Here's our full-length interview with Jordan Bramble and our own Julia DeWahl, co-founders of Antares, where we dive deep into how Antares plans on manufacturing in mass micro-sized nuclear reactors to provide abundant energy for all. Huge thank you to our sponsors: Range Fund Holdings: Tired of volatile markets and unreliable energies? Look no further[...]- Here's our full-length interview with David Kirtley, founder of Helion Energy, where we dive deep into the need for fusion as a replacement for fossil fuels. Huge thank you to our sponsors: Range Fund Holdings: Tired of volatile markets and unreliable energies? Look no further than the Range Nuclear Renaissance ETF, your gateway to the[...]
- Here's our full-length interview with Bret Kugelmass, founder of Last Energy, where we dive deep into nuclear manufacturing and the importance of manufacturing efficiency. Huge thank you to our sponsors: Range Fund Holdings: Tired of volatile markets and unreliable energies? Look no further than the Range Nuclear Renaissance ETF, your gateway to the clean, safe,[...]
- We're kicking off the first of our bonus episodes with Tyler Bernstein, founder and CEO of Zeno Power, where he shares in-depth how they're creating radioisotope power systems for lunar applications. Huge thank you to our sponsors: Range Fund Holdings: Tired of volatile markets and unreliable energies? Look no further than the Range Nuclear Renaissance[...]
We can live in an Age of Miracles, but it’s going to take a lot of work. Energy abundance is the most important thing we can work towards as a species. More than simply surviving climate change, we have the opportunity to unlock a new level of human thriving if we can successfully navigate this[...]
In the bizarro relay marathon that is the fusion race, the baton is firmly in the hands of the startups. The outcome, to be sure, is still uncertain, but the question isn’t whether humanity will achieve commercial fusion, but which companies will, with which approaches, when? Fusion, many believe, will be one of humanity’s greatest[...]
There’s this joke that fusion is always 30 years away. 50 years ago, it was 30 years away. 20 years ago, it was still thirty years away. Today, though… we might be within a decade. We spent the first half of the season on nuclear fission, and the last episode on many of the other energy[...]
Packy and Julia have spent the first five episodes of Age of Miracles diving into the past and present of nuclear fission—before jumping from the yin to the yang and covering nuclear fusion in the second half of this season, today we wanted to take a step back and talk about all the non-nuclear energy[...]
This week, Packy and Julia take a break from our regularly scheduled narrative programming to look back on the past five episodes we've published focused on nuclear fission—and address news stories, feedback, and listener questions collected through this season so far. We cover: Illinois pushing back on the nuclear moratorium, Nuscale's cancelled contracts, COP 28[...]
Let's dive into the world of advanced nuclear startups—where founders are playing entrepreneurship on hard-mode, and navigating how to build new reactor designs, sell to new markets, and forge new regulatory pathways. This episode is the second focused on nuclear fission startup founders—while last week Packy and Julia spoke with entrepreneurs who laser-focused on the[...]
What if we treated building nuclear more like a manufacturing challenge than a construction challenge? How could nuclear benefit from the tried-and-true methodologies of other large industrial industries like ship-building and oil and gas to make nuclear as cheap as solar and wind to produce? In this episode – the first of two with leading[...]
If we just tried to implement and scale the technology we have today for large scale nuclear reactors, with no innovation on reactor designs or business models, could we do it? How hard (or expensive) could it really be? Turns out, this question gets to the heart of the paradox of nuclear power in America:[...]
“Nuclear fission is a miracle technology, and we've had it for 80 years. But we don't live in an energy abundant world. Because progress takes more than miracles.” Almost exactly 50 years ago, nuclear fission and large scale reactors were on track to deliver abundant, cheap energy to the globe. But instead, nuclear power declined[...]
Welcome to the first episode of the first season of “Age of Miracles”. This new show from Packy McCormick, investor and writer of the Not Boring newsletter, asks the question: how do we create a future of abundance? This season, we’re exploring the future of energy – specifically, diving deep into nuclear energy, both fission[...]
Age of Miracles is a narrative show that explores the complex industries that will play an important role in creating an abundant future for humanity. Episodes 1 and 2 drop October 27th. Every season, host Packy McCormick – a venture investor and writer of the popular Not Boring newsletter – brings in an expert cohost[...]
Crusoe is on a mission to align the future of computing with the future of the climate. It has pioneered infrastructure that taps into stranded energy — methane being flared or excess production from clean and renewable sources — to power the compute resources we need to drive our shared progress and reduce its environmental[...]
Emi Gal is the founder and CEO of Ezra. Ezra is on a mission to detect cancer early for everyone in the world. The company offers full-body MRI scans in order to catch cancer earlier to increase the odds of beating it. I recently did an Ezra scan myself, and while it was nerve-wracking to face[...]
Dylan Beynon is the founder and CEO of Mindbloom. Minbloom's mission is to transform lives today, to transform the world tomorrow through psychedelic medicine. It's starting with Ketamine therapy serving patients with depression and anxiety. 89% of Mindbloom clients report improvements in anxiety and depression symptoms. Beyond Ketamine therapy, Mindbloom is riding a wave of[...]
Brandon Arvanaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Meow. Meow is Costco meets financial services. It offers low-cost, high-value cash and treasury management products for high-growth businesses. This is Brandon's third time on the podcast, and this time he discusses Meow's navigation of the recent banking crisis and why Meow is built to last. ---[...]
Zach Marks is the co-founder and CEO of Jia. Jia connects capital to small businesses in every corner of the world. Here's how Jia works: When business owners repay a loan, they drive value to lenders and the economy. They deserve to be compensated as owners of that economy. That’s why Jia rewards borrowers with[...]
LINK TO ESSAY: Google isn’t facing the Innovator’s Dilemma; it’s just so deeply Positioned in search that it’s been a sitting duck for the first superior technology or business model strong enough to take it on. Positioning is the flip side of one of Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers, counter-positioning: “A newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does[...]
LINK TO ESSAY Will AI steal our jobs, let us work less, or force us to do more, better? Induced demand, Jevons Paradox, the Marchetti constant, and consumer psychology 101 suggest that the increased supply of intelligence will create more demand for tasks that require intelligence, that we’ll turn gains in intelligence efficiency into ways of[...]
Trevor Bacon, Kellan Grenier and Jason Lewris are the founders of Parcl. Parcl bridges traditional real estate investments with cutting-edge blockchain technology to provide data-driven solutions for modern investors. Parcl was built to revolutionize how users approach real estate as an investment towards generational-wealth. By giving everyone the tools they need to access one of[...]
Andrew Herr is the founder and CEO of Fount. Fount is crafting the operating system for the human body. To start, it provides extremely high-touch personal health services to clients: blood tests, fitness plans, meal prep, supplements, and much more to meet its clients personalized health needs. But Fount is running a series of experiments[...]
Ryan Glasgow is the founder and CEO of Sprig. Sprig is the easiest way to collect product feedback, inform product decisions, and increase your speed of innovation. The world’s best product teams including the teams at Notion, Loom, and Robinhood use Sprig’s in-app surveys and concept and usability tests to capture insights from their customers[...]
Packy an Anton discuss Chroma's (Anton's company) launch of Stable Attribution. Stable Attribution is a tool that let's anyone find the humans behind AI generated images. Given any image generated by Stable Diffusion, Stable Attribution is able to identify the images in the model's training set which most contributed to the generated image. Packy and[...]
Sam Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Melonfrost. Melonfrost is using the power of evolution and machine learning to launch the next generation of microbes that will revolutionize the fields of therapeutics, biomaterials, food, and agriculture. You'll learn more about what exactly that means in this conversation between Packy and Sam. Melonfrost, a[...]
Andy Chatham is the CEO and co-founder of Dimo. Dimo's mission is to be the driving force behind the future of mobility: a future where data shapes infrastructure, emissions are lower, roads are safer, and life behind the wheel is—well, better. DIMO helps you get more from driving. Save money. Learn how to better take[...]
Michael Kelly is the co-founder of Open Forest Protocol. Open Forest Protocol (OFP) is a scalable open platform that allows forest projects of any size, from around world, to Measure, Report, and Verify (MRV) their forestation data. Through OFP, individuals, communities, NGOs, entrepreneurs, and governments are able to create transparent, immutable, proof-of-impact data that[...]
Nicholas Chadwick is the founder and CEO of Mission Zero Technologies. MZT is developing direct air capture (DAC) technology that will recover high-purity CO2 from the air while incurring only a fraction of the costs and energy it takes to do so today. Frontier is a recipient of an advanced market commitment grant from Frontier,[...]
Exponential makes it easy to discover, assess and invest in liquidity pools across chains. It wants to be the Coinbase of DeFi. We were joined by the companies three founders: Driss Benamour, Mehdi Lebbar, and Greg Jizmagian to discuss the current crypto market, Exponential's risk-first approach, and how to asses a digital risk-asset. You can[...]
LINK to essay Every new year is a blank page, a chance to start fresh with new ideas and new sources and new energy. Of course, January 1st isn’t actually any more different from December 31st than December 31st was from December 30th. But the collective time we all spend away from the daily routine[...]
Audio Essay: Four Seasons Total Tech Link to full essay: https://www.notboring.co/p/four-seasons-total-tech Packy analogizes the Gartner Hype Cycle to the four seasons, to explain why some technology winters feel so long and cold while all summers feel pretty much the same. We're coming out of a many decades long winter for a bunch of frontier technology[...]
Packy and Anton breakdown one of the early, foundational artifical intelligence papers, "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity," which was first published in 1943. The researchers, Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, were trying to understand how the brain could produce such complex patterns by using basic, connected cells. Their work[...]
The idea is this: the world oscillates between centralization and decentralization, with progress sloping upward through the turns. We’re approaching an era of decentralization. This shift from centralization to decentralization is popping up everywhere I look: Energy: Fossil Fuels vs. Renewables Manufacturing: Globalization vs. Reshoring Manufacturing: Making vs. Growing Science: Government Funded vs. Decentralized Hard[...]
We're back! In Episode 2, Anton Teaches Packy about Deepmind's March 2022 paper, Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models, or as it's more commonly known, Chinchilla. Prior to Chinchilla, the best way to improve the performance of LLMs was thought to be by scaling up the size of the model. As a result, the largest models[...]
Anton Teaches Packy AI is Not Boring's attempt at making AI more accessible to our audience. It's become increasingly obvious that we're in the Golden Age of AI, so we think it's important to demystify what's going on and how it all actually works. Anton Troynikov is the founder of Chroma, former Meta Reality[...]
Odyssey (formerly Agora) fully believes in the power of technology to provide families with opportunity to choose the educational environment and services that help them best meet their unique learning needs. In order to help parents do that, we have partnered with the best K-12 providers and vendors in order to create a robust marketplace[...]
Capital & Taste audio essay. Capital is banking built for founders. If that sounds like you, sign up for a Capital account today, whether you’re just raising your first million or doing millions in ARR. Capital expands Party Round’s offering from fundraising to a full suite of financial services focused on startups. Today, that’s banking[...]
Formic delivers Robots by the Hour to manufacturers. It’s making small and medium American businesses stronger, fighting inflation, and creating abundance Link to full essay here. -------------------------- The goal is abundance. We want more and better things, more cheaply. We want those things to be made closer to home. We want less fragile supply chains,[...]
John Andrew Entwistle is the founder and CEO of Wander. Wander is a fully-integrated platform for experiencing magnificent short-term rental homes. Wander owns the customer experience end-to-end: the homes, the booking platform, and the value-added services. Over 100,000 people have joined the Wander waitlist. In this episode, John Andrew announces, for the first time, Wander's[...]
Social vs. Science Experiments: We talk a lot about progress here in Not Boring. Progress can be difficult and messy and winding, and importantly, progress moves at different speeds and follows different paths for different kinds of products. Today’s essay is my thinking on two types: science experiments and social experiments. Successful science experiment products[...]
In "How Do I Teach These Kids?!" Packy confronts the challenge of how to properly educate his two young children in a rapidly evolving world. "Dev and Maya get a blank educational slate to start with. Puja and I are responsible for figuring out how to give them the best education possible, one that helps[...]
Tegus is building the modern investment research platform for fundamental private and public market investors, starting with a novel twist on the classic expert call model, and expanding into adjacent opportunities by listening intently to customers. This audio essay covers: The Course to Tegus Modernizing Investment Research The Tegus Business Model The Outsiders: Fundraising, Buybacks,[...]
Peter Johnston is the founder of Polywork. Polywork is a place to discover opportunities to collaborate with other professionals. Existing networks like LinkedIn focus on connecting us to 9-5 opportunities — but where do you go to find opportunities to speak on podcasts? Or discover partners for your side project? Check out who at Google[...]
The Enchanted Notebook: on the real and growing power of writing down the future you want to see exist. In the context of a recent Lex Fridman and Ray Kurzweil podcast conversation, Packy explores where we are with AI today and what the future may hold. This essay and audio essay were sponsored by Secureframe.[...]
Monday Audio Essay: "Indistinguishable from Magic" Packy explores "magic" in tech and how it impacts the startup lifecycle: "It’s the Magical Startup Circle of Life. A startup, if it’s lucky, creates magic, turns that magic into dollars, and transitions to life as a successful Big Muggle Company, capable of enormous profits and power but no[...]
Mike Saunders is the co-founder and CEO of Captain. Captain powers restaurants and their communities through a mix of web2 and web3 technologies. Mike is an experienced food delivery entrepreneur, having previously started campusfood.com, which subsequently sold to Grub Hub where Mike served as an exec for a number of years. Captain, in many ways,[...]
Eli Wachs & Alex Grinman are the co-founders of Footprint. Footprint's mission is to bring back trust on the internet. The company wants to put people in control of their identity while solving KYC, IDV, and PII storage problems for enterprises. Footprint just announced a $6M Seed Round led by Index Ventures. --- Send in[...]
Brandon Arvanaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Meow. Meow is a startup that opens corporate treasurers up to crypto markets. This is Brandon's second time on the podcast -- and he's on to discuss raising Meow's Series A & navigating challenging times in the crypto markets. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Amplified Tribalism: Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a vibe shift online: the conversation seems to be getting more negative, aggressive, and polarized. Today’s piece is an attempt to unpack why so many people are talking past each other, why it’s so unproductive, and what to do about it. It’s not as upbeat as[...]
Sponsored Deep Dive on Circle & USDC. In one of our longest essays yet, we tackle the following topics: What are stablecoins? How do stablecoin issuers generate revenue? Why are stablecoins a valuable primitive? How are USDC and Circle a platform? What is Circle’s competitive advantage? What would a new financial system built on Circle’s[...]
Monday Essay -- "Intertwining Threads": Imagining the wild things that might happen when we mix and remix new technologies. Sponsored by Athletic Greens. Athletic Green's AG1 is foundational nutrition you can count on. Learn more at athleticgreens.com/notboring and when you use our link get a free 1 year supply of Vitamin D + 5 free AG1[...]
Thomas McLeod is the Founder and Executive Director of Arkive. Arkive is redefining culture by building the first-ever decentralized physical museum. Its mission is to curate, own, and create culture. Its community helps shape the future, by curating the past -- members vote on what items to acquire, how to display them, and much more.[...]
Alok Tayi is the founder and CEO of Vibe Bio. Vibe Bio is a community of patients, scientists, and partners committed to identifying, funding and developing promising treatments to rare diseases and empowering patient communities with unprecedented ownership over the process. Packy and Alok discuss how rare diseases can find cures, the biotech industry today,[...]
Samiur Rahman is the co-founder and CEO of Heyday. Heyday is a browser extension that automatically saves web pages you visit and pulls in content from your apps. It uses AI to resurface that content alongside Google search results, overlay it on articles, and curate it into a knowledge base that fills itself. Samiur joins the[...]
Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus. Pocus is a Product-Led Sales platform that helps go-to-market teams use data to improve customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion - without relying on engineers. This is Alexa's second time on Not Boring Founders and she joins us to discuss some big news, what Pocus has been[...]
Henry Ward is the co-founder and CEO of Carta. Carta helps companies and investors manage their cap tables, valuations, investments, and equity plans. Packy previously described Henry as a "Worldbuilder" - an entrepreneur who can see something non-obvious about the future, timestamp their prediction, and then execute against that prediction (sometimes for over a decade)[...]
Justin & J.P. Alanís are the co-founders of StoryDAO. Story DAO is a new kind of production studio where individuals have the opportunity to collaborate with established Hollywood writers and artists to create and co-own the next generation of culturally relevant story franchises. It's a radical experiment in community world-building and is changing the way[...]
Will Manidis is the co-founder and CEO of ScienceIO. ScienceIO's mission is to make all healthcare data computable. It's products enable real-time transformation of unstructured healthcare data into structured data that can be used for search & analysis. If Will and team are successful, he envisions a world in which healthcare is more connected, transparent[...]
Humberto Ayres Pereira is the co-founder and CEO of Rows. Rows is the spreadsheet with superpowers. With Rows, you can esily create and share powerful, interactive models with a passionate community of other spreadsheet users. It's taking on the likes of Microsoft & Google head on, and doing so by focusing on its interactivity and[...]
Paul Kromidas and Woods Buckley are the founders of Summer. Summer is re-imaging second home ownership -- with a unique rent-to-own model, members get the benefit of homeownership without the headache of the purchasing process, furnishing, and rental management. In this conversation, they discuss Summer's ten year vision, why people do & don't buy homes,[...]
Tally Labs is a software-enabled web3 media business blurring the lines between community and creators. Packy is joined by its two pseudonymous founds, SAFA and Valet Jones. Tally Labs started as a media business built around the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT known as Jenkins the Valet -- and today the team is working on[...]
Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit. Replit's mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. The company believes that the ability to write code should be as ubiquitous as the ability to write essays -- and it wants to be the first place that anyone writes a line of code.[...]
Packy and writing collaborator, Tina He, break down token design and why now is the perfect time for tinkerers to build new economies. The piece also explores how protocols are similar to corporations and nations, and where those analogies fall apart -- while suggesting a new framework for evaluating good token design. This audio essay[...]
Sahil Mansuri is the founder and CEO of Bravado. Bravado is the largest network of sales professionals, with over 200,000 salespeople on the platform. The company is building a killer community and business around salespeople with the hopes of building a bottoms up sales network. Currently the company has three core products: a community for[...]
Introducing The Founder's Letter, a new series by Not Boring. Storytelling is core to Not Boring, but usually it's from Packy's perspective. With The Founder's Letter, founders tell their story directly to the audience, in their own words. Mackenzie Burnett is the CEO and Cofounder of Ambrook. Ambrook creates finance software for farms, from bookkeeping,[...]
Alex Herrity is the co-founder of Anima. Anima is a augmented reality, NFT company blending the physical and digital worlds. Packy and Alex discuss the current state of the NFT market, building in a bear marketing, Anima's decades long vision, and what the company does today. SponsorSeason 2 of Not Boring Founders is sponsored by[...]
Isaac Newton's lifelong pursuit of alchemy may surprise you. Newton is the father of science and one of the most rational thinkers in history, but he also dedicated enormous amounts of time and energy to the now discredited field of alchemy. Yet, without alchemy we do not have chemistry. Many of the key problems and[...]
This is episode is a cross-post from the podcast Cartoon Avatars, hosted by Logan Bartlett. Logan is joined by Packy and Ben Thompson of Stratechery. Packy, Ben, and Logan talk about their respective businesses and experiences on the internet, and give advice for other content creators. Packy and Logan have been friends for nearly 15[...]
When the Twitter acquisition was a story about free speech and content moderation, I didn’t have much to say. Those are really hard problems about which I have no special insights to contribute. But over the past week, the story has evolved into one with which I’m much more comfortable: how to better monetize Twitter.[...]
Gabby Dizon is the co-founder of Yield Guild Gaming (YGG). On its website, it says YGG is a play-to-earn gaming guild, bringing players together to earn via blockchain based economies. That description is starting to expand - YGG is quickly becoming the infrastructure for x-to-earn DAOs. Packy and Gabby discuss the future of ownership, earning,[...]
Packy is joined by Alex Danco of Shopify's Blockchain team to discuss "Tokengated Commerce." Alex breaks down what it means to make Shopify "wallet-aware," answers why this type of commerce needs blockchains, and paints a picture of what web3 commerce might look like in the future. This audio essay is sponsored by Masterworks. --- Send[...]
Gina Bianchini is the founder and CEO of Mighty Networks. Mighty is a platform that makes it easy to create, grow and monetize online communities. Mighty is the result of nearly two decades of Gina's career spent building online social products back to the early 2000s, when she built Ning with Marc Andreessen, and she's[...]
Alamin Uddin is the co-founder and CEO of NexHealth. NexHealth’s mission is to accelerate innovation in healthcare. It's doing it by making it easy for your health data to go from point A to point B, and from doctor to doctor. The company recently announced its Series C round of $125M at a $1B valuation[...]
ReFi (Regenerative Finance) is having a moment. ReFi is a reimagining of the financial system that accounts for the needs of all stakeholders, current and future. It puts a price on externalities: charging those who create negative externalities and rewarding those who create positive externalities. Celo is becoming ReFi's home. Celo is a carbon-negative EVM-compatible[...]
When Adam Smith began writing about an invisible hand, a metaphor for the market’s self-correcting mechanisms, in 1759, the world was very local, and information moved at a more leisurely pace. Today, though, information zips around the world instantly, the talent pool is becoming more liquid and global, venture capital has more money to deploy[...]
Shane Curran is the founder and CEO of Evervault. Evervault is an encryption infrastructure company that makes collecting, processing, and sharing sensitive data ultra secure. When a company encrypts with Evervault, they could put their database on a billboard and no one could get at the data. The company’s mission is to encrypt the web. Its[...]
Not Boring just turned two years old. Packy reflects on the last two years of Not Boring and looks to the year ahead. Each of the first two years of Not Boring had a defining "thing." Year 1: Grow the newsletter and survive Year 2: Not Boring Capital For Year 3, Not Boring is building[...]
Mariam Hakobyan is the co-founber and CEO of Softr. Softr is an easy-to-use no-code platform to build powerful websites, web-apps and client portals from Airtable, in 10 minutes. With Softr, non-technical users can easily build web-apps that previously would’ve required engineering resources. Softr is riding the No-Code wave, and in this discussion Packy and Mariam[...]
Hadrian is different than the companies we normally talk about in Not Boring. While it relies heavily on software, its main focus is in the world of atoms. It uses big machines to make precision parts for rockets and satellites. It blends automation and high-skilled labor. It’s an incredible example of something we’re going to[...]
Bryan Pellegrino is the co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs. LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that enables the realization of cross-chain applications with a low-level communication primitive — simply put, LayerZero enables more secure and affordable cross-chain activity. During the podcast, LayerZero announced it had raised a $135M round co-lead by Sequoia, a16z, and[...]
Kaeya Majumunday is the founder and CEO of Swaypay. Swaypay is a platform that allows customers to get cashback for posts on TikTok. Customers earn cashback for posting about their recent purchases and brands can get free content and distribution from authentic brand ambassadors. Kaeya and Packy discuss Swaypay’s recent copycats and why she takes[...]
Elon Musk sparked The Current Thing Meme. There's another meme happening: The Current Financial Thing. Everyone agrees that things are bad, and they agree in the same way. They even agree on how things are going to play out. Groups of humans aren't typically right when they all agree on what the future will bring.[...]
Alice Albrecht is the founder and CEO of re:collect. re:collect is focused on augmenting human memory and creativity. The product tracks what you're reading and ingests other content information (like notes, highlights, ect) and hands you "thought building-blocks" in the moment of creation. They are building an automatic bridge between you, your digital knowledge, and[...]
Ben Rollert is the co-founder and CEO of Composer. Composed is an automated trading platform that allows users to build hedge-fund like strategies with a no-code visual editor. Ben and Packy first met while working together at Breather over 6 years ago, where Ben established himself as "the smartest person Packy has ever met." Composer[...]
Today, Ramp announced that it raised $750 million -- $200 million in equity and $550 in debt -- at an $8.1 billion valuation from existing investors, led by Keith Rabois at Founders Fund. Not Boring Capital participated. It also hit $100 million in annualized revenue just two years after launching. For this piece, Ramp's co-founders[...]
Rushir Parikh is the co-founder and CEO of Popchew. Popchew is a platform that allows creators to build their own restaurant brands at a national scale. When Packy first met Rushir, he passed on investing -- in this conversation, Packy explains how he (thankfully) was able to invest later on and Rushir lays out the massive[...]
Vance Roush is the founder of Overflow. Overflow builds infrastructure that makes generosity frictionless across every major asset class. The inspiration for Overflow came from Vance's other calling -- he's the founder of Vive Church, an Bay Area based church that now has over 4,000 members across 10 locations. As Treasure of Vive, Vance realized that[...]
Fount is running the Elon Musk Company Formula on health. The Starting Point is that healthcare is broken – we spend too much money on managing diseases versus preventing or curing them, and we rarely optimize for performance. We’re wasting human and financial capital. Today, Fount is in the “Sustainable Business Model” phase. Just like[...]
Rohit Mittal founded Stilt to give loans to immigrants and underserved people for whom traditional underwriting models didn't work. He came to the US as an immigrant and experienced the pain of establishing credit without any, and after years of working within the system and learning, he built the product to fix it. That meant[...]
Flow, the blockchain for open worlds created by Dapper Labs, is a normie blockchain. In a world in which L1s are battling for 300 million crypto users, going for the other 4.7 billion internet users is crazy differentiated enough that it just might work. You can read the full essay at Not Boring. Thanks to[...]
Abrar Ul Haq is the co-founder of Tazah, a B2B agricultural marketplace that provides access to market and access to capital to millions of farmers in Pakistan and in the middle east region. Prior to Tazah, Abrar and his co-founder worked at Careem, a regional super app that competed with Uber, beat it in its[...]
Today, Quaestor is announcing a rebrand to Standard Metrics and a fresh $23.7 million Series A to build the data and relationship graph for the private markets. In this episode, we'll discuss why the private markets, and especially venture capital, needs an Entropy Wrangler, and the two key strategic decisions that Standard Metrics is making[...]
Neuro-ID and Alloy are teaming up to tackle the $721B in estimated losses from identity theft, stop fraud ring attacks, and create smoother experiences for good customers. We dig into the direct fraud problem and the even bigger problem caused by stopping good actors who want to purchase. Plus, Jack and Tommy share how a[...]
I recently read two books on quantum physics by Carlo Rovelli: The Order of Time and Helgoland. While this isn't a quantum physics podcast, I think they're actually useful to think about in our context in three ways. Understanding the current state of the science. It’s at least interesting, if not practically useful to most[...]
In five years, Snappr has gone from graduation photography to the leading on-demand marketplace for professional photography and now, to end-to-end visual content workflow software used by many of the world's largest companies and marketplaces. Matt Schiller is running the the API-first playbook in reverse, and the business is growing like a weed. You can[...]
The American Dream is on life support, but it's not dead. We need to stop focusing so much time worrying about protecting peoples’ downsides and start spending more time working on getting more people more upside. We can revive the American Dream by making ownership an explicit economic strategy. You can read the full post[...]
Braintrust is a user-owned talent network that has done $37 million of volume in under two years since launching. It's also the best example of a "real-world" use case I've found in web3. Read the full post at Not Boring. This episode is brought to you by Masterworks, our presenting sponsor for Q1 2022. Disclaimer:[...]
Last week, Not Boring crossed 100,000 subscribers. In this episode, we take a quick look back, brush off the trolls, and re-commit to taking risks, getting things wrong, and being unabashedly optimistic. You can read the full post at Not Boring. Thanks to the Presenting Sponsor of Not Boring's Audio Editions: Masterworks. --- Send in[...]
The dialogue around web3 has turned into a full-fledged debate and the focus has shifted to winning instead of the truth. I actually debated in high school and college, and started a Debate Club in NYC. I think the web3 debate is silly, and that the right answer is always in the middle, but after[...]
Oscar IPO’d on March 3rd at $39 per share and started trading at $36 per share, good for a market cap just north of $7 billion. Since then, it’s down nearly 77%, its market cap hovering around $1.5 billion. As The Abstract Investor summarized, the challenge, and opportunity, is that: Many tech analysts aren't paying[...]
Not Boring Capital is launching a $30M Fund II. In this episode, we go behind the scenes of raising and running a small venture fund, share the most recent LP update, and talk about the value of pushing out the weirdness and risk curve. This podcast is brought to you by our Q1 Presenting Sponsor...[...]
2022 is the year that web3 starts making a meaningful impact on atoms-based challenges like healthcare and climate. Web3 is a global, real-money economic and social simulation, a digital laboratory for complex problems. We dive into Allen Iverson, complexity economics, and non-fungible olive gardens to understand why, and what that means. This episode is presented[...]
Medici, Not Boring Capital's first anon founder and Not Boring Founders' first anon guest, is the founder of Abacus, a decentralized NFT appraisal protocol. Launched in late November, Abacus has already been used to appraise millions of dollars worth of NFTs, including multiple Bored Apes, an XCOPY, and a Parallel. In this conversation, we discuss: [...]
Brandon Arvanaghi is the CEO of Meow, which lets corporate treasuries play offense with their balance sheets by offering potential 4% yields via crypto lending. We discuss: The importance of building compliance-first. Building a crypto-native financial institution. How it's possible to get such high yields with crypto. Building in-house versus plugging into existing DeFi protocols. [...]
I only have one prediction to make for the next year: If you thought that 2021 was wild, 2022 will make it look normal. The best is still yet to come. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Web3 is a vortex for talent, money, culture, and brainspace. I’ve been trying to figure out why, and explain it in the simplest terms. I think I have it, my tailwit explanation: Web3 pushes out the Pareto Funtier. The Pareto Funtier is the set of options at which you can’t have more fun without making[...]
Regy Perlera is building the future of retail with Seasons, an access-oriented rent-to-own platform for men. What most impresses me about Regy is that Seasons, which is very much designed for a world in which people go out, came out of COVID even stronger, and with a broader vision, than when the company started. We'll[...]
Chris Dixon tweeted that "Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance." Money builds on money; software builds on software; the results are exponential. While it's harder to measure or intuit, the same is true for ideas. Each new idea is an idea lego. Read the full post at Not Boring. --- Send[...]
Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus, a product-led sales platform backed by First Round Capital. Alexa started the company while getting her MBA at Stanford GSB based on her experience leading up sales strategy and operations at Dataminr. We discuss a wide range of topics including defining a new category, setting up[...]
As we speak, thousands of people are contributing funds to the ConstitutionDAO in order to win a copy for the last remaining private copy og the US Constitution when it goes up for auction at Sotheby's on Thursday night. It's expected to fetch roughly $20 million. We'll cover the backstory, what a DAO is, and[...]
Imagine a place... Built for gamers Home to everyone playing the Great Online Game Has 150 million MAUs Generates $130 million in revenue Is a web3 sleeper This week, I teamed up with Mario Gabriele of The Generalist to tell Discord's story. You can read the full piece here. We cover: The circular origin[...]
Neuro-ID is a real-time behavioral analytics tool that analyzes all of our very human and unique taps, clicks, and swipes to help its customers fight fraud and better understand their customers. The company, based out of beautiful Whitefish, Montana, announced a $35 million Series B yesterday, in which Not Boring Capital is participating. I sat[...]
Last week, Facebook announced a rebrand to Meta and an all-in bet on the Metaverse. Zuck said all of the right things about openness and interoperability. The question people are asking is, "Can we trust him?" The more interesting question is, "Do we even need to?" In a world in which people are more used[...]
Since February, I’ve been writing an accidental series on how web3 is impacting culture, work, and the way that we all interact with each other. Power to the Person was about how technology is empowering individuals as the new atomic units of commerce, The Great Online Game was about how the internet blurs the line[...]
Lauren Rothwell is the co-founder and CEO of Retrera, a platform for remote employee engagement that makes it really easy to host team offsites and retreats. Every founder that I talk to with remote employees, even those who have offices, is organizing at least one offsite per year, and often one per quarter. They love[...]
Not Boring Capital has invested $8 million in 79 companies over its first two quarters. That's fast. This weekend, I sent an LP Update to Not Boring Capital's LPs. In this episode, I share the update with a particular focus on Not Boring Capital's strategy and the trade-offs I need to make to lean into[...]
ScienceIO decodes the language of medicine to unlock the full potential of healthcare data. Its industry-leading clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform structures data in real-time to enable search, analysis, and insight generation. Not Boring Capital invested in ScienceIO's $8M seed round, and in this episode, I'll explain what they do and why I invested,[...]
Ayush Jaiswal is the founder and CEO of Pesto, a Not Boring portfolio company that connects companies with the most valuable resource in the world: engineers. Ayush founded Pesto because he realized that remote was coming even before COVID, and that companies working anywhere meant that they could hire the best talent from anywhere. He[...]
Nick Greenawalt is the co-founder of Wanderers. I've become obsessed with Wanderers since discovering it a couple of weeks ago. The current batch of 8,888 NFTs are 8 second animations of space ships hyperdriving through space at warp speed, soundtracked by spacey music. That's just part one of Phase I of the Wanderers master plan.[...]
Power is shifting from institutions to individuals. Remote work, web3, the Great Resignation. When careers, jobs, or institutions are no longer as reliable a source of meaning as they once were, how do we find our own meaning? How do we keep it all from spinning out of control? Today, we're waxing philosophical. We'll explore[...]
Going from 0 to 1 -- taking your company from idea to real live working product with customers -- is hard. In this special edition of Not Boring Founders, Packy and Thrive Capital's Gaurav Ahuja sit down with Stytch co-founders Reed McGinley-Stempel and Julianna Lamb to discuss how they've done it. In the past 18[...]
Unit is a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform that lets tech companies embed financial features into their products. It's growing spectacularly fast and has raised over $70 million from some of the leading investors in fintech since its founding in July 2019. What makes Unit special is that it believes that tech companies with existing distribution are[...]
What kind of company would Jeff Bezos start if he were 30 years old today? We look back at four '90s Bezos interviews to try to figure out what he would look for and how he would approach starting a company today. (Hint: it's probably a crypto company). Read the full post at Not Boring.[...]
Chris Toy is the co-founder and CEO of MarketerHire, a talent marketplace for the world's best marketers. MarketerHire is quietly putting up some all-time great growth numbers and is perfectly positioned to help companies and talented people make the transition to the future of work -- not just where we work, but how we work.[...]
We shape our interfaces; thereafter, they shape us. Today, we’ll explore how those new interfaces and spaces might bring web3 mainstream: The Apps-Infrastructure Cycle An Incomplete History of Interface SuperCycles Web3 Interfaces Into the Future We'll dive into web3 worlds like Cyber, Decentraland, The Sandbox, and Somnium Space and wallets like MetaMask, Phantom, and Rainbow[...]
Solana is one of the most valuable and fastest growing blockchains in the world. It can handle over 65,000 transactions per second, and transactions cost a fraction of a cent. Over the past few months, both the price of SOL, its token, and developer activity on top of Solana have exploded. Today, it has a[...]
The way that companies tell stories and build narratives is changing -- from top-down storytelling to bottoms-up narrative-building. Because they're such empty vessels for narrative, NFT projects like CryptoPunks and Degenerate Ape Academy make a useful study. We’ll cover: From Storytelling to Narrative Building Narrative in Venture Capital and Startups Lessons from Crypto Read the[...]
You may not know Lithic. Until recently, it was called Privacy.com. In May, it announced an Amazonian move: delivering the card issuing & processing infrastructure it built for itself via an API. Now, it's worth $800M and growing like a card rocket. This is a fun one. We'll learn about Lithic's pivot using the framework[...]
Equi is building one of the most impressive investment tech products I've ever seen. The problem: Institutions & family offices have 50% in alternatives. Individuals have
Pinduoduo is the fastest company in history to reach both $5 billion in revenue and a $100 billion market cap. The Chinese ecommerce platform, famous for popularizing the team buying and consumer-to-manufacturer (C2M) model, was the talk of the town last summer, and it's had an even more fascinating intervening 12 months. I teamed up[...]
Bet you've never seen something like Axie Infinity. April: $670k revenue May: $3M June: $12.2M July (18 days in): $79.1M Axie is a blockchain-based, Pokémon-like game pioneering a Play-to-Earn model. People work by playing video game. It looks cute. It's so much more. You can read the full post at Not Boring[...]
This is the first episode of a new series we're doing: not boring founders. It's a behind-the-scenes look at the companies I'm backing with Not Boring Capital, from the mouths of the founders building them. We'll talk about their products, but we'll also dive deep into how the businesses work, how they think about company building,[...]
Unit21 builds modern infrastructure for activity monitoring. It just raised a $34 million Series B from Tiger Global at a $300 million valuation to expand from its first use case -- AML / fraud -- to serve the wide variety of use cases in which operators and analysts write and deploy business logic. The company[...]
We're switching it up this week. I asked Not Boring readers for questions on Twitter, and I answered ten of them. Read the full post at Not Boring. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
NexHealth is a $400 million startup with a three-part master plan to accelerate innovation in healthcare: First, build a SaaS product for healthcare SMBs, starting with dentists, like Shopify. Then, use the integrations it accesses in step one to build APIs for healthcare, like Plaid. Then, use the doctors and patients and developers it acquires[...]
Scale is a 5-year-old company building infrastructure for AI & ML. Already, it's achieved a lot: $100+ million in ARR, $7.3 billion valuation, and customers like the DoD, Lyft, Airbnb, & OpenAI. Today, we cover: The State of AI and ML Getting to Scale Scaling Like Stripe The Bear Case for Scale The Bull Case[...]
Cometeer makes my favorite coffee. I drink three a day. They arrive frozen, with the flavor locked in, and I just add water. Today, in this Sponsored Deep Dive + Investment Memo, we cover: Founding Story and Team: Cometeer Co-Founder and CEO Matt Roberts used to be a Dunkin’ guy, until he went abroad and[...]
Zero-knowledge proofs let someone prove that they know or have something without giving up any information about what they know or have. ZKPs have the potential to eliminate a major trade-off inherent in living, working, and transacting online: the convenience, speed, reach, and scale of the internet in exchange for our privacy. They also allow[...]
Medicaid is a $613 billion market that, as of 2017, had only attracted $20-30mm in VC funding. That left a massive, if complex, opportunity for someone willing to vertically integrate, take risk, and treat the whole person. Meet Cityblock Health. Cityblock is literally keeping people out of the hospital and saving lives -- the things[...]
Cooperation is the winning strategy in the Great Online Game. In this episode, we'll discuss why power is shifting from individuals to institutions, and how individuals can team up to accomplish bigger things together than any can alone. We'll cover: The Big Smile LeBron and Super Teams Liquid Super Teams The Cooperation Economy in Action[...]
Melio, which has raised $256 million and was recently came out of stealth valued at $1.3 billion by Coatue, makes it easy for SMBs to pay each other. It's a Venmo-like experience on the front, with powerful tech in the back-end. It's also executing brilliantly on the disruption playbook. Today, we’ll look at Melio’s story,[...]
What if I told you about a business that: Has strong network effects Grew revenue 200x YoY Is preparing to offer a 25% dividend About to implement a permanent share buyback program? That's pretty much Ethereum. This episode is my bull case on Ethereum. It is not financial advice. Read the full post[...]
Prescription drug commercials are confusing. People eating ice cream while a voiceover talks about herpes. The Cialis couple in the bathtubs in a field (backstory revealed below). The long list of side effects that seem much worse than whatever disease the advertised drug claims to cure. I asked Nikhil Krishnan, the man behind healthcare newsletter/community/novelty[...]
We’re all playing a Great Online Game. How well we play determines the rewards we get, online and offline. The Great Online Game is played concurrently by billions of people, online, as themselves, with real-world consequences. Your financial and psychological wellbeing is at stake, but the downside is limited. The upside, on the other hand,[...]
Truework is building the verified identity layer for the internet, starting with employment and income verification. The company has raised $45 million from Sequoia, Founders Fund, Khosla, and Activant, and is executing on a brilliant 10-year plan to win you back control of your most sensitive personal information. We cover: Meet Truework How to Win[...]
When Packy auctioned off his Power to the Person essay as an NFT that split proceeds with the people whose work Packy cited, Clint won the auction with a 2.19 ETH bid. We had to talk about it, and I'm glad we did. We covered: The psychology of NFT buying The future of media and[...]
I teamed up with Mario Gabriele, the author of The Generalist, to study Tata Group, the 152-year-old Indian conglomerate with public subsidiaries worth a combined $234 billion. We cover: Tata’s rich history, beginning with the opium trade The complexion of a messy conglomerate The necessary moves to perpetuate the dynasty Read the full post[...]
In today's Not Boring Guest Post, Ali Montag writes about the original multi-channel creator: Martha Stewart. For more than five decades, Martha Stewart has evolved to stay one step ahead of the curve. Montag writes, "Martha Stewart has, over the course of a 50-year career, with mystically perfect timing, refashioned herself from Wall Street stock[...]
In 2020, startup employees left $4.9 billion on the table by not exercising their pre-IPO options. Employees at Snowflake, Airbnb, and DoorDash missed out the most. Most of that can be fixed with a little eduction, so today, in this sponsored post, we're going to explore startup stock options: How Startup Equity Works Why Employees[...]
This week, I teamed up with Lillian Li, the author of Chinese Characteristics, to write about Agora. I took the bull case, and Lillian took the bear case. We cover: Agora’s History $API’s API China’s Livestreaming Boom What Agora Looks Like Today The Bull Case for Agora The Bear Case Against Agora Bull or Bear?[...]
The first question anyone has when they hear about BlockFi is: “What’s the catch? 8.6% APY sounds too good to be true. That can’t be legit.” I went DEEP to understand how they do it, and it’s legit. Essentially, BlockFi arbitrages the fact that traditional finance and crypto don’t like to deal with each other.[...]
I'm minting a Not Boring essay, Power to the Person, as an NFT, auctioning it, and splitting the proceeds with the people whose work I referenced. In today's Not Boring, we discuss: Chris Dixon's canonical pieces: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010) and What the smartest people do on[...]
Today, I'm sharing the Not Boring story as honestly as possible -- it often looks way easier from the outside -- with lessons I’ve learned on writing, growth, business models, investing, and creator psychology sprinkled in. We’ll cover: Getting Here: Per My Last Email → Not Boring Club → Not Boring Growth: Luck, Shares, Ups,[...]
If you're building a software company, you need security compliance certifications like SOC 2 and ISO 27001 to sell into large companies. It sounds boring and tedious, but it's fascinating. The story involves: - Russian hackers unleashing malware called NotPetya on the world and causing $10 billion in damages. - How startups are selling into[...]
In this episode, Dror Poleg and I break down WeWork after the recent announcement that it's going public via SPAC at a $9 billion valuation. We cover: The Royal We. Adam Neumann was narcissistic and brash… exactly what was needed to shake up office real estate. WeStory. From 3,000 sq ft in Soho to millions[...]
Today, On Deck is announcing that it’s raising a $20 million Series A led by Keith Rabois at Founders Fund with participation from Learn Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya, Slack Fund, Village Global, Eric Yuan, Fred Ehrsam, Allison Picken’s The New Normal Fund, Charles Hudson at Precursor Ventures, Adam D’Angelo, Jen Rubio, Elad Gill, Julia DeWahl, Henry[...]
DAOs - Decentralized Autonomous Organizations - are the next stop down the Web3 rabbit hole after NFTs. We explore: - The DAO's $6.6b Hack - What's a DAO? - Coinbase vs. Uniswap - $UNI vs $SUSHI - Progressive Decentralization - 7 Powers Analysis - The Future Read the full post at Not Boring. ---[...]
Epidemic Sound just raised $450 million at a $1.4 billion valuation to Soundtrack the World. Spotify's Stream On event showed the company is ready to do battle with the labels. The time is right: Spotify should acquire Epidemic. We cover: Spotify’s Problem with Labels Spotify Streams On Enter Epidemic Sound Spotify x Epidemic Read[...]
UserLeap helps product teams continuously discover customer needs and evaluate the user experience via short, highly targeted surveys (microsurveys) displayed contextually within the product. Companies use UserLeap to track NPS, iterate toward Product-Market Fit, improve onboarding, reduce churn, and make the myriad small improvements that make a great product. The magic of UserLeap is that[...]
Edmund Zagarin is the co-founder and CEO of BidOps, a startup building strategic sourcing software powered by AI. We discuss the global supply chain, how survey design informs good procurement software design, and how college debate informs the way that Edmund approaches running a startup. Of course, we start out by asking Edmund to convince[...]
Excel may be the most influential software ever built. If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today. Excel’s success has inspired the creation of software whose combined enterprise value dwarfs that of Excel alone. There are two main ways Excel has set[...]
Why is Jack Dorsey so much worse at being the CEO of Twitter than he is at being the CEO of Square? Marc Rubinstein and I teamed up to tackle that question, and came away thinking that maybe Jack doesn't run the two companies so differently after all. We cover: Jackground Back to Square One[...]
Beacons is building a link in bio into a competitive space, and I think it's going to win. The link in bio is the point of leverage in the Creator Economy value chain, and Beacons' early growth indicates that they are building something that stands above the rest. In this episode, we cover: Meet Beacons[...]
It's been a wild month for the Passion Economy, crypto, and NFTs. While it feels frothy, and certain asset prices certainly are, I think it points to a larger future. This episode is a thought experiment based on three ideas: A main Not Boring theme that Genies don’t go quietly back into bottles. Chris Dixon’s[...]
AltoIRA makes it easy to invest in alternative assets like startups, real estate, private equity, and even crypto, all through your IRA. I sat down with Alto's CEO, Eric Satz, to talk about why he started Alto, what they're building, and what he wants the CEOs of Southwest and BlackRock to say about Alto in[...]
It feels like we're in a tech bubble, but what if I told you that the best startups and non-FAAMG public tech companies are actually undervalued? In today's Not Boring, we cover a different way of looking at tech valuations, not P/E, P/S, or FCF Multiple, but Price/FAAMG, or the probability that younger tech companies[...]
In this not boring guest post, Dan Teran, founder of Managed by Q and early stage investor, argues that while the pandemic looks like a boon to third-party food delivery companies, it's actually the beginning of the end. He weaves together strategic frameworks from Porter, Christensen, and Peter Drucker, plus actual restaurant data, to show[...]
Twitter is getting its groove back. Smart acquisitions and product development, in addition to foundational work that the company is doing, might change the bearish narrative that's surrounded the company for half a decade. We cover: Prof G vs. Twitter. Scott Galloway ripped the company and its CEO, Jack Dorsey, last week. It’s a good[...]
Brett Beller, my good friend and former Breather co-worker, was the first employee and practically co-founder at Drizly, which just sold to Uber for $1.1 billion. Brett tells the stories from Drizly's earliest days, goes deep on liquor laws, talks about why he sold a bunch of his shares a couple years ago, and walks[...]
Supersapiens is energy management for athletes. It provides continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) via a biosensor and app, in partnership with Abbott. That partnership is a cornered resource that gives Supersapiens tremendous power. Over the past year, wearables and connected fitness tech have been on fire. Google bought Fitbit for $2.1 billion, Lululemon bought Mirror for[...]
If you've been wondering what's going on with GameStop, WallStreetBets, and Robinhood, I got you. This was inevitable once Robinhood introduced free options trading. Robinhood bet that it could introduce tremendous amounts of risk into the financial system, push all of it onto its users and the market at large, and insulate itself from the[...]
Dror Poleg, the author of Rethinking Real Estate, a good friend, and one of the longest-standing WeWork rationalists I know joins the not boring podcast on the heels of the WSJ report that WeWork may go public via SPAC. We discuss: - WeWork's history, from 2010 founding to failed IPO - Adam Neumann and SoftBank's[...]
Podz is revolutionizing audio - the very format you're listening to right now - by using machine learning to solve the seemingly intractable audio discovery challenge. I sat down with Podz CEO Doug Imbruce to discuss building social apps, selling his first company to Yahoo!, the state of the audio landscape, and how Podz is[...]
You’re going to be hearing a lot more about Web3 (including DeFi), NFTs, and the Metaverse, so today, we'll try to define them and figure out how they fit together. What is Web3 and Why is it Important? Non-Fungible Tokens and Digital Ownership. NFTs in the Wild. The Size of the Metaverse Prize. The Open[...]
Masterworks is making blue-chip art, a $1.7 trillion asset class with strong returns, low volatility, low correlation, and increasing scarcity, investible. Listen to learn about the art market, the most expensive painting ever sold, what makes art valuable, and how you can invest in art with Masterworks. And if you want to explore for yourself,[...]
Antara Health is a HealthTech startup based out of Nairobi, Kenya that is building virtual-first primary care for emerging markets. It’s reimagining healthcare by leveraging telemedicine, data science, and emerging markets payors’ and regulators’ willingness to try new models. When they succeed, they'll help close the insurance gap in the emerging markets, deliver better healthcare[...]
Teamflow is a virtual office that makes remote work work. Led by Flo Crivello, a former Uber engineer who launched Uber Works and gig charging for Jump, Teamflow brings back the presence of being in the office, the energy of working in the same room, the spontaneity of hallway conversations — the joy of feeling[...]
Florent Crivello is the Founder and CEO of Teamflow, a virtual office startup that came out of stealth and announced a $3.9 million seed round led by some of the world's best early stage investors. Flo and Packy discuss how a late night at Uber sparked the idea for Teamflow, hiring world-class engineers and designers,[...]
Jack Ma is missing. $BABA is tanking. Ant Group's IPO is suspended. Government regulation (or worse) looms. But Alibaba continues to build an underappreciated, customer-centric juggernaut. There's never been a better time to go deep on Alibaba. This week's audio edition is brought to you by Masterworks.io. You can read the full original post on[...]
New year, new me. For the first Not Boring of 2021, we're doing our first bear case. Bill dot com is the worst software I use to run Not Boring, & trades at the highest rev multiple of any BVP cloud stock. In 2021, bad B2B UX doesn't cut it anymore. We cover: 1. What[...]
After a wild 2020, I think the best is yet to come. We cover three reasons: The Markets Are Eating Up Technology. More demand for tech stocks means more innovation, more quickly. SPACs may be a good thing and IPOs unleash investment in the next generation. Cloud Companies. Entrepreneurs can build new types of highly-differentiated[...]
Ramp is using its corporate card as a Trojan Horse into the CFO Suite, helping companies save time, money, and headache. Ultimately, it wants to help companies save money and build better businesses. Today, it announced that it raised $30 million and hit $100 million in transaction volume than any corporate card company in history. [...]
We all hate Facebook, but Zuck and Co are building a juggernaut whose business is undervalued relative to all competitor sets and which is attempting to pull off some fascinating moves in communication, commerce, and potentially... the Metaverse. Read the full post here: Everybody Hates Facebook --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Outfit is DIY Renovations in a box. Listen to hear the case for this early stage startup that's using software to scale architecture. Outfit's Website Read the full post here: Outfit: Not Boring Investment Memo --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
APIs are all around us, powering the products we use and love every day. Chances are, you're passingly familiar with the concept but have never gone deep. When Stripe and Shopify announced that they were deepening their partnership last week - that Shopify would use another Stripe API, Treasury, I figured it was time to[...]
The future of work is remote. Companies that want to compete for the best talent don't have a choice, the employees do. Luckily, better software and new hybrid physical models are on the way so that life doesn't become a never-ending series of Zoom calls until we die. Read the full post here and subscribe![...]
FEMSA is a 130-year-old Mexican brewery turned world's largest Coca-Cola bottler and the Americas' largest convenience store chain, plus a 15% stake in Heineken and a bet on the digitization of the Mexican economy. I teamed up with Post Market to write about the company's history, present, and future, and why we think it's so[...]
In this collaboration between Sari Azout of Check your Pulse and Not Boring, we cover crypto, equity financing, and programmable money. Fairmint is making it possible for companies to sell or give equity to all of their stakeholders as easily as adding an "Invest" button on their website. That could reshape who shares in upside,[...]
Slack's stock has been beaten down based on fears that Microsoft Teams is going to crush it and the fact that it hasn't benefited from WFH as much as Zoom. That narrative will break, and when it does, Slack will be valued like the top quartile SaaS company it is. Read the full post here:[...]
After 50 years in darkness, there's a psychedelic renaissance underway. Psilocybin and other psychedelics may be our best weapons in the fight against mental illness. There's even a publicly traded psychedelic stock: Compass. Come take an auditory trip with me. Original post here: https://notboring.substack.com/p/the-magic-of-mushrooms --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
7.6 Lessons from Sam Hinkie and The Process, the Philadelphia 76ers innovative rebuilding process. Read the full post here: https://notboring.substack.com/p/trust-the-process --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Pipe solves Business-Funding Fit for recurring revenue businesses. The company created a new asset class, allowing businesses to sell their recurring cash flows to investors, often for $0.90-$0.95 cents on the dollar, to fund their growth without dilution or debt. You can read the full essay at https://notboring.substack.com/ If you run or work for a[...]
The COVID-fueled rise of consumer investors may be here to stay, as spending shifts from things and experiences to investments, and new platforms allow users to invest in new and old asset classes with better user experiences. Read the full post here: https://notboring.substack.com/p/software-is-eating-the-markets --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
The Not Boring Syndicate is back with our fifth investment memo. Today, we're talking about SkillMagic, a startup building remote-native training for engineering teams. You can check out the full post at notboring.substack.com. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
The Indian conglomerate Reliance has historically vertically integrated, but it needs to loosen the reigns and become a growth stage investor to capture as much of India's growth in the next decade as possible. Full essay at notboring.substack.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Reliance Industries is the largest and most important company in India. It's also the best way for foreign companies to access the market. Over the past six months, it has raised over $25 billion from investors like Facebook, Google, KKR, Saudi Arabia, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi for its Jio and Retail businesses. Read the[...]
Today, in this sponsored post, we're talking about Fundrise, a company that lets anyone invest in a professionally managed real estate fund through an app. We go deep on the company and why Ray Dalio is such a big fan of diversification. You can read the original post and get all of the additional links[...]
In this episode, we try to answer the question: Would it be possible to run a real business in a way that feels like playing a video game? Check out the original essay here: https://notboring.substack.com/p/secure-the-baag --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Every week, Mario Gabriele (the author of The Generalist) and I (the author of Not Boring) have a conversation and post it to YouTube under the Not Boring Generalists banner. We figured we'd put it here too, so you can listen while you walk, drive, or go to sleep. This week we discuss: - Our[...]
Chamath took Opendoor public via SPAC last week. In this episode, we talk about why Opendoor is the Amazon of real estate, its advantages over Zillow, and its flywheel. Original post here: https://notboring.substack.com/p/knock-knock-whos-there-opendoor --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Today's Not Boring is all about a startups that sends other startups and SMBs free money: MainStreet. By getting you the tax credits and incentives that the government owes your company, MainStreet send companies $51k on average. See how much you're owed and get paid at https://mainstreet.us/notboring You can read the full post at https://notboring.substack.com/[...]
This week, we're doing a Case Study on Zoom. - Its numbers are on fire. - Its stock is overvalued. - It has no moats. If you're CEO Eric Yuan, what do you do to increase long-term shareholder valuer? Read the full essay and participate in the Case Study here: https://notboring.substack.com/p/zooms-blank-check --- Send in a[...]
Not Boring Investment Memos are deep dives into early stage companies that are raising money now. This week, we're talking about Swaypay, which gives shoppers discounts in exchange for using their social capital, or sway, to share products, all within the checkout flow. It takes money that would normally go to Google and Facebook and[...]
A deep dive into SoftBank's history, the Vision Fund, and its new hedge fund, plus the bull, neutral, and bear cases. Read the full essay here: https://notboring.substack.com/p/masa-madness-3cb --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
You can read out the original post here: https://notboring.substack.com/p/oze-not-boring-investment-memo --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
This week, we dive into Stripe, and cover: What it is. Why Stripe is undervalued. The Stripe bear case. Stripe's underappreciated strategy. Stripe's future. Link to original post: https://notboring.substack.com/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Tencent's investments in Epic, Snap, Spotify, and more put it in the best position to bring about, and profit from, the Metaverse. Read the original essay here. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Tencent is the most impressive company that Americans know the least about. In Part I of this two-part series, we go deep on Tencent's history, its core businesses, and its investment portfolio. We also explore how the company is the perfect implementation of William Thorndike's The Outsiders. Link to original post here. --- Send in[...]
Shopify and a new wave of ecommerce infrastructure tools make it easier than ever to start a direct-to-consumer business, but it's harder than ever to stand out from the crowd. Michael Porter's Five Forces and his value chain concept explain why it's a great time to be an ecommerce platform, and a hard time to[...]
Ali Montag joins Not Boring to tell us about a Linear Commerce empire you wouldn't have any idea about, unless you have kids. You can read the full post here and subscribe to Ali's newsletter here. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Google should buy Slack to take on Microsoft with a modern solution in the productivity and collaboration space. You can read the full post here. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
The Marcy Lab School's Reuben Ogbanna takes over Not Boring to explain how we can explain the tech talent pipeline beyond traditional schools and backgrounds. You can read the full post here, and get in touch with me on twitter @packym to get intro'd to Reuben. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
In this episode, we discuss what a SPAC is and why Juul is kinda the perfect company to go public via SPAC. You can check out the full post here. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Not Boring Investment Memos are deep dives on early stage companies that are currently fundraising, and that the Not Boring Syndicate is investing in. In this episode, we talk about Composer, which is aiming to close the wealth gap by giving investors access to more sophisticated tools for self-directed investing, with a clean, easy UI.[...]
Entropy Theory explains industry evolution as a story of ever-increasing chaos and suggests that the most successful businesses are those that use the latest technology to wrangle that chaos, until entropic forces unleash the next set of opportunities. In this episode, we explain Entropy Theory through examples in real estate, tech, and employment. Why did[...]
Gil Kazimirov joins us to share the surprising history of the ringtone - the polyphonic pocket music that launched the mobile revolution. You can read the full post here. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message
Twitter is the most undermonetized product in the world, because it doesn’t know what it is. For someone so into meditation, @jack’s lack of self-awareness is a surprising error with major implications. Twitter’s ads business struggles to support the entire company. Twitter doesn’t know who its customers are, or what its Job To Be Done[...]
A narrative show that explores the complex industries that will play an important role in creating an abundant future for humanity. Every season, host Packy McCormick ‘ a venture investor and writer of the popular Not Boring newsletter ‘ brings in an expert cohost to go deep into the possibilities and challenges of making ‘sci-fi’ dreams our reality in our lifetimes. The first season starts at the root of all progress and prosperity: unlocking 10x more clean and reliable energy by splitting and fusing atoms themselves.
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All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are directy attributed to Packy McCormick or their podcast platform partner. If you believe your copyrighted work is in use without your permission, you can follow our process outlined here. See terms of use.
All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are directy attributed to Packy McCormick or their podcast platform partner. If you believe your copyrighted work is in use without your permission, you can follow our process outlined here. See terms of use.
