YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Erlanger

lines on the record: 68
first: 2026-06-27
most recent: 2026-06-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Going to be really interesting to see what happens. I think there's only so much demand in the retail markets. I think SpaceX being first to market, it's going to be very interesting. I think like 30% is devoted to retail now. Will there still be a ton of retail interest if people get burned on SpaceX in Anthropic or OpenAI? I think if SpaceX performs well, the OpenAI Anthropic IPOs will also go very well. I think if SpaceX performs poorly, then those are going to have a hard time.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there you go. And this Harry is why perps are so important. Because with the perp, you don't actually need to trade the underlying thing. So like we could have a perp on whether anthropic will go up or down, but we don't need to actually transfer the underlying anthropic asset. So phanthropic goes all secondary asset transfers are null. It doesn't matter because we're just betting on the price of the thing. You're never actually exchanging the underlying thing with me.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The goal for FOMO as cheesy as it sounds is to be a beacon of light. It seems like everyone else in crypto has always been so short term focused, and I think in any early industry you go to, the industry at first is kind of like riddled with like the short-term gains and the people who are like taking advantage for themselves. And then someone's got to like come with the broom and sweep up the mess. And our goal is to create a product that's for our traders and something that they'll love and something that's with them for the long term. And I think what's given such a bad rep is there's no consumer protection here on a lot of these products. So people will buy it. It's so hard to do in the first place. But then they get over the leap of actually doing the thing and then they just lose all their money. And it's not because they didn't know that this coin might go down. It's because it was a scam coin. And there was actually a real one they were trying to buy, but they bought the wrong one. There was no warning signal. And I think people just got burned so many times in a row that it led to all this negative dogma.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's been a lot of positive movement on regulatory clarity, but at the same time, I think that sentiment for crypto has also gone down significantly from the general public.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have loosely held strong beliefs in the sense that sometimes the downside of it is sometimes you just need to make the decision, but I always listen. Like whenever there's a decision at FOMO, we're asking every single person, especially the core team, what they think about it, and we're talking it out and coming to the right conclusion, I think it's definitely more of a strength than a weakness because it's a forcing function for us to strongman the other side always because we're always like, what if we did it this way or I have the opinion that's inverse to yours? Let's talk it out. But I do think that sometimes you need to just make a decision and we get hung up on things.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think at FOMO, there's no, we don't put numbers to it. There's no 996. I think if you give, and this might be unique to our business, but if you give a lot of ownership to a team that takes a lot of ownership, like these people are fully autonomous and they really care about their doing, they all feel like they're owners of FOMO. They feel like they're owners of the business. So I trust that they're going to do their best work. And there are times where people don't have to work on the weekends. And then there are times where we're building new product like this week and we're working all weekend. But people love to do it. I think you can't beat a team that's having fun. And we're just loving what we're doing. So I'm always on in the sense that if something comes up, I have to work on it, but we love what we do.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have the hard conversation sooner. I think the hardest thing about being a CEO is having hard conversations, whether that's with employees, whether that's with early investors, whether that's with friends who are helping you, all these things. And I think that people try to avoid confrontation and avoid having the hard conversations because it sucks, but have those sooner just be completely transparent and honest and come from the best place you can and they'll understand.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think use less AI because you're going to have AI at your disposal and all of the best engineers today had to learn not using AI to become really, really good. And I think that when you're in practice in your job, you're going to use AI. But I think this is a controversial take. I try to use AI for as little of my writing as possible because I think if I use AI for all my writing, I'm not going to be able to write anymore. And I'm not going to be able to remember what is good writing. I'm pretty scared of that, to be honest.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a Robin Hood user because I'm in the US, so I'm gonna say Robin Hood, but I do think Revolute is very well positioned. Maybe Revolute”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, let's do it Important social is on FOMA. I think we were doubling down the trading product and assumed that people will come to trade and then the social graph will go from there. But you need to be very intentional about the social graph. And I think that's something that is very momentum based. And as soon as you start losing momentum there, people stop using the app and then the whole thing can kind of unravel.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're trading at first. I think that's really important with the social features due, they at least right now in its current form, is they allow you to become a better trader by having transparency to what the best people are doing. So you could instantly discover, you could instantly get notified, you could follow people. I do think over time, you want to create momentum for people to use the app maybe even if they're not trading. You don't want to obfuscate what the app is good at. We have to always be the best trading app in the world because the top traders won't use us otherwise. However, over time, if you build these other social products, maybe the people who aren't necessarily trading every day can interact on the platform more. So I'd say we're much heavier on the trading side today, but heading in the direction of becoming more social.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's true. I mean, listen, because every country has different brokerage laws, Europe is a lot larger in terms of like there's so many countries in Europe. And I think Revolute has been able to kind of saturate all of Europe at once and has been able to grow globally a lot faster than Robinhood. Robinhood has done a great job. I think they have a little over 20 million funded accounts in the United States. And we were discussing before how they've horizontally grown to other product categories. Their biggest move with on-chain tokenized equities is to be able to finally distribute these things globally. And I think it's really important look at Facebook, look at WhatsApp, like all of these business social businesses that really scaled are global.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A really good question. Anything that has to do with the core product, meaning the things the users face, you kind of have to build yourself. For example, some of our competitors, they just acquire trading terminals and then built that into their product. But FOMA Web is like a whole different experience. You have the same social graph. You could place a trade there under one identity, open it on your phone. And it's this social training experience on a web that no one has ever done before. So that's something that was like very obvious that we just have to build this. But then something like data infrastructure. Maybe someone who's already set up bare metal servers so we don't have to pay so much money to AWS or Google Cloud or someone who does indexing for us or these things that are behind the scenes that would take so long for us to build up the expertise to that's something that obviously makes sense to kind of acquire to bring in house.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And you're like, exactly. And that's why, I mean, that's why giving away so much ownership is important, but also having this capital really keeps motivation high during those periods because we know no matter what we can build through it. And it's not like we're scraping by, right? We're like building in a way where we're really being able to take the risks that we need to because we have the capital to back them. Our plan is to kind of verticalize all of our infrastructure and own as much of it as we can in-house because it just makes the product experience that much better for our users.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there are a few things. One, it obviously kind of helps us even more in the former point about market cycles. Our team is scaling. I mean, we're making money. We have much more money in the bank that we ever raised.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I've watched the podcast actually with who was it? It was Evan Spiegel. He was on the Dire CEO. And one thing he said is that our goal is to build FOMO for the next decade. And he mentions that him taking some secondary on was really important for him saying no to Meta, right? When they came to acquire him. So I think founder secondary is a good idea as long as it's not extravagant. We took a little bit off the table, but it was very little amount. Nothing that would really change our lifestyle in any way.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was an early conversation far before the term sheet where we discussed what price range would make sense for us. I think we weren't looking to do a round. So they were like, what price would be interesting to you? And we set a number. And I think that kind of helped anchor the conversation. And yeah, when they were open years to that, I think that anchored the conversation away where we had a great conversation from there.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he comes to the office. We're building a relationship with him. He was actually super helpful on a few things, even when he wasn't an investor. And we just really appreciate that. And then we got inbound from some other investors. And I remember the first time we talked with index ventures. They were just amazing partners. I think Benchmark doesn't really have as many resources. Like these multi-stage funds have so many resources for founders. The Series A announcement, we did all the PR in-house. Like we didn't have anyone, any help with anything. And having know the history of index being very involved in Robin Hood and USB being very involved in Coinbase and then even aside from the fact just Julian Yan being such amazing partners and same with Fred at USV, we were opportunistic and thought it was time to do the rounds. It was a really great timing for us. I think the capital is going to be high leverage for us to”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So, I think it was actually one of the other times besides the Chatham conversation where there was this aha moment. But we didn't get to speak with Fred during the Series A.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we weren't in a position where we necessarily need to raise capital and we were pretty opportunistic about it. I think after the A, we got some inbound and we took some time. We didn't really talk to investors. We were just building products and we were talking with USV for actually a few months. We really like Fred. We spent a lot of time with Fred. He's incredible. Talk about VCs not being focused on the product, but Fred actually has a really good product intuition. I think it's very rare for VC and just the conversations with him and.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, at a certain point, building a product transfers from a game of intuition to a numbers game because you just have so many users that one of the early stories from Robin Hood I love is that the deposit amounts from people with iOS were twice the ones from people with Android. And their assumption was just, oh, like people with iPhone just have more money. So they're depositing more money. And what they realized through data is actually there was something on the loading screen where it took like twice as long to load for Android. So people were just churning off and not using it. And as soon as they fix that, then the prices converged. So I think there's a lot of unintuitive things that data can explain. And at a certain point, when it becomes a numbers game, it really is data-driven. And that's, we haven't gotten there yet, but that's something we're aware of.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brand marketing is actually one of the hardest things because you don't see the direct benefit. It's so important, but it's not like you don't really even know what the CAC is, right? And you could spend infinite amounts of money and not even see conversion.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess there's opposing forces, right? The force that makes it go down is that you get better at the game and you iterate, but the force that makes it go up is that each incremental user, usually you get the lowest hanging fruit, right, to convert. So each incremental user is harder to convert, so they cost more to convert.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I guess there's two things here. One, you need to make sure that the lifetime value of the user is actually worth it. But two, you don't always have to go for the lowest hanging fruit. And this is a journey that we're on now where you have someone whose lifetime value might be, let's say, $30 and you're only spending 80 cents on them. But then there's another user that you actually need to spend $3 on, means they need to see it 10 times instead of two times to actually convert. You should actually start to increase your CAC even if the LTV stays the same to capture a larger and larger audience as long as the CAC is lower than the LTV.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And this is the most important lesson that I've learned. Early on, you create a form of content or you find a creator that has a form of content and they're working and you're like, okay, now figure out the next thing that works. That is completely wrong. What you want to do is continue to iterate on that and make it better and better and better until it works better and better and better. And then replicate and just have that type of content being replicated. This is something that we're still building out the muscle for. Users are more likely to convert if this is the type of font, if this is the color of the font, if this is the placement of the font, if it's this person talking versus this person talking and you figure out these things and you kind of just double down on what works.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's revenue to us, right? So it's someone who has to deposit and trade. So depositing is free. If you trade and then we take the total amount that we earn on any given month, I guess, from people who trade from those channels that are directly attributed, and then how much it costs us to get those users.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's honestly a numbers game. It's just based on their impressions. So, like, when you're building a product, it's a lot about intuition, what your users will like, when it comes to like growth, especially on these platforms, it's just based on metrics. Like how many impressions they're driving, how many conversions they're driving, et cetera. And the ones that, whatever, the CPM or the CAC based on the acquisition cost versus the lifetime value of the user, if that ratio isn't right, then you'll just kind of turn out that crowd.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we actually have this all at house. We have these crater managers, they're fully in house, and we manage a group of 30 to 40 creators. We're constantly getting rid of the bad ones, adding new ones.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have a great intuition. We're building a huge media RMF FOMO. Right now, it's external to the product. So we're doubling down on content creators. We're doing tons of partnerships with streamers. We're trying to do like a lot of the clipping content, et cetera. And we want to become one of the largest media businesses for a tech company in the world.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So, for example, one of the most important things on FOMO are the share cards. So when you, if I go to Harry's positions, I can see all of your positions and share any of your positions in these beautiful share cards on any other social media platform or your fumbles. So let's say you sold too early and then the price rockets, then I could see how much you missed out on. And what this does is it creates this feedback loop where I can fully publicly share your things on other platforms and then people want to see that in real time so then they come to FOMO. And then you're building this growth feedback mechanism within the app that every single time there's a top person that's having a top trade, whether it be this guy Iceman who turned 10K to two and a half million dollars overnight in one night on FOMO. There's another guy Remus he turned I think it was $300 into one and a half million in a month and then these are being publicly shared on other social media platforms and then it's driving attention to our platform”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think B Real didn't have the feedback loop. It required people to do something every day, and people don't want to have to do something every single day. And I think as soon as you lose that, you lose momentum very quickly.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. That it's very important to find native creators to your platform. So instead of going out and bringing on all these creators from other platforms, they already established that. Like Logan Paul, he got big on Vine, right? for the first time. And I think when there is a new social platform, there is a outsized strategic advantage for creators to build an audience on that platform early because they'll be known as the creator of that platform. So I'm not trying to get LeBron James to trade on FOMO. I want these native creators.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's somewhere between mostly the latter actually Figma has a huge advantage here because humans want some control. So for example on FOMO, we could just be an LLM, you execute trades, et cetera. Maybe in the future we have an interface that allows you to do that. But I still want to go to Harry's profile, see in this beautiful view everywhere you've traded and be able to track that through a graphical user interface. Someone on Figma will be like, I want this design. It generates you the vector file and then you could still manipulate it and do whatever you want. And I think that's really important to have the hybrid because humans still want to feel like they're in control. So with lovable, it's much harder because they haven't built the human-centric software. I think it's much easier to add the LLM on top, especially as it becomes commoditized by all these major models.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, we only have one designer. But yeah, I do think that design becomes more and more important, especially for some of these bigger businesses that do have a lot more mid-level engineers and doing tasks that AI can kind of take over pretty easily.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely. I mean, it depends on the price of the tokens. I hope that there's a race to the bottom and these major models are kind of commoditized and they get cheaper and there's not like price collusion. Yeah, so hopefully they get cheaper with time. Energy gets cheaper. Compute gets cheaper and then these things get cheaper. But at the current state, absolutely. I think 20% is definitely within reason”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think depending on how big we get and how much we use it, maybe currently the trade-off is it just makes no sense to limit it.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all. We don't have enough engineers that it's really, really hurting our bottom line yet. Once it starts to do, maybe we'll have some kind of quota there, but no, we're”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so for us. I think we have seen some frictions. Like, these models degrade, and then the cloud code credits got really expensive recently. So there's definitely some frictions there.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly Yeah, so we have an internal AI policy to make sure that we're only using enterprise account, that there's not sensitive things being uploaded, et cetera. I think that's really important. And then within those guidelines, most of our engineers are using cloud code and codecs.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's definitely faster. It's not just a lot more code. It's a lot faster to thoroughly review even than write. For example, Tina, she's a staff level front engineer of ours. She built our feed. She is building sliders for our new product. There's like all these small things on the front end that probably would take a while to implement and learn. You have to go watch YouTube videos or go search to find libraries. And she's experienced with a lot of this, but some of like the small components are new. But if you could ask AI to do it, they'll kind of give you an overview of how to build this thing. They'll even write the code for you. And then Tina will go back through and even restructure and rewrite most of the code. But having the framework of understanding how to write it, I think just speeds up the learning process significantly, even for the best engineers. The product velocity, like I told you that we just dropped everything to ship this new product we're shipping next week. We built this product in three weeks and this product is basically what entire other apps.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, maybe things change, but currently we really don't see a need. We did have a bottleneck on our engineering side. We just hired two to three incredible engineers.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So curly FOMO is extremely horizontal. We don't have meetings one on ones. We don't really have any hierarchy. Everyone is kind of self-reporting. And I think as we scale to a certain number that will have to change, you will have to.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How you reconcile it is the best people are just so much more valuable now. Because it's like you could use ChatGPT to make art, but you need to have like the creative direction behind it. Your software engineers are your architects and they're doing amazing things. But now they can use AI to do like the lower level things, maybe a B tier or a lower level engineer would do.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hiring too fast is something we're very, very vigilant of. Some of the biggest mistakes I've seen and other people scaling from one to 10 is they start to acquire businesses. And when you acquire businesses, you're not interviewing all the people that you're bringing over. So you end up just adding tons of bloat all of a sudden into your business. And I think that can be a huge issue.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best people you're going to hire are not going to come from a recruiter and they're not going to come from like a one-time intro. It's people that you spend months building a relationship with. Those have been all our best hires.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the founder and CEO's main job. It's like sales, sailing to future employees, selling your product and vision, building the product”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the person you're going to call every week for every decision you make? You have to like them and they have to be someone that you trust. If you trust them more than the other person, like I don't think the decision should be pick the highest tier VC. I think it's pick the person that you trust will help you scale your business the best and it's not going to be someone who's giving you product advice. Like the founders have to build a company, but someone who might know how to build a company because you don't have experience doing that or someone that just trusts you and your intuition.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, I definitely think benchmark be on our side helped us in that sense, but that's not the reason we did it mostly because we were naive to that, right? Which is kind of a funny set of circumstances. But yeah, definitely I think that there are some venture funds that their strategy is just to follow on companies like benchmark, et cetera. And we had a lot of inbounds. And the partners we ended up working with were not those partners. I think they were like very intrinsic reasons why we worked with the partners we did for our series B. But yeah, I think a lot of people just kind of follow investment. And this is a little bit of a separate topic. But one thing that I discovered was if you're trying to raise another round, wait to announce your last round. Because as soon as you announce a round, you get tons of inbound from other investors and it takes up time to kind of tell them, no, we're not raising right now. So in the future, that's kind of a note to self that if you really want to raise capital.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the story is we met with Chathan on Friday. We ended up talking with a whole partnership that following Monday. A funny story from that is we were talking with the entire partnership and we were going through the pitch deck. And I remember Peter Fenton was actually on his phone most of it. And I was like kind of bummed out because I was like, damn, he's not interested. He's focusing on other things. He's doing emails. And I remember as soon as we finished the pitch, the first thing he said to us, he goes, guys, I love the app. I've been on it the entire time. And that was kind of this like deep breath moment where we're like, okay, he sees the vision like we do. They love it. And it just really felt like a natural fit.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, for the series B, that was all inbound, but the Series A, we actually did run a process because we were like, we should have raised money here. And the benchmark intro came from Aaron. So going back to the most helpful angel, one thing that we discussed earlier that is kind of funny is Say and I didn't really know the venture game and we're just builders and we didn't really know who benchmark was. I had heard some stuff about how they invested in Uber, but I didn't understand kind of like the tiers of VCs or anything like that. So what we met with then it was just a very natural conversation. And out of all the conversations we had, he got it instantly. Like he had this deep intuition about what we were building. We had very high conviction on what we were building. So to find someone else who has the same vision and conviction off the bat as us, who doesn't historically do deals in our industry, it was, yeah, just an amazing conversation.”
2026-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source