YouSaid · the spoken record

Greg Isenberg

lines on the record: 48
first: 2021-09-17
most recent: 2021-09-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Exactly. If you're listening, this could be finally your wake up call to get involved in Web3 and community-based businesses. I hope you're as excited as I am.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So I spent a lot of time on Twitter. I love that platform. So you can find me on Twitter. Just my name at Greg Eisenberg. And then in my Twitter bio, you'll see a link to late checkouts Twitter or Nate Checkout's website in my newsletter. So go check that out, have some fun. DMs are open.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business, like there's nothing wrong with that. And I think that we need to remove that stigma of raising venture capital is good and bootstrapping is bad. And actually the founder of Microfire is a great Twitter follow if you don't follow him already. Andrew Gezdeki. And he just launched, I think it's, what is it, bootstrap.com. It's like a competitor to tech crunch and they only talk about bootstrap companies because he was tired of people celebrating the venture round. Oh, this company raised $2 million. This company raised $4 million. No, no. This is about four boot trappers, buy bootstrappers. And that's an exciting trend.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of entrepreneurs who are going to create something who create it maybe quickly or get some level of scale there at like 500k or million dollars AR and they don't want to raise venture capital and like scale it and go through that process. And there's just an opportunity there for someone like us to be like, hey, you built this amazing community. We know how to take it from X to Y. You want to get paid for your work, which is totally fair. Let's go and go after that. And I'm excited about that because it gives opportunity to studios like ours who can get and help scale some of these communities and businesses. And it also gives optionality for founders who no longer have to go out and raise venture capital and swing for the fences if they don't want to. There's nothing to be wrong about starting a bootstrap business, getting it to, and just, you know, if you're passionate about something, you want to create this.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so full disclosure, first of all, I'm an investor in micro acquirer or late checkouts and investor in microchoir, which is a marketplace to buy and sell small companies. And I think that's like the reason we invested was because exactly what you said. We believe that there's”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No code tools or these infrastructures that you can go and build so cheaply. And that's why I think Studios is a really compelling model for a lot of entrepreneurs.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I believe that startup studios, which is really a factory, a startup factory is going to be Sharing learnings across teams. And why do I think studios are going to be more and more prevalent? Well, I think the cost of creating a startup today is so much less than it was. You can go and create a startup today, 50 grand, 100 grand, 10 grand, $1,000. Like if you would put me in the back of the, you know, put me in the corner and say, hey, what would be a startup for $1,000 that you can create that could be for the fat fire community? And you can do that now because it's so quick to create and so cheap to create. The hard part is distilling the insights, right? It's like going to those places on Reddit, going to those places on Facebook groups, going to those YouTube comments and trying to distill the insights coming up with the product ideas, shaping that minimal viable products. It's simple. And then using all the infrastructure that exists that's given away for free often through platforms like Google, et cetera. They're giving you these.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Invest. We invest in community-based products and we do about 15 to 20 investments per year and also looking to acquire one community-based company per year as well. So we're building this ecosystem. That's why I like using the Berkshire analogy. It's building this ecosystem around investing, owning in this future.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. So late checkout has a thesis. Now that you know me now, the thesis is community-based products outperform non-community-based products. Shocker, obviously, that's what I'm working on. And it's a holding company that almost like the Berkshire Hathaway of community and community-based products. And we've got three business units to go after this mission. One is a product studio where we incubate our own startups zero to one. So we might say like, hey, let's go build a co-working type or work for first metaverse and we'll go and fund it ourselves and build it. We've got also a product design agency, which is the leading product design agency for community-based products and community first products. So we work with some of the biggest brands in the world to go and help them figure this out and transition to this new economy, the community economy, as you mentioned. And the third is we have a fund, which we just”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but someone probably should. Facebook's trying. I think Mark Zuckerberg just did a demo of what a virtual boardroom could look like. And it's like you put on your Oculus VR set and you can talk to people and converse with people. But there's opportunities beyond. I think Facebook might win a portion of that, but I think there's tons of opportunities for startups to go and create what is working in a metaverse look like. I'll tell you right now, it certainly doesn't look like Zoom today. Like it certainly doesn't look like Hollywood Squares, basically, in boxes. This doesn't feel like this is the end all and be all of working in the 21st century. So tons of opportunity.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're on Instagram, you're on Facebook, you're on Snapchat. That's where you're spending your time. Metaverse land, I think what would happen is you'll have a handful of those places that you'll go to. Some might end up being work-related places, meaning like, what is co-working look like from a virtual first perspective? Some will be Minecraft, which might be for eight to 14 year olds. Some might, you know, you're just going to have these different use cases for different demographics and different use cases, which honestly is better for the ecosystem, I think, to have multiple products versus just one or two or three central companies.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Roblox is very platform, we'll see where it goes. We'll see who wins this metaverse world. I can't tell you today, is it going to be Minecraft versus Roblox versus Epic, the Makers of Fortnite? I think what ends up happening is it's not a winner take-all and it ends up becoming a winner take most maybe, but a lot of opportunity for different types of spaces for different use cases. So I think what ends up happening in the metaverse land is actually going to be different than what happened in Web 2.0, which was a massive, massive consolidation and concentration, I should say, of power between the Holy Trinity of Facebook and Google and even Snap from a social perspective, where you're kind of just spending, if you're in social in 2017, like you're on WhatsApp.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we end over here. All that's new is old. And we're kind of moving back to the shopping mall type where you, instead of going to an e-commerce place, like I believe that where e-commerce is going at least, is you're going to go to a place like a fortnight event, like the Travis Scott event. And not only are you going to come and experience it, but you might buy virtual shoes. You might buy a virtual beer for a friend. You might buy a beer that just shows up at that person's door in 10 minutes. Gifts, virtual gifts, real gifts, all these sorts of things, you're going to transact in these virtual worlds. That's where it's going.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think so, yeah, my family ran kind of like a William Sonoma type store, but in Quebec, where I'm from. And they were primarily in shopping malls. And so as a result, I kind of like grew up in shopping malls. And having spent a lot of time there just looking around, it was a place where a lot of stuff would happen. People would fall in love. People would meet friends. People would go and have this like slot machine type experience where they're just like, I wonder what I'll see at the mall or what kind of clothes, you know, and I think what ended up happening is when Amazon came up and Amazon Prime came out, we ended up just being like, okay, I'll just get it on Amazon. Let me just get it on Amazon. I'll get it on Amazon. Let me just reorder. And e-commerce became extremely transactional. And the way the internet works and the way the world works is it's a pendulum swinging, you know. We start over here.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's talking about there's going to be smart contracts. We can't trust banks. We can't trust governments. We're going to transport into these like metaverses where there's going to be like 100 foot tall rappers instead of in-person events. And I think this is just, I think metaverses and having places in virtual places that we can go and hang out in are going to be a greater and greater part of how people experience culture. And so it's a really scary thing to say because By a guy named Matthew Ball. Let me pull it up here. I think it's called Meta. Yeah, Roundhill, Ball, Metaverse, ETF. It's literally an ETF just about metaverse-based companies. Huge opportunities.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Travis Scott did a concert in Fortnite where he was this thousand foot tall Fortnite character and he was moving around and you were flying around him and there was millions of other people there with you. And it was this massive cultural moment where we were during the pandemic having an experience, seeing someone, interacting with them. And it felt like it felt really magical. It felt a lot similar to like, I love going to concerts growing up. And it felt similar to that where you feel like you're a part of something bigger than yourself. This is what they call the metaverse. And this is something that authors have been talking a lot about for years and there's been movies about it. Ready Player One's a very popular one where you put in your VR headset and you just get transported to this environment and you're able to interact with other people. And I know a lot of you are probably thinking and you're like, wow, that Greg Eismerk guy is at this point he's crazy.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely. Does it move quick? Absolutely. But it still means that I think that it's important that you get involved because this is where everything is going.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My concern would be not allocating, even if you're of the Warren Buffett mindset, which is awesome, and I'm also like, I believe, you know, I believe in that as well, I still believe that taking a very small amount of your net worth to experience Web3, even if it could go to zero, the amount of lessons that you're going to learn is going to drive your business forward is going to make you more cutting edge when you're investing in public stock market is going to help you become a better company employee, it's worth it. And best case scenario, Ethereum was like, you know, people were talking this week, like we're talking right now, September 8th. I think Ethereum went down like 25% this week. It's still 10 times in the last 12 months. This is huge alpha that's worth paying attention to. So yes, do you have to keep up with new projects?”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understand all these white papers and do the research once you've done the research allocate some liquid net worth to some of these up and coming projects. And some of them could even be like the seventh biggest coin, the ninth biggest coin. It could be projects like Solana, it could be projects like Chainlink, could be projects like Polkadot. And you can find it. If you go to coinmarketcap.org, I believe you can see a list of the top coins by MarketCap and just see what you like and see what speaks to you. It's basically like the Nasdaq coins. And then the third is, you know, putting a third to NFT project. And should you buy something like a crypto punk, which is the number one by market cap NFT project, which is these pixelated punks, you know, should you buy something like that? Should you buy a board ape? And just thinking about, it's basically collecting crypto characters and crypto assets.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say this isn't financial advice, but here's what I would do myself. And everyone's different. But here's what I'll say. Take a percentage that you're comfortable with. Call it 4% of your liquid net worth and put a third of it to BTC Ethereum. This is the blue chip. This is the Amazon of the era. It has staying power. That's where the biggest communities live. It makes sense to have some exposure there. The second is put a third to five or ten upcoming projects that you really believe in and do the research. So every crypto project has a white paper. And a white paper just describes what they're doing. And you might not understand 97% of what's in the white paper. And I think that's a good, that's actually a good thing. It's a good thing for you to actually go through and put the work and try to and try.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where you would have lost. But I do think from an investor perspective, if you're not, you know, everyone should allocate 1%, 2%, 3%, 4% of their net worth into Web3, come up with a portfolio approach. You're sitting there. It's $19.94.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Web3 changes everything. It's going to be as big as that shift from company to internet company, except that it's going to go from company to internet company to within the Web3 terminology. It's called a DAO decentralized autonomous organization, which is basically a company that's governed by smart contracts. The world is going to, has changed and is never going back. Once the internet happened in 95, 96, 97, it was commercialized, we couldn't go back. The genie is out of the bottle with Web3. And just as how there was millions, billions, trillions that were made in Web 1.0, there was a lot lost. There was tons lost. Yes, Amazon is a, what is Amazon? A $2 trillion company, something like that around there. If you would have invested in 95, 97, 98, you would have done really well. But there's obviously the pets.coms of the world.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. So the decentralization piece of it is all about trust. So instead of having, instead of me trusting TD Ameritrade or instead of me trusting this institution or this person or this or Facebook, we live in a world where people are trusting a lot of these organizations less and less. And that's why decentralization is so powerful as a concept. And I think it's probably one of the biggest inventions of all time because, you know, we're seeing this all across the world. People are trusting governments less and companies less. And they need a way to execute on day to day operations. And they want to do it in a way that they can trust. And they want to do it in internet native way. And a lot of these people are in their 20s or even younger.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which basically is a piece of content that exists on the internet that I could say that you tray own this photo, not anyone else. Similar to how in the house example you have a title that exists that says Greg Eisenberg owns this house on one, two, three main street. This is on the internet. It lives on the internet. So the way to summarize how I think about Web 1, 2, and 3, I think of Web1 as read, web two as read write, and web three as read write and execute.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is someone's impeding on my lawn, and I had to believe a lot of the title. There's a lot of trust that I have to have in all these systems. And then it happens pretty manually. Like someone wires the money, someone signs this, but we live in a world of code. Web3 is about removing that human trust that you have and being able to buy products, services, experiences that are executed smartly by code. So I think that's a hallmark of the Web3 is the sole smart contracts thing. The other thing is money and creating internet native money. So I'm sure everyone here has heard of Bitcoin and Ethereum. These are internet native money. And I think that's a hallmark of it. And the third thing, the other hallmark of Web3 is probably ownership, just ownership in general. And we can talk more about NFTs, but I think NFT is a good example of that non-fungible token.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See a photo, but you can also post a photo and you can comment on it. And it was this two way social networking, mobile phase of the internet. And that was like 2005, 2004, let's say to 20, you know, 17. Where we are today is this new era called Web3. Web3 is all about execution. And when I say execution, I mean things like smart contracts, which are contracts that are executed by code versus people. So imagine I bought a house a year ago and that house, I like had to go to, it was in Canada, I had to go to like a notary. The notary had to like draw some documents and had to go to the bank. The bank had to like drop some documents. I had to like believe this like paper that I saw that like here's the backyard is one acre and the”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, let's do it. I think it's worth diving into crypto, I think, is today more than a two trillion dollar industry. So it's worth sort of crypto and Web3 is big. So it's worth diving into. So I'm happy you brought it up. So Web1, we're talking 95 to 2004, commercialization of the internet. That was about information. It was about your people magazine. You created people.com and you just took your magazine. You basically threw it on the internet. It was just about taking analog things and putting information, the hallmark of Web 1.0 was information, putting it online. And that was very big. Web 2.0, Web 2, was all about people. So this is Facebook. It's no longer about just having this one way interaction with information, but being able to, you know, read information and write information. So you could”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the biggest businesses that will be creative over the next 10 years are going to have community at its root. And that includes B2B businesses. I know some of you might be like, oh, he's just, you know, yeah, it makes sense for like a keto diet community to have that or a keto diet product to have a community around it. But how does that make sense for my SaaS business? But community is a big part of that too. We're seeing it happen. I mean, it's happening right now with crypto. We're seeing things like Board Apes, a billion dollars of NFT transactions in 2021. And it was $40 million less, you know, last year. And just like.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what is a tool that we can be building for that particular community? And then layer around that tool a actual community. So going back to the Wall Street Survivor example, the tool was this stock market simulator. It was coming for like, hey, get $100,000 of virtual cash. But then the community was or the network was, oh, hey, like Johnny from Des Moines, Illinois. Like, you seem really cool and you're around my age and like I want to follow your stockpics and I want to have a conversation with you and there's so many opportunities to build network and community around it. And that's how, yeah, just giving an example of how I think about it.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you look at that, you can look at him and be like, cool, that's interesting. Or you can be like me and be like, okay, let's take a step back. Is there a product to be built here? Is there a paid community? Maybe there's a $29.99 a month product that we can create specifically to unbundle the Fat Buyer community, specifically to unbundle the path to Fatfire portion of it into its own product. So we're just riffing right now, but I like the framework of thinking like, what does it come for the tool, stay for the network? I'm sure you might have heard that before.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I'll give you an example. So, one of the things I like to do on Reddit when I'm unbundling a subreddit, and we'll use Fatfire as an example, is look at on Reddit, there's these things called flares. And Flares is just a category. It basically is the moderator of that community saying, how are people using this subreddit and how can I make it easier for people to filter through different posts? And what I like about looking at flares is it gives me a sense, a bird's eye view of how people are using this community. One of the most popular flares on Bapphire is path to that fire, meaning of the whatever 200,000, I think it's like 175,000, 200,000 subscribers to this group, a large chunk of those people are not actually fired, as they call it, meaning they don't have a net worth of more than three or four or five billion dollars, but they have this desire to get there. And those are some of the most active people in the group.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into this world and see the writing on the wall and be able to distill those insights to create products and businesses around. Not many places.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's just say Fat Fire Out, which is FAT, F-I-R-E on Reddit. And it's basically a community of people who subscribe to this lifestyle of, hey, I want to retire early, but I don't, and there's that 4% rule. But I don't want to retire off, let's say, 30 grand a 40 grand a year. I want to be making 200 grand, 400 grand, 500 grand, a million dollars a year with these passive investments. And it's people just like asking questions, learning about how to do it, sharing their experiences. And it's beautiful. It's beautiful because it's people going back to what we talked about with Wall Street Survivor. It's people who have a shared mission, shared identity, shared culture, and real progress is being made every single day. Now, I look at that community, you know, going back to your question. It's like, why am I fascinated with Reddit? Well, I'm fascinated with Reddit because where else can I teleport?”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is a gold mine. Break down Reddit. What is it? You have hundreds of thousands of what they call subreddits, which are communities, like a Facebook group in particular niches where everything is public.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take 25 grand per year. Take 20 grand per year. Take 15 grand. Take 40K per year and just put small bets into people you meet along the way. And I think you'd be surprised with the results.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that's another one, which is like the narrative is that the best founders are focused. Therefore, you should only be focused on your business. I mean, that's true. You should be focused on your business. But as a founder, you kind of get access to this exclusive club of other founders. Like you end up meeting other founders and another founder would be like, oh, like it's like the expression real recognizes real. Another founder will recognize you. And he or she's going to tell you or they are going to tell you about how their business is actually doing in a certain type of way that you wouldn't give to, for example, a VC. And what I should have done was write really small checks into these companies, $1,000, $5,000, $10,000. A lot of times other founders will take small checks like that because it's another founder. It's tough. They know the struggle. And I think like if I can give advice to my 22 year old self is instead of investing or what”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lesson for me there. I mean, I think I looked at that deal at a $4 million valuation, something around then, something like that. So I don't know, do the math, you know, 25K. We're talking about like, what is it? Like a thousand times return or something like that. It's a lot of valvos.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, it's really inconsistent. So, we're going to create a network of spaces across the world, and it's going to be consistent. There's going to be like a coffee maker there, and it's going to have Starbucks coffee, and we're going to put in everyone. And the Wi-Fi is going to be good, and we're going to, and we're just going to list on Airbnb. And I was like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. As a consumer, I get it. And I asked some other VCs or other friends about it. And they're like, oh, dude, like, forget about it. It just takes, you know, one button from a product manager at Airbnb to be like, no, we don't want this on our platform. Forget about it. So my lesson there is yes. Like, although you have to be careful of who you build on top of, it could lift you up if you're built on someone's shoulders, a shoulder of a giant, it could lift you up. And there's tons of opportunities of how do you build zero-to-one businesses that are scaled on top of giants. You just have to be conscious that they can turn off points at any moment. So that was a huge...”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think you hit it upon a really good point, which is if you're a founder and you want to build a really big business, you need to have some chip on your shoulder. You need to prove something to someone somehow. If you've proven everything and you just, you know, I just don't, I don't know if it's going to give you the extra gas in the tank, which you need. So I totally agree with you on that point. This one, platform dependency kills startups. That's what everyone was telling me. I get it. I get why being built on top of Airbnb or Facebook or Twitter could completely crush your business because, you know, Twitter could shut down the API access and all of a sudden, you know, your business is worthless. I remember meeting a company called Sonder. It was called Flatbook at the time, the founders. They're actually going to be spacking. I think I read 2.8 billion dollars. And they had this business where they're like, hey, listen, Greg, Airbnb is awesome, but you”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We went to work at Facebook. They graduated Stanford. They graduated Harvard. And based on that, you will do well as a VC. And what does that do? That's a very exclusionary, non-inclusive way, I'm frame of mind. And you end up missing huge, huge opportunities. An example of a company that I invested in a year ago or so at this point is Yasser, which is Uber for French speaking Africa. With using that methodology of just like patterns, like no, you wouldn't do that. Like you would be investing in, you know, just Uber. And I think there's a ton of businesses, global businesses, global entrepreneurs who didn't graduate Stanford, who didn't work at Facebook, who didn't go to Harvard, who are going to be the world's best, biggest entrepreneurs. And I want to back those people.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually think that's another thing I didn't put on the list, which is you need to be a value add investor to be a great investor. And you actually don't. Like some of my best companies I invest and like they don't have any questions. They're just kind of executing really, really well. And like they might have a question once a year, whatever. But I also think that's another thing, which is you don't need to be in the trenches every single day with your portfolio if you're an angel investor. You could just be there when people need it. The second mistake I made was, or big mistake I made is invest in founders with pedigree because when I first moved to San Francisco, I went on Sandhill Road where all the BCs are and I asked for their advice. I said like, hey, I want to do more angel investing. What kind of advice can you give to me? And they all said, VCs about pattern recognition. You need to invest in people that you think that fits a certain pattern. And I was like, okay, tell me more about the pattern. Oh, you know.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, like, it makes sense to you, and it makes sense to me at least. It's like, yeah, you want to be in business with people you like. But it turns out there's like some brilliant people or some people that you might not be, might have very different views about the world or you might like tennis and they”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, having lived in San Francisco for many years, being in the startup game, you end up meeting a lot of people. And those people end up starting very successful companies. So the post I think you're referring to, I think I talked about some mistakes that cost me $75 million. It's actually more than $75 million, way more than $75 million. So I had the opportunity to invest in multiple seed-based companies that became unicorns. And not because I was particularly special, but just because of like these are the people I meet at like I'd see them at like Phil's coffee shop in San Francisco. So the first thing I just want to say is that like if you're going to be serious in tech, like you're going to come across these deals and it's going to suck. You're going to learn the same mistakes that I made. So I can talk about a few of them. The first is everyone told me that there was this narrative. Well, if you can't go for a beer with the founder, don't invest in a startup.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People crave it. And I think why do you think Wall Street bets has gotten so big? Why do you think personal finance YouTube has gone so big, Graham Stefan? I don't know if you follow him, but he's gone from like 100,000 subscribers to a couple million over the last 12 months. And it's like people are craving this and there's not enough places for them to talk about these things because money is taboo”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm fascinated by businesses that have community at the core. And I'm also a nerd. So I'm a nerd in the sense that like I just bought a Volvo. I'm like hanging out in the Volvo subreddit and I'm geeking out about the smallest details about Valvos. I'll get really into a particular Colombian coffee bean and I'll go find those people on a Facebook group and like go to a meetup for this particular thing. That's really my nature. So when you combine the lack of community that exists for financial communities with a black swan event like the 2008 financial crisis would excites me is like there's an opportunity not only to give people utility in terms of teaching them literacy ultimately financial literacy and also combine them with people that they can meet that can really unlock potential. Like to me that's so exciting. Like I love those types of businesses. You really are making the world a better place and you're also”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And I think the business model, we built it really just out of the need, to be honest. And then we were kind of like, oh my God, we have a million people using this or whatever. How do we generate money? And the first thing we started doing is putting on ads. So that's what everyone used to do at the time. And then we're like, you know what? Why are we selling ads to TD Ameritrade when we realized that these people would spend three, four, five, six, seven hundred dollars for an acquired customer? So then we started basically doing deals with some of these bigger fun, bigger sort of advertisers. And the lesson there was pay attention to who's advertising on your website and try to like strike up sort of direct deals. But the, yeah, the business model was very strong around you. You're basically top of the funnel for a lot of these financial firms.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we really did make it feel like a game. So, Wall Street Survivor was that it was a community centered around demystifying, yeah, demystifying investing. And I remember when we started building it, people told us like people don't care about education. It's not sticky. They need things like Instagram, Facebook, whatever. Turns out actually people do care. I mean, why do you listen to this podcast? You listen to this podcast, you're trying to be better. So that was Wall Street Survivor. And it became the number one stock market game on the internet basically overnight. millions of students used it as a part of their finance curriculum to learn about investing. 85% of the top US business schools use it as a part of a finance curriculum. And yeah, I was in my early 20s. This is in or even earlier at 21, 20, 21, 22. And that's the story of all sheet survivor, which we ended up selling.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. First of all, Trey, no one asked me that. So I'm happy that you did. Picture this. It's 2008, economy's crashing. Half of your net worth disappears and you don't know why because people, a lot of people didn't understand what was happening. You know, they hear, what do you mean, the stock market's supposed to go up 7% every year? And then when they get there, Charles Schwab or Vanguard statements, whatever, and they see like their net worth start going down by 30, 40, 50, 60% overnight, that's when they went to Google and were like, what do I do? So I met a guy who had recently just bought a stock market simulator. And we talked about how can we use this real-time simulator and create almost like game around learning about the stock market. So what we did is we gave people $100,000 of virtual cash. They're able to trade options, buy stocks. And as they're buying, we're giving them tips.”
2021-09-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP379: Into The Metaverse w/ Greg Isenberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT