find it. It's a tune that you know, all the components are there, but it just doesn't work. It's honestly a pretty bad song. But then you listen to Californication after Rick Rubin touched it, and it's an undeniable hit. It's a generation-defining level kind of song. So he's talking a lot about being attuned to greatness. And he's talking a lot about being able to follow your inspiration, follow your deepest soul movements. So, a lot of the things that he writes, you can read them, and it can sound like hippie mambo jumbo, like whatever, be in tune with the universe, bro, that kind of stuff. But if you leave your judgment before you open the book and you actually read it as an epiphany of sorts of a very, very wise and experienced person who has seen his fair share of stuff in this life, good and bad, you start realizing how deeply, it's basically a recording of how he worked on himself. And I think that the whole meaning of this book is that it's the creative act, but not of the art that you live out for yourself, but of yourself. It's like the proverbial philosopher's stone. It's not a stone, it's you that you polish and shape into what you want yourself to be. It all goes back to this concept of self-actualization and things like that. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it is very interesting to see. I'm not sure if it's quite fair to distill down everything that Rick Rubin is to like taste, but I think that's sort of how he expresses his skill is just I know what I like, I know what I don't like, and I'm confident in communicating that. 

Arkady Kulik: But that takes so much, especially in the modern culture, it takes so much courage. It takes so much vulnerability to be able to go and do that. And the reason I think what he writes there is another really interesting piece. You started this podcast with a question, what would we like to do with this podcast? What is the end goal of it? And I said let's do something great. And if people like it, it will get distributed. If people don't like it, then it's not going to get distributed. But if you and I know that we've done something great, this on its own is enough. And he says it very clearly in the book, you can write the best song you think ever, it will never be picked up by fans. And then you would write something very mediocre, and it's going to be your greatest hit. He says that the feeling of greatness and the way it is distributed and appreciated by other people have nothing to do with each other. That was a revelation to me. I always thought if I did something great, people would love it, but not necessarily. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's very liberating, isn't it, to just try to create something for you as the only audience and just sort of give up on the fact that you're trying to create any specific outcome in the world. 

Arkady Kulik: It's close to the proverbial death of an author. Not exactly that, but very close to. 

Eric Jorgenson: Do you think- I think taste is an interesting thing to drop into. Like, do you think taste exists in the world of venture capital? Like, how much is art? How much is science? How much is- can you separate taste and judgment? Like, there's a rational and there's an irrational part of every decision. 

Arkady Kulik: The reason I'm laughing is that I was meditating this morning, and this is exactly the topic that I was meditating on. I went into my normal practice, and it was so undeniably in front of me that I had to think about it. I don't know about taste in exactly the same, in exactly the same way that you would talk about taste for fashion or music or art. I’m not sure that it has the same mechanism of manifestation, for the lack of better vocabulary. So, it doesn't necessarily feel the same as a taste when you see something beautiful. A good example that I use is Air Force 1. When you see Air Force 1, you're like, that's a shoe. That’s one of the ultimate forms of a shoe. Or when you see some Christian Louboutin ladies beautiful shoes, you are like that’s the ultimate from. So there are certain things that exist as if they were designed by the universe itself. And that's where taste comes in, in my opinion. It's a bit of a, is it close to an ideal form? So that's what taste is for me. That being said, intuition, gut feeling, different things. Both intuition and your gut feeling are very important when you engage startups, when you engage founders. Intuition, I would say, is important when you engage technology and product. Gut feeling is important when you talk to founders. Does it feel right? Do they give you the right vibes? Are these the people that you believe will be able to connect with many other human beings, whether it's clients, executives, their other investors, or is it a person that is so saddened in his own ways that it's going to be impossible for him to connect to other beings? So, taste, maybe less so. Intuition and gut feeling, 100%. So rational versus irrational. Yeah, sure. 

Eric Jorgenson: That's a very good, separating intuition and gut feeling is a very interesting one. 

Arkady Kulik: You want me to talk more about it? 

Eric Jorgenson: Well, it's just a useful distinction. I think a lot of people would treat those as synonyms, but... 

Arkady Kulik: Oh, okay. Do you want me to double-click? 

Eric Jorgenson: Please, yeah. 

Arkady Kulik: So, here is how I feel, or how I think about that, or both mixed into one mushy ball. Intuition is something of a... The way I understand intuition is it's your subconscious mechanisms, your mind basically, working without you being aware about that, digesting some kind of data and trying to understand if this fits whatever you know before, if this fits your model of the world. So if you look at 55 battery companies, you will inevitably start to develop intuition whether the 56th or 57th battery company is something that you like or not, if it's going to fit into the market or not. It's a subconscious process of your psyche. Gut feeling is an unconscious process of your body. It has nothing to do with your mind. It is your visceral response, your animalistic, if you wish, response towards a human that you see. It can be something like, oh, I want to hang out with these people. I want to spend more time with this girl. I want to go and do snowboarding with this dude. I want to go into the mountains with this guy because I trust him. I know he will not give up on me if something goes wrong, for example. It's very animalistic, very like your animals have gut feelings. And I would argue that animals' gut feelings are more finely tuned than humans' gut feelings because they don't have all these other layers and other subsystems. So, in a sense, I would say that your intuition lives in your head, while your gut feeling lives in your guts, literally, like in your digestive system, if you wish. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's primal, it's like your genes sort of warning you of danger or safety. 

Arkady Kulik: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would distinguish those things. 

Eric Jorgenson: So you're born with a gut feeling, like we all have that sense. Intuition is subconscious, but it's trained over time and lives in the head. 

Arkady Kulik: Intuition is experience-based. And gut feeling is with you since your day one, yes. 

Eric Jorgenson: Very interesting and very useful. I think something that has really struck me as I've gotten to know you as a really powerful sort of alloying of talents is this deep technical expertise, like from your studies through your business, but also you're very thoughtful about, as I'm sure everyone listening has picked up by now, about communication and about the soft skills. And you've been pointing out like the bottleneck is the communication between the scientists and the capitalists and to some extent, the entrepreneurs. I want to spend some time on that, the communication piece of what you do and how you work and how you work with entrepreneurs. Maybe start with the local and how you do it specifically and see if there's anything to generalize from that into how we resolve some of these bigger bottlenecks. 

Arkady Kulik: First of all, thank you for your kind words and for highlighting some very rare pieces of me that are actually good. The communication piece is essential simply because I think that miscommunication is the source of all the conflict, and communication is also something very, very actionable. Anyone can be better at communication. It's not like- you can do 10 pull-ups and I can do 10 pull-ups if we train. Can both of us go do 100 pull-ups no matter how much we train? I'm not sure. But there are people on the planet whose muscles are built in such a way that they can do 100 pull-ups and, as if nothing happened, walk away. Same is true for marathon. Same is even more true for music and art. There are certain things that would require some raw talent or maybe some childhood trauma to see the world in a different way. Think about Eminem and how he was brought up and how much of his rage and how much of his energy is from his really abusive childhood. A lot of those things are not trainable. Communication is definitely trainable, coachable, and anyone can be a better communicator than we all are today. So, I see it as a very critical piece for many reasons. But the main reasons are, number one, it is the source of all the conflict that exists. Because if people really communicated properly, they would have come down to something that is either, I love to quote hip-hop artists, and Jay-Z said, either love me or leave me alone. So either they would just leave each other alone or have something fruitful between themselves. What we have today, people don't leave each other alone, and they start fighting in this relationship, and that spans across everything, your work, your personal life, anyone's- pick any kind of type of relationship, people would fight for no good reason. And the second main reason is that anyone can act on that, anyone can become better at that. I'm not asking people to learn differential math. I'm not asking people to learn to paint like Picasso did. It's not necessarily possible. But we can all be better communicators. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it was actually a source of optimism, as you were explaining and I was coming around to the idea that that is a huge bottleneck. It's like, well, in the thought experiment that we are all perfect communicators, that's solvable. That is a cheap solution if we are willing and able to go through this learning process of becoming better communicators. How has that- what's your personal journey towards improving your communication style or tactics or system been? 

Arkady Kulik: So, first of all, let me wrap up on the last thing that I wanted to say. There is a very short story called Specialist by Robert Shackley. And it's a beautiful book that I will send you a link to after. It's a very, very short story. It's about communication. The point is aliens land on Earth for whatever reason, and they look at what's going on, and they conclude that humanity is still in the conflict phase of their civilization. They're still arguing and quarreling instead of cooperating together, and basically there is no point of trying to establish contact because they're still in this nascency of civilization, in the crib of civilization, because we still argue about stuff. I think the honest to God answer is my frustration with how certain relationships played out in my life, whether it's business or personal relationships, have made me focus a lot on communication. My absolute love for negotiations have really forced me to learn a lot about communication, how to do it properly. One thing that I have, a very important caveat, when people are trying to do mechanically good communication, like, hey Eric, nice to meet you, you're such a great person, that is very visible, that is very clear, and being a good communicator always comes from genuine interest. And if there was no genuine interest from you to me or from me to you, this podcast would have never happened. Some people pick up formal rules of communication and never really come off as genuine, and that doesn't work. So, I think it's pretty much like anything else in life, it's your personal traumatic experience in the past, whether it's an abusive girlfriend or whether it's, I don't know, an irritable boss, or something like that. All of us have seen situations when just a little bit of effort on the communication layer would have helped. My wife and I talk about everything and anything. We're not one of the couples that is like, oh, you didn't wash your dishes, but you three years ago didn't put the laundry in, and you five years before that- But you know these couples, which like at the tiny, tiny speck of incident kind of starts unraveling these layers and layers of mutual grief towards each other. We're not like that. And when I see that there is no understanding with the person, I would just address it heads on. I would be like, look, we cannot communicate, there is no way for us to properly communicate, so we either should end this relationship now forever, or we should sit down like two freaking adults and then talk about what exactly is going wrong. But just throwing feces at each other doesn't really work if we're trying to build something. So my idealism, my belief that we all can be better people at the end of the day, that humanity can be a better version of itself is what drives my passion towards communication. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that's beautifully said and a beautiful aspiration. It is either sand or oil in the gears of everything we ever do, personally and professionally. And when you find people who can communicate with you for whatever reason, you have that common ground or you have that rapport, or you're just generous enough with each other to not have those little specks of irritant that sort of start that compounding fracture, it's amazing how far you can get and how good it can feel to just continue those relationships. 

Arkady Kulik: Sand and oil is a beautiful metaphor. I'm going to use it from now on for my own things. 

Eric Jorgenson: Please. It's all yours. I seek to create that in any entrepreneurs or investors that we work with. I'll be curious to hear how you've sort of involved that in your personal approach, if you've seen it change over the years. Has it been refined? It seems like a good communicator as an investor seems rare and prized by entrepreneurs for whatever reason. 

Arkady Kulik: You've read my piece on how to deal with bad actors. 

Eric Jorgenson: It was excellent. 

Arkady Kulik: The issue that- I'm trying to be in a politically correct format here. So, the issue with people that is especially visible in artist management and venture capital, the biggest problem is that people don't do what they promise they will do. Whether you're managing an actor or a musician or you're trying to do venture capital, there is a lot of this like, I'm going to introduce you, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'm going to put you in touch, I'm going to... And then the person disappears and never does what they promised to do. So one thing that will already put you in top 10% is either don't promise stuff that you don't plan to do, or if you have promised it, go and act upon that. Do that introduction. Provide feedback on their slides. Connect them with an advisor that will help them meaningfully advance forward. Just do one little thing. And this goes beyond communication. It goes towards relationship management and how you manage relationships with everybody in your life, from your parents to your associates, from your wife to, I don't know, your dog because it's still a relationship. It's not a human being, but it's still an alive being. You still have a relationship with them. So, one thing that really helps me, I always do something for anyone that I meet. I think you've experienced it yourself. 

Eric Jorgenson: You did it on the call. Like, I was so... I left my first hour of experience with you being like that guy is values aligned, a clear communicator, does what he says he's going to do, does it immediately, and follows up with the agreed upon next steps. And it all happened in an hour, and it was all completely unambiguous, and it was just so refreshing and clear and fantastic. And I was like, yep, I want to work with Arkady forever. 

Arkady Kulik: Also very lazy if you think about it. Because I promise you something, I've done it immediately, and I don't have to think about it again. I don't create this lingering expectations that are there now in the space. You're waiting for something from me. I need to remember to do something for you. Like, I've done everything, you're happy, I'm happy, we're both better off after this interaction. Even if our paths would have never crossed again, you would still have had a good impression, you would still have had some value for me, and it didn't cost me anything. 10 minutes of my time, 20 minutes of my time, man, I can watch one episode of some stupid TV series or help five people in a day, 10 minutes each. What would you prefer? It's so straightforward. So, I always give something first in the beginning of the relationship. It is also a very good test, in a sense, because a lot of people would not do anything in return, and you're like, cool, okay, that's on them to go back to this relationship and try to build something because I've done my part. I've put my cornerstone in the ground, they put nothing into this building, good, there is no building. Some people would come back and say, ha, so you gave me something, what about you do something else for me? What about you do more? What about like, basically, don't you want to be my free employee? Not to go deeper into some semantics. And some people would come back to you and say, hey, I like this, can I do something for you? And with those people, this is a very simple test on value systems. Can it be a reciprocal relationship where both people are trying to do something meaningful? Or will it be a one-way street? It doesn't cost me anything, and it's a very simple test, very straightforward test, and open as well. It keeps everyone honest. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And in the venture and startup industry, for the most part, everyone gets to choose who they work with, really, when it comes down to it. And so, people who are not operating from that kind of give first, give back, like help each other. We are roughly all on the same mission. It really like, yeah, it's sand in the gears again. And when you work with people who are values aligned and generous and really all coordinating in service of founders achieving their missions because we believe in those missions and those founders, things just get so easy. And as soon as you have somebody who's not acting from that place, all of a sudden, you're playing a strategy game instead of just pulling a plow together and having fun while you do it. 

Arkady Kulik: It goes back to value systems and how genuine these people are though. Because you and I do it because we believe that this tool, venture capital as a tool, helps us advance humanity forward. For many other people, venture capital is not a tool, venture capital is an end in itself. So I'm a VC, I'm a fantastic human being, everybody look at me. Some people do it for the status, some people do it for the money, and all they care is about assets under management and they will cheat and steal and lie through their ways with their LPs and try to get bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, and they don't care about the return, they care about the management fee. Some people think it's fashionable, some people think that, there are VCs who want just to enjoy the raw power dynamic of dealing with the founder, sitting like that, their feet on the table, dictating, you know what to do, kiss my finger, all of that, kiss my ring stuff, like what the... Like guys, if you wanted that, you should probably immigrate to Russia or some sort, whatever, I don't know. What I'm trying to say is that a lot of people, and this goes back to psychological maturity, a lot of people are not doing what they want to do. They're doing what they're being told is fashionable, interesting, or in any other way beneficial to them. They're miserable. Like, you asked about taste. Sometimes I would look at the deck of a company and I just look at the photos of the founders and I can see that they're miserable when the photo was taken. And it's especially horrifying when it's like a whole team. It's not some random photos picked from the internet, but it's the whole team. And there are a couple of people who are like, yay! And there's the founder who's like, I like what I do, but you can see it in his eyes, he's terrified. And you're like, yeah, I'm not even going to take a first meeting because this person is clearly not on his path, and it will end up in psychological trauma or depression or something else. I don't think it's going to be a successful company. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it is so satisfying to blow into the sails of people who you know are on their path doing the thing that they are meant to do. And if people aren't, there's no amount of wind in the world that's going to get the job done. 

Arkady Kulik: Because they're their own biggest problem. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's very interesting. How often do you find those alliances between scientists and entrepreneurs to be sort of already in that place by the time you are working with them at early stage? To some extent, it's emergent, right? It has to be. I'm just curious what the archetypes are that you see and how people put their puzzle together as they're building, as they're moving forward. 

Arkady Kulik: If we're talking about that specific aspect of their personality being on their own path, it's way more common that you would find a scientist who wants to be an entrepreneur or who sees entrepreneurship as you and I see venture capital, as a means to an end, he's like, I have to be an entrepreneur to bring this technology into the world because otherwise who else will do that? In that sense, you see that quite a lot. Again, we don't see a lot of scientists who want to become founders to begin with. It's like maybe 1% of the companies that we see, within this 1%, maybe half of them are on the path and half of them are actually trying to do what they feel is the right thing to do. When it comes to a composition of several founders, it is very often that they might be on a converging path or parallel paths, but not necessarily the same. Scientists want to develop technology and bring it to the world, sure. Entrepreneurs want to make money by developing this technology. So it might be that their paths are aligned for just enough to get this startup successful. And again, it's much easier to say when the person is clearly doing something that's not close to their heart, rather than say that this person's clearly doing something close to his heart. It's more of a, at a certain point, there is a cutoff and everything else beyond it is kind of not interesting anymore. But then after you see that there is some potential, you cannot really gauge how much, or maybe I cannot gauge because I don't have enough experience, by how much they are on their own path. This thing fluctuates as well. You can have a better day, a worse day, the path can change. But let me put it this way. People who are not true to themselves, people who lie to themselves are not founder type of material. And that I can say for sure. And the people who don't lie to themselves and they know what they're trying to do, those are people who can actually get there. 

Eric Jorgenson: And that's a read that comes from the gut, it sounds like, more than the conscious? 

Arkady Kulik: Absolutely. Is it a happy animal in front of you or not? Like dogs see each other on the street and they immediately understand if this dog is happy or not. Same stuff here. Does the person light up like you light up right now when that person talks about their startup, or does the person just sit there telling you the pitch deck that he kind of learned by heart and now tries to recite? 

Eric Jorgenson: It is very interesting how much comes from that, the blend of art and science, of gut and rational analysis. It's a weird time to do this, like 40 minutes into an interview, but I think now that we've had an interesting tantalizing number of hints about your background, that actually doing a quick overview of your very unique background and path to where you are now would be valuable. Because I see, knowing your background, I see a lot of the amazing DNA of your firm and where it came from in your past. And I think it's just interesting to explore your trajectory. 

Arkady Kulik: Sure. I've been an entrepreneur since I was 18 years old. I launched my first company that was an artist and event management agency. So I would go and study theoretical mechanics and quantum physics in the morning in the university and then in the evening I would run a DJ/singer/musicians event agency. It was fun. We've made a lot of money. I've built a huge house, the Oscars of Moscow. And when you're like 19 or 20 years old, it's a very fun industry to be in, all of the non-stop parties, nightclubs, everybody knows you, you get anywhere in all of these kind of coveted private parties and whatnot, lots of stunning ladies and lots of just pure teenage type of fun, never-ending flows of drinks and stuff like that. It gets boring, and it got boring for me as well. And I was like, cool, so we found out how to make money in this industry. Why don't we look at something that is not working? And at this moment, what was not working was digital music distribution. So, we went into the digital music distribution in Russia in 2009 when it was all pirate landscape. You can download any kind of music for free, in any kind of quality, in any kind of live version, non-live version. There was no law enforcement, no nothing like that, and honestly, it didn't even look like it's ever going to be enforced. It looked like this is going to be a gray area forever. It is still very much so. If you look at a majority of pirate websites for music, books, or videos, or whatever, movies, some of them will be, the biggest ones will be in Russian language, and you can still pretty much use it even in the US, just go online and find whatever you need and read it, watch it, listen to it for free. We've decided that we want to leverage something else, we've decided that we want to leverage emotional connection between the listener and the musician, and we've looked at who has done that before, and it was Radiohead. A couple of years before what we did, they launched their album that was distributed in the Pay What You Want model. And we thought that it might be a very good idea for Russian people who are very emotion-driven and very passionate when they become passionate. It's kind of hard for them to become passionate, but when they become, they're ready to kill for somebody, coming back to this discussion about ‘drugs’ and friends and the differences between words. We've launched the firm. We've signed up pretty much every single artist in Russia that existed. We became the largest label. We became the most prestigious label in the country, non-stop barrage of interviews with the main channels and the main videos and all of that, TV, major federal channels. We then kept on raising funding. And at some point, the big players started copying our model. And at that point, I sold my shares to my investors, and I moved on to INSEAD because to me, in a sense, what I wanted to do was complete. We found a way to make money in the digital realm. Some of our top musicians made millions on our platform. And some of the top pop musicians made like 44 cents or 50 cents because these top musicians, they already ride in their Rolls Royces, they're already flying their private jets, and everybody knows about their luxury lifestyle and has been on the cover of the magazines for like decades at that point. Nobody feels that they need to send a couple of bucks to this guy. But when you're dealing with hip-hop, when you're dealing with alternative music, when you're dealing with electronic music, a lot of people have a lot of emotional connection to the text, to the music itself. And I had a dude who sent like a thousand bucks without- like, it was not even a release of album or anything, just there was an album available for some rock band. So he sends a thousand bucks, which is a lot. Again, you can download anything for free. You can buy an album for like five bucks. He sends a thousand bucks, and the musician's like, what the hell is that? And we reach out to the user, and he's like, you know what, my first baby was conceived listening to the music of this band, and I've made my money, and I like them so much, I just wanted to say thank you. The label was called Thankyou.ru. So the whole idea was to be grateful to the musicians that you like. So they were so touched, they signed an album for him. Every single band member signed an album. We sent him a CD, of course, for free. He receives it and sends another thousand bucks. So there were stories like that. And I felt that, to a large extent, I've accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. Getting into legal battles with the big IT players in Russia who are just copying our model, or getting into the budget war with them. They started paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to our musicians, just as an advance payment, to get their next album. And these musicians would come back to us and say, hey Arkady, I like you a lot, but they pay me 250. Are you ready to match it? Are you ready to pay just half of that? I'm like, we never paid a single cent to anyone, why would we start now? So, I sold my shares. I moved to INSEAD, a business school in France and Singapore and I believe also now they have a hub in San Francisco, just a couple of blocks away from my new home. It was a phenomenal experience for me. If you want to get an MBA, go into, A, go into top like three, five schools in the world, and B, and that's the most important thing, have a clear agenda of what you want to achieve. I have a bunch of friends who went into INSEAD and said, well, whatever, it didn't change anything. I'm like, what did you want it to change for you? They're like, we had no idea, we just wanted that to change something for us. I'm like, okay, maybe that's not the school who's at fault then. So, to me, it was a phenomenal experience. I was not that great of a communicator. I was not that great of a negotiator or a people manager either when I started, and I came out with a lot of really good tools for myself and a couple of really close friends as well. And then it was just more of the same. I was invited to restructure a couple of companies in IT. I've restructured them. We sold one of them. Another one is still profitable to this day. I was then invited to be a COO of VK, that's the largest social media in Russia, Facebook of Russia if you want. I went there for a couple of years. I helped them scale it up to a couple of thousand people. We crossed a billion revenue during my position there. So it was more of a corporate job. I made quite a lot of money during this period. And in 2020, I've relocated to the US just a week before the pandemic started. And this was a fun experience. And my idea before relocating to the US was I want to do something in the world of science and technology, real science, real technology, not IT, not advertising campaign optimization, not click-through rate optimization, not the user conversion anymore, but actual science, actual tech. And I had no idea what it was going to be. Then in 2020, I moved to the US. It's a natural place to take a beat. Do you have any questions so far, or do you want me to continue? 

Eric Jorgenson: Oh, please continue. I think we're getting to the crossroads of how you participate in that world of technology and science, which is an interesting place to pause and do the full inventory. But it's already a really amazing story. 

Arkady Kulik: I think what, before I jump into talking about the fund, I think what really stood out for me in terms of experience of dealing with other people is that there are creative types, and you can meet creative types in any profession that you want. It can be, you can find a musician who is not a creative type, and you can find a developer who is a creative type, very much so, and you have to deal with them as with creative types. I still remember to this day, in one of the companies that I was restructuring, so I joined the company as an official CEO, and I just couldn't get the read on the people who were doing the product for us. Like the whole development team, the whole product team was kind of encapsulated. They were like that before I joined and they kept the same behavior with me. And I was like, I just cannot relate to these dudes, there is no way we can connect. And then at some point, some user writes something into support and I have this GIF on my laptop that is basically about how users, no matter how you design it, that they will find a way to break your product. And it's some kind of a cartoonish gif about the guy who's trying to lick the glass instead of drinking from the cup. And I sent this gif into Slack, and just this one gif completely destroyed all the ice between us. I immediately became like their dude. They invited me into like a closed channel on Slack where they kind of had their own echo chamber of how everybody in this office doesn't understand what they're doing, and this was actually a very big key to unlocking how to restructure this whole company. The reason I'm mentioning that is dealing with musicians, artists of all sorts and all walks of life, from high-posh French musicians to some real dark underground hip-hop folks with freaking needles on the table, on the kitchen table, and weird bags of white powder next to those needles or not so white powder. So, walking in all these different avenues of life gives you a very interesting understanding and perspective of how to deal with creatives. And, oh my God, scientists are the most creative creatives that there are, with very fragile egos, very much married to what they create and then build. So I think that gave me a lot of tools that I'm using today, up to today, in dealing with them. Sorry, that was a necessary caveat because I think if we're talking about communication and flavor of today's conversation is humans, then I think I should have stopped there for a second. Then I moved to the US, I started looking into the deep tech as a space, joined a couple of companies as a startup- a couple of startups as a mentor, a couple of companies as an advisor, looked more and more into that, and I realized that there is that translational error that I mentioned at the very beginning, the scientists versus capitalists, and the more I started talking to capitalists, and maybe talked to 50 to 60 VCs before I decided to do something in the venture capital world, the more I realized that it is indeed a need, and nobody who's already playing in this game has enough time to kind of hit pause and rebalance how they deal with everything. They just keep doing what works for them, and good for them, but nobody's trying to get this deep expertise in the world of science or technology. I was like, okay, cool, then probably it should be me. And I was talking to Chris Duvos, who is a very, very prolific LP, very well-known, he's done a lot of good deals, he's respected by many people who I respect. And I was kind of afraid because he sees hundreds and hundreds of funds every year. I was a little bit afraid that he's going to tell me, yeah, Arkady, that idea was tried 50 times before, it doesn't work because A, B, C, or something like, yeah, it was tried, it works, but it doesn't matter. Like for example, he could have said, your scientific and technological due diligence does not give you any edge in investing in startups over anybody else. And there are people who believe that. There are people who believe that it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the founder. And every time I say, Elizabeth Holmes, but the point is we talked to him and Chris was like, yeah, that's a very important thing. And it's not a matter of whether it's needed or not, it's a matter of ability. And if you have connections in the world of science and you can bring those connections and excite them about the world of venture, then you have a unique proposition to the whole industry and you should give it a shot. I was like, cool, let's give it a shot. That's how we started the fund. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's a beautiful marriage of all of the different experiences that you've had, working with creatives, sort of, I don't know, brokering is not the right word, but like collecting and marshalling resources to help a creative person find their way in the world. And you mentioned that whole chapter of restructuring and being a COO, having an MBA, like how you've actually constructed the organization and the mechanics of your fund even in your very first fund as a small, like small first fund, fund one, getting it started, you have laid a strong foundation operationally and logistically for growing something really robust. As a fellow small fund at the moment, I've learned a ton from you and can imagine working with you as an entrepreneur is incredibly refreshing because of the speed and organization that you have as a result of the operational experience. I don't imagine that a lot of VCs have that kind of operating background, really tight process orientation that you have. 

Arkady Kulik: Yeah, I think it all comes from the past traumas, if you wish, or past pains because when you have 10 people working for you, you can still build process. When you have 100 people working for you, rebuilding process is such a pain. So why don't you build it when you have two people working with you, or three? Initially, refresh it, fine tune it. When it stops working, like it stopped working this year, I go and build it again. We've sourced more than a thousand companies since the beginning of the year. And of course, my pipeline process broke in every single place. I remember I went into my intake tab in Airtable and I had like 360 companies there. I was like, ah, God, and I just closed it. I was like, I'm doing like- it was so large, it was like I didn't even know how to chip into that. So, I was like, okay, 30 companies a day. And of course, it was kind of coming up and up, so like around 20 days I was done with all of that, but I had to rebuild the process and update it and upgrade it with a new flow. It is fundamental and critical to have things that work for you on the background, because if your operations are taking your time and taking your efforts on a daily basis, then you're fighting an uphill battle every day. Right now, for example, in my Airtable, if I push the company to a specific stage, all the right people are notified, all the needed Google Docs are created, all of that is done automatically. And if it wasn't working, and it's true for every stage, every single question that we want founders to answer, we have a form that they just fill out after the first call, which saves them like half an hour of talking about that with us because it's done in like five minutes, saves us half an hour talking to them. And then this Google form is populated into our company cards and stuff like that. So having good and seamless operations saves you so much time, so much effort. And I'm too lazy not to have them. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's well put. I want to explore a little more the combination of your thesis and the technical due diligence that you mentioned as being part of the founding DNA of the firm. I think that's worthy of lingering on. So, I don't know, whichever one you'd like to start with makes more sense. 

Arkady Kulik: Sure. Our thesis is defined by two things. It's largely defined by the problem that the industry has, this translational problem that we've talked about a couple of times before. And of course, it's defined by our capability to solve that problem. So what we say right now, and of course, it will probably change in half a year or so, it's going to keep on refining on its own, physics enabled, hardware startups with proprietary scientific breakthrough. So physics enabled is our limitation. If I had more people who understand biology or chemistry or things like that, I would have done that as well. I don't have experts in biology or chemistry and being just another fund who winks their shit, I just don't see why. I know physics, I understand physics, I can reach anyone in the world of physics that I need in any sub-field of physics, so focus on that. Hardware startups, I think we both talked about that, I understand why it's more important than software. With a proprietary, which means a defensible IP, which means they can have a moat, which means they have some business level protection to what they're building inside. So they essentially have more time to iterate on what they're trying to do. Scientific versus engineering means that their breakthrough is not about how to recombine an existing thing, but rather how to apply novel scientific research or how to use technology in a novel way to get some serious breakthroughs on that side. And the breakthrough means something that improves the experience, either it completely shifts the experience of the end user or improves it by a serious factor like a battery that lasts 10 times longer, not 5% longer, a display that is consuming a thousand times less electricity than the one that you use today. A thing that will heal inflammation in the brain without any pills or any surgery or anything like that. A diagnostic method that will be able to say that this person has a risk of Alzheimer's five years from now, not when the Alzheimer's is already very prominent and visible in MRI as a dysfunction of the brain. So things that really shift the paradigm, that's what we're looking for. Given the very early stage of what we invest in, we double down on two things, founders and the technology that they're building. Markets, as you said yourself, once the technology is there, a lot of those stacks will have a very clear market and no competition, that would just be a monopoly. Competition, we do competitive analysis, but not in a sense of we parse Crunchbase and who else to find somebody who is addressing the same problem. We're looking at the scientific papers, the actual other labs that are trying to compete in the same space. So, we over-index on science tech, and we spend the other half, the other 50% of our attention on the founders themselves. 

Eric Jorgenson: I love that. And you sort of already spoke to your physics background and network in that world as a huge asset for how you can actually pull in experts in each of these fields to vet them, the companies or the claims more specifically, which is an incredible asset. 

Arkady Kulik: It is. It is unique also, so it helps me. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And these are, I mean, back to the story you told, I think, about, I think it was Dave McClure, just this is- people pop up AI funds or pop up crypto funds, and this is a thesis that would have always worked since the history of venture capital and before. If you are reliably finding the scientists and the entrepreneurs who have proprietary breakthroughs producing a novel benefit for humanity with an obvious market, like you can't go wrong with that. You can iterate against this thesis for decades and I don't think it'll ever lead you astray. 

Arkady Kulik: I had a conversation today with somebody else who was like, what do you think about this whole American dynamism trend? And my take is whether it's American dynamism, clean tech, or longevity, when we're talking about soft trends that define what is fashionable today, in a sense, we are always going to be losing on the strategy side versus some more fundamental place, whether we're talking about fundamental traits of human nature, like proverbial, I've heard it from many people. I never heard Reid saying it himself, but I've heard that Reid Hoffman thinks that a lot of monetization comes from the seven deadly sins. And it makes sense. If you work towards gluttony, you can sell a lot of hamburgers. If you're trying to work towards lust, you can sell a lot of stuff or greed. So they're a fundamental driver of human nature. Not the best parts of the human nature, but nonetheless. If you're trying to fundamentally click on, super focus on greatness, like Rick Rubin does, you will inevitably be successful. It's very hard to focus on fundamentals because, A, they're hard to uncover with all the noise that runs around you and, B, fundamentals require real work. You cannot win your stuff through that. I always tell my founders, you cannot growth hack your way out of laws of physics. It's just not going to happen. You can growth hack your way into marketing, but laws of physics will stay there. You cannot fight the second law of thermodynamics, it's impossible. And it's hard. It's just hard to have fundamental traits of whatever you're doing at the core of whatever you're doing. It's so easy to lie to yourself about them. It's so easy to create castles, air castles for yourself and mirage for yourself that you're actually doing it while you're focusing on something very different. A lot of what we do as VCs comes down to personal maturity. And a lot of VCs that are not successful, you will see that the common trend is lack of personal maturity. And it just manifests itself in so many different ways. 

Eric Jorgenson: Is that- the first thing that comes to mind for me is sort of the lemming-like behavior of seeking the herd, the social proof. 

Arkady Kulik: Very good example of that. Very good example of that. 

Eric Jorgenson: Or feeling drawn to the axiom fully prepared for the past. Like investing in wherever the returns just were in the last generation. It's like maybe even worse than chasing the herd this time around. 

Arkady Kulik: FOMO, same there. FOMO is a very big indicator of that. Focusing on fleeting trends versus real fundamental items is very much like that. We can go even further and say that they might even become successful VCs for one or two funds. Some people can capitalize on their marketing genius and whatnot. I will throw another wrench into their wheel. Will they be happy human beings as a result of it? It's a big question. I've had these conversations during fundraising of my first fund with a bunch of my LPs who would introduce me to some other people. I would go and meet the other person and come back to my LP and say, I'm not going to do business with that person. He's like, why? Is there so much cash? I'm like, I don't want to see him. I don't want to talk to him again. I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to have a relationship with that human being at all. They would be like, okay, that makes sense. And a lot of emerging managers would take any money that are available in the market and they will find themselves in the court of law or some other corporate trade situation or some other really unpleasant situation simply because they were not mature enough personally. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think it's Fifty years of Seth Bannon who advertises himself as having, I don't know if exclusively, but certainly primarily entrepreneurs as LPs. I think that that is a tremendous asset for them. It's something we, I think, passed that test at the moment now, but there's plenty of people flying direct from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia and maximizing for fund size rather than LP relationships or longevity or anything like that. 

Arkady Kulik: Maybe that's the game they're playing. Again, we're all playing a little bit of a different game. I'm not sure that this is the game worth playing in my opinion. There are people who wage war in the 21st century and I'm sure they're fascinated with that. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I like- and with the long-term orientation as well, I like sort of the pithy version of like, if you don't get rich on carry, you won't be around long enough to get rich on fees. I don't know if it's true in 100% of cases, but I think it's the right way to go about life. 

Arkady Kulik: It's the right way to go about life, not just venture capital. If anything that you do in life does not have long-term benefits for you and people around you, then there is no reason to stay for the short-term benefits. You can apply it to a relationship with significant others, you can apply it to your work. If you're not a VC, even if you're not an entrepreneur and you're listening to this podcast and you're going to a paid job day to day, find a job through the same lens. Try to find people with whom you want to have genuine human relationships and work with those people and you will be happy, you will make more money, and you will not have to go and see a therapist or pop a pill of Xanax every morning. I mean, you will be a happier, healthier human being and people around you will flourish. It is critical. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it is critical. And I think when you find people who have reached that state, that recognize each other, and they are so excited to work with each other. 

Arkady Kulik: Rare breed. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. You had a list of these sort of earlier in one of your previous answers, but I wanted to ask you about any companies that you're especially excited about and the potential impacts that they might have to sort of end on some optimism. 

Arkady Kulik: How many companies can I list? 

Eric Jorgenson: We're not going to run out of tape. 

Arkady Kulik: How many companies do you want me to list? One, two, three?

Eric Jorgenson: Let's do two. 

Arkady Kulik: Okay, cool. I've got just the most important, most interesting ones for you right now. And for my dear founders, those are the companies that are raising right now. That's why I mentioned them right now. So don't think that I didn't mention your company because I don't like you as much as somebody else. There are two companies that I'm excited about straight today and they're all in the market for raising right now. First is Humanity Neurotech. They found a way to reduce inflammation in the human cells by 70% within 24 hours after a non-invasive exposure to a low amplitude magnetic field. So it's basically a device that has a very specific form of magnetic field, frequently oscillating, and it allows, it reduces the inflammation in your body or in your cells specifically by almost 70%, 67, 69 in different cases. The impact I think is beyond measurable just on the brain health alone, that's where they start because your brain has all these barriers for chemicals not to enter the brain, so it's very hard to treat inflammation in the brain, much more harder than in muscles or joints or anything like that. So they start with the brain, and I'm very excited for these guys. The execution has been stellar, the team is fantastic, and it's called Humanity Neurotech. I love what they do. Blake Gurfein is an amazing CEO. Another company that is a personal favorite of mine as well as they're raising right now is called BIOS, Biological Input Output Systems. They've built a universal translator from neural to electronic signals for people who use prosthetics. So it gives them two major things. First of all, it's a seamless operation of prosthetics with a latency of 30 milliseconds. So it's as quick as a person would operate his own limb. It's not anywhere close to Myoelectrics, the old approach, when it would take like 150, up to half a second, 150 milliseconds up to half a second for the command to reach a prosthetic. Nope, it's very fast. And the most important and unique property, it has a two-way feedback. So a person with prosthetics can actually understand how strong they squeeze something. No other technology on the market allows that. A lot of my friends keep telling me that cyberpunk is a cautionary tale. I'm like, yeah, but let’s advance it in any case. The only thing which we're missing is artificial limbs, and these guys are working on that right now. The fun fact about this company is that they got the FDA breakthrough device designation in eight business days. Just for the context, it usually takes half a year. They got it in eight business days, which is phenomenal. 

Eric Jorgenson: That's incredible. Is it non-invasive or is it a neural implant? 

Arkady Kulik: This is an implant, but not in the brain, in the limb itself. It is implanted in the limb. It connects to the neural tissue, directly to the neural tissue, not to some muscles, not to some other redundancies, but directly to the neural tissue. So, it is an implantable device, yes. 

Eric Jorgenson: Wow, very interesting. Yeah, I think some of the most fun investments are starting with a sci-fi utopia and picturing what we would need to get there and then knowing that we are funding something that can get us to like Star Wars 2050. It's the ones I get excited about anyway. But that's because I invest like a 10 year old boy. 

Arkady Kulik: There should be a passion involved in everything that you do. And if there is no passion, then maybe you should start thinking about something else. So I'm also passionate about those things. The only thing I would say is every time I get too emotional, I get other people involved into the deal and try to kind of excuse myself from that because I'm afraid that if I'm too emotional, then maybe I'm not doing my job exactly as my LPs should expect me to do my job. So I get other people involved and I usually have at least two other partners look at the deal and at least three to four scientists look at the deal. So, among those people, they keep me very honest and very... sometimes I have to face an ugly truth that I got too excited about that. There is no real tech. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, we all need people we can count on to hold up a mirror when we need it. 

Arkady Kulik: Have you seen this short video about David Beckham and Victoria Beckham? When she's telling how she was just a normal girl, and he's like, be honest, be honest… Rolls Royce, be honest. She's like, I was just a normal girl from London, nothing special about me. Everybody needs his own personal David Beckham.

Eric Jorgenson: Yes, yes, that's true, that counts for a lot. And it takes trust and a strong relationship and good communication to do that well with people. Okay, second to last question, penultimate, what important problems are you not seeing pursued? I feel like there's always something that people are like, God, I'm waiting for this one. Will somebody please bring it to me? 

Arkady Kulik: Are we talking in general or are we talking about VC backable things? 

Eric Jorgenson: I have VC backable in mind, but if you've got something that's not necessarily, I don't want to miss out. 

Arkady Kulik: On the philosophical level of things, each of us, every single human being, including you and me, should focus more on less conflict in everything that we do. And there are certain people, all of us know their surnames, unfortunately, who should probably be put into the camp of how to be a non-conflicting person. So philosophically speaking, I think humanity is not paying enough attention to how important it is for us to have less conflict and more cooperation. It's not a VC-backable thing. It's not a government actionable policy. It's an individual exercise for each and every one of us to become a better human being, to become a better version of ourselves. 

Eric Jorgenson: That's an incredible answer. And actually, I happen to be exploring this. I think this is an underexplored family, I think of them as cooperative technologies, like things that allowed humans to cooperate better, the family, religion, language, the corporation, the nation state, whatever. There is an unwritten book that desperately needs to be written that is like tracing the history of cooperative technologies and sort of breaking them down and showing us maybe where the next leaps or two are. You can imagine hard tech playing a role in some of these, but historically it's been mostly like soft technologies or inventions. But to your point, like the thought experiment of what does a perfectly cooperating humanity hive mind look like, like putting aside free will or freedom, personal freedoms, decisions, assuming everyone is just like all in perfectly coordinated and happy to be doing so, which I think is a reachable space, that’s an unfathomable leap in progress and abundance and quality of life. It is a really interesting and good thought experiment and, to your point, actionable on an individual level and as a calling to create one of those technologies or improve one of the existing ones. 

Arkady Kulik: You and I should work on an essay about cooperative tech. I am very interested in that. I'll ping you after the call today, yeah. We'll do that. I think this is the most important problem. In terms of VC-backable things, the needle shifts all the time. I would have told you that neuroscience in general is very big and is still very big. I am very interested about, literally, it's a very unbaked thought, I’m very interested in novel medicine, and by novel medicine, I mean non-invasive diagnostics, non-invasive predictive diagnostics and non-invasive treatments. So something like, instead of having a glucometer that pinches your skin, have a glucometer that just does spectral analysis of your blood and then tells you if the glucose is up or not. Something as simple as that or something that diagnoses Alzheimer's would be interesting. A way to treat a whole subset of diseases, informations and whatnot without the necessity to put chemicals in your body or pierce your skin is also very important. So, I'm sure that we're just at the very beginning of this, and the more I look at the medical devices that we see, including Humanity that I've mentioned today, that's really interesting. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, incredible. Okay, I appreciate the hell out of this as I do all of our conversations. I feel energized, enlightened, and excited to continue to do what we do together. 

Arkady Kulik: No pressure for other conversations. 

Eric Jorgenson: No, no, no. Yeah, no pressure ever really. We're just here to have a good time. If entrepreneurs or potential investors want to reach out to you or anybody who just wants to follow along with what you're learning, what you're sharing, where would you send them? 

Arkady Kulik: My email is the easiest one. 

Eric Jorgenson: Do you mind sharing that? 

Arkady Kulik: Sure, ak, like in two letters, @rpv, the name of the fund, .global. I think if you can put it in the comment section or description of the video, we should just add it as an email. Yeah, anyone can reach out to me. I usually respond within 24 hours. And I try to respond to everybody, even if it's not a fit. I'll just say it. It's going to be a short note, but I try to get back to everybody. And if for some reason I did not, LinkedIn is also a good way to try to get in touch with me. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, well, I appreciate you taking the time to share your many hard-won lessons with me and being so generous with us, with all the things that you've come across. I'm such a believer in what you're doing and how you're doing it. I am very excited to see where you and RPV go over the next decades. I think it's going to be a meaningful contributor to a lot of really exciting projects. I feel like the world's more likely to be a better, more beautiful, more abundant, bountiful place because you're doing the work that you're doing. So, I salute you. 

Arkady Kulik: Thank you very much, Eric. Same to you, my friend. 

Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. If you like this episode, there are a few great ones that are very similar, similar energy, similar ideals, and you might want to queue those up next. That's episode number 34, Josh Storrs Hall talking about the next industrial revolution through the combination of AI, nuclear and nanotechnology. Then Mark Nelson, episode number 45, gives us a history of nuclear energy, energy markets and more. I left that one very optimistic about what the future could hold. And then that battery company I mentioned is episode number 66 with Eli Dorado and Ethan Loosbrock. We talk about batteries, their role in the electrification of the future, and there's so many cool things coming. It just sparks my imagination to spend all this time thinking about what's around the corner in 10 years, in 20 years, imagining what this next industrial revolution is going to look like and the part we can play in making it happen. So, sign up for the Smart Friends email newsletter at ejorgensen.com, invest with me and my partners through rolling.fun. Links to both are in the show notes. Support the show. Please text this episode to a new smart friend or a coworker that you think would enjoy it and be a brother or sister in arms to build an incredible future. Remember, every episode you listen to, every good idea you learn brings us one step closer to utopia. So, thank you for listening and I'll see you next time.

Investing, TechEric JorgensonTechnology, StartupsComment