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Dave Fontenot

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2024-03-19
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2024-03-19
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  1. “And then I met her, and she was pretty much like, why are you here? And I told her, Oh, I came here to keep this thing alive, but I don't know if it's possible. And she just believed in me at that moment where I could have let this whole dream, this whole vision fade. And next thing I know, I was giving a speech in manner in front of a bunch of people in politics in Taiwan. helped me get the visas and then I was able to fly everyone out to Taiwan to run the first full bachelor during COVID was what came to mind when you asked the kindest thing that someone's done for me.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Have a close mentor who's passing away soon, and the kindest thing she ever did for me is We started HF0 February 15th, 2020 in New York. Two weeks in, I had to shut it down because of COVID. But I knew we were onto something. And so I heard there was no COVID in Taiwan and I flew there. I spent six months learning Mandarin. I was like, I got to keep this thing alive. But by the time my Mandarin was getting good enough and I was six months in there, I lost faith that it could be pulled off because I kept asking people to help me and I couldn't figure it out.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Faster than ever before. I just hope that as people see that, as people witness that, they're going to realize those other 2400 teams, a lot of them are really strong, want something like this. And they're not being met. There's a ton of demand for a product like this residency or just a product that takes care of you as human beings that you can just build not worry about anything else. I would just love to see venture find more ways of offering that.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “When I think about Venture today, I'm just like, how are we not taking care of our founders as human beings? We were doing Venture today is we're taking the top Lymphic athletes and just giving them money, telling them see you at the Olympics. And there's just such an opportunity to actually take care of founders as human beings. And I just want to see more of that. We bring in a doctor of physical therapy the first day of the batch who works with you to put your monitor at the right height, your keyboard at the right height, set up your body for, if you are going to code for 14 hours straight, how should you sit? What exercises should you do when you take breaks and stuff? This should be table stakes, man. Coding for extended periods of time is actually pretty rough on your body, especially as you get older and early stage investors should take care of their founders at a way higher degree. And I think it's inevitable. I think as right now what we're doing is working so well and it's working so well on that it's attracting the top founders in the world, but it's also working so well in that they're making progress.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “into hackers. And that's that shift. It's about agency. It's like an internal shift that happens. And I remember 10 years ago, I tell people, hey, when they built Facebook, it was really hard to build an app like that. Now, if you wanted to build a basic app like what Facebook was, you could do that in your first weekend building stuff. That barrier is just going to continue going down, but it's still going to be about this shift in agency. The most important thing is having a vision, having an idea of something that you want to build. But then you're going to be able to manifest that much quicker. But the real key is that shift where you actually believe that you can do it.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I actually think when we were running the hackathons early on, I would be taking a bus to a hackathon. If someone didn't show up for the bus, sometimes I'd say, hey, hold the bus, and I would go to the center of whatever campus we were on and just convince random freshmen to jump on the bus and come to the hackathon. And I wouldn't look for the freshman who had done a CS class. I would look for the freshman who have ideas. I'd say, hey, do you have any app ideas? Hey, do you have any app ideas? Hey, do you have any app ideas? Maybe the third or fourth person would be like, oh, yeah, actually, I have this app idea. And then tell them, hey, you can build that this weekend. Oh, but I've never coded it before. And I'm like, do you have a laptop with you? Yeah. So even the barrier 10 years ago with hackathons wasn't that high. If you actually gave yourself two days where you subtract everything else from your life, you could actually build something. So I think a lot of people who identify as non-technical end up opting out of taking those two days, but even someone who previously identified as non-technical could come to a hackathon and build something. And so what I would really tell people is hackathons aren't just for hackers. Hackathons turn normal people.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “What it means to be technical is just going to shift. You will be technical if you're building stuff. But the key is what I mentioned earlier is that felt sense. The key is way less about your exact coding skills. It's way more about you seeing something that's possible that doesn't exist yet and you being in the felt sense of that vision, actually seeing something. For me, it's the world where people can just build stuff, the world where people can just build shit and not have to worry about anything else, where they can just suspend themselves in the matrix, suspend themselves in that bubble and just build whatever that vision is for you, what's going to happen is that if you actually do have that vision, you're going to be able to build it much faster. You're going to be able to build it much easier. The barrier for that's going to be lower. The other thing is that as more people are able to build stuff, you actually start seeing more possibilities as you know what is possible. You start envisioning more possibilities. To me, the technical non-technical thing is actually more of an identity.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “To someone that we know to try to get them to donate $500 to the hackathon. Because I knew if they got one yes email, then the hackathon would happen. So I'd really start with why and then think about the one concrete thing I could get that would set things in motion. And so that's what I'm trying to figure out with residencies right now. So if you're listening to this, you're thinking about starting a residency. One thing I'd say is just start it. Don't ask us for permission. Just do it. And then two, I need to figure out what the lightest mechanic I can do on my end that actually takes the people who are thinking about starting them or who are starting them and trying to get them going sets them fully in emotion.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Really talk about why we were doing it. I talk about why do we want to build this big hackathon. I remember this is actually from my meditation teacher from Dalai Dama, this guy from Israel's retreat. He would always say, we run the risk of no transformation, that your hackathon could go smoothly, but actually the risk is that people come to your hackathon and leave the hackathon, the same person. And so the real opportunity there is the transformation. This is what I mentioned earlier. So I tell the teams, I'm like, hey, if y'all throw this hackathon, not everyone, but some percent of the people, it might even be pretty high. It might even be like 40% of the people are going to have their entire life changed. They're going to walk in the door of that weekend and walk out the door a different person. And then what I would do is I would say everyone, the one thing you need to know about organizing a hackathon is that everyone has to help with fundraising. So everyone pull out your laptop and let's all send at least one email.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So, when we started MHACS at the end of the hackathon, I started at Michigan, it was the largest hackathon in the world, and it was the first hackathon I ever threw. At the end of it, I gave a speech that was like, hey, look, there's no good reason the largest hackathon the world is here at Michigan. It's a good school, but it's not the best. The only reason this isn't happening at your school is that you haven't started it yet. So if you want to start the hackathon at your school or you want to scale it up to this size, here's my Facebook link, bitly slash hell yeah, any number of L's I just ran a script, hit me up and I'll come to your school and I'll help you get it started and students from 28 of the 35 schools hit me up. So I dropped out two weeks later and just started traveling to these different universities helping them get their hackathons off the ground or helping them scale them up if they already had one. I really started zeroing in on figuring out what is the lightest touch way I can increase the chance that that school ends up having a mega hackathon. What I do is I go to a lot of the universities way before they threw the hackathon. I tell them, hey, call a meeting with your whole hackathon team and then I would”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Love writing code and stuff, but there's something about being seen in the right way by someone who actually understands you, not just understands your work, but understands you when they see what you've built. And this is the part that I think most people don't understand. And I think even most hackers don't understand about themselves that I think is the first principle that's led me to success building hackathons that people love going to.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Still working on this definition, but I'm zeroing in on it. My definition of hacker is essentially an artist who's not attached to any medium of expression. It's essentially an unshackled artist. And this is important to understand that hackers are artists. I think a lot of people view engineers and because we use the word engineer, they don't view it in the space of creative expression, but you better believe it's creative expression. The element of being an artist that I think people neglect with hackers is understanding that it's really about expression. I realized this when I was running the hackathons. I started thinking about how do we end the hackathons in the right way. We end up coming up with this whole expo format that pretty much all the hackathons switched to. But the key insight here is that there's something about being seen in what you're building that's actually really important. Fun to build. A lot of hackers like.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And so I think more than ever right now, it is crucial for founders to be steeped in first principles of working backwards from their customer. Right now I'm seeing more rampant than ever technology in search of a problem, hammers in search of nails. And so we really look for the founders who understand their customer and are incredible at building stuff. But really, if we're thinking about the business stuff, the key is, are they talking to their customer? How well do they understand their customer? Are they building backwards from their customer? I don't care what tools they use. I don't care if they use React on the front end or Angular. I don't care. I care about, do they actually understand their customer? Are they building something that solves their problem?”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So, we're industry agnostic, and we back the most brilliant engineers as early as possible. That's our thesis. And I always tell our team to stay non-religious. Doesn't matter, crypto's up, crypto's down, AI's up, AI's down, just how do we stay non-religious about it all and just keep backing the most brilliant engineers as early as possible? That said, the most brilliant engineers constantly are trying out the latest technology to give them an edge. And so our view of AI is that AI is a tool, not an industry. And it's a tool that's generally useful across just about every industry. And the founders who don't find ways to leverage it will get disrupted by the founders who do. So people like AI residency and I'm like, we look for AI hackers. We look for hackers who are messing with these tools because if you're not, you will get beat by founders who do. But it's less important to us whether they're in quote unquote AI company. I really don't buy this idea of AI company so much unless you're building a foundation model. Who's your customer? That's what type of company you are.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “An efficient process where you actually get to know investment partners as humans. And this is why our demo day is so special right now is that we only have roughly 10 teams demo, two minutes per team, 20 minutes. The rest of the time as a GP, you can just go talk to the founders that you want to get to know and get to know them as human beings. And each team sets up an experiential version of their startups. You can actually experience their startup. And not only do you get to see their startup, you get to see their personality. And we only have 44 seats at our demo day. We only allow each firm to send one GP, no junior partners, no associates. So we really have been trying to create a space where the founders can just get to know these GPs as humans. Because who am I to pick which GPs they should work with? They should work with the GP that believes in their vision that they really resonate with. And that's going to be able to help them in the ways that they need, that they need help.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “One's really hard. I'm trying to figure this one out. I think for us, for every founder, it's about them finding the right fit partner for them. And so really we've been thinking a lot about the thing that founders waste the most time on within six months of HF Zero is if they do a fundraise. That is the thing that they waste the most time on. I want to save them as much time as possible. Our whole thing is about taking care of you as a human is about being human driven. And so how do we create?”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Step ahead of everyone else because we're so close to our customer. We pretty much live with our customer for 12 weeks. So that's the key.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I try not to look at what other people have tried because honestly, even if you did a lot of things right with residencies, if you didn't have Emily, you wouldn't have been successful executing it, a much more on the Peter Thielen on the learning from failure is popular to talk about, but at least in the context of doing new things does not teach you everything. I'd say the biggest thing that we learned is just looking at all the programs other than YC, is that every program that tried to go ahead to head with YC lost because they got the founders that YC didn't accept. And so that was probably the biggest learning. And so we just engineered a program that went after a different demographic than YC. But I try not to learn too much from them. And really, I think there's a power and we don't even spend that much time thinking about YC. We really try to think from first principles just around what our customer wants, what the founders want, what they need. And we know that if we can stay in touch with that, we'll constantly be.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “For the specific demographic that you're targeting, who's your audience? So for us, that's repeat founders and first time founders with breakout traction.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Pretty much no other program that's really been able to crack going to the right of the bell curve from YC. And we really spent a lot of time being intentional. You don't want to compete with YC. YC is so good at what they do. I'm not going to compute with YC on giving advice. They have so much data. They give incredible advice. Gary, Michael Cyb, those folks are fucking awesome at what they do. And if you try to go head to head with them, you have no chance. So we did is we spent a bunch of time thinking about what demographic isn't being served right now by YC and then we built towards that demographic. That's how we came up with our deal. That's how we came up with the programming. That's how we came up with the messaging. That's how we pick the founders and stuff. So most of the founders doing HF serial aren't considering any other program. And the key is that any residency that wants to start needs to be thinking in the same way. If you try to go head to head with even with HF0, with YC, you're going to end up getting the founders that don't get into those programs. So the real key is how can you engineer your program to be an incredible fit”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Any potential financial return is knowing that I love doing this so much and that if I don't find the best teams that end up making this sustainable, then I don't get to keep doing it. So that would be the key. But yeah, Waterloo, Stanford, MIT, Michigan, all My hunch is that. You have to start with the right side of the bell curve. That's why we've started with the best founders in the world.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Inevitably, there will be a residency at most major engineering universities where you can take a semester off and just build. The key, though, is that they actually do the residency fund model because you don't want to be in a residency if you're not with other people who are as driven as you. PG talks about this all the time. The problem with co-working spaces and a lot of accelerators and incubators try to do YC but with a co-working space. The reason that doesn't work is that if you're not insanely selective, you're going to have two things. One, nascent ideas get shot down before they freely bloom because most ideas seem shitty in the beginning, even if they end up being really Airbnb probably for a lot of people, they're like, what? The second thing though is you need to be around people who are as driven and as curious as you. So this is why the residency fund model is so key is that it forces the organizer to know actually there's accountability. If you don't get incredible teams, you don't get to keep doing this thing that you love. That is so motivating for me. Way more motivating than”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “We're after a different talent in that. We mainly work with founders who are 28 to 35 who are EP founders who are much more experienced than college students, but there's going to be a residency like this at every college for sure, 100%. There was already something like this at Waterloo called Velocity. It's not quite the same anymore, but it was like dorm that you lived in if you wanted to build stuff.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Batch. Her 101s with the founders end up giving her the insight to know just the right way to nudge the culture of the batch to be what the people in the batch need. And before this, she's the best living community builder I know. Anywhere she goes, any city she goes in the world, not just for work for HF0, any city she goes, she went to Portugal a year and a half ago. Next thing you know, there's a 16 person house in Portugal. She goes to Croatia sailing. Next thing you know, 48 friends are sailing for a week together. Anywhere she goes, I mean, a lot of our friends say that anywhere Emily is home. I don't know how you find more Emily's because I don't know if they exist. I probably know more engineers than just anyone else knows North America, that pairing, someone who deeply understands hackers combined with someone who deeply understands living communities and people living together. I think it's not just finding one person. It's actually finding that type of...”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “She can see when you're afraid. Doesn't matter how composed, she just sees through it. And so she doesn't do check-ins with the founders on their business. She does check-ins with the founders on them as a human being. And we essentially make adjustments to the batch. Every batch, we make adjustments that are specific to the human beings in that batch. It's funny. Two batches ago, we rewrote the values a new way to fit that batch better than this batch we're swinging it the other way We're nudging things the previous batch people weren't hanging out enough. They were so in the zone working that they almost afraid to talk to each other, knock each other out of the zone Whereas then in this batch people have so much chemistry between them that they almost like each other too much to hang out every batch is different pretty much every batch to be totally honest with you halfway through just about every batch it would break if it wasn't for Emily She has a one-on-one with every founder individually at some point in the”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I don't know if there's other Emily's in the world. She's one of one. She has such an insanely high level of empathy. She's able to see the founders way beyond their company, really see them as a human being, really see.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Together in harmony. All of this to say really you'd need to find more folks like my co founder Emily. She's really the secret sauce to the residency.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “That's a good question. I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes founders good founders. I have probably like 20 friends who have started unicorns and stuff. I don't have as much training data on other people who have started residencies successfully because actually outside of our residency, I don't know another one that I really look up to yet. But our hope is to actually inspire a whole wave of residencies. And internally, we started bringing our attention more to this idea of essentially backing other residencies and helping them get off the ground because we realized how hard it is. The first year and a half of HF Zero, we lived in the house. And if we didn't, it wouldn't have worked. And this is where people, oh, what if big fun copies y'all? I actually, I would love more people to start residencies. And I would love to help you because I actually don't worry about competition at all. There's so many little things that you need to get right to make these work and even have adults, especially with strong personalities or founders living.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Spend a ton on Schounder doing what we do with how well we take care of the founders. There's pretty much no other way to do it other than this residency fund model. So to your question, that is another key part of the only way you can justify the amount of expense that we spend per founder is if you're getting equity upside in their business. And really our fund is structured around $10 billion plus outcomes. We're really looking for the founders who are taking the biggest swing of their life. Like maybe their last company was worth $2 billion. Now they're taking a swing that could be a generational company could be a hundred billion dollar company could be the next NVIDIA. That's really what we're looking for, people taking that big of swings.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “500K is more than enough to do that, to bring on someone else if you need to bring on someone else to pretty much anything that's taking up your time be able to actually bring on third parties or pay third parties to win back that time. So that's another part of it. And then on the LP end, we've actually done a bunch of modeling to structure the deal to make sense for LPs. But essentially, I asked LPs, like, what's the best deal that I can give founders that you feel good about? And then I worked backwards from there. I think most funds try to ask founders what the best deal the founders are willing to give them is. Whereas my approach is actually to LPs, hey, what do you need to see? And then trying to give the founders the best deal I can give them because my goal, I've done a lot of inner work on understanding what drives me. And I'm not really driven by money. I want to work with the best founders in the world. So our deal is structured so that it works for these top repeat founders who wouldn't necessarily consider a program that's taking 7%. But at 3% for the exact product that they're looking for that no one”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “So it's easier for us to not set a valuation. So that's one side of it. The other side is that we actually want to give you enough cash where even if you don't do other venture, roughly half of our team's already raised around before they did the batch, and then other half were the only venture money that they're taking, maybe the only venture capital they'll ever take. We want to give you enough money where you actually can leverage capital to win back time during the batch.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Not necessarily magic, but it's intentional. So there's a few goals that we had one we didn't want to set a valuation for your company. So a lot of the founders that we're backing are ridiculously strong founders. I mean, Alex Atala, the founder and CTO of OpenSea, started his next startup with us, Andrew D'Souza, the founder of Clearbank, started as next startup with us, David Vork, the founder of Siacoin, started their next startup with us. These are all repeat unicorn founders. We have a founder who we just accepted our first team for the next batch who IPO'd his last startup. Something about setting a valuation for them early on just doesn't feel right. So we really tried to engineer it where we don't set evaluation at all. So that was one of the goals because honestly, like some of these founders, one, they don't even need a raise in the beginning. They're not looking for venture capital. They're not looking at other programs. They just want to do HF Zero because the only thing they care about is their time. And we're the only product built from the ground up to win them back time. So often we're like, especially for these top repeat founders where their only investor or they're raising around ridiculous terms.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Don't pay anything. So, our model is that we take 3% of each startup and then we invest 500K uncapped. That's it. Simple. We did a ton of research on this, and we wanted to make it really easy for founders to just be able to understand the deal. So it's 3%, 500 can capped that converts at the price of your next round.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Maybe we make some introductions. No, what do you do with Olympic athlete? You'll figure out every single thing in their life that you can make better. You get them the best coach in the world. You get them the best dietician in the world. You put them around the best peers in the world. You put them around other Olympic athletes. In 50 years, there's no way venture looks like what we're doing today. The equivalent, we're giving Olympic athletes money and telling them, see, there's no way. In 50 years, people are going to be dropping into these residencies. They're going to be dropping an institution that actually just takes care of pretty much everything in your life so you can just build. And so much potential will be unlocked.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Takes advantage of him this way. How is there not an institution for people who are in the prime of their career where people can just build and not have to worry about anything else? And the fact that we don't have an institution that creates that space for people hurts me inside. And that's why I feel so motivated to be building HF0 is that really this question of how do we as a society take care of our most creative people right now we don't we maybe give them money in some industries and tech and music and film we give them money but we don't actually take care of them as a human being and the analogy I would give is what we're doing today in venture is the equivalent of taking the top Olympic athletes in the world and just giving them money and saying see you at the Olympics”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Right now, only 10 teams get to go through this, and I love working with 10 teams. I don't necessarily want to scale up what we're doing, but I think actually there's just a missing institution in the world, man. Right now, a third of people in the US get to go to college now, get to go to this institution where they get to spend two to four years of their life being curious about whatever they want to be curious about. Not everyone.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “His co founder Victor told him one day he's like, Hey, that moment when you hit your limit, that's actually when the workout starts. When you can find what's there that allows you to keep going. You hit your limit. And so It's that when you're sitting in meditation and you have a distraction, it almost pulls you out, but you like bring it back again. When you're running, you keep running even when you feel like you hit your limit. What is there that motivates you? So that would be my recommendation is to actually just get in touch with the thing that motivates you. If you can actually be on the edge of your curiosity, there's authenticity there that can't be replicated any other way.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Yeah, meditate. Yeah. The answer is pretty clear. And this means different things for different people, but creating space to meditate. For some people, that means running. For some people, that means swimming in the bay. For some people that means sitting on a cushion and breathing, but figuring out what it is for you that really gets you in touch with yourself when it's not yourself on your phone or on your laptop connected to the world, connected to something deeper inside, what actually pushes you to keep going when you're running and you're tired and you almost have nothing left to give, but then you keep going, what's right there? For some people, it's lifting weights. And actually, one of the previous HF0 founders, Diego Rodriguez from Crea AI, he came by the house the other day and he was talking to some of the founders in the current batch and he was talking about how when he was in HF Zero they would go work out every day in HF Zero we really have an emphasis on exercise as part of what makes you most productive and he said he would hit his limit and then he'd stop and then”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Talking about it from different perspectives, but there's this felt sense, there's this place that they're talking about, that is alive in a way. It's live because as they're talking about it, they're seeing it. Often I'll notice that the founder's eyes are off into the distance, looking to the side of me, not directly at me, because they're looking at the future. They're looking at this vision that they have. They're feeling into this felt sense. And so my favorite questions are the questions that can get in touch with that felt sense. Some part of that can be vision. Another part of it can be motivation. What at a deep level is motivating that founder?”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “And Vitalika was crashing on her couch, and I remember thinking he was telling us about all the things we don't need government for anymore. Same stuff he's saying today, by the way. But at that moment, I was like, I'm not sure if this guy is crazy or if he's visionary. And at that moment, when he was trying to convince us to buy Ethereum, early on, I thought he was crazy. Whoops. I realized in retrospect to reviewing that experience the difference between crazy and visionary is consistency. When someone is visionary, they're not necessarily always right about their vision, but they're speaking from a felt sense of something. They're able to feel into something. They're seeing something that doesn't yet exist in the world. They're actually able to see something. They actually are visionary. Then when they talk about it, they might not have the perfect words, but you can tell that they're talking about the same thing because they can see it. And maybe they're talking about it from different angles.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Best questions are when you give the founder space to tap into their aliveness or their felt sense of what they're building because that's the type of thing that you can't really prepare an answer for. And you can just feel it. The founder's eyes will light up. They're not talking from a, oh, I memorized this before. They're not talking from the, this is the story I've told over and over again. They're actually talking from somewhere much deeper than that. They're talking from felt sense of the thing. You know where I learned this from is I met Vitalik. He was crashing on our couch at Mission Control, Mission Control is this house I lived in in San Francisco when I first dropped out and moved out there. That was in some ways some of the inspiration for HF Zero because so many.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “So much can be built in 20, 40 to 48 hours, especially when you're in continual flow state. So essentially, we look for the most brilliant engineers who are already the most productive engineers in the world because our product, HF0, amplifies their productivity the most. If you're already one of the most productive, let's call 10X engineers in the world, HF0 makes you 100x engineer.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “A lot of the teams that get into HF Zero, I mean, people ask, Oh, do you back teams before they have product or before they have idea? The people who end up getting an HF zero, even between applying and getting the interview, if they haven't built something, they probably don't build fast enough to get into HF0. Most of the teams in HF0, a lot of teams, especially bigger teams, plan in terms of quarters. Some startups plan in terms of months, some startups plan in terms of two-week sprints. The teams that get an HF0, they plan in terms of days. In two days, they can ship end-to-end product or end-to-end feature and end-to-end changes. And so we're able to evaluate this better than anyone else because of our experience with hackathons. Well, usually a whole business can't be built in a hackathon. No one knows better than us what can actually be built in 24 to 48 hours. And actually for the top engineers within incredible product sense.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Are going to be able to attract even smarter engineers than themselves. That's the brilliance that we look for, and it's reflected in their writing, it's reflected in the way they communicate, it's reflected in the way they write code, it's reflected in the way their product feels. In terms of more specific things, the three things that we look for in founders that we think are the winning formulas, grit, storytelling ability, and product sense. And our heuristic for product sense is how quickly can the founding team ship end-to-end consumer grade product. I think actually most engineers can't. Doesn't matter how much time you give them. It's venture to say 90% of fang engineers can't ship end-to-end consumer grade product. And it's not that they're bad engineers. It's that the skills required to contribute to a large system and the skills required to ship end-to-end product as a small team are just disjoint. They don't teach this in school. And so we really look for the top engineers in terms of this, what we call product sense.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Residencies, there's some stuff that's popping up. There's Neo for younger founders, there's the residency. Nick is running. But right now we have about 2,500 teams who apply to each batch. And we only accept 10. So it's 2,400 plus teams that want to join residency. There's just not capacity. And so it's really challenging. My co-founder, Evan leads our admissions, and he actually uses LLMs to sift through the applications and get what he's looking for. We're a people driven firm. We're not a thesis driven firm. We back the most brilliant engineers as early as possible. That's been my thesis from day one when I started investing. And so that's really what we look for is this brilliance. The word brilliant has this connotation of a light shining that other things are attracted to. And so really my belief is that the only real defensible moat is having the best engineering team in the world. And so we really look for founders who”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Honestly, this last application process were 40 teams that we thought was crazy for us not to back. There's just so many incredible teams that want to do this residency, that want a residency right now. And there's not really any other.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Yeah, for sure. My co-founder, Emily, really helps a lot of the founders navigate this and stuff, but it's really about being intentional. It's setting up that date night that you have time carved out where you're fully present in the same way that you're fully present during the program with your company, with code, bringing that same level of presence to partner when you are with them because you're not going to have as much time for them during the program. But I'd say most founders, if their partner doesn't live in San Francisco, they'll visit the partner will visit or they'll visit every other week. And then if they live in San Francisco, usually we'll encourage them to set up a date night once a week.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “It's palatable, and really, a lot of the founders who do HF Zero, and some of the founders have kids for the founders in our current batch already have kids, but most of the founders are in this demographic of their repeat founder, had a lot of success in the past, but they know they need to take the biggest swing of their life before they have kids. And often their partner, their husband, their wife, their fianc ⁇, hey, when are we going to have a family? And so actually the partners end up really liking the idea of the program because they're like, oh, if they can get their company off the ground faster, then we can have a family sooner. If it could be longer, it should be longer. And in fact, after probably half the founders, after each HF0 batch, try to recreate HF0 in their lives after that. When you're first signing up for it, I think 12 weeks is already a long time to be in the monastic flow state. So it is powerful that it has ending. But actually once people hit week three, week four, week five and they're in flow, a lot of folks wish they could just have that.”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Why not even call it three months? The reason for this is funny. So most of the founders are living with their partner prior to the program. The average age of founders in HF Zero is 28 to 35. And 12 weeks is the longest we can convince the partners to be on board with it for. Even if we say three months, the partner's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, three months. But 12 weeks”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Saturday and Sunday, people are in the zone. There is a big emphasis on talking to customers during HF Zero and in company building in general. So Saturdays and Sundays often end up being the most continual flow state for coding. Because Monday morning you're meeting with customers who are expecting a whole new product that you've built for them for exactly what they need. So Saturdays and Sundays, the house is usually really quiet. And that's where people feel like the most uninterrupted time to just build”

    2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source