moonshots ep30 dakin sloss venture capital transcript

I’m looking for people who are driven by a desire to grow personally and a desire to contribute to the world these are drivers that will basically fuel a person endlessly um you might hit like a particular Plateau But ultimately that’ll kick back in and you just keep wanting to to give more and grow more and that’s what’s necessary to to make big big things happen and a massive transformative purpose is what you’re telling the world it’s like this is who I am this is what I’m going to do this is the dent I’m going to make in the hi everybody Peter dandis here with moonshots and mindsets we’re about to enter a podcast with a dear friend daon SLO a venture capitalist philanthropist entrepreneur he runs Prime movers lab it’s a billion doll fund that unlike other Venture Capital funds is going after solving the world’s biggest problems we’re going to be diving into as an entrepreneur what is a venture capitalist looking for tricks and trades the dos and don’ts the way that they go

[00:01:00] through their process of how you reach them how you present to them you know how you value the deal with them and ultimately uh how do you get to a point of capitalizing your company we’re going to be looking at some of uh Prime MERS Labs uh most exciting companies in space in Hypersonic and supersonic aviation in Fusion in brain computer interface in energy production and storage and carbon capture you know they are looking at some of the most exciting companies on the planet that they’ve backed and taken from startup to public this is an opportunity for any entrepreneur who wants to understand the inside baseball of uh you know the Venture Capital funding uh listen up you know as I like to say rather than starting a photo sharing app go and build something that can change the world that can make a dent in the universe all right now to our podcast with daon Sloss the founder and creator of prime movers lab welcome

[00:02:02] to moonshots and mindsets I’m here with a friend uh ADV venture capitalist and entrepreneur of philanthropist uh and I’m excited about this conversation daon um we’re going to talk about uh the lifeblood of entrepreneurs uh Capital uh coursing through their veins their moonshots their ideas help them go big uh and hopefully not go home uh where are you today thank you for having me Peter I’m in Miami at the moment really appreciate you having me on and excited to chat with you yeah no absolutely you know one of my premises for this podcast is to inspire entrepreneurs to go bigger than they have before you know uh with all due respect to those people who are in the photo sharing app business I keep on saying you know we don’t need another another photo sharing app you know go after something that is going to change the world you know impact the lives of a billion people you know I like to say the world’s biggest problems the world’s biggest business opportunities and when I think about a venture fund um that has

[00:03:00] that as a principal uh precept I do think that uh Prime U laabs PML your fund uh uh that’s foundational for you isn’t it yeah here at Prime movers lab we only invest in breakthrough scientific inventions that have the ability to transform billions of lives that’s literally our mission um you were a bit of an inspiration as you know Peter for uh starting the fund and encouraging me to go even more moonshot in the things that I was building and yeah I mean I think it’s quite clear at this point we at this this threshold as a human civilization and photo sharing is not going to move us forward we need to address the world’s most important problems climate change an aging population the mental health pandemic changing demographics making goods and services cheaper expanding into space and these are opportunities of course as you said to uh produce huge businesses and thus huge portions but also when you build a company they’re all actually really really equivalent difficulty it’s going to be a decade long process if you’re going to build something something meaningful and you might as

[00:04:02] well build something that’s going to meaningfully make people’s lives better it’s just so much more rewarding so much more fulfilling to know that you’re really making a contribution to the world yeah in this in this podcast I really want to talk through advice for entrepreneurs at every stage at the seed at you know series a b and so forth and um what ultimately makes for a great company to back I want to hear your points of view what you’re looking for what you’re not you know tips and and tricks but also just uh you know help get entrepreneurs on the right on the right path and so uh let’s let’s jump in I want to talk about a number of things first off the name primover laabs where did that come from so uh I think we’re both a bit of fans of ir Rand and we are uh that comes from Howard Ro’s speech in the Fountain Head in a courtroom where he is talking about the prime movers the inventors of the wheel uh the people who brought fire to to civiliz ation and

[00:05:01] really why we started Prime movers lab was to be the place where Prime movers people who are breakthrough scientific inventors can come and not just get Capital but get real partnership where they actually have the Hands-On tools across PR marketing government relations sales fundraising and uh you know not to put it lightly but like the shoulder to cry on over that long journey as you uh go through the ups and downs of uh the startup game and a partner that you can really turn to at every step along the process to help you build this company and help you enjoy the process of building that company you know you said that and it’s interesting right cuz you only I mean historically people think about venture capitalist as a place to go get money um they’re also uh a a means for filtering and vetting but it sounds like you’re offering a lot of additional Services beyond that uh to the companies that you’re backing let let’s start with some of the basics here how much Capital do you have under management how many companies have you backed thus far far and uh I want to

[00:06:01] dive into sort of the through line on on your philosophy yeah it’s about $1.2 billion under management we have a few early stage funds we have a growth stage fund and we’ve done a ton of spvs and uh basically been around for now almost six years we’ve done 40 companies roughly the most of the capital sits in about 15 companies you know our philosophy is to be very concentrated and we’ll start at the seed round do the a do the B even do the C and we’ve ended up with companies where we have 100 plus million dollars into them a couple of them that are kind of the core things that we focus our time and attention around yeah and if you were going to say you’ve invested 40 companies how many have you seen over that period of time just to give people a sense of the ratio when you go into a venture capitalist you know all things being equal what’s your chance of getting Capital 6,000 it’s a lot harder than uh uh getting into Stanford or Harvard wow yeah and I think those numbers are a little out of date uh it’s probably more like 8,000 at this point I just don’t have the latest one

[00:07:00] 40 out of 8,000 um and and so the principal focus of backing sort of world changing billion person uh high technology high science I mean some of these ideas must be crazy ideas at the end of the day I like to say the day before something is really a breakthrough it’s a crazy idea and do you back stuff that other funds think is too crazy and and don’t want to yeah definitely I mean I think in the last couple years some of that stuff has gotten a little more invogue um so maybe our craziest things don’t even seem so crazy anymore as more money has flown into deep Tech but uh we have a space-based Solar Company for example which if you asked anybody about that you know 24 months ago they would have thought you were just totally nuts um I think there’s now actually a couple different companies that are uh tentatively pursuing that but uh we think we have the the best team and the best technological approach for that and we we I mean we we have something out

[00:08:00] there on our website which people should check out which is our breakthrough science road map where we take the six areas broadly that we focus on energy Transportation infrastructure manufacturing human augmentation and Agriculture and we go for each of those areas what’s going to happen over the next decade two decades three decades and we’ve broken down a few hundred different technologies that are kind of coming to Market whether it’s like Advanced lithium extraction or brain computer interfaces or cleaning up oceans and that road map gives us a context of what’s the right level of to back you know there might be something like asteroid mining that I know you’re excited about that probably isn’t the current decade thing that’s probably a 203s thing and so come the end of this decade we may invest in an asteroid mining company today it might be a little too early for Venture scale returns yeah I I can tell you it is uh and I’ve been my pick on that I had an argument with I had an argument with Elon about whether it was too early he said he would buy the liquid oxygen from us if we delivered it but he said it’s too early and he was right yeah um he hasn’t been wrong about many things but we can get I think I think Mar Mark and

[00:09:01] Jon said this really well you know every idea we see as venture capitalist is a good idea it’s really just a question of timing and so even the crazy like things that we see uh that we pass on for the idea reason they’re usually good ideas like most of the things that are uh we’re looking at 99% of things we’re looking are going to happen at some point in time and a lot of our project is essentially figuring out what is uh overly enthusiastic wishful thinking and what is real technology here now today that’s going to make an impact on people’s lives you know a mutual friend of ours and you backed a number of his companies uh Bill gross um I’ve had on my stages he’s been a ex prize supporter I’ve worked uh as CEO one of the ideal lab companies uh Bill had done a study that he uh presented at dld and at Ted in which he looked at all the different parameters of uh successful companies and failures looking at you know is a firsttime CEO how much Capital went in what field they were in and said what

[00:10:01] was the key factor of the successful companies uh do you remember what the answer was oh my my answer is that didn’t give up but are you gonna say timing timing yeah it is timing yeah I mean it it’s like it’s like you know Airbnb and Uber you know materialized you know the idea wasn’t you it had been a it had been conceived of before but after 2008 when people wanted to earn additional money after that came down you know uh SpaceX after the spatial accident right uh the commercial crew contract allowed them to get into business if they hadn’t won that that would have been a difficult slog and being an entrepreneur who I I’ll use a a phrase from Ray kerswell who lives long enough to live forever so to speak right if you’ve got income and you’re break even and you have long enough to intercept new business ideas and opportunities so is I assume that’s the sort of stuff

[00:11:02] you look at absolutely yeah I mean if you’re talking about kind of our criteria for the companies that we’re investing in yeah I mean we we basically look at companies I’ll give it to people very directly through four lenses it’s the team technology business and deal kind of going in reverse order you know an early stage fund has certain valuation and ownership criteria that it needs to achieve a growth fund has slightly different ones uh those valuations have changed dramatically in the last 12 months as the market has changed um if you go to the business we’re looking for things that can be1 billion do plus businesses I think that’s uh clearly the case for all the kind of technologies that we’re investing in but when you just as an entrepreneur if you’re communicating with a venture capital firm you have to understand power law returns that as a venture capitalist even though you’re really excited about all your portfolio you assuming that if there’s 10 or 15 companies one or two of them in a hit and the one or two that hit have to be big enough to kind of help you produce a 5x or 10x fund whatever you’ve kind of marketed to your p is and the time frame that you have for us that’s a 10x fund

[00:12:02] which means you really need to see Investments that can be 100 x’s and if we’re investing initially at 10 1520 million valuations or less then you got to see $10 billion plus outcomes as uh as possibilities H when you account for delution that those are kind of like the check the boxes things the two things that we spend the majority of our time evaluating at the early stag is the team and the technology on the technology we really think of a spectrum of risk so there’s s risk engineering risk and commercialization risk if it’s at the point of science risk it’s still in a lab in a context where it’s pretty difficult to predict even as the inventor of that technology how long is it going to take to Market how much is it going to cost because you’re still in the fundamental uh invention uh process and the level of uncertainty is such that it’s actually generally better suited for an incubator an accelerator a uh government grant uh is often what’s funding that kind of research when we like to enter is right at that inflection point between science risk

[00:13:00] and Engineering risk because at that point the market still doesn’t have a lot of people out there who know how to price this and how to assess these uh types of companies and support them but you’ve gone through this major inflection point where now you can sit down and make an engineering plan and understand how long it’s going to take to get to Market so that that’s kind of our typical entry point then we help companies overcome that engineering risk build the product and then of course commercialize and scale it and I’ll talk more about the the team piece too if You’ like sure I I I definitely do um I want to get into some of the dos and don’ts so you’ve got a firsttime entrepreneur who’s listening to this and they have a great idea um maybe they have raised some seed capital from friends and family maybe they’ funded it themselves uh you want to talk through the first off the stages of capitalization of a company you started that a little bit but let’s you know just to give some uh some entrepreneurs a sense of when should you be going out

[00:14:00] and actually presenting to a venture capitalist with the hope that you might get an investment yeah so typically right there’s two or three people who will start a company split up the equity 50/50 or a third a third a third or something like that and then you uh you know maybe put in some of your own money as a Founder to fund it or don’t take a salary for a period of time you get to the point where you’ve got something that you can show off uh so that this is no longer just an idea it’s gotten to the point where there something to show off maybe now you bring some friends and family in um for a couple $1,000 maybe you actually go get some professional Angel Investors these days for a couple hundred thousand dollars even a million bucks um what you really have got to aim to get to at that point is being able to show a professional venture capitalist that this is not a science project is a business um this is a business and customers and a business model there’s two ways there’s two ways of showing that one is go get customers go get uh revenue of course that’s the best way to

[00:15:01] show that but even more subtly and a lot of these types of companies you know I mean we’re we’re an investor in suponic and Hypersonic jet companies that just have no chance at the time that we initially investing of having customers lined up that’s not going to be the case but you can tell from the founders mindset and I love that this podcast has uh the focus on mindset in this we we have a very simple uh thing we’re kind of screening for is is the founder in love with their technology or is the founder in love with their customer and if you’re a technical founder the number one mistake you can make is come tell us everything about how exciting your technology is as your starting point come tell us about your customer come tell us about the uh paino that they’re experiencing and then explain how your technology solves that problem let me Point let me put an exclamation mark on top of this right because I can’t express that enough at the end of the day there are so many companies where the founder falls in love with an a widget a technology a science and then they’re out there searching for a solution and that’s a that’s a formula

[00:16:02] for failure there’s a great video of uh of Jeff Bezos over the course of 20 the first 20 years of Amazon basically saying all we care about is our customers making our customers happy what do they want what do they need serve their customers over and over and over again that’s his massive transformative purpose is serve the customers whatever makes them you know whatever you can provide for them I I think his business plan is anything that’s cheaper faster better you know more variety uh Amazon will do um also to slow down a little bit what you said early on at the start of a company don’t be going to a venture capitalist with an idea right uh if you have an idea you’re going to fund that early on by sweat Capital meaning nights and weekends um putting a few dollars and shekels in and then at the next stage when you’re bringing in some potential Partners or looking for Capital to develop the idea further Maybe it’s developed some software maybe it’s developed a

[00:17:01] prototype you’re typically going to go to the people who know you and love you best and who are backing you not your idea they’re backing you I trust you dcon and I’m going to back you on this because I know you can be successful they know much they know nothing about the idea right and that’s your friends and family round Angel round and then they have when they’re coming to you they have a what a minimally viable product some customers lined up it it’s a wide variety given the types of things that we do you know we we have nuclear fusion we have two nuclear fusion companies you know we were the first investor one of those nuclear fusion companies and at that point they had a really uh ambitious vision and a team that had kind of you know collectively hundreds of years of like the right expertise and a plan like a really wellth thought through road map of how are they going to do this over the next two decades to to make commercial Fusion viable hard to have like a really uh built out proof of concept given the scales of capital that were required in

[00:18:00] that case but they had a lot of research to show you that it was possible that’s kind of like the far extreme I think more typical would be we’ve got some uh you know if you take a uh Aviation company there’s like a small model scale of the plane that demonstrates the proof of concept on a technical level now they’re going to go through years of building it certification and bringing it to Market or if it’s a energy technology company they’ve done like a bench scale kind of prototype that shows that the science works and now it’s a question of can you manufacture it at a large enough scale and cheap enough to actually have the unit economics uh add up for going to Market that’s your sory early you do some seed funding and Seed stage funding has valuation in what bracket would you imagine you no it could be any we’ve entered at companies at like a $5 million valuation all the way up to a $30 million valuation for seed rounds I think you’re seeing in the market today at least that it’s more in that kind of like 10 to 20 range again given uh tough macro headlines sure and

[00:19:01] then uh series a and series B follow on later stage investing how would you bracket those yeah so I mean first off for everyone like these these letters and names are made up and you have to recognize that and not get too rigidly stuck on anything but generally series a so seed you are backing a team with a proof of concept series a there’s some sort of customer traction right by the time those kind of Aviation companies I was talking about at series A uh or raising series a they have some Lois from Airlines or from the defense Community or some customer that validates there is a significant customer demand and the kind of business model through which that is going to be monetized um probably very early revenue or no Revenue in some cases and these are going to be valuations that are in the 25 to you know Max uh $100 million valuation range and uh again those number those numbers have come down 40% in the last eight months um so probably more like 25 to 60 at the at the moment

[00:20:01] and then series B you have you have customers you have Revenue you have some sort of validation and again with deep Tech it’s going to look a little different than a software as a service company but uh there there’s Revenue um and that could be a uh contract with a customer for pre-orders that could be a uh joint development agreement and those valuations once you get into series B and series C there’s such a widespread because it’s so dependent upon what the uh is doing but you’re looking at you know north of a $75 million valuation and some series BS have been very high this episode is brought to you by levels one of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my Peak vitality and Longevity is to monitor my blood glucose more importantly the foods that I eat and how they Peak the glucose levels in my blood now glucose is the fuel that powers your brain it’s really important High prolonged levels of glucose what’s called hypoglycemia Le leads to everything from heart disease

[00:21:00] to alzheimer’s to sexual dysfunction to diabetes and it’s not good the challenges all of us are different uh all of us respond to different foods in different ways like for me if I eat bananas it spikes my blood glucose if I eat grapes it doesn’t if I eat bread by itself I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels but if I dip that bread in olive oil it blunts it and these are things that I’ve learned from wearing a Contin is a glucose monitor and using the levels app so levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what’s going on in your body it’s continuous monitoring 24/7 I wear it all the time really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat remain conscious of the food that I eat and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics you know on this podcast I only recommend products and services that I use that I use not only for for myself and my friends and my family that I think are high quality

[00:22:01] and safe and really impact a person’s life so check it out levels. l/ Peter give you two additional months of membership and it’s something that I think everyone should be doing eventually this stuff is going to be in your body on your body part of our future of medicine today it’s a product that I think uh I’m going to be using for the years ahead and hope you’ll consider as well all right let’s get into the dos and don’ts so uh first time entrepreneur comes in and uh and presents so we’ll talk about inperson versus zoom in a minute uh and he’s making the classic mistake uh you mentioned one classic mistake which is being in love with your technology versus the customer uh other other big mistakes that entrepreneurs make coming in uh without the experience well I wouldn’t say this one’s necessarily recognized as a classic but I think it’s a pretty important one if I’m giving a presentation the first thing I do is I ask a lot of questions and and I make sure I understand the person I’m

[00:23:00] presenting to what matters to them what are their decision-making criteria what are the language and uh tools and patterns that they like to use when they’re speaking and I’m speaking to someone for their benefit right we often get caught up and hear in our own voice and lose track of who is our audience what is the that actually matters to that audience and I think a lot of entrepreneurs would benefit from pausing and doing a lot more custo like you’re you’re when you’re fundraising it’s customer a customer is the investor and you should do customer Discovery and understand what do they like what do they not like what are the things that are going to land for them in a presentation um so that that’s one of the top ones that comes to mind I think another would probably be if you have a team making sure that the team is presenting together and it’s flowing well amidst the team often at an early stage so much of the investment thesis is the team and you can see with a team in a live presentation are they in a good sync or is one person uh just running over another person kind of

[00:24:00] verbally what what would an entrepreneur who’s presenting to you do to impress you or what have they done to impress you is there something that stands out in mind like that was impressive yeah so one is videos Andor actual Tech demos are really helpful things at this stage where you can kind of visually see this like long-term Vision as it’s going to come together um the second is order books I mean a lot lot of what we end up getting most excited about is company comes to you with a billion dollars of Lois and as you dig in on those they’re not like madeup Lois that are like Lucy goosey it’s like if you build this it’s going to have a customer base and uh and then the thoughtfulness of the engineering road map right they’re these are all fundamentally boiled down to like pretty big hard hairy engineering challenges and the question is how well has somebody thought through what’s it going to take who you’re going to have to hire what are the most challenging Parts how much is it going to cost um

[00:25:01] yeah yeah when you speak about a book of business you know one of the companies you backed uh energy Vault from again from Bill gross I was so blown away when I heard the book of business that he had set up oh my God we’ll get to that we’ll talk about some of the companies that uh PML has has backed that are epic successes um inperson versus Zoom it used to be all iners are all your presentations now over Zoom initial conversations tend to be over Zoom but we won’t invest without uh without an in-person meeting between a Founder uh or CEO and multiple of the partners and that’s just because there’s something that doesn’t get captured over uh video that’s really important to kind of assess you know we’re we’re signing up for a long-term relationship it’s like a marriage and many ways harder to get out of than a marriage and uh there has to be good chemistry between our team and the team that we’re backing because we’re not just giving people money and saying goodbye we’re getting involved and we’re really helping um slides versus no slides have you you know do you see uh teams or entrepreneurs coming

[00:26:02] in and just speaking to you and having a conversation uh versus you know depending on a slide deck and and how long should they be pitching give me a sense of of that mix that works well that you recommend I’m always more impressed by a conversation than a set of slides but that’s a personal thing there’s other people who like slides I think it fundamentally again it comes back to that customer Discovery Point of when I was a found I built two companies myself I would ask somebody do you like slides or do you like just having a conversation and let uh let your audience tell you how it wants to be sold um and don’t don’t do it like your way do it their way and uh length of time I always find it challenging if somebody’s talking for more than a few minutes without there being some back and forth I think you you just don’t know what impact you’re having and whether it’s actually effective communication so that’s that’s also part of why I don’t like the slides is it

[00:27:01] tends to depersonalize an interaction rather than uh allowing Mutual engagement to occur yeah no I I find that so important to be able to you know have a you connect and have a relationship with the individual understand how they think uh and steer the conversation in a way that’s important for you um you know jockey versus horse um I mean they’re both important right the entrepreneur versus the field that they’re in the customers that they’re serving uh I assume you want both but can you talk a b a bit about you sort of the uh uh the jockey versus horse uh calculus that you do yeah it’s a both you know we have backed uh and we’ve done this from learning you know we’ve backed Founders that we loved that were in areas that just didn’t have the momentum required to to build something big and the right timing and doesn’t work and we’ve backed uh uh some Founders that I would not back again

[00:28:00] even if they were in huge areas um because they just didn’t have the mindset required to to adjust and adapt and adapt and ultimately succeed so it’s a both you know we want people who are oh please go ahead you know just say yeah of course it’s it’s both but end of the day if you’ve got a great team uh that team will pivot and find a solution right if you have a lousy team in a great Marketplace you made a bad investment totally and what what we I mean what we’ve often found is because of the level of expertise we have in the areas that we invest and the way we engage with Founders is even in the process of doing diligence with worldclass Founders they are learning and growing and shifting in that process and hopefully we’re contributing something that helps them narrow in or refine a strategy or refine a tactic and uh you you see the the pivoting uh micro pivoting happening you ideally you don’t want to have to make huge pivots you want to make micro pivots and like that adds up to the huge pivot and those uh micro adjustments are happening often in

[00:29:00] the diligence process and that’s a good sign to us we don’t want somebody who’s like here’s my plan I’m not listening to any feedback whatsoever we want somebody who’s like here’s the big picture strategy and I’m going to do whatever it takes to get there and this is my current thinking what can I learn okay cool I’m going to do a slightly different let’s talk about how a deals get to you I’m I’m assuming that who introduces a deal to you uh matters versus I mean that’s part of the signaling right versus something coming in as a cold email or into your website it how do you find deals and how do the deals come in and how important is the introduction to you yeah we’ve done zero cold email or introduction deals even though that represents thousands of those deals in the pipeline it’s just not going to happen ever um we have such a large volume of high quality introductions coming from folks like yourself and other folks that we trust and uh rely on and uh if if you’re not if you’re not uh getting an introduction from somebody that already knows us and that we’ve already done some sort of business with it’s almost impossible um and uh meaning that’s the first

[00:30:00] filter right if someone if there’s a if an entrepreneur or an idea is strong enough they should be able to overcome that hurdle yeah so deals are are you know the split between deals that you hear about and go after versus ones that are inbound how does that feel I mean this has changed over time you know in 2018 we were kind of hustling and going after everything and today we we’ve basically end up established as one of the preeminent uh deep Tech funds out there and so pretty much everything is coming to us um there’s not a lot of us going out needing to to chase something now and what that boils down to is what we talked about before is uh the commitment we make to Founders is the least useful thing we provide as capital and I think we’ve delivered on that for a lot of great folks like Bill and other serial entrepreneurs that I know one of the companies that you backed uh that I was a co-founder of vacinity we’ll talk about that uh PML provided huge value uh throughout the entire startup process and that was um that was awesome I want

[00:31:00] to talk about mind entrepreneur mindset right um there’s the entrepreneur who’s excited there’s the entrepreneur who has P passion and purpose and then there’s the entrepreneur who’s obsessed um what are you looking for in the mindset of that entrepreneur that you want to back looking for a few things number one is what’s driving them I’m looking for people who are driven by a desire to grow personally and a desire to contribute to the world these are drivers that will basically Fu a person endlessly um you might hit like a particular Plateau but ultimately that’ll kick back in and you just keep wanting to to give more and grow more and that’s what’s necessary to to make big big things happen um second thing I’m looking for is somebody who’s really resilient uh there is no way you’re building a major world changing company without falling flat on your face a number of times every year on the way to getting there and you’ve got to basically start to learn to hear and know as not right now or that person hasn’t figured it out yet or I got to try something else rather than that

[00:32:01] actually causing you to stop uh we we joke you know people need to run through walls um and uh and then the third thing is being really adapt it’s kind of like a weird contradiction the most successful entrepreneurs or oxymoron are both unbelievably resilient they’re not going to take no for an answer and they’re extremely flexible and adaptable so they’re not going to take no for an answer in getting to that big long-term Vision but all of the tactics all of the things around hiring firing sales government relations all the specifics they’re willing to take new information and learn and adjust and shift and we specifically test for that and like the process that we go through with people is making sure they get some sort of feedback they get some knows and they have to push through them and they get some sort of feedback and that feedback uh is useful feedback and they act on it um and they adjust and if they’re not willing to do that then they might be successful somewhere else but they’re not the right partner for us you know one piece of advice for entrepreneurs and I I got this message I’ll tell the story briefly I would was at MIT um I was running my first organization ever

[00:33:00] students for the exploration and development of space saids which grew into a a global college group and I was trying to raise money to print a monthly newsletter this is back before the internet this is when you actually used a printing press in the US mail office and uh I went to Draper Labs which had had a lot of money and I met with the head of Draper labs and pitched him on like $5,000 a year to do Printing and mailing of our newsletters to our chapters and he you know on the way out you know he said I’m sorry would love to but we’re not in a position to make donations and I was like you know uh okay and I was literally walking out the door had opened the door partially and I paused and I said well you can’t make a donation but could do you have a do you have printing facilities and mailing facilities could you print our newsletters and mail our newsletters for us and he said absolutely and we got probably $10,000 a year

[00:34:00] versus 5K uh worth of services for the next 5 years and the lesson I learned in that is whenever you get a no don’t stop there walk away with something even if it’s a what would it take for me to come back and get a yes or what’s the most brutal uh advice you can give me you know another short story is I’m on stage interviewing uh Elon at a Goldman Sachs event one of the things said that I’ll never forget he said my friends tell me what’s great my best friends tell me sucks you know so can you get brutal truth from somebody CU that’s that’s worth a lot yeah I mean uh number of stories that come to mind of the same uh lesson and genre but I think at the end of the day if you really think about it uh to to succeed you’re going to have to fail a lot of times in order to get there and really what entrepreneur ship boils down to is can you fail really gracefully you know the people who are

[00:35:00] great entrepreneurs fail constantly and their failures just become learning and fuel rather than something that gets stuck with a bunch of emotional baggage like a lot of other people have and if you can kind of get excited about like failure equals I’m growing then you’re going to succeed at everything in life but particularly in entrepreneurship I think that’s so critically important and as an entrepreneur you know if you if you don’t believe in your idea enough to keep keep going you know the proverbial story and you know it from me day in was with you know the Ansari X prise before it was the Ansari x prise 150 NOS you know they’re they’re the same stories for Google and for a multitude of companies and just you got to keep going you have to believe in your deal and your company and your vision enough to keep going so one of the things that makes you different uh daon and and I love you and the team there are for it is your you know your moonshot vision your billion person Vision your desire to go big um and ambitious versus

[00:36:03] conservative so uh there’s how do you dial that I mean one of the questions and if I come into to you with this crazy ass Vision um of putting like 100,000 satellites in low earth orbit which our friend Greg Wier did uh that vision and you funded it um so I’m I’m trying to give advice to the entrepreneur here who wants to go big doesn’t want to build a photo sharing app um but they don’t have the experience yet or the track record that Greg had Greg Wier had um but so how do they balance audacity and vision and like you know going to go mine asteroids out there uh with actually starting and building a company it’s a great question so and my advice might surprise you a little but i’ say if you’re if you’re a first-time entrepreneur you should not be going after the same scope of problem

[00:37:00] as uh as a Greg there Greg started and built other companies that were simpler companies and learned valuable lessons about hiring and firing and scaling and fundraising and the basics and a lot of our philosophy is uh ski uh making sure the founder and the mission are good fits you know if we’re going to go put 100,000 satellites in low earth orbit like nobody has ever done before that person better know how to do all the basics of company building so that you’re not having to stumble over those issues and can just focus on how effing hard it is to do the thing that they’ve set out to do and um even for myself you know if I look back my first company was a software company called open gov that was delivering government budgeting and planning software that super useful Mission I’m really proud of what we’ve done there and nowhere near as hard as my second company that was delivering oil and gas modeling and optimization technology that involves some really fundamental uh scientific uh incorporations into that software and nowhere near as hard as uh doing Hardware venture capital and so you you

[00:38:01] have to progress in your own career and build your skill set and there’s nothing wrong with that like I remember in my early 20s thinking like I wish and sure Elon had some of this like of like when he was building PayPal I wish I was doing the Rockets now and you kind of got to get over that of like you’re not going to do the Rockets until you get the basics down and there are enough interesting hardware and biotech problems today that you could go after some of those problems that are platform plays and maybe don’t have quite the same level of difficulty or are tackling a little niche within that as your first company if you’re younger and build off of that success to kind of set yourself up for the longer term thing that’s one approach second approach which if you really do want to do it now go partner like if you’re like a fantastic uh uh uh inventor of something and you want to go for the moonshot now go partner with a Greg or a bill gross or somebody who had Peter um somebody who’s done it before and uh uh you’re going to give away a little bit economics but it’s well worth it um to to be able to bring to Market

[00:39:01] and have somebody there as a day-to-day mentor to help you kind of get over uh the basics and focus on commercializing your technology yeah I mean it’s it’s important to realize a lot of the biggest companies on the planet which are billion person companies like Microsoft like apple uh like Facebook uh were started by firsttime entrepreneurs in the early 20s so the the situation uh is there I wouldn’t say there are many Hardware companies that have done that because and if you’re going to put a ratio of the degree of difficulty to a software versus hardware company what would you say 10 to one yeah at least Hardware is hard so if you’re looking at starting a hardware company um I like to say if you’re going to build a hardware company come prepared with a large bankroll uh you know the only way that Elon really got SpaceX going was he had $100 million out of his Paypal uh you know 140 he made he put into Tesla into

[00:40:02] into SpaceX and would never have gotten it going there and he ran out a couple times and had to get Peter and others to jump in after the third failure he scraped together enough money for a a fourth attempt on the uh on the Falcon 1 and and succeeded and then won the government contract that from NASA that allowed him to give birth to SpaceX this is why partnering with somebody who’s already had success can be such a good strategy here because at the end of the day there’s doing the thing and there’s funding the thing and even if you actually have many much of the skill set to do the thing if you’ve never raised the money at the volumes that we’re talking about before that is its own project and you really need somebody who has some track record once you start getting into the much bigger dollar figures that are involved so if it’s a very Capital intensive business it almost certainly is going to require a uh seasoned entrepreneur yeah and the other option is can you start in the software business build something that is cash flow positive and then start

[00:41:00] building your Hardware Vision on the margin uh by stealing time until you have an MVP something to to show and have a track record and then raise the capital there right um way to do it for sure you can have the long-term Vision but not jump into the fire right away so a lot of entrepreneurs are probably right now saying I want to build something I want to build a world changing company I’m excited I’m passionate I want to do something in one of the you know the global Grand Challenge areas um and they come to you dayon and they say hey daon uh uh what where should I build a company um you know where are there the biggest opportunities unet unmet needs how do you answer that well a I mean a couple things first is I think the best entrepreneurs do do have gravity towards a particular area and so I it is really hard to build fantastic companies and I would encourage people to make sure they are connected enough to the problem

[00:42:01] they’re solving so I would never encourage someone solve the problem I think it’s important like they got to solve the problem they think is important that that caveat aside um the two kind of obvious things to focus on today is something around energy transition there are trillions of dollars going into a change in the fundamental infrastructure of our world across nuclear wind solar geothermal energy storage uh vehicles the utilities um electric Aviation all of these things and so there’s just like you can come up with a hundred different uh things that are happening there I just finished a Blog on energy and by the way pml’s blogs are amazing and I just finished one on sort of the future of where energy is going over the decade ahead and it is ripe for uh entrepreneurs right to build on the margin build in the center of it it’s huge you know and on the software side and the hardware side totally like endless possibility um the second thing

[00:43:01] broadly speaking would be we are undergoing a extraordinary revolution in biology and biological engineering and we look at this kind of in two areas but uh the fundamental building block is just if you think about what we invest in any of it like space the cost of uh Transportation has come down by a factor of 10 is going down by another factor of 10 in the near order maybe even more depend on where Starship ends up and that just opens up this whole new economy if you look at bi biology the cost of sequencing the human genome has come down orders of magnitude so these These are million fold millionfold yeah these are different analogues of Moore’s law that was what was driving kind of the software Revolution and you’re seeing that software Revolution now in hardware and in BIO because of the follow-on effects of that and so in BIO some of the things we’re most excited about is longevity medicine we obviously have uh talked a lot about that area and it’s something really uh near and dear to your heart where we are starting to understand aging as a disease and what

[00:44:03] are the uh uh causes of Aging that we can address directly so that instead of tackling uh cancer or a heart issue we’re tackling the cellular mechanisms that have led to degradation of the body or degradation of uh a particular organ well in advance and actually prevent them and this is uh obviously really exciting and then the second thing is our understanding of Neuroscience has progressed so much in the last uh 20 30 years and the probably the single greatest challenge we face as human beings is now that we have so much abundance in the west how do we actually enjoy it how do we remain happy how do we not fall into the traps of depression anxiety that hundreds of millions will probably billions of people have and I think there are extraordinarily exciting things happen in psychedelic medicine brain computer interfaces non-invasive devices to address this that are only going to continue to accelerate over the coming decade yeah no agreed and I love the fact that youve centered your thesis

[00:45:00] areas there also Transportation on the abundance side I’ve got my I’m using my abundance mug today and it says on the back how would you live how would you live life if there was no scarcity and so that’s uh that’s I think where we’re where we are heading you know technology is a force that takes whatever used to be scarce and makes it abundant over and over again I I just want to pause there and say remind everyone uh basically if you’re if you’re listening to this podcast no matter what exactly uh where someone sits in like the current socioeconomic system there is no more scarcity like we we actually have transcended that as like a western civilization if you told somebody a thousand years ago that uh the poorest person in the US was going to have a cell phone or a computer and toilet paper and this thing that like flushes toilet yeah like Refrigeration um Kings would have uh given up their leadership of countries or whole segments of the the globe to to have that and I think

[00:46:00] it’s just important to pause and remember that uh regularly that we we’ve already made it like this is all bonus at this point and uh of course there are people with more than me and you and there are people with less than uh less than us but focusing on who has more or less when everyone already has so much gets the the wrong mindset yeah I agreed and I think one of the questions is if there isn’t scarce if there isn’t abundance in an area um are you the entrepreneur that will create abundance in that area one of the companies I love um I know the founder uh Martin he’s going to be speaking at at abundance 360 this March uh is the diamond Foundry um and and they basically have built the capability to build perfect diamonds uh you know do you want a five karat perfect diamond or 10 karat 40 karat perfect diamond you know it’s eventually will be be dollars per carat it’s going to redefine it and they’re building now Diamond Wafers and so you know aluminum

[00:47:02] used to be the most scarce metal on the planet because of the energy required to turn boide into aluminum and so everything becomes you know we’re seeing you know something may not be uh available but technology makes it available and so that’s something I’m asking entrepreneurs all the time what do you see is scarce that you could make abundant a brief note from our sponsors let’s talk about sleep sleep has become one of my number one longevity priorities in life you know getting eight deep uninterrupted hours of sleep is one of the most important things you can do to increase your vitality and energy and increase the health span that you have here on Earth you know when I was in medical school years ago I used to pride myself on how little sleep I could get you know it should be 5 5 and 1 half hours today I pride myself on how much sleep I can get and I shoot for 8 hours every single night now usually I’m great at going to sleep if I’m exhausted you know work work a hard day I’m right out but if I’m having difficulty and it

[00:48:00] occurs I’m having insomnia or my mind’s overactive and I need help to get that 8 hours I turned to a supplement product by life force called Peak rest now Peak rest has been formulated with an extraordinary scientific depth and background includes everything from long lasting melatonin to magnesium to L glycine to Rosemary extract just to name a few this product is about creating a sense of rest and really giving you the depth and length of sleep that you need for Recovery it’s a product I hope you’ll try it works for me and I’m sure it will work for you if you’re interested go to myli force.com Peter uh to get a discount from life force on this product but you’ll also see a whole set of other longevity and vitality related supplements that I use we’ll talk about them some other time but in terms of sleep Peak rest is my go-to supplement hope you’ll enjoy it go to myli force.com Peter for your discount I want to go to

[00:49:00] inside baseball if that’s the right term I’m not a sports person uh on on deal analysis here uh and if you don’t mind uh being open with it you know you said you’re seeing thousands of deals per year or seen thousands of deals and you’re investing in you know one in a th000 one in one in 4,000 whatever the number might be so an entrepreneur comes to you um and through a mechanism scores a an hourlong uh virtual pitch is that the first step um usually it’s like a quick conversation with a member of the team over Zoom to get to know them as humans frankly that’s where we start our process um and then we’ll go on to more details about the the technology and the business how long how long before an AI pitches you and it’s no longer getting to know them as a human but it’s an algorithm you’re investing in well um I

[00:50:00] don’t know that uh that seem that seems like a little ways off to me I think uh but we’re we’re doing humanoid robotics Investments right now so let’s see I saw that that’s awesome so uh so uh I introduce someone to the PML team uh they say sure Peter we’ll we’ll listen to it uh the CEO the entrepreneur uh makes a has a a meeting with a member of your team uh what happens next well uh I mean roughly speaking our process is there’s an introductory screen where you’re kind of getting to know the person there’s a second screen that’s much more business and technology and deal focused if it uh passes those two things one of the partners who leads the firm there’s four of us advocates for the deal and uh then we go do a deep dive and that’s where we’re really allocate significant resources first in the Deep dive on Founder references uh business um customer references deal doal all that stuff and then the last

[00:51:00] thing we actually look at ironically enough is the technology because it takes the most time you know like when we go do a deep dive on and we’ll do it in like layers but when we go do a full Deep dive on a technology that might be two or three people’s full-time job for three weeks and full-time is like three times full-time um and uh it could be months you know if the there’s not a sense of urgency there’s usually a sense of urgency um so that that’s kind of how we make sure that we’re not investing in atheros or uh clean tech in the mid 2000s is really understanding that technology the patents the intellectual property um and the engineering plan but we we backload that to make sure that everything else checks out before we spend the time and resources all that so you come back now to the entrepreneur and say we’re interested and there’s a concept of leading a deal versus participating in the deal that entrepreneur has without question gone and spoken to other Venture capitalists as well um um let’s talk about when you decide to lead and what happens if you

[00:52:00] know do you find yourself in situations where you’re the sole uh Advocate you know five six 10 other uh Venture funds have said no we don’t like it but you do or you know there’s a almost like a herd mentality here like you know people jump on the deal that everyone else wants to get into or shun a deal that no one else wants to get into how does that uh that mindset work yeah so we exclusively lead we don’t follow and we’re we’re unique I mean uh probably if you’re on my team the one question or one thing you know not to say is like this person’s interested or this person’s not interested in terms of other firms that has no sway for our decision-making process unlike most firms it does most firms are like who has invested before who will invest later who we’re asking a very different question of what is the right answer here and it’s so easy in Venture Capital to get stuck in a herd mindset so I’ve kind of like forbidden that and when someone uh they’ll get a look for me of like why why are we focusing on that that’s not like the

[00:53:01] thesis is we know how to assess these things we don’t need to rely on somebody else’s uh perspective now you do have to understand are there other sources of capital available so that you’re not going to be the only funer indefinitely and what are the Milestones that a company’s going to hit where somebody else can realize you know maybe at a growth stage and come in so it’s it’s not like it’s uh totally binary but we we just don’t function that way and it is unique um I think uh a lot of other firms do get caught up in the I know this guy and this guy is in or is out and there there’s validity in that right like there there’s uh a legitimate approach there it’s just not the approach that we’re taking we kind of view ourselves as best inclass at assessing these types of technical risks love that now let’s talk about how a deal gets priced uh you know I’m not sure if entrepreneurs understand the dynamic here you know you’ve made up a number in your head that you think the company is worth based upon how much time you put in how big the market is but at the end of the day um how many of the deals are you pricing as the lead

[00:54:02] venture capitalist versus the entrepreneurs saying I’m looking for this much money at this valuation it’s always us pricing it yeah I mean the obviously Founders have what they’re looking for and we’re very upfront with people as well we’re not going to be the cheapest source of capital um 80% of our time last year went into supporting the portfolio and 20% into making new Investments that’s a typical that’s not uh how most firms are working we are really working closely with our companies and so often the thing we challenge people on if there is a disconnect on valuation is what do you think you would need to give to get us as part-time members of your team incentivized to come work on this company and add that on top of whatever delution you’re kind of expecting to get from a financing and that that’s how a lot of our Founders think about it if you know if they wanted to sell 15% of the company but we need 20% is the 5% extra that they’re giving worth the incremental odds of success of making

[00:55:00] this a 100x or THX bigger company in partnership with us and that that’s kind of like our Focus got it um and then at the end of the day you you do want to bring other investors in with you right you’re not looking to be the sole investor so um typical check size for uh that you’ll put into a company if it’s raising you know if it’s raising a $10 million uh you know late seed early a round yeah I mean uh frankly Peter we will often at seed or late seed like that we will do a full thing um if there is a $10 million on we can do 1010 million but we’ll uh we’ll do anywhere from 5 to 10 and it depends uh who are the other folks that are around the table that are interested if there are other folks that are around the table and interested we make space and we want to uh uh have others who can help but we’re comfortable uh at least in the early stages doing it all ourselves and then as Le get into later stages bringing in other folks that can help with those later stages if you going to say out of 10 out of the average 10 deals that you’ve invested in uh how

[00:56:00] many succeed are wildly successful you you alluded to this earlier in terms of the power laws of a return to a fund but what do you typically uh are seeing what is a best in-class Venture capitalists expect out of 10 deals well I’ll give you straight math from one of our funds so our first fund was raised in 2018 15 C deals we followed on to five of those companies as series A’s where 75 or 80% of the capital up in those five companies of the other 10 companies five are zeros at this point uh five and a half six years in um five are still operating and we’ll see what happens with them um don’t know i’ guess that two three of them have raised up rounds I guess so they they’ll be uh either decent or or uh good exits two others probably go to zero so half basically of the portfolio if you’re tracking that end up at zero and then of the five that we put most of the money into um three of those are breaking out as huge successes and that’s like a really good ratio I would not uh bet on that

[00:57:01] happening every time usually get one or two um but three are breaking out as huge successes so you get something like one to three really good out of those 15 um another uh seven five to seven that are like okay and then everything else is zeros so I mean and that’s one of the reasons again if you’re an entrepreneur going to to present to venture capitalist that the the venture capitalist needs to own enough of the company early on so that if you’re the breakout success that’s going to make up for the other you know 80% who are not hey everybody this is Peter a quick break from the episode you know I’m a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming I don’t watch the crisis News Network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet I spend my time training my neural that the way I see the World by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology

[00:58:00] how entrepreneurs are solving the world’s Grand challenges what the breakthroughs are in longevity how exponential Technologies are Transforming Our World so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at the future of longevity age reversal biotech increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural Nets with go to demand.com bblog and learn more now back to the episode some fun questions here craziest idea you’ve ever been pitched or craziest ideas you’ve ever been pitched if you have a few categories I mean we had somebody uh bringing us uh this thing for like terraforming the moon using nuclear um to kind of like

[00:59:02] blow up like spots on the moon and like uh create like infrastructure beds from that it it would sounded pretty wild um we’ve had uh folks that are looking at uh I mean what I don’t even know how like in some ways I don’t know how to answer the question because everything we’re doing is nuts yeah was going to say like we’re opening people’s schools and putting implants but yep that’s uh that’s part of the the brain computer interface stuff um so it it are we we are totally comfortable with things that other people are not comfortable with and we’re really understanding not like shock face value of like an idea but there’s lots of things that sound shocking at first and uh you know I think if we were talking five years ago and you said somebody was going to be able to write at uh like with an AI uh the level that chat GPT is writing at I think we would have both agreed at some point in the next 20

[01:00:00] years I don’t know that we would have thought five years from now that it would have been the case yeah or if you’d asked the question you know 18 months ago uh it’s it’s insane any companies come in that are fundamentally disrespecting the laws of physics I’m curious yeah yeah those ones we have to pass on um I I mean I I have a soft spot for those because I personally suspect that we I mean I know that we don’t the laws of physics today or our current laws of physics and at some point we will have a new understanding of the laws of physics so I as a physicist always get curious maybe I’m talking to like the next Einstein that’s uh that’s on to something there does tend to be a strong correspondence though between the companies that are presenting things that require new laws of physics and some very weird behavior that uh so far I don’t think I found the guy that is actually presenting new laws of physics uh you know I’ve had a few experiences in my life and I’m curious if you if you’ve had this where you’re in the midst of the meeting and you’re like I value my time more than uh being overly polite and like stop and say I

[01:01:02] just need to end the meeting here right now and and go have you have you broken off meetings in the midst yeah and I I mean I think one of the benefits of uh being a couple years into this is there are people who screen those things out the the that doesn’t have to happen anymore the The Venture Capital business is has changed over the last two to three years and a lot in the last 6 months how would you describe that in the last two to three years probably the main change is there’s a lot more funds um you know it used to be is there a glut is there a glut of funds there’s probably to many right now um and you’ve got people look in a low interest rate environment uh venture capital is a very attractive thing for any investor to invest in and you had a lot of people enter who probably are not going to last as durable uh Brands kind of in in this through multiple Cycles um because in the last six months markets have corrected heavily last 12 months you have series B and series C valuations down 70 to 80% you have series a down

[01:02:00] 40% C 20% which means that a lot of people who’ve invested over the last few years are sitting on portfolios that look good on paper but are not actually good and are going to have trouble going to to raise more money so you’re going to see uh a number of the new funds shut down but then there are people who started in this period of time who have the right kind of uh companies in the portfolio and will weather the storm and and come out the other side um and it’s positive you know I I somebody wrote a blog post the other day about juice cleanses you know and how it’s an opportunity to cut the fat um and that’s what’s happening in the industry right now and uh it can be painful in the moment um a few days in you know when you’re like uh just starting to get really hungry from the juice ganss but uh when you look back on it afterwards you’ve ended up in a much stronger position as a result and uh you know one of the the advice of the companies I’ve invested in and the companies I’m on the board of the companies i’ I’ve co-founded is over the last six months was you know top up the tanks your goal is to be able to survive the next two or three years and really build the company

[01:03:01] until we’re out of this uh out of this uh DL drums if you would for sure at the end of the day uh not running out of cash is your number one job as the founder and uh if you can get profitable fantastic if you can’t raise enough money to get to the point that you can get profitable I I’d love to share some of your fun companies that uh that you’ve LED and and backed cuz they’re uh extraordinary companies uh that uh sing to my heart so to speak right as as moonshot companies um I’m not sure we want to start but let’s uh let’s cover a number of them and give a sort of a top level description and if there’s a story as a piece of advice for entrepreneurs as you’re telling that that would be great where do you want to go maybe let’s start with a couple of the bill companies since we’ve mentioned them before Bill gr the CEO of Ideal lab in Pasadena uh one of the most consumate entrepreneurs and they’ll just you know just for a moment uh Bill comes up with his own ideas and he’s one of the most

[01:04:00] prolific thinkers and entrepreneurs on the planet we’ll typically back them with a quar million dollars and put a team together and and incubate them inside of uh ideal lab on Union Street and then spin them out uh a few Classics you’ve backed uh talk about them yeah so we’ve done now five energy technology companies together uh heliogen energy volt carbon C capture water from air and flowing energy and kind of going through those um heliogen is basically industrial solar where he can kind of take and concentrate solar energy and get up to temperatures north of a th000 degrees C so they can use this to break down thermochemical bonds and steel production cement production glass production and ultimately produce green hydrogen uh cheaper than any other means out there is is the thesis and I think a good story on this is Bill has started this company three times times this is the third iteration of it and uh at the end of the day the best entrepreneurs are so focused on I’m going to make the

[01:05:02] world this particular way that even if they uh fail twice they build the company again um and uh you know the prior times the the unit economics were not there the market was not there the technology was not there at this point we believe that it is there um and we have validation of that with significant customer traction um so that’s an exciting one I love going to the roof of IDE lab and there he’s got the uh the mirror units and it’s you know it’s Material Sciences and AI tracking software that matured to be able to do this and then the Market’s maturing right at the same time that you might be engineering and designing it the world’s changing and people’s and tax credits are changing and people’s you know needs absolutely um second one is energy volt yeah so this is grid scale energy storage you know if solar and so at this point solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels the problem is they’re intermittent and so you need some way to store the energy that is generally being produced at a time of day that isn’t the

[01:06:00] time of day that it is needed most and uh if you look to like lithium ion batteries the cost is prohibitive um so what they figured out how to do is basically make a more efficient form of gravity storage like Hydro where they basically take a crane and move around blocks again using computer vision to very efficiently store and then uh put the energy back into the grid when it’s needed and energy volt and heliogen have both gone public um both have major major you know uh Billion Dollar Plus many billions tens of billions of dollars of order book um kind of behind the idea and have gotten to the point where they’re not just ideas they’re demonstrated Technologies and now they’re just scaling them out to that customer base yeah love it what’s next on your list carbon capture um so carbon capture company exactly yeah it’s a direct air capture company so they’re pulling CO2 out of the air and probably two interesting stories from this one is between the time uh that we invested

[01:07:01] first and a later investment they basically completely pivoted the technology and when they when they brought in a CEO um he was just telling the story at our annual investor conference uh last week um when they brought in a new CEO he basically said guys we’re about to go scale this thing you got 60 days to check is there anything we want to change and the team basically came back built a totally new version of the system that was significantly more efficient before they went to to go scale and I think it was a great uh we often think that making changes is going to take longer or be harder uh than it may actually be and having a culture where there’s space to experiment and as a leader you’re actively encouraging experimentation even as the company grows and taking risk like that worst case scenario you keep scaling the current technology you have not a big deal but you give people 60 days man that company is going to be so much bigger as a result and uh the second thing is for a lot of these areas you got to pay attention to regulatory

[01:08:00] regulatory is one of the number one drivers obviously with carbon capture so it’s a bit of an unfair example but the when I invested in this company to be frank I was pretty skeptical uh I liked bill and I liked the area but there wasn’t the inflation reduction act yet um and you were kind of uh hoping that the technology was going to get uh cheap enough to match up with the current subsidies last year with the inflation reduction act it’s basically five times the amount of uh uh incentive for removing CO2 from the air that took this from like a good heart story to probably one of the most profitable businesses in the portfolio um overnight because of that change and and by the way this goes this goes back to the the the concept of timing like living long enough to live forever right and it’s like when do you start your company and can you continue it um you have enough capital or Revenue to keep going until the world shifts in this way uh to make it much

[01:09:02] more profitable for sure um so so that’s a good sampling of some of the bill companies and uh how about the Greg Wilder companies you’ve got a couple of Greg Wier Investments here yeah we got two uh one is called Toronto Wireless so they basically have built a way to deliver fixed Wireless to people’s homes that’s significantly cheaper than laying fiber and uh uses unlicensed Spectrum so you don’t have to go buy a bunch of spectrum and it’s kind of like magical almost where basically they send signal through noisy spectrum and they can reconstitute the signal out of that noisy Spectrum um which which basically has allowed them to go from nothing to $100 million in Revenue in you know less than a 24mth period scaling super fast yeah it’s it’s the power of computation and uh and algorithms um and uh and his newest company uh were and I’m an adviser for

[01:10:03] some of the companies here but espace in particular which you know having spent 30 years in the space business when I first heard Greg’s pitch here it was like dude you’re insane yeah no I mean Greg Greg is uh insane but right um and uh I Greg likes to keep things uh relatively quiet on uh on companies so I don’t know how much to say other than he’s figured out a next generation of satellite design that significantly reduces the cost um and has has a lot of customer interest at this point and um hopefully he’ll he’ll be sharing a lot more publicly soon one of the coolest things is basically it it might be a way to uh to add address the space debris problems that we have out there he’s been public about this where basically the satellites are designed to if they get uh some sort of debris in them ENT trap it and then kind of gracefully uh return through the atmosphere um which is uh you know not

[01:11:02] the core actual use case but a uh pretty exciting way to make space sustainable yeah I think the other public item he said is it’s 100,000 100,000 satellite constellation which is impressive right I mean historically back in the first satellite constellations like idium at 66 satellites um by the way it was supposed to be 77 satellites which is the atomic number for idium and then they change it to 66 which is the atomic number for dysprosium but it didn’t sound as good as aridium so I don’t think they changed the name but you know it used to be like you know 10 to 100 satellite and then comes starlink with uh with you know tens of thousands and uh Here Comes Greg with 100,000 and ultimately cheaper than starlink by a significant amount yeah um though starlink is up and operational and looking for it to to Greg getting his up and going uh you want to head towards the brain yeah so we’ve done a lot of stuff in Neuroscience but I’ll flag uh

[01:12:00] two things there one is a company called paradromics that’s building brain computer interfaces they have their kind of yeah it’s fantastic they I think they have the best technology in this space for addressing uh the populations that really need this medically um if you look at folks who’ve had a stroke and can’t communicate Um this can really become a way to restore full communication abilities um and they’ve demonstrated this in animals and should be moving into humans in the in the very near future um and then you know probably the area I’m most passionate about again I think about the world very simply is there are a lot of people who actually already have enough stuff today and of course spreading further abundance to them is great but the number one problem they face is enjoying what they already have and then there are of course huge portions of the world where I do a lot of my philanthropic work that uh don’t have BAS basic needs met and that’s a that’s a real problem and a real opportunity to to serve and to contribute but in the west the number one thing we’re facing is a mental

[01:13:01] health pandemic you know there are hundreds of millions of people diagnosed with depression anxiety it’s probably actually billions when you look at all of the kind of uh moderate effects of this and uh there is one tool that we’ve known for thousands of years that in a single couple of hour session can basically radically shift that and that’s psychedelic medicine um and in the 50s and 60s it became LSD is actually people don’t realize this LSD is the most studied compound in human beings on the planet um and what you’re seeing now is a new psychedelic Revolution where basically people are producing novel psychedelic compounds that can help with anxiety depression PTSD and maybe have less psychedelic effects be shorter acting and actually fit in a single Psychotherapy session with a therapist so that this could uh could scale hundreds of millions of people and the data that’s coming out of the clinic right now on M dma cybin and some of these next generation psychedelics is so promising that you have therapists who’ve been prescribing

[01:14:00] ssris for a long time clamoring to how do they get access how do they get their patients into clinical trials and we we invest in a company called Gilgamesh that we think is the best at uh these next Generation psychedelic compounds and we also invest in a company called uh Beckley scitec that uh has some other ones that are also complimentary anything else you want to flag for the for the community here your favorite children one one other one is axium space uh founded by another kind of uh serial entrepreneur who’s built quite a few exciting things Cam gafari and he’s got intuitive machines which is landing stuff on the moon uh Quantum space which we backed which is building kind of the infrastructure of CIS lunar space between uh here in the moon um and axium space which we’ve backed which is got basically a replacement for the space station uh and they’ve won that contract and are in the process of kind of uh delivering on that you know one of the things I find so fun and exciting uh now

[01:15:00] is the idea that space companies and fusion companies are Venture back companies that’s insane right these things that are always like you know there are the The Long Hall Government research projects that move at you know snail’s pace I mean there’s something like 70 Fusion back companies and there are you know dozens of VC launch companies I mean it’s amazing it’s amazing and that means that the entrepreneurs and the technology need to have created a convincing enough case that you know there is a relatively decent chance of a near-term return which means the speed at which the stuff is moving uh you’re in a fusion company too too yeah uh focused energy which is laser based fusion and recently like probably one of the most exciting things that happened last year in human history is nith the national ignition facility in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved net gain um nobody had ever actually demonstrated net gain

[01:16:01] before infusion and it basically took what was a science problem and made it a very expensive engineering problem and we uh we had been fortunate enough to have some of the foresight for that and backing kind of the best laser based uh team and approach out there and then we also did back Commonwealth Fusion which has gotten a lot of press and is a magnet based uh Fusion approach as well okay last chance any other um I think we’ve covered a good number there I I guess the last would be Aviation okay you got to talk about you got to talk about boom yeah so we I’ll start with Venus and then boom so Venus is Hypersonic Jets and this really today starts as a defense application but the promise is you know LA to Tokyo in an hour where you basically launch something like a space plane up kind of above the atmosphere and then it w rides waves basically along the edge of the atmosphere SKS along the top of the atmosphere yeah yeah yeah and uh so we’re we’re kind of the the initial investors in that and then uh little

[01:17:01] more near term is Boom supersonic which actually I was basically one of the first Angel Investors in back in 2012 2013 and then by the time I started priming movers it had matured enough to what we did like a growth stage investment in this and uh Blake is just a phenomenal example of everything you’re looking for in a world-class entrepreneur of he has uh no matter what has come up figured out how to tackle the issue it can be Capital issues team issues technology issues partnership issues some of which were public last year and he just always finds a way through um and they’re they’re delivering a supersonic Jet and they’re delivering one that is economical and that there are pre-orders to the tunes of billions actually tens of billions of dollars for at this point and really at this point you know that the plane is going to be built as long as they have the capital for it and the capital is coming together yeah I mean if if there I was going to say if there’s a category of company that I go and say a to hard

[01:18:02] just insane right uh Hypersonic and supersonic uh aircraft and doing it within a small private company and not I mean the reason it can be done is because it’s in a small private company versus a Boeing or McDonald Douglas or locked and so forth but still insanely difficult and um you know I I think the size of your konus I think is the right French term for taking on projects like that is amazing well I I always like to joke uh naive is a good compliment for the kinds of things that we do and we we have some some amount of courage and some amount of uh uh ignorance that comes with uh maybe not having watched some of the failures so spectat uh from the past but either way yeah we’ve T we’ve taken on some big projects and I think we’re we’re really fortunate that at least so far a number of them are uh are panning out but we got a lot more work to do to make them reality still too extraordinary so you

[01:19:01] know watch this channel for world changing billion person you know uh opportunities and you know if your success record holds out as it has and I hope it does where you’re seeing you know two out of 10 three out of 10 then some of these companies that portend for an exciting future are going to materialize as well all right the question I ask every guest at the end of the podcast which is you know if we were going to do a PML X prise or dayon SLO xprize you know uh hundred million challenge out there that want to inspire entrepreneurs philanthropist to go and focus on solving a problem that’s stuck or needs to be accelerated what would you want to do it on raising Consciousness imagine a prize that you know many of us have touched probably either through uh being with children or meditation or yoga or an Incredible accomplishment or psychedelic

[01:20:01] medicine an experience that kind of transcended our everyday Consciousness where we really embodied and were aware that we’re not just the little simple creature that we appear to be and that there is this vast interconnectedness between all of us imagine a way of making it possible for a day-to-day basis for most people to be living in that state of ious that that’s the world that I want to live in and it’s not pumping DMT into the bedroom while you sleep well somebody might submit that to the X prise but I think there’ be some side effects of that too yeah so it’s basically uh that through your day um you are you know we have amazing books like uh uh The Power of Now and the new Earth that that portends to the idea and the power of being present uh by the way one of the Technologies I use for being present I don’t have it on now but I have a watch that on the face it’s not a

[01:21:02] you know Apple watch it just says now just print it on the face so that if I’m I wear it on weekends or on vacations and when I go to see what time it is it says now okay you know be present because we’re always driven by our schedule and what we have to do next instead of being being present so that’s the tech now um take me beyond that one second so you want through the day at various points for some amount to be connected with the uh higher level of uh sort of the infinite wisdom out there yeah I mean I’m not proposing I I have thoughts about particular Solutions but I’m more kind of proposing uh I take the question as like what is the most important problem we face as human beings and uh that is worth directing everyone’s attention and awareness to and uh living as our deepest self and bringing that level of kind of caring compassion and awareness to to Our Moment to moment being at the end of the day if we were all doing that it

[01:22:01] matters a whole lot less what what’s happening with any particular technology um that’s kind of what we’re all after in a certain sense in my my book uh that I wrote future is fast and you think I closed out the book talking about the future of brain computer interface BCI the side of work that paradromics is doing uh and said you know in the future in which I’m connected to the cloud and you’re connected to the cloud and a billion people are connected to the cloud We are Becoming conscious connected to each other at a you know a new level sort of a a a meta a meta level that would be an interesting solution to it as well for sure yeah buddy where can people go and learn about the work that you’re doing and your team is doing at primover Labs yeah if you just go to our website it’s uh www.pr movers.com so Prime movers with s and then lab.com and uh the road maps you mentioned there uh take a second and describe those cuz I think for any entrepreneur who’s looking for how do I

[01:23:00] get inspired where should I be going what does the future look like these road maps are amazing yeah so we we basically realized we’ve been looking at all of these opportunities and they broke down into 100 plus sectors that we were kind of analyzing and we thought it would be helpful to us to understand what’s our view on green hydrogen is that a 2020s or 2030s or 2040s thing on uh psychedelic medicine on any of these particular areas and so we went and kind of uh took all the research we had done and published and organized that into this road map that takes each of the key Technologies we think are coming over the next few decades and Maps out how we expect them to evolve and what are like the current investable thesis versus future ones and we are not Omission so I’m sure there’s lots of stuff that we’re wrong about but we’d love for people to check it out and give feedback and ask questions and engage with it and we recently held a conference uh uh in the fall with 40 academics kind of giving their perspectives and takes on entrepreneurs and other folks from industry trying to kind of refine and

[01:24:00] hone this to make sure we’re presenting as uh uh viable of a vision of the future as possible beautiful ladies and gentlemen a dear friend a brilliant venture capitalist and entrepreneur philanthropist daon slos daon thank you for joining me today buddy yeah thank you Peter it was good to [Music] connect