YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Fontenot

lines on the record: 81
first: 2024-03-19
most recent: 2024-03-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And maybe 30, 40 people are there, but it's such an eclectic, interesting crew because these are the people that these founders who are in the zone of their life are choosing that they want to spend time with, with a little bit of social time that they're carving out. So that's from 7 to 9 p.m. At 9 p.m., we kick everyone out and we get back to work.”
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 week monastic retreat. We have an elixir bar with healthy drinks, smoothies, cacao, stuff like this. And it's a whole vibe at the house. And we don't invite the folks who come on Fridays. It's the founders and the batch. So the only way to get an invite is for a founder in the batch to invite you. And it's really cool because the people they end up inviting for the most part, they're just actually saying no to hanging out with people. The people they actually end up inviting ends up being some of the most interesting researchers in AI.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To people. You have them set up as text expanders in your phone and on your laptop. That's an example. So it's very concrete life hacks that immediately win you back more time than that. And then Fridays we have a community dinner. Community dinner is really powerful. This is an insight that we realized that's probably different than monasteries don't necessarily do. But pretty much we realized that the mental cost of your friends asking you to hang out, even if saying no is pretty high. Having to say no over and over again, some people are good at it. For most people, it's a challenge. A really good friend wants to hang out. It's tough to say no. So what we've done is we create a party full every week that's 7 to 9 p.m. on Friday. And any person who hits you up about hanging out, you have a text expander set up and you just send them a party full. So instead of having to say no, you just come for dinner Friday, come for dinner Friday, come for dinner Friday, come for dinner Friday, seven to nine p.m. on Friday. We don't allow any alcohol or substances in the house. It's essentially...”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To grab one other founder and go out to dinner with them. For the most part, as this arc of the week, the things that I'm mentioning each day are pretty light. Demo dinner is probably the heaviest thing. Then the check-ins 15 minutes. It's up to you. You don't have to go to dinner, but a lot of the founders really going deep with each other because they're such talented people in the batch. I feel so grateful to be able to spend the amount of time that I get to spend with the founders who join HFZero because these folks are so brilliant, man. They would never hire me. I feel like I somehow hacked life to be able to spend as much time as I get to with such brilliant people. Then Thursdays we'll have these what we call concrete workshops. They're 12 minute workshops. All of them are designed to save you more than 12 minutes within the first week from that workshop. So I share a lot of my secrets and stuff of how I organize my life and how I, an example of this is we help you set up text expanders. They're very concrete. So by the end of them, you have the 20 things that you messaged the most.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our speaker last week Eric and Kareem, the founders of Rample, come tomorrow. So that's Monday. Tuesday, we have check-ins with each team. And this is really where we're able to hold up the mirror and say, hey, fill us in on what's going on. What are your biggest challenges? And we don't necessarily give you advice or solve your challenges for you. We do two things. One is we ask questions and reflect back to you what we're seeing. This is what I mentioned earlier where we can see sometimes when there's a blind spot and just ask you, hey, do you think there might be something you're missing here? Is this actually the most important thing, stuff like this? The second thing that we do during those check-ins is we introduce you to experts one-on-one based on whatever challenges you're facing. This is one of the keys to our approach is we only work at 10 teams. So we can actually introduce each team to the exact expert. That's the best person in the world we know at each challenge that they're facing. So those are the two things we focus on for check-ins. There's like 15 minutes usually. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, we encourage the founders.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So maybe I can walk you through the week. That probably gives a better shape to the batch. So every Monday we have what we call demo dinner. It's the only mandatory thing in the batch because our whole thesis is around subtraction rather than addition. A lot of other programs, especially for first-time founders and stuff, they're like, how do we add in this programming, this content, this workshops, this and that, ours all about subtraction. So the only thing that you have to do during HF Zero is show up to demo dinner every Monday. Each team has two minutes to show what they built or what they sold. No presentation, no fanfare, no show. It's just this is product that we built over the last week, or these are numbers. Usually they just screen share their stripe dashboard. And maybe you tell the story of what impacted those numbers and stuff. And so it's really just actually just showing your real shit. So that's Monday demo dinners. We'll often have a guest speaker who's the founder of a multi-billion dollar company who we think has particular expertise that's relevant to the batch guillermo from Brazil.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one biggest challenge of your business, the one hardest thing, is not that you're not being productive. You're doing number two most important thing. You're doing number three, and you're spending all your time doing those things. And we might not necessarily know for sure what number one is. We can usually tell when they're blocking themselves or running away from that number one thing and being able to reflect that to them and create the space where they can figure that out, that's the biggest unblocking that people get. And that's the layer that we're able to work with people at the residency that's beyond the mundane. That's beyond the list of a hundred little things that take up your time that we subtract out. It's this deeper unblocking”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That gives them a really clear picture of what's actually going on for them, where they're getting in their own way. And often we'll find that the biggest distraction isn't some crazy distracting thing like partying or going out or your social life or this and that. It's actually the second most important thing that you could be doing in your business or the third most important thing you could be doing your business. And what we'll find is we're able to see so clearly because we're just pretty much living with you. We're able to see that wow and we can just bring it up in our check-in with the founders. Hey, it seems like you might be avoiding”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different than accelerators, incubators, other things. Why this residency thing is different. The residency thing isn't about advice. It's not about helping you fundraise. All the founders who are bars so high were the most selective startup program right now. And so the founders who get into HF Zero, they're the folks who would be mentors at incubators or accelerators and stuff. They don't need advice. They don't need help fundraising. Everyone wants to give them money What can be really powerful is if we're able to show them a mirror.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you are really in your zone as an engineer, you're writing code, you're getting out of the way and letting it flow in so much of the brilliance of engineering happens this way. And so being able to essentially hack this continual flow state, I'd say for most folks, maybe they get a couple hours of flow state a day. Maybe. I think a lot of folks never really reach full flow in their normal life. Whereas in HF0, you could have uninterrupted flow state for weeks. Really, the big unblockings are actually when you're holding yourself back. One of the powers of the residency is the surface area that we have with the founders. If you were just in your own apartment, we were trying to unblock things that are taking up your time. It would be really challenging. Because really what we're doing is we're watching how you're spending your time and then helping identify where we can win back your time. And one of the other things that we notice is where you're blocking yourself. When we say HF Zero is we don't really give advice to HF0. You're asking why it's...”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The small examples are a bit obvious like food. It sounds so mundane, but having rotating chefs that cook incredible food that's super healthy to your dietary preferences and a gong goes off at 1230 and Agong goes off at 6 and you just don't need to worry about time and you just hear this in the back of your awareness as you're writing code. It's like even the touch of having the gong. You're just coding. You're in the zone. It's not like some alarm that just completely throws you off. It's just something that enters the back of your presence. And you're maybe writing code you're in full flow and you just have a little light ping in the back of your head that's like a healthy, nutritious food that's delicious. That's upstairs and let the right stopping point. I should go and grab some. The actual amount of mental space that is saved up by that flow is massive. I always tell the founders at the beginning of the batch. The only thing that makes me angry, I don't really get angry, but the only thing that makes me angry is if you knock someone out of their zone.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the real power is in aggregate, it's like 100 little things. And when you constantly have someone looking out for you, watching out for you and just subtracting these things, getting these things out of the way in a monastery, most of the stuff that they're doing, you don't notice because they're doing a good job before it even distracts you, before it even gets in your way, before it even takes up your time.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amount you can get done is insane. And it's interesting. I mean, a lot of the things that we take care of individually are very mundane. We just figure out everything that you're, we only work with 10 teams at a time. So it's customized to each team. We just figure out what's actually taking up their time and we try to subtract that from their life. And so it's not like any individual thing I mention, like food or like laundry or like cleaning your room. Oh, yeah, you could hire someone for that. You could hire someone for that. You could hire someone for that. You could hire someone for 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
“Subtracts everything from your life so you can drop back into that zone you were in when you were building your first company and even deeper than that. You can drop into the zone of your life to build your next thing. People will ask us, they'll be like, oh, the startups that join the pre-seed or seed. And I'm like, honestly, like stage, it doesn't really matter. If you just stop everything that you're doing in your life for 12 weeks and you have someone else take care of everything.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a lot of success. You're probably angel investing. You're advising. You're getting invited to speak at conferences. You're maybe writing your first book. You have a thriving social life. Most of these repeat founders are either like married. They have a husband, a wife, or a fiance. They're living with their partner prior to the program. You got a lot of stuff going for you that's awesome. But you know that that wasn't the recipe that got your first company off the ground. And so the way that a lot of founders view HF Zero is that it's this button that you can press that just”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“HF Zero is essentially a 12 week residency. What we mean by residency is you live there. You actually live there. Pretty much everything in your life is taken care of so you can just build. So this vision I have of a world where people can just build and not have to worry about anything else. Hackathons give that to you for a weekend. HF0 gives that to you for 12 weeks. It's hard to get a business off the ground in a weekend. In 12 weeks, we've seen crazy stuff. We have a team in the current batch that launched their app a few weeks before the batch started and then just started hitting so much velocity during the batch day number 14 on the app store during like seven mil annualized revenue it's like nuts the results that we're seeing in those 12 weeks and the reason is that we essentially audit your time as a founder and we figure out every single thing that you're spending time on that isn't building product or selling product and we aim to subtract that from your life so you can just build and so the reason this is so powerful especially for repeat founders is that as a repeat founder you”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're taking the biggest swing of their life. And when they come in, they're not sure if it'll work. And then when they're walking out, there's a personal shift that happens deeper inside that you see manifested in the startup to us, our view is that startups are outer manifestation of someone's inner world. But the biggest thing that happens during HF Zero and the biggest thing that happens during a meditation retreat isn't the realization that you have during the meditation retreat. People build incredible things in 12 weeks. People say they build like make two years of progress in 12 weeks, but it's not even what you build there. It's the shift that happens and you knowing what's possible and knowing what you're capable of. You already knew you were a very capable person, but now you've unlocked another order of magnitude of that. And that plays out for the rest of your life.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“End, they're just like, wow, that was the most productive 12 weeks of my life as engineer and expanded what I thought was possible. A lot of these repeat founders will come in and they're building the hardest technical thing of their life, the hardest business of their life. And it really is at the edge. A lot of these founders, they already took a big swing before. Now they want to take the biggest swing of their life. They want to birth their life's work. A lot of them are building companies that not just from a technical standpoint, but really are at the edge 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
“Your relationship with what's possible shifts the thing that you're not sure if it can even be built all of a sudden becomes possible and you're like you're sitting there and you're like, wait, actually, you know what? If I have 12 weeks undistracted, if I have two weeks undistracted, I can build anything. The way I put it is that you can meditate anywhere. You meditate in your room. You really don't need anything. You can meditate anywhere. But for some reason, when you go on a retreat, you end up going 10, 100x deeper. I would even argue 100x deeper. Like you go to depths that you didn't know were possible. That's the big unlock. And I think similarly in HF0, we mainly work with repeat founders. A lot of these founders have done really legit stuff in the past. Five of the founders who joined the program in the last year built multi-billion dollar companies before this. They've built really impressive stuff. And then they come into HF Zero. And at the end,”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking forward to is this world where you can just build and not have to worry about anything else, not just for a weekend, but as a way of life. Yeah, hackathons gave that to you for a weekend with HF0. It's really my next foray into how do we expand that out? Right now it's 12 weeks, but really in the future, how do we create an institution that just takes care of the most creative people in the world, that takes care of the builders, and just allows them to 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
“And then I got hooked. And the key with the hackathon isn't just that space. It's similar to the monastery. It's all the things you're not doing. You're actually not going out on a Friday and Saturday night. That you're not trying to meet up with friends. You're not a bunch of things. You're just fully focused on building. And hackathons give you that for a weekend. And I got really into hackathons, ended up throwing the largest hackathon in the world, helped a bunch of universities start and scale their hackathons. But really, the vision I've constantly been.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much magic happened there. And the monastery is similar in that you don't have to be whacking your head at a problem, but you can just let it unravel because you have seemingly, I call it relatively infinite time to just sit in it. HFRO is similar. My vision from early on the hackathons, I was coding in that basement. And I was just like, oh my God, I just want more space like this. And I started to envision a world where people could just build and not have to worry about anything else. And I almost imagined being able to throw Pokeball that created this bubble and you could just jump in this bubble and just float in it and be plugged into the matrix writing code. That's actually my vision is just to be able to fully suspend yourself into the matrix and write code. And so I started thinking, how do I create more space for myself to do this? That was when I went to my first hackathon. I never really built anything before. And I was just like, whoa, a whole weekend where you can 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
“When I started coding, I was a freshman at Michigan. It's doing my first coding class. I decided to take accelerated intro to programming, even though I had never coded before, because at the orientation, they said, accelerated intro programming is for if you have four plus years coding experience or you just really passionate about programming. And I was like, well, I'm passionate about programming. I'd never coded before, but I'm in this class and it's so hard. The other kids in the class were incredible programmers already and I never, I thought we were going to type zeros and ones. And I just remember there were a few key moments in that class where there was a problem I didn't know how to solve. And I just went into the basement of the Eks building and I was like, I brought a bunch of mountain dew with me. I was like, I'm just not going to leave until I figure this out. And in that expanse where time ceases to exist and you're just solving the hard problem that you need to solve and there's nothing else.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beauty to being in a state of life where there's not really a space between the thing, the core thing that you're doing, there's just the thing. Just the breath. It was just the meditation. And so it's less about the specific things that they're adding to the experience and all about what they're subtracting. It's that you don't notice all the other things of life. Maybe you notice your body's aching. You're sitting for a while, but at least within their control, they've subtracted every single thing. Just so relaxing, your nervous system just relaxes into it of just knowing that there's relatively infinite time to just do the thing, whatever that means for you in the context of the monastery, it's meditation, in the context of HF0, it's writing code.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did three hours of yoga every day. That was super intense. And we meditated, and I wrote a ton on this retreat. If you think about the way that these things, which have been around forever, are operated. I'd love to go into as much detail as possible because I know it's very relevant for everything you're building now and what we'll talk about the rest of our conversation. Just to go through the details in as grand neural level as you're able of what they do so well to allow for a different kind of experience. The back of house of the monastery or whatever, the things that have been figured out over centuries, what stands out to you as most important? The biggest one thing is this. It's that you don't have to worry about time at all. Your relationship with time shifts drastically because I don't need to be keeping track of time. There's a gong that rings that lets me know it's time to eat. And besides that, I'm pretty much meditating. So there's some...”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is 10 days pretty much everyone that I talk to has done a 10 day and has stuck it out, has both a breakdown and a breakthrough. So, what was the longest stretch that you spent in any one place? I did a retreat in this beautiful rice valley in northern Thailand. It's called Prow for six weeks. At that point in life, I was spending a couple years where my main focus in life was meditation. I went on a lot. It was like two years of just seeking out different meditation masters and learning different techniques. This is the capstone, end of that period of my life.”
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 days. It's a finite amount of time. But if you haven't done a 10 day before stepping into your first day of a 10 day, you're like, wow, this is an expansive time. It's more time than I can even imagine. The 10 days really powerful. And they figured this out thousands of years ago. The important thing is that you have enough time to have a breakdown and a breakthrough in 10 days. That's the cycle. The distribution, almost everyone has within 10 days of just sitting and meditating with yourself, not writing, not talking, not reading, just being with yourself. Pretty much everyone has a breakdown and enough space for a breakthrough. Challenge of seven days is there's some distribution of people like myself one day seven have their breakdown.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pathway to the monster? In retrospect, it's much clearer. It was my first major heartbreak. In the moment, I didn't know that this was the reason why. But looking back, I couldn't handle it. I have pretty severe ADD. And so I was on ADD medication and I blamed being on the medication for things not working out. And so I stopped taking the ADD meds, but then I couldn't read. So I needed to build natural concentration. started meditating. In the beginning, it was really hard. I'd meditate for 15 minutes so I could read for 15 minutes. And then it became so much more than that. Can you tell me about the first day there? Well, the first retreat I did was a Guenca of Aposana retreat. It just felt so spacious to just be able to sit and feel like I had an infinite time. I think there's something about feeling a sense of abundant time that's really powerful.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guest today is Dave Fontenet, founder of HF0. Born out of Dave's experiences in monasteries across the world, HFZO is a 12-week residency for repeat founders to supercharge their next venture. For three months, 10 teams of engineers relocate to HF Zero's house in San Francisco. During the residency, everything is taken care of, so their sole focus is on building. It's one of the most interesting incubators I've come across, and we discuss the model and its monastic origins in detail. Please enjoy this conversation with Dave Fonten.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is in Best Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other resources to keep learning at join Colossus.com.”
2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2024-03-19 · Invest Like the Best · Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source