​Rolling Fun #5: Investing in Nuclear, Ecommerce Data, and AI Productivity

 
 

Once again, it’s time for some Rolling Fun updates and laughs with Bo and Al.

If you are new here, Rolling Fun is our rolling fund where we invest in early-stage startups creating world changing technology. Accredited investors are invited to join us through AngelList.

In this episode, we start off with some cow talk. Cows have nothing to do with our investments, but Al is elbow-deep in trying to buy one. We also talk bacon and my next book. Then we get into the good stuff: our Q1 investments and what’s going on in the current portfolio.

Here’s what we explored in the episode:

  • Our first Q1 company is FasterBetter, brought to you by Mat Ellis and team. FasterBetter is using AI to build a suite of productivity tools for Google and Microsoft workspaces.

  • Our second Q1 company is Aalo Atomics. They are building and designing nuclear fission micro reactors, at factory scale. They are focusing on the perfect solution for things like backup data centers, remote military bases or factories.

  • Our third Q1 company is Solve Data. If you were in ecommerce a decade ago, you might remember Sailthru. Well, the Sailthru founder is back at it again with a data solution for aggregating first party data--exactly what everyone needs as Facebook, Apple, and Google stop offering third-party cookies.

  • Current companies Gently and Omella are going strong and steady, executing quickly with small teams.

  • ​Drivly has been quiet, but they have early customers and cool stuff in the works. You'll hear a lot more from them soon.

  • ​Weavechain is coming on the podcast soon!

  • I’m excited to give everyone a Glyph for Christmas 🤞🏼🎁

  • Despite the downturn, the fund is still growing... and we are still having fun.

 
 

This episode is sponsored by Athena.

 Athena  is a company completely dedicated to providing top-caliber executive assistants from the Philippines. I’ve had a conversation with Athena’s CEO and CCO in  episode 38  of this podcast.

Get a free first month (Worth $3k!) when you sign up with my code:  athenago.me/eric-jorgenson 

Learn more about Al Doan, Bo Fishback, and Rolling Fun:

Additional episodes if you enjoyed:

Episode Transcript:

Eric Jorgenson: Hello again and welcome. I'm Eric Jorgenson. I don't know much, but I have some very smart friends. And if you listen to this podcast, then no matter who, where, or when you are, you do too. Together, we'll explore how technology, investing, and entrepreneurship will create a brighter, more abundant future. And today, we're going to do it with a lot of giggles because I'm hanging out with Bo and Al, my partners in Rolling Fun, our early stage investment fund. We invest in startups building world changing technology, and we try to make some money for you as we do it. If you're an accredited investor, you can join Rolling Fun and invest alongside us in these companies. Visit rolling.fun to learn more and apply. In this episode, we talk about our three new investments from q1. We talk about what's going on in the current portfolio towards the end. And we talk about sort of what's going on in the macro and tech, preparing for the barrage of new startups after all the layoffs. And we talk about how unprepared Al was to buy a cow. We start talking business about 30 minutes in. And if you don't care about the cow, you can skip to that. Before we get to our conversation, a brief partner message. And if you're pulling out your phone to skip this part, that's a great opportunity to leave a review on your podcast player. It is truly a massive help to me and the show. Thank you. 

Our sponsor for this episode is Athena. Al and I both have assistants, executive assistants or EAs through Athena, and we talk all the time about how much they help in our lives. Later on in the episode, we fight about it a little bit. But my EA Ivan has been a huge help to me in building this podcast, starting this fund, and writing a book all at the same time. It's the best way I've ever found to buy back my time and get more leverage in life. And Athena makes that possible. They hire, train, and match you with a full time EA who's based in the Philippines, then they provide ongoing guidance and accountability to be sure that you and your EA are successful together. They recently added playbooks which means you don't have to figure out all the new systems for your EA and teach them every little thing. You can basically copy and paste capabilities from some of the best delegators in the world. And Athena will provide all the materials and training for your EA to upskill and deploy them in your life. So all you have to do is text them a link. And they can add capabilities and like automatic present sending for birthdays, magically refilling refrigerator, which is something that I love, and calendar audits and a ton more things. I think there's like 45 playbooks already, and they're adding more all the time. So open your browser, type in athenago.com to sign up. There's a waitlist to get matched with an EA, unless you sign up with my link that's in the show notes. And then you skip the line and you get your first month free, which is nearly $3,000 in value. So go to athenago.com, the link in the show notes, and sign up right now. There’s no commitment required when you do that. And if you just want to learn more, I did an episode with the CEO and CCO of Athena. It's episode number 38. And it's overflowing with valuable ideas. It will teach you a lot about more about the playbooks, what truly great delegation looks like, when you're sort of getting ready to invest incorporation of you, which is really what adding an EA is. So once more, athenago.com. Be sure to list me as your refer or go through the link in the show notes. I'm careful to only pick sponsors I believe in whose products I enjoy, and I think you will too. I really appreciate that you support the sponsors who help make this show possible. I’m very grateful to them. Now with both ears and everything in between, please enjoy this conversation arriving in three, two, one. 

Bo Fishback: So, we got to knock this podcast out and get on-

Al Doan: We are the worst prepped of all time. We have never prepped less, but I'm confident. Yeah, we will at least be entertained. 

Eric Jorgenson: Never less prepared, never more confident. 

Bo Fishback: That's right. And here's how you make bad decisions.

Al Doan: Give us your money, people. You can trust us. 

Eric Jorgenson: Never short on topics. What are the life updates? Did you manage to buy cow? I know you were trying.

Al Doan: Oh, yeah. Well, I was trying. Literally got in the car to go get him. The guy was like, oh, we sold him. So, I was trying to buy two bottle calves, where you bottle feed them. They're early from like a dairy where they're like, yeah, we have man calves, we don't want these. And so I was like, alright, love to buy them. It's like 50 bucks. And I was going to go get them. And then when he said I couldn't, I was like, okay, and I messaged another buddy. And he's like, yeah, I got some calves, 400 bucks, but they're like on grain already. And I was like that's a big price jump. I'm not ready for that. So then I started looking at like what do I have to do to raise a bottle fed calf, and it was like that's a lot of work. And there's a little cold snap. I'm like, wait, do I need to have a home for it? I thought I'd just throw it in the field. So, it got a little more complicated. I'm kind of glad when I got in the car it wasn't there because I'd be really signed up for a lot more work.

Eric Jorgenson: How much research did you do before you attempted-?

Bo Fishback: This is a classic, classic case of like good from far, far from good. 

Al Doan: We were playing with the cow in the playroom, and I was like that cow but bigger, what if I could do that? So then I went to talked to there's a farm that does like a2 to milk. Do you know this stuff? It's a2 that like if you're lactose intolerant, you can drink this milk. There might be a thing for- because it's like the enzyme isn't in the milk that normally- So they have a big farm. They're on like 35 acres, and they've got like 40 cows, and so I went and looked at that. It was like maybe you could run some cows here because I'm more about the regenerative farming aspect of this. I want like some poop going in the ground and helping rebuild it and move it around.

Eric Jorgenson: Full ark, just all the creatures.

Bo Fishback: Family size ark. Convenient one. 

Al Doan: Big enough I need to hire a guy for two hours or more to come and do the stuff. So then when I go on vacation, I don't have to board my dog. So went and saw this. They’re way overcrowded, this huge mud pit, the whole place. And I was like, I don't want anything like this. But I want a cow. What do I do? So now I'm still- I'm just sort of- like I’m inviting some people to come and run some cows on there. But I want them moving often so it doesn't turn into a mud pit. And I just put wildflowers down. I don't know. There's a lot to do. So short answer, no, didn't get a cow. Long answer, I am knee deep in trying to get a cow. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah, that's good. That's good. In the process. I like it.

Eric Jorgenson: And soon you'll be elbow deep in a cow.

Al Doan: Delivering a baby. Look at me. Can you imagine me delivering a baby? I’d be great at it.

Eric Jorgenson: Cow births are supposed to be pretty easy.

Al Doan: I have an incredible bedside manner. Hello, it’s me again, Dr. Al. Just going to use the backside of my hand, very professional. They say when a cow is born, the first thing you should see is two hooves and then the nose. And then it comes out like Superman. I didn’t know that. Obviously, I'm like, man, in my mind, it's two back hooves coming out. But no.

Eric Jorgenson: If they get stuck, they like take this giant like lever and just crank, they like tie up the hooves and like have a ratchet.

Bo Fishback: Yeah, wait until you see human birth. It is the forceps go in and pull the head. Eric, when you're in that delivery room, you're going to be in shock. It's the jaws of life in there. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's just like the cows. It is Superman. My wife will shoot me, instantly. 

Al Doan: Let's see, other life updates – got new motorcycles for the kids, which is very exciting, the little electric ones. Going to be good time. So that's like-

Eric Jorgenson: For them to ride over those bridges that don't have like rails on them?

Al Doan: Yeah, I built another bridge too. I cut another trail in the other direction. And used the telephone poles for this one. So like more stable and wider than three foot. But we'll see. We'll see. As the weather changes, my life gets dramatically better. 

Eric Jorgenson: Daredevil don’ts, tearing up the woods. 

Al Doan: That's me, man. Here I am. 

Bo Fishback: Mostly just youth basketball, man. That's the world we're living in these days. 

Eric Jorgenson: And a personal chef. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah, a lot of cooking and a lot of hoops. That's what we're into. 

Al Doan: Every time we come over, Bo just tells us about the breakfast he makes. Sous vide bacon last night. 

Bo Fishback: That's true. That is true, sous vide bacon experiment.

Al Doan: Tell us how you know bacon's done right.

Bo Fishback: Let me just tell you, the sous vide bacon, delicious, also not worth the hassle. Let me just save everybody the time. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's not hard. Just put it in the oven. Make Al mad.

Al Doan: I hate oven bacon. I hate it. Bo says the perfect bacon is when it cracks, but it's still connected on the inside. It is still chewy. So you get the crisp, and it hangs in there, so you get that little payoff. And I didn't know that. 

Eric Jorgenson: I'm very happy if my bacon shatters when I look at it. I'm fine with that.

Al Doan: I burned bacon for the first time this last week. And that was a sad, sad moment. But still good. 

Eric Jorgenson: You've made it pretty far without burning bacon. That's good.

Al Doan: 40 years, no burnt bacon. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah, not bad at all. 

Al Doan: What about you, man? 

Eric Jorgenson: Well, I’ve mostly been working on this fund. Have you guys heard about it?  

Al Doan: You were fundamentally ill for a moment.

Eric Jorgenson: Very briefly. I'm back. We're fine. It was short lived. But yeah, just working hard. About to publish this book. We're almost done. We're almost done. Everything's like coming together. Waiting on the illustrations, waiting on the forward, but like almost done with the manuscript.

Al Doan: Who is drawing things for you? 

Eric Jorgenson: Jack Butcher. Visualize Value. No, no, no, his stuff is so good. 

Al Doan: So how many illustrations will be in a book?

Eric Jorgenson: Depends on how many he gets done in the time.

Al Doan: Is it like 20?

Eric Jorgenson: Probably 10 to 20 is my guess. But he's been working on it for a while. It's going to be awesome. His work is sweet.

Al Doan: Are you ready to move on to the next subject? Have you stared at Balaji wisdoms too long?

Eric Jorgenson: I'm ready. I mean, two or three years on like one. I mean, he's got a ton of ideas. But like, yeah, I'm ready to like do the next thing.

Al Doan: Can you do the next one faster? 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. This one was faster than Naval. I think the next one will be even faster. 

Bo Fishback: When do you get like the book workshop where you just throw it to a bunch of 26 year olds, and they magically write exactly the book you want? 

Eric Jorgenson: I think after the next one. 

Bo Fishback: Like, here's the recipe. Now you guys can cook food, and I'll stamp it. 

Eric Jorgenson: This is what James Patterson does. That's how he has scaled like quality-ish writing. 

Bo Fishback: This is what I want, the James Patterson model for writing books.

Al Doan: Which one is James Patterson?

Eric Jorgenson: He did all the books, Jack Ryan, like a ton of thrillers and spy thrillers.

Bo Fishback: It has to be hundreds. Like, it has to be hundreds of books, literally hundreds of books. And it's because he has like a- he has an engine to create the books that come out in his voice and his style. I mean, it's the most unbelievable like high leverage like book creation thing. And they're all good. Like, it's amazing. It's amazing.

Eric Jorgenson: He works with co authors. He's like, here's my outline, you take it and write the book.

Al Doan: Like, how did you write this many? These are all fantastic.

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, there's different people, like Danielle Steel does it by working like 20 hours a day and abandoning her family. And like that's just all she does is write and James Patterson is like I’m going to hire a couple collaborators. 

Al Doan: But she still finds erotic satisfaction in the book she writes.

Eric Jorgenson: She is probably the happiest person alive. 

Al Doan: If you read one of those, you're doing great. You're having a fun time.

Eric Jorgenson: I’m going to experiment with some of the like scale up stuff and different formats and stuff after this one. 

Bo Fishback: You got one more to do before you're ready for that? 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think so.

Al Doan: Is the next one still Elon, even with the controversy?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I don’t care.  

Al Doan: Like the controversy, like he doesn't historically get into all his own controversies already. 

Eric Jorgenson: These books are about finding like the most helpful things someone has ever said in their public lives, and like compiling all that. I don't give a shit about the 10% stuff that everybody disagrees with and wants to fight about. 

Al Doan: Yeah, it's been funny to watch. I mean, Twitter has fundamentally not changed for me at all. But also, I feel bad that I'm not angrier. Should I really- aren’t we supposed to- I don't know. I still use it. I actually use it. I don't hate the for you page. And that feels controversial to me.

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, the link aggregator thing, there's a bunch of good stuff in there once you're-

Al Doan: I still remember when Zuch launched the News Feed, man, it just like, this is bull crap. Like millions of people telling him he's wrong. It's like screw you guys, this is way better.

Eric Jorgenson: So you guys know you're all using it like another two hours a day, right? Got you. 

Al Doan: Also, V1 of the newsfeed was the best V1 or best news feed. So and so updated a photo, they did this thing. It was all your friends doing stuff. That was what I wanted to see. 

Eric Jorgenson: There wasn't even ads back then. 

Al Doan: And you were like, this is cool. I remember the biggest complaint, it felt too voyeuristic. It's like you know if somebody changed their relationship status, and as a single guy, it was like, man.

Eric Jorgenson: I got push notifications on that. And our parents were all yelling at us, like stop putting public information online, and now like they are spending hours a day.

Al Doan: That part is terrifying. Do you guys remember somebody did like the lollipop video where you'd like launch it, give it access to your thing, and then it like shows pictures of your kids playing in the playground. And the guy in a creepy- you don't remember this?

Bo Fishback: No, I didn't fall for that one. 

Al Doan: I have to find it because it's fantastic. It's all just like whatever your profile is open to, it'll build the story around it that should freak you out and like convince you to lock down your settings. It was very well done. Nice work. I'll find it. I'll find it. It's a good time.

Eric Jorgenson: Don't send it to us. All right, you want to do some work? 

Al Doan: You don't remember the creepy man video? That’s so weird. I loved that one.

Eric Jorgenson: Al, you should go first. You got two, you lead two deals this quarter.

Al Doan: I'm on the agenda. Al bought a cow.

Eric Jorgenson: Question mark. I needed to know. Subscribe for cow updates. I also like that you didn't look at the agenda until 11 minutes in.

Al Doan: You're making me look bad, or I'm making me look bad by doing what I do. Okay, yeah, we did have two investments come through, like with me as the sponsor this month, or this quarter, which we're excited. So first is FasterBetter. FasterBetter comes from Mat Ellis and team. They built Cloudability. Mat Ellis is a very good friend of mine. He built Cloudability by like he built this little tool that like monitors AWS usage and told him where he could- like, he built it for himself and then enabled it for like a couple of friends. And then they told their friends. And it was literally like an automated spreadsheet that he would do a thing. And then he had like, nobody was paying him any money for it. And then this company like- their like finance department messages him and is like, hey, this went offline. He's like, you don't pay me for it. Like, what do you care? They're like, if you take this down, we will sue you. Like, we need this tool. This is how we run our business. And so, he's like, okay, I’ll professionalize it, make it a thing, and then turn it into a great big company that did great. And so they sold that I think last year, two years ago. And then that whole founding team, like the CTO, the VB, and all those guys moved together, sort of banded together on this, and they're all working on FasterBetter, which is like that was our first one where we sort of, if it's people that we love, we follow them pretty regularly and say, all right, we want to be a part of whatever you do. So, that's our first move on it. The second one is FasterBetter is actually a great idea. So they're tackling things like for my inbox management, I use a tool called SaneBox. I also pay for SuperHub. I do all this work to try and get my email to not suck. And I have an EA. I will spend whatever it is to try and like make that protocol manageable for me. 

Eric Jorgenson: An Athena EA.

Al Doan: An Athenea EA. Yesterday, I was like, I told my EA, I was like, would you leave Athena? Can I just poach you from them and give you all the money? Because they drive no value to me. But you're great. Sorry, Athena. 

Eric Jorgenson: We can fight about that if you want.

Al Doan: That would be an interesting thing because yeah, my satisfaction surveys are all like, you're great. I think your service, Athena, drives so little value to you. That being said, I don't know her before Athena. So they might have done dramatic improvements with her. And then like-

Eric Jorgenson: They train, they coach, they feedback, they like give them playbooks. 

Al Doan: No, I like the idea. I like the idea. But I'll talk to her, and I'll be like, doesn't anybody teach you how to book a flight? And she's like, no, I'm sorry. Nobody knew. I'm like gosh dang it, why am I flying to Memphis? This is wrong. 

Eric Jorgenson: I can hear- Chris Ho is the new- he's a new investor of ours and sent another deal that we're going to talk about in a second. He's the chief client officer at Athena. I can hear him screaming at me right now, like there’s a flight booking class, she just didn’t go to it. I have 90 pages written about how to book a flight. 

Al Doan: Like I yelled at him at our last quarterly because I was like, I have to put so much of my energy in teaching them how to be- well because it's hard. I think what I'm used to is like an EA that is great scheduling and calendars and stuff and like amazing at that, and then everything else is like iffy. And I think an Athena EA is more like they're okay at that. But they're also okay at like a thousand other things.

Eric Jorgenson: It’s more- I think. Yeah, I spent a lot of time just being like you go to learn. I want you to go learn this skill because I need you to have it. 

Al Doan: Well, I think what killed me was like I started with a fractional EA that just did my calendar and stuff. She was fantastic at it, but she didn't do anything else for me. And then I went to my EA now, her name is Zane. She's fantastic, but like she didn't know a lot of this stuff. I'm like, alright, I'll teach you how to- Let me show you how this goes and how to make this work. And I'm like, dang it, Athena, you guys should have scaled her up to this. But it's probably just a misunderstanding on how that all works. So anyway, I mean, I'm still paying her, still a client of Athena.

Eric Jorgenson: She’s running your puzzle- you like bought a company.

Al Doan: She literally, she runs my real estate stuff. She runs my puzzle stuff. She runs, like I make her do all of my- run my budgeting app, not budgeting but she'll classify any charges that come through and make sure that it's where it's supposed to be. And I'm like my life is dramatically better. Every bill I pay, I just take a picture, send it to her, like it's great. She does a fantastic job. 

Bo Fishback: Can you do a thing on Athena where you just hire them after they've worked for Al for like nine months? I want the post Al experience, like now you can do everything. 

Al Doan: She is legit, man. She is like a ninja at this stuff now. Just like, it's fun when you reach the spot, but it's taken a year. But we've reached the spot where I'm like, I was just thinking I should do that. She's like, I know, I got you. Hey, your friend’s having a birthday. You want to send them this or this? And I'm like, yes, I do, and that’s exactly what I would send them. It's a whoopee cushion. You nailed it. That's going to pay off this year. So anyway.

Eric Jorgenson: We've invested a lot in trying to make email better. And that's the problem-

Bo Fishback: FasterBetter, what they're doing is they're doing like Office 360 and Google tools, basic things, like small basic things like the same box move, which same box is we’ll take anything that we think might be spam or whatever and turn it into a digest and like show you what's there. The FasterBetter guys are like we could do that with AI. We can dynamically- nobody opens this one, it's always spam. You never open it. We're going to move it to a place where you can still find it, you can still search for it, but like we're going to give you the best inbox experience possible. We can do a lot with basic AI and understanding of who you talk to you around your contacts and merging that, cleaning it up. Like a thousand people have tried to do that. And like we just want to take the easiest low hanging fruit and charge you a buck or two a month for it. And like you can start cleaning this up, and then we'll add more tools on as we go. I'm like, I love it. I think everybody will be a subscriber. And this is easy, basic stuff that should be there, will dramatically improve experience with calendars, with contacts, with email, all the stuff that we touch a thousand times a day and make that better. So, we're excited. We're excited about the space. We're excited about their solution for it. I also love that they're like solving in the exact same way they did before with like we're building a thing that makes our lives better. We're expecting nobody to use it, we'll build it, put it out there. And then, once a million people are using it, we say oh, we've got a great thing. And off we go. So really like Mat Ellis, really like the team, really like the company. So we're excited to be in their very first raise, which it's fun when you're like a first check into these things, which is sort of a badge of honor I think for us to be like we saw it early, believed in them, went with it. 

Bo Fishback: I like that a lot too. I've had a few conversations with family offices recently who are kind of interested in what we're doing. And so much of it is that like we get to do the most fun part in those first checks. And they're like, they're all kind of like, we wish we could do that. But like the checks aren't quite big enough. And we don't quite know the folks who are doing those things, and we don't hear about them until they've already raised an overpriced seed round or whatever. And I think that's like, it is I think actually what makes it like the most credible for us to be positioned the way we are. It's like this is all we're going to do. Like we're not trying to go raise $50 million to do this stuff because that is like the most meaningful and fun part. And that's like what I love about these. I hope Mat and the posse kill it, but also like they're all high risk and fun because of it. 

Al Doan: Well, it's funny too, like speaking of the fundraise, he's like, yeah, I sent a note out to like a hundred of my VC buddies. And I got like 88 responses within two hours. He was like, everybody was really excited for me. That's one of those though that like if we tried to show up two rounds from now, we'd never make it. There'd be no way. But because like, we get to be like, oh, you're doing a thing, we love you- 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you guys go way back, so you get that first email. Yeah, that's awesome. I like that they- I think they're in the under- all the like tinkerers and builders are in the kind of like sexy like Mac app activity space. And these guys are like, no, look at where the big numbers are. It's all like Office workspace users, Google Docs. Like we can do a ton of stuff in that, and that's where the big market is. 

Al Doan: If they can have margins at like two bucks a month, great. Awesome. You're doing fantastic. And then like you'll probably end up charging more because that's just the way it works. But if you can live around there, man, that'd be amazing. Everybody would put it in if it’s the cost of a candy bar.

Eric Jorgenson: Yep. Experience working with big partners is huge. Like, they'll just grow right under Google's nose. Like they'll watch them develop. 

Al Doan: They built all their- their last company was all on inroads into AWS, which is notoriously hard to like interface with or build a company around. But like they did great. Yeah, so high confidence that they can navigate this. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's cool. This is an accidental theme that we usually have each quarter. But all of our companies are repeat founders or entire founding teams, experienced previous exits. It's pretty awesome. But yeah, reading through that deck is just like all four of them have worked together at their last company. -successful things. And you can feel in that deck the like-

Al Doan: Content.

Eric Jorgenson: Like the design is so like stock fonts. He's like, I got this, just give me the money. Like, I'm not over investing in design and pitch. Like here's the deck, yes or no, I got work to do. Yeah, that's a good one.

Bo Fishback: What's yours, man? What's the next one?

Eric Jorgenson: So this company finally has a name, which is exciting. It's a-

Al Doan: Aalo! How do you say it? Aalo!

Eric Jorgenson: I’ve been saying Aalo, but I'm not sure, not positive. I haven’t learned how to pronounce it.

Bo Fishback: I think they should go with Al’s pronunciation. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's very bright. It's exciting. Yeah, it's an optimistic company.

Al Doan: Which for a nuclear company, you want it to be bright and exciting.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, Aalo Atomics has been in the making for a long time. So like probably more than a year ago now. And I did a podcast about Where's my Flying Car? That book gets you really into like nuclear and nanotech and all this stuff. Chris, who's a friend of mine, the guy we're just talking about at Athena, reached out and was like, dude, you should meet my buddy Matt. He was my founder at Humi, which is a healthcare sort of company. They're like the Gusto of Canada, payroll, HR, benefits, huge enterprise successful company up there, built that whole thing, but he's-

Bo Fishback: It took me a minute to remember Gusto.

Eric Jorgenson: It's been a minute since Al had to work with Gusto. It’s big; it is a successful company. But Matt's like original education was all in nuclear like engineering and physics and stuff. And so he's just gotten like, here we go, like I want to spend the rest of my life working on this.

Al Doan: Isn’t that weird when you are like, well, what do you do? And they're like, oh, I'm a nuclear physicist. You are like right, oh, you really are. I forget that they exist. Like, it’s such a trope of uber smart. I mean, the astrophysics is like wow. 

Bo Fishback: What are you doing in payroll software?

Eric Jorgenson: Getting some easy money and going back to nuclear. 

Al Doan: He took a semester off so you can go do the thing that really matters again. I'm working at Arby’s so I can go back. I’m making my money in payroll so I can go fly rockets. 

Bo Fishback: This is the classic trope of the stripper paying her way through college, guys. That's what this is.

Al Doan: I had to build a successful payroll company, so I can finally go do- my father wasn't proud.

Eric Jorgenson: Matt and I sort of caught up quarterly or so as he was like navigating and exploring this like world of nuclear and being like how the hell- like, why is nobody getting regulatory approval? What are the startups doing? Who's building what? What's crowded, what's not? What are the pathways to commercialization? And finally, kind of the pieces all came together. And this is going to be a slightly edited version, like we are not able to share everything that we know about this company publicly on the podcast. There's more in the LP notes.

Al Doan: Give us your money, and we'll tell you. 

Bo Fishback: Classic pay wall trope, Eric. Really nice. Really, really nice. That's amazing. 

Al Doan: Paywall is 5 grand a quarter and we’ll tell you what’s up. Are you titillated?

Eric Jorgenson: You think this is a bulletproof case because it's not. So there's the pieces are coming together for this company to kind of like get created and find this really interesting- 

Al Doan: What are they doing, Eric? We are all dying to know. 

Eric Jorgenson: They are building, designing and building nuclear fission micro reactors, so micro reactors like small scale in the like-

Al Doan: Power a city, don't power state. 

Eric Jorgenson: 100 kilowatt to 10 megawatt range. Yeah, very small. So like small modular reactors.

Al Doan: Small enough to power a residential home? Or a suburb?  

Eric Jorgenson: More than that but not a suburb.

Bo Fishback: What about my home? 

Eric Jorgenson: Maybe Bo’s house.

Bo Fishback: Color me interested.

Eric Jorgenson: We need- like there's a bunch of people doing small modular reactors. That's Last Energy, that's X energy, there's like a ton of people retrofitting like whole power plants. That's like a big ass thing. These guys are like not quite shipping container scale but like smaller and ideal for remote installations and things like that. So they want to like design and build these at like factory scale so they can crank out a ton more of them.

Bo Fishback: Honestly, that's like an incredibly fun space. Like if you can pull that off, that is like magic. Like that is awesome. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's really, really cool. They've got a good niche, early in the market. I think they've got an interesting like path to regulatory approval that like amounts to a competitive advantage in this space at the moment because none of these have ever been approved for sale yet. And their explicit goal is like to be the first one to actually like legally reach the market.

Al Doan: Well, and their secret sauce is like it's two guys that can actually do this, right?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. But we can't say any more at the moment. We didn't install this paywall. Okay? Matt, the founder, did. I'm not mad that it exists. I do want whoever- I do want you to pay us. I'm not going to hide that. 

Bo Fishback: No, no, no. I think this one is really cool and out there. And it would be really awesome to see this thing pulled off, like really a world changer if you can pull it off. 

Al Doan: The idea of just letting like my city, a sub-5000 person thing, all of a sudden be like, oh, look, we shut all that down and put this coke can on there. 

Bo Fishback: That's right. That's right. Not that micro but yes.

Al Doan: Powers the whole thing, we nailed it. 

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, it's an interesting niche. They're not trying to do like a grid level stuff. It's like you need a backup for a data center, let's say, or a military base that's remote or factories that need like, that want the heat and the energy, and they're off the grid, or they need to like manipulate stuff independently. You could build a ton of these and serialize them into a plant, which is really cool. But they also are small enough, like the big ass like dump trucks they have in mining operations and stuff like that, you can put one of these on a big vehicle or in theory like a train or something. Like you can do really cool stuff with this.

Al Doan: The train that ran forever. 

Eric Jorgenson: Snowpiercer. Let's make that real. 

Bo Fishback: This is your next book. You told me you wanted to take a cut of the fiction book at some point, and it's actually going to be rooted in this investment. 

Al Doan: It’s a Sea Wolf. Bowed out there, just going forever, harvesting protein cakes. 

Eric Jorgenson: This is the beginning of the nuclear pirates. 

Al Doan: We have so many weird books that we brought together in this one moment.

Eric Jorgenson: And nobody knows what the hell we're talking about. So, Aalo Atomics, really, really cool. They’ll be announcing a bunch more. Recently, the founder- I’m going to unplug Al’s mic. The founder shares a bunch of great stuff on nuclear on Twitter. So follow Matt Loszak and learn more about this company. It is a really, really cool one. It'll require a lot more patience, I think, then some of these quick software company SaaS things that we got, but I’m really glad this one is in the mix. 

Al Doan: This is one of our longer throws that like can we change humanity with our small check?

Eric Jorgenson: Regulatory risk and technical risk, if it hits the market, it's a big company.

Al Doan: It's a lot of ifs, but that's what we're about, man. We need some of those in here. You guys don’t want only sure bets. You want the micro nuclear reactors in here. And we're here for it. Well, it's funny because like so much of our criteria too is like do we like this stuff? Is it interesting? Because there's a bunch of people that are like building companies that you like I'm sure you'll be successful, and that's cool. I just don't want to think about it ever. And so, we're going to pass, I'm sorry. But this is like, oh, we can nerd out on that. That'd be fun. Cool, man, good find.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's a good one. Shout out to Chris for hooking that up and Matt for letting us in. I think we're lucky there's not that many in this industry that raise at like smaller rounds, reasonable things. You don't always get a chance.

Bo Fishback: Well, this is one that like at the point where either regulatory or technical is proven out, they don't- they'll never need any of us ever again. Like it's a solved problem. So, to be able to like pay a small salary for the guys while they're going, yeah, of course, we'd love to be here.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And their round was led by Fifty Years which is a cool like super futuristic- 

Al Doan: What's their jam? 

Eric Jorgenson: San Francisco based, like all entrepreneur LPs, which is really cool, looking at like a pretty big fund.

Al Doan: 50 year type companies. Yeah, that makes sense now that I hear the name. I got it. I got it. 

Eric Jorgenson: Good work, Al. 

Bo Fishback: Alright, let me tell you about our third and final for the quarter. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yes. Three for the quarter. 

Al Doan: Just three? Okay. This is like the last check out, so it was like not 50k, it was $46,993.28. We are just kings of ruining the math on cap tables. We would like to write you a 25k check. We'd like to write you a 26k. check. You suck. 

Eric Jorgenson: We appreciate your patience when we do that. We deploy every dollar as best we can. We don’t want it sitting around. 

Al Doan: Okay, so this is Solve Data. So Solve is from this guy Neil. Neil built Sailthru from back in the day. So if you've been in ecommerce for a decade-ish, you'll remember Sailthru. Sailthru was actually really, really forward thinking in terms of like they would crawl your catalog on your website, ingest all of your products, and then like build customized recommendations by email for them. They were the first to be doing this. They were innovative in that you didn't have to maintain a fee to them. They just knew and saw. There's a bunch of stuff they're doing right. Their product really struggled after Neil left. But man, for a while there, they were- they cost a fortune, had a big promise, did a great job. But then just got surpassed by a bunch of people in the market. We used them. I tried to stiff them with a big bill as I left. I tried sending him like the spider that I valued at $30,000. Like that idea. They didn’t go for that. I ended up having to pay them money. But really didn't like the service in the end. But in the beginning, we loved it, thought it was great. So Neil's back. Neil's back doing a thing. He's doing Solve Data. So the idea with this is, I've been waiting for a long time, I literally have a PowerPoint from like a decade ago where I describe like the ecommerce brain where like if we can start building data events around a primary key of a customer, so like Bo comes to the site, Bo chats with a customer service agent, Bo doesn't come back for three months, like I should know that, oh, this thing, he came tied to this, and then I didn't see him again, maybe there's a customer service problem here, or what was this event that happened right there. And then we send them an email, and then we send them a text, and then this other thing happens, and like we can understand what's happening in this and then change what we're doing based on these inputs. And so everything- there's a lot of places that you can save data, like you can data lake data where you just dump it all in a big space. But there's not a lot of stuff where like you're trying to have an active center brain that is aggregating all of this around the customer and then building outputs or like changing how the site behaves or how customer service flows would go, something like that. So, Solve is coming and saying, hey, we're going to do that. Their V1 is really around first party data, trying to like help you, the merchant, recreate the data that you used to be able to access very easily with like, I mean, you used to be able to connect to Facebook and find your people and do stuff with them because it was very transparent who was doing this and your third party apps would help you. 

Eric Jorgenson: So first party is like the ecommerce company itself that owns the data.  

Al Doan: So if I go to your website and you're allowed to track what happens on your website, but third party trackers now is a big no, no, which is like other companies want to be put on my website and monitor what they're doing.

Eric Jorgenson: Which was everybody used Facebook and Google for that.

Al Doan: Everybody used a third party tracker because it's hard to build and maintain your own data storehouse of your own customers and what you're doing. So they're coming and saying, look, we'll help you solve this. First, we'll help you build your first party data. So you have data again that you can access, you can take with you, you can do whatever you want with. But also, we're going to make that a really rich dataset by connecting all these other sources as time goes on, to the point where now you will have your ecommerce brain that you can connect back into your Shopify store and say, hey, when somebody does this, this should happen. And like we'll learn about this and make it better. And so I've been looking for this forever, man. There's a lot of people that are doing data, a lot of people doing data and ecommerce, none that are doing data that I think are doing it phenomenally well. And so, I mean, it's still too early to say that they've solved it, but they're aimed in the right direction. It's from a founder that we really believe gets it and has done interesting stuff in this space before. 

Bo Fishback: Now this is such a sane next stop after Sailthru because Sailthru was so much of this on like the front end CRM side. But like internalizing that and giving it to you, the ecommerce owner. I mean, this dude has got to be one of the smartest 10 people in the world about the thing that he is tackling, which is exactly who you want to- use. Literally one of the best- it was one of the best kind of ecommerce tool pitches that I've ever seen. It was so good, in fact, that I remember the sticker shock on their pricing. Everybody swallowed it. And I remember there was like a six month period where everybody that I knew working on an ecommerce business got on Sailthru. Like, I mean, it just- having the skill set to do it was the biggest shortage. And then it's like do you need to hire them to do it, can you hire people to do it? I mean, he has lived this show before, and I think really awesome to get the backend, like this is going to be really cool. 

Eric Jorgenson: And the environment is perfect, like demanding this solution. Like, as these- Facebook already turned theirs off? 

Al Doan: Well, with Apple, like everything- it is just very out of vogue to let third party stuff exists. And so, like building your own and then enriching that in meaningful ways is going to be crucial.

Eric Jorgenson: People can't afford to keep reacquiring their own customers through like the acquisition costs of Instagram and YouTube and stuff, like increasingly have to just like own your own data.

Al Doan: Acquisition is one thing. And then there's also just the maintenance and like longevity of that customer, which is where like imagine my world. So I've got an ecommerce sort of collection of companies. And so, I should have first party data from like five different stores. And I should know if I got a customer in one, and like did I feed it over to the other, like where else is it shopped, what has happened. But like because I don't own that first party data, I like- it's really tough to do that. So now creating a world where it's like, no, no, no, and they've hit these flags and they've done this. And so like me as an enterprise, I built this profile and I've augmented it with all these other inputs, like it starts to be a really, really cool thing. This one came through, there's actually an investor in Pretzel, my defunct- I'm so sad that that doesn't exist. Every time I try to- I was a genius. 

Bo Fishback: This episode will now be devoted to Pretzel. 

Al Doan: They were one of my first checks into Pretzel and just a good group that we stayed in touch with. And they were coming in on this and sent it over to us because he knew I loved the space. And so, we're coming in and excited to be in.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's a big round too. Like they're going to be able to make a long way on this.

Bo Fishback: And this is one that like you can't raise a million and a half and do anything. It needs like a real engineering move which uniquely positions a guy with his track record into the space to do it. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, the early traction is good. I mean, they've had a very thoughtful like wedge and expand approach to this.

Bo Fishback: We installed it on our- so we're testing it on my companies. I was like, I've seen a lot of these. Let me try it out. We'll test it and make sure it's real before we come in because yeah, so it's real. We like it.

Eric Jorgenson: It's such an amazing advantage. Every time we get an ecomm pitch, I'm just like, Al, do you like this? 

Bo Fishback: Would you try it? Are you a customer yet? Let’s go. 

Eric Jorgenson: Have you been desperate for this for four years? If so, try it. Yeah, if you're like oh, shit-

Al Doan: There has been a bunch of them where like yeah, I've stared at this for a long time and never cared about this.

Eric Jorgenson: I've seen this pitch every year. But yeah, when you see one like that, you're like, yeah, we integrated it. And it made us money. Yep, let's go. 

Al Doan: I'll tell my friends. We should all do it.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, really cool one. Interesting set of companies.

Al Doan: What's the next quarter theme going to be?

Eric Jorgenson: We never know. The last quarter’s theme was oops, all b2b SaaS. But all different industries, all different stages. Like that one was good. And now, we have this one is oops, all repeat founders teams.

Al Doan: What's- man, I'm curious, like what do you guys- What's your impression of the of the space out there right now of like fundraising and stuff?

Eric Jorgenson: I think the bar is going up. I think like less of the low end companies are getting funded. I think prices are coming down. But not as much as they will. I think they'll continue to kind of come down.

Al Doan: Because that is one of the things that we ask ourselves now is like we want to be early but can this round actually come together? Like do we believe you're going to go and get everybody to follow?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and it's a tough- I mean, like there's a story to tell both ways. Like we'd like to be early and like first check in, which we were for Aalo and for FasterBetter. I also do not mind being like the last check in on some of these that you're like it's just dicey. 

Al Doan: That's the most frustrating investor feedback too, like yeah, want be there. Call me when you've done- when everybody else is committed, then I'll be in there. But like- 

Eric Jorgenson: I think it's- you guys might have a different perspective. I don't think it's like super responsible of a founder to be like, I'm raising a round, just like give me your 50 or 100k right now and like I'll you know. It's like I want to know that you have a whole actual round put together. I don't want to pay two weeks of your payroll like while you keep fundraising.

Al Doan: Honestly, yeah, it kind of goes both ways. Where like if you're going to raise a million dollars, you pull 500k in, like great, go build, and then the outcome of that build will fill your other 500k. Like you look at there's no right way or wrong way to do it. I don't think it's- I'm saying I don't think it's irresponsible of a founder because I did it this way. But it is like, yeah, it's- I think any way you make a company exist is worth it. But it does feel- it feels like there's a lot less- Like it feels riskier to start a company right now than it has in a while maybe. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah, I agree with that. But I also think that like there's going to be a lot more people in the next six months whose best alternative is to go start a company because they lost their Fang job or whatever. And everybody's going to, watching this Twitter experiment, hey, can we get rid of 80% of the people and still grow? Well, those people are going to go do something. I think, actually, my hunch is that sometime in the next three quarters, we will end up with a theme that is all people who are laid off by Fang that are starting companies now, I think, actually, we'll see a round of that. I think it's going to be hard to avoid seeing at least a quarter or two where there is not a handful of different combobulations of AI companies. And the tough thing with those right now is like they're all kind of using the same back ends. And they're different wrappers on the front end and stuff. And I've been looking at a few of them that I'm like, I can't tell if those are real companies or if those are little tools or whatever, but it's coming. Like we're going to see a bunch of them all clustered together at some point, I think. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's a little bit of a scary- like from our perspective, it's like I don't want a ton of pitches from people who've been thinking about something for three months. Like, we got to filter hard for them. 

Bo Fishback: I mean, it is the opposite of the folks who were like, hey, they've been in a sector 10, 20 years, or they're the experts in a thing. It's like, on the other hand, amazing consumer things get built on stuff that people have been thinking about for less than three months because it wasn't possible a year ago. And you've got new tools on the back end, where it's like, yeah, this is obviously going to exist. It's just until this other thing existed, you couldn't do it. And now there's 20 cuts at it. 

Eric Jorgenson: And there's a bunch of great companies that are like capabilities that were worth building inside Facebook that someone would lead, like adversarial testing was like an example of this.  

Al Doan: I had a buddy call me and say, we're just talking about the AI stuff. He's like, this feels like buying domains in the 90s, where like there's got to be a bunch of little like stuff that AI now solves that if we can like get in early- Like, is there anything that you're like staring at that you're like, man, this should exist now? Like dude, using ChatGPT and like nerding out on it for a couple of weeks, like my mind is blown. But also everything I want to do with it is like iterative executive assistant stuff.

Bo Fishback: I mean, look, I think the current killer app that everybody's fired up about, but I don't know if there's a company, is just cheating on your homework. But in all seriousness, someone is going to build a thing in that space that gets used by lots of people. 

Eric Jorgenson: I saw somebody rigged up their 3d printer to be like ChatGPT is generating a script and the 3d printer is handwriting it, like their homework. 

Bo Fishback: I honestly, like the ones that I've been playing around with,and again, they're not really companies, but like there will be companies, is like I actually think the iteration, like the integration of like AI and like real time generated art, I think it's one that made me think of you a bit because I think there's going to be some really interesting art companies, where it's like every piece- I was literally playing around with my 9 year old and 11 year old, and we're playing in there and saying, like slash imagine in this little discord and just coming up with anything they want. And it's like creating one of one art that's never existed before. Yeah, Midjourney is amazing. And we're like- and I was like, the obvious things you want. And then you go find there's some versions of it. I was like, oh, I want to print a collection of these. And it's like someone is going to go build a little print on demand cool version where all of the art in your house is created by you. You are the artist. And there's going to be 10 cuts of that and it's going to be really cool. 

Al Doan: I did a little presentation of it for fabric where I'm like give me a repeating floral print that I can use for this. It is like, oh, this- now do it with lilies. Now do it with lilies and butterflies in the style of Van Gogh.

Eric Jorgenson: Glyph is going to do a bunch of that, I think.

Bo Fishback: Yeah. I actually think Glyph is one of those where it's like I keep thinking about that investment and like, man, there's going to be some cool stuff where those things get paired. But what I really think is like, I think we're going to see a bunch of interesting cuts, some of which smell like ecommerce but on an AI back end, some of which look and feel very different. And I don't know, like I've had a hard time figuring out like, oh, this feels like the killer app-

Eric Jorgenson: A bunch of this is going to accrue to incumbents. Like, where like Notion already rolled out AI assistant, like Google will have autocomplete. There will be a ton of that stuff in there. And then there's these like- the really high level language, large language model stuff is going to be like whoever has the biggest data centers is going to be able to like crush everybody else, or like that'll be incumbent on the big side, versus incumbent on the adoption side. I think the real opportunities, which we have some that are kind of our watch list where we're talking to founders about this, where if you're creating your own proprietary dataset and implementing it, like AI needs to be like one of your three- it needs to be a part of your full implementation, and like then you can crush an entire industry. But you can't be like- actually, I think the most exciting ones are outside of software.

Al Doan: By missing that one, missing the AI piece, those companies couldn't exist. And so we're like, add that in. I really want- I want the Jarvis from Ironman where like give me the voice that just reads- like, let me interact with this, with ChatGPT. It'd be way more fun than an Alexa or a Google Home. Way more fun to be like, hey, what's going on here. It is like, well, actually-

Bo Fishback: I'll tell you a thing that I was watching recently as I was playing around in Midjourney is you can go into those like newbie rooms on Midjourney and watch what everyone else is using it for. And so the ones that I think- so you see weird art stuff, you see a lot of weird stuff in there. But then you start to see these like very utility use cases where it is very obvious to me that there is some kitchen designer who is asking Midjourney to give it better ideas to present to some client that they're going to go sell to them. And it's like modern kitchen with prairie vibes and blah, blah, blah, and it renders four. And then they change the words a little bit and do it again. And it's like it's doing all of the work for someone who's getting paid. And the end customer actually has no idea that that's coming from an engine like that. And there's some beautiful things. And so, it's like where you can like kind of expand your scope of creativity or whatever on those tools but you already are an expert in a thing feels like very rich territory to me. 

Al Doan: We've seen some like, oh, we'll write and illustrate a kid's book for your kid, and it'll be unique to you. Like there's some stuff like that that I'm like- they're sort of kitschy cool things. But I'm like, man, I still can't quite see what the V3 of that is where like it's solved a real problem or changed how we live somehow because of this.

Eric Jorgenson: The Jarvis thing, like I want an AI assistant, voice assistant that fails over to Athena. Like, I want- who's like watching my conversation kind of play out. Like anything that AI can't do, I want the EA to just like jump in and do it. Like, that loop is really- like if you can speak into a thing and it is resolved. And I don't even care whether software did it or not.

Al Doan: That's interesting. That's interesting of like an EA that stands behind the- 

Bo Fishback: Exception handler. Yeah, real human as an exception handler.

Al Doan: You’re sort of like book this flight, but I want you to book it with my Amex points. And all of a sudden, it's like well, it doesn't have the right access. But now a human is like oh, we got it and here's the result. And then the AI is like, Eric, I've solved your problem. 

Eric Jorgenson: Which Magic tried to do that through text.

Bo Fishback: I remember that.

Eric Jorgenson: Which was interesting, but like the voice feels so much more magic if it's-

Al Doan: Honestly like I had an idea 15 years ago, like I wanted the drivetime DJ that would like pull your news, your podcasts, weather, and everything but like for you and the stuff that you like. And like just build my morning routine as you wake up, and it sort of interacts and like you can say, move this thing on the calendar, do this thing, do this instead, like that level of just like it's a tight one hour. Or even like, dude, you sit- somebody let me plug in all of my Netflix, my Hulu, my whatever, and like you're going to build my nighttime programming. We're going to do 15 minutes of Seinfeld. Oh, that was great. Anyway, moving on. I’ll just lean back and watch.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that kind of hyper personalization I think is going to happen. It could be really, really cool. Especially since you can stitch it together. You can generate everything really easily in between.

Al Doan: I wonder if there's anything sort of, I don't know, AI but with the turntable FM sort of style where we all come to- like where there's- we're actually all getting together but there's something that solving a thing- I don't know. There's a lot of that stuff, man, that I'm so curious where we end up. I can't wait to see what some of these companies coming up the chain are, man.

Eric Jorgenson: There's going to be some wild stuff. Do you want to do some portfolio updates?

Bo Fishback: Lay it on us, Eric. Eric, you are the captain.

Al Doan: Me and Bo are just excited to be a part. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah. I can't wait to hear them.

Eric Jorgenson: We have a note going out to LPs, I think I'll put it out tomorrow, as we're recording this, that's about just what's going on in the 14 companies we invested in last year basically. And there's 6, 7 that there's material exciting updates for, just really not all are like publicly accountable yet, but just really cool to see everybody growing, like Gently, Omella steady, like just growing usage week over week. 

Al Doan: Yeah, they know where they're going. They're just executing.

Eric Jorgenson: Small teams, executing quick. 

Bo Fishback: I feel like all of their investor updates literally could just be one chart, and you’d know everything you need to know. It's like up and to the right significantly. Have a nice day. Which is really awesome. 

Eric Jorgenson: Plenty of cash, growing like crazy. Yeah, and Gently is, I think, looking for another raise. I think Omella too is going to make it a long way on what they’ve got, which is beautiful.

Al Doan: Is Gently getting ready to raise again? 

Eric Jorgenson: They want to- Yeah, I think they were planning on it, in a good way, not in a have to way, fuel on the fire kind of way. 

Al Doan: They raised 2 million in their first round. And they're a team of four. So, they've got plenty of moves. But if they see something come together, like it's funny because as you build for your A, it's like, alright, now we need to get the product out. We got to show that we can get users. And as soon as you have that, it's like that's your best time to go.

Eric Jorgenson: And they're very much like we are- our goal is to dominate an entire market. And speed matters a lot in that strategy. So, I get it, they want more gas in the tank right away. Drivly, like staying quiet for a while, but early customers, cool stuff happening. Like, I can't wait until they announce, and we get to have them on the podcast and hear their stories. Like those guys are amazing.

Al Doan: They were great because like I remember when you're pitching them, like I don't know the space as well, man, but I'll trust you on this. But I got a buddy that's like the dude in the car journalism world. And he’s working on a new idea. And I was like, you should talk to the Drivly guys, connected him up. He's like, this is the real deal, man. This is amazing. That's great to know. But he was just so excited about what they were building and the problems that it was going to solve for like people that are trying to do the next generation of like car buying and selling and parts and the aftermarket, and all that stuff now gets to exist in a world where Drivly does their job well. And it's like that's cool.

Eric Jorgenson: It is wild how some- like, I think Plaid is the best example. Some of these companies would be like if you heard the pitch, like unless you really understood the history of the problem, you'd be kind of like, is that- doesn't that already exist? Does that matter? Like doesn't everybody have the data already? And then like people in the industry who experience it are like, holy shit, if you can give me that, you know what I could do?

Al Doan: Plaid is a great example of like the pitch- we're going to let you log into your bank account. And it's like, why can't I- I’d just go build an API into Chase. Like they offer it. I could do it just like that. It's like, but we're going to charge an obscene amount of money on top of it and then we'll do it for a bunch. And it's like, alright, whatever, man. But then as they get going, now any FinTech that comes up, you would never try and build that yourself. 

Eric Jorgenson: And now they're so big that the SEC blocked their acquisition. Wild.

Al Doan: We should all build companies the SEC blocks. I think when we get there, then I'll be happy. Once I do that-

Eric Jorgenson: Lucky for you, they're lowering their bar every day. They're just like, block, block, block, no, nobody can sell anything ever again.

Bo Fishback: I’m sorry, Al, you cannot have a quilting monopoly on the planet Earth. You just can’t have it. 

Al Doan: Which is a real thing, man. I think Joanne’s is trading at like 160 million market cap right now. Like dude, we should all just pitch in. Oh my gosh, how great would that be? 3 billion in revenue for 160 million.

Eric Jorgenson: They do that much revenue?

Bo Fishback: Dude, yeah, 2.9 billion last year. 

Eric Jorgenson: Why is the stock too bad?

Bo Fishback: Because Al is not running it. 

Al Doan: Because they have 600 and something stores with a mountain of debt attached to them. And like physical retail gets valued so crappy because- like Michaels, if Michaels can do 1% of growth, everybody just high fives and they have parties on a yacht. Like that's all you're trying to do is just this tiny incremental, but we're running in these physical retail shops. Where ecommerce, you don't have any of that debt, you don't have any of the leases, and all this stuff tied to that, doesn't matter. You're just making money out of a warehouse. Physical retail, you have such a mountain of overhead associated with that $3 billion that their value is just like peanuts.

Bo Fishback: Al buys them both, gets rid of all the real estate, ships all their inventory to Hamilton bank. Let's go. Everybody comes.

Al Doan: Who wants to do a roll up? That’s going to be our entire q2 is the Missouri Star, the quilting investment roll up. Great ideas. Great ideas.

Eric Jorgenson: Okay, other last few portfolio updates real quick. Stell engineering like launched, their press is out. They didn't launch a product. They announced their fundraise, finished a $3 million round, added a co-lead, hired they're-

Al Doan: They ended up being like a little Cinderella, man, everybody loved them.

Bo Fishback: Yeah, everybody loves him. Yeah, I think that was one of those where I think we all looked at it in the beginning. We're like, that sounds like hard. They seem smart. Let's see what happens. And now everybody’s like, oh, they're amazing. 

Eric Jorgenson: But that's going to be a hard company that, yeah, totally believe it. And they added a technical, I'm not sure if co founder or senior technical person who's managing that product team has a perfect background, like SpaceX Palantir. So that's going to be really cool. I'm excited for it.

Al Doan: Glyph is rock and roll. We got to go out to Utah and see this guy and test this product. 

Eric Jorgenson: Everybody I know is getting one of those things for Christmas next year. I can't wait to get those out in the world. Every time my wife gets out her Cricket, I'm just like soon that's going to be a Glyph. This is happening. 

Al Doan: I will destroy them.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and then Omar's going to come on the pod like next week. I'm going to have him and Zach Pettet on. Going to like tear up fintech.

Al Doan: They finished their round, yeah? 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, they're kind of like value add angels only stage right now. They're playing the game of like how far- like how much conviction can we get before like we have to do a bigger raise. So, they're like a couple of months, we might get another like big partner or two like which could really boost evaluation. It is like a tough dance to play. But they're doing great and building like crazy. They have customer implementations, they have revenue now. Like it's growing like crazy. It's just such a cool- I was telling Omar, I was like, dude, you need to- we can lobby Congress to like mandate- like there is no world in which like financial institutions that hold people's money shouldn't have like a verified the chain of custody and like proof of liquidity and proof of reserves at all time. FTX should be impossible.

Bo Fishback: Well, as I'm looking at the blockfi bankruptcy settlement papers in the other room where they're like, oh, we locked the prices there. This is how much we think it is. Like no, you actually like said you were custodying my coins and instead you were not. Like, what? But that's what it's going to end up being. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, like that should be every financial institution should just permanently have like red light green light next to it. And it's like, if you have to lose that red light, like paratroopers fall out of the sky on you with-

Bo Fishback: Or at least tell all of the customers, like just transparent- 

Al Doan: Or a text goes out. Either one really solves the problem.

Eric Jorgenson: I like my solution. Yeah, that's one of the early like use cases where it’s I think super cool. 

Bo Fishback: I think timing is amazing with that. So it'd be great to hear like their perspective on the current state of things because they have got to have like a lens where it's like we're going to fix this before it ever became a problem. Don't you want to keep it from happening again? 

Eric Jorgenson: Like every- I can imagine every politician wanting to stand up and being like FTX should never have happened, it can never happen again. Like everybody should pass this thing that like requires- yeah, seems so clear. Like if you want regulation, have itself automatically self regulate. It’d be very easy.

Al Doan: Also, it feels like that should exist inside of non financial companies too. Like just the ability to do accounting should be so like oh, we know exactly what money's here, where its aiming for, like what it did before, just connect your thing, and we'll tell you if we can give you a loan or not. 

Eric Jorgenson: All right, that's portfolio updates for the most part. Fund’s still growing. I wasn't sure like, it’s a downturn, people holding cash. I understand. 

Al Doan: People still like getting into nuclear.

Eric Jorgenson: People still like nuclear. We’ve got seven new LPs this quarter.

Al Doan: Yeah, we're doing- we're aimed at some of the- couple bigger fish to round us out and like really- I mean, I feel like we've kind of got the best friends in that we love. If you have other best friends you'd like in, come along. But like, initially, it's mainly like Eric's Twitter following and then like a few of our friends have come together and like let us do this, which is awesome. And then we'll round it out with some big swings. 

Bo Fishback: I was talking to a friend this week who is a, whatever, he is a guy in the hedge fund world. And we're just talking about kind of what we're up to and kind of how we approach this and everything. And he was quiet for a long time. And he's like, what you do is so much more fun than what I do. I was like, I think you're probably right, right, you're right. And I was like, yeah, we don't want to- Like, we want to intentionally keep this in the 2, 3 million a year because that lets us write $50, 100, 150,000 checks. And he was like, oh my god, that is like such a breath of fresh air compared to like, oh, we need a $30 million commitment. And then we- There's all of this regulation that goes- I was like, yeah, AngelList really does most of that for us on the back end. Like we basically get to talk about cool companies and people we want to back and then decide. Like so awesome. 

Al Doan: Someone on Twitter described like working on Wall Street that like they were like I used to work on Wall Street where the highlight of my day was trying to put together my seamless lunch order. 

Bo Fishback: I saw that. I saw that. That was hilarious. 

Al Doan: That is the exact reason like not to be in a hedge fund. We want to be here where it's like there's no dread in any of the work we do. If we're trying to do some big a16z, it's like oh, just got to crunch numbers all day, and I wonder what I'm going to have lunch. 

Eric Jorgenson: But we are excited about lunch. Still fun. 

Al Doan: Who are we sponsored by today? 

Bo Fishback: Johnny Joe’s Stromboli. Is that true?

Eric Jorgenson: Johnny Joe's, a local legend hole in the wall. 

Bo Fishback: You haven’t had it, have you? Al, you’re in for a treat. 

Eric Jorgenson: This is part of Bo’s plan, fill us up with cheese and dominate us on the basketball court. It's going to be a thing.

Al Doan: The surprise awaits though. I only play basketball when I'm filled up with cheese.

Eric Jorgenson: Speaking of LPs, I was listening to a fascinating podcast recently about the size of the endowment and hedge fund inherent in the Mormon church. And I was wondering, what are our ins on that? Is there a way to get the- get some of that 100 bil, just a tiny fraction of that. 

Al Doan: The thing about the 100 billion dollar hedge fund, the Ensign Peak, it's like 7% growth. Like they have not crushed the returns. They've just like-

Bo Fishback: Actually, my friend that I was talking to who was at a hedge fund, that is one of their LPs. And it is like one of the big homerun LPs when you can get them. It's like you want to get Harvard, you want to get the big university endowments, and then you want to get the Mormons. 

Al Doan: Everybody says that about us. You got the Mormon vote, great. You got Utah. You got Utah and two counties in Southern California.

Eric Jorgenson: There's no higher compliment than the affection of a Mormon I’ve found.

Bo Fishback: That's true. That's true. 

Al Doan: Because it is not sexual.

Bo Fishback: They love you for you. 

Al Doan: They are not trying to bone you. They just want to give you love.

Bo Fishback: Makes sense. Honestly, now that you said it, Al, it makes perfect sense.

Eric Jorgenson: So pure. 

Al Doan: You're welcome.

Eric Jorgenson: We are honored by your presence.

Al Doan: I hope you feel the genuine love here, nothing sexual. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah, no, I've never been more relaxed than I am right now. Actually, it's amazing. Just hearing that out loud, I just feel calm.

Al Doan: There you go. Alright, you guys, until next time. 

Eric Jorgenson: That is a good place to stop it.

I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you for listening. This podcast is even more fun to listen to when you are an investor and you're getting equity in these companies alongside us. If you want to join through AngelList you can do that today. We're now enrolling for q2. The minimum is 4k a quarter, or 16,000 a year and only open to accredited investors at the moment. And a standard disclaimer: startup investing is risky, illiquid, it's unknown. These things take a long time to play out. You never know. Only invest what you can afford to lose and are going to be comfortable losing and don't mind not seeing for a very long time at the very least. You'll learn more at rolling.fun. If you liked this episode, you'll also love our previous Rolling Fun episodes. We've done four before. Scroll back, see what else we've been up to. If you'd like another way to support the show, please leave a quick review in your podcast player or text this episode to a friend or coworker you think would enjoy it. Thank you so much for hanging out with us. I hope you laughed. I hope you learned.

Tech, InvestingEric JorgensonRolling Fun, Executive Assistants, NuclearComment