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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“Yeah, and it wasn't necessarily just the pay. I think that was fine. But we saw Robin Hood and Coinbase, and those are both very volatile businesses. Like you've seen their stock price movement. It's because financial markets are volatile, right? You have like the short and long-term debt cycle and we were taking a big risk and starting a company and we were starting to feel like we found product market fit. But why are we going to take the risk of a sudden market turn just wiping us out? And we were five to ten years focused. So at first we were like, let's not take any venture capital. We'll do this angel round. We'll just build and find product market fit. And then when benchmark kind of came around, we were more open to the idea to take money to protect the downside.”
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
“Yes, top performers 100%. In fact, more than that, right? I think we gave non-founders a percentage of the company that usually founders get. And it was mostly this core group of original people that didn't take any pay. And I think what's really important here is all those people feel like owners of the business. Because if those five to seven to ten people build this business for the next 10 years, there's literally nothing stopping us. And we talked about this and work-life balance and how do you push your team to work harder. And our team is senior enough and also has enough ownership where they feel like FOMO is theirs.”
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 did this Angel Round. We're making some money. Most of our team was not taking any pay. So like for the first eight months to building, no one on our team took any pay. And it was mostly because most of us are senior engineers and we were taking a bet on the company and that was really important to us.”
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
“Actually, Chathan had a really good point here because there's this balance I've always tried to find between shipping fast and doing things perfectly. And I've been a perfectionist and I'm like this detail, everything needs to look perfect. And now I'm like, we have 50, 60,000 daily active users. We need this to be perfect from day one or else we're going to lose that user base. Cheto was pushing us like, well, what if you shipped faster? Just like think through this. Let's steal, man, that side. And I was like, well, look at Apple. Everyone envies that company. They always ship perfect products. And then we were talking about how lithium ion batteries exploded, how the first iPhone was glitching out all the time. And looking back, you look through hindsight with rose colored glasses, but actually most companies don't ship perfect products. And you have to find this balance between shipping something. A good framing is the one you're using that a specific user base might want to adopt and it could grow from there rather than just building something for everyone and something that”
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 you have to stay humble because at any moment you can lose it, everything is about momentum. So when you have momentum, instead of like taking the gas off the pedal and be like, okay, like this is working, it's like, no, you need to double down 10 times harder. And every day we come in and we're like, listen, we need to ship these features today or else we're going to lose everything we have now. I guess it's somewhat of a fear mindset, but it's really just like trying to continue to keep pressure on so we continue moving forward because once you lose momentum, the boulder starts rolling down the hill. You know, you need to keep pushing it up.”
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 view on fundamentals and when you're buying business, you're buying the cash flows in that business. But most people, when they buy a stock, they're not looking to get dividends. They're looking to just sell at a higher price. So in that framing, everything becomes speculative. And I'm not going to take a normative view of whether that's good or bad.”
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. I think casino is kind of a derogatory way to view it. I think it's somewhat empowering, right? Like hedge funds have determined the value of stocks for the longest time. This group Wall Street bets saw a bunch of shorts on this stock and was like, screw the hedge funds, we're going to have to have them cover call the shorts and the price is going to skyrocket. It was kind of cool to see a group of retail investors coalesce and be able to kind of fight back against the institutions. I think this is a really cool corollary to FOMO because FOMO is a public network whereas you had to be on Wall Street bets on Reddit and FOMO everything happens on real time. So people in retail can coordinate there. And I do think that attention drives a lot of things. I think whether it's sports cards like everything is speculative to a degree, right? Like why are you buying diamond rings? It's because we've kind of agreed as a society this is worth this value. Why are you buying gold? Most financial assets are speculative. I understand the”
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 a lot of people that are on Robin Hood would have never been on a brokerage otherwise. I see some criticism of like, do I want to have my retirement account in the same place as I can trade prediction markets in sports bet? I think that they can do better tooling for users to self-guard against some of those products. But I understand why they horizontally scaled. They grew their business and they were able to saturate the US market, but they weren't able to go global. And I think this is why they're focused on on-chain assets, because on-chain is global from day one. And if they could tokenize equities and a lot of the stocks that are existing on Robinhood, then they could give global access to these assets. I think that as they go global, they could be less focused on horizontally scaling all these products and really capturing a larger market.”
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 what a purpose is you're placing a bet on a price, basically. I think the face. Do you think it will go down? Exactly. And instead of me selling you SpaceX stock, I just bet you that SpaceX will go down. You're betting me it's going to go up and then we trade money. So what you can do is you have a price on the exchange that people just agree. Like you're like, I think SpaceX should be this much. I think I'm willing to sell this much at that price. So I will sell you that much at that price. And then we're betting on it going up and down as a side bet. And you actually don't need the transfer of the underlying asset because of that because it's synthetic. What's beautiful about that is you can trade these things without necessarily having that underlying price. So what we saw with cerebrus is when that IPO happened, the hyperliquid price started to converge to that price at IPO. And there were people, there were pictures of people on the New York Stock Exchange with the hyperliquid UI up and people looking at those markets. And I think that's really cool and interesting. But with pre-IPO, with prediction markets, retail gets access to these markets earlier and early.”
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 mean, we haven't integrated prediction markets yet, and I'm not sure exactly where it fits in on our roadmap. I think it's very interesting there. Our first version of the product would be built on something like a polymarket in Calci. Those are great businesses. And I think that there's a lot in flux around the regulation of these businesses. So we want to watch and see what happens and then move from there. But I think it's really important because public markets have been how retail gets access to capital, and we talked about this. And we were talking about Shopify and how amazing that was that retail investors got private scale returns in the public markets when it launched at, what, $2 billion is where it is now. This is becoming earlier and earlier, right? If you have perps that are pre-IPO and then you have prediction markets at from a year ago.”
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
“Because everything at means not intentional. It means let's just throw everything in there for the user to access. What is the glue between these things? At FOMO, we think it's the social graph. We think that you can express a thesis, I think that the straight of her muse is going to close. Well, I can buy oil on hyperliquid perps. I could short U.S. equities that are lying on oil. I can buy the prediction market that the straight's going to close. And I can express my opinion in all these different things. And the reason these different market types exist is to you express conviction on a belief. Whereas all these other apps are just everything super apps and there's no intentionality behind why all those things have to exist in the same place.”
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 you just have to be super epistemically modest because sometimes the user doesn't even know what's actually best for them. When you get feedback from a user, you really need to listen to your instinct on what the fundamental product experience is and your intuition and then see if that fits in your larger vision. Honestly, I think that certain product conditions could potentially kill the product like that one. So ones like that that actually have this large potential outcome, you need to be very thoughtful in implementing.”
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
“Talk to them, you need to keep iterating until you have 10 people, 100 people, a thousand people using it. And when you have 10 people using it, get the feedback from them. And then iterate on that feedback. And then 100 people.”
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
“Aaron is an incredible angel investor. He is an incredible partner. He understands financing really well. And I think that when you're financing for a business, it is one of the most important decisions you make because a small change in a term sheet could completely change the trajectory of your company. So I think having him there in our court to really help us work through some of that as first-time founders was really helpful.”
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 was pretty intuitive to us, so I think if you're running a B2B business, you hire a big sales team and it's not an easy job, but it's a lot of outbound repetitive. When you're starting a consumer product, it's a very different problem space because there's a lot of great products that just never get off the ground. So we knew we need to solve this cold start problem, like get people on the app. So when we raised the initial round, the goal was to create distribution. And we think that our best users should have some ownership in the product. And early on, what we're able to do is get people motivated by allowing them to invest in the product and create as large of a distribution channel as possible. And not all those people are traders. Like there are definitely builders in the industry and we've been able to leverage tons of them as we continue to build. But I think that initial round was really core to the success of FOMA.”
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, FOMO is a mobile trading app. Right now it's mostly on chain assets, meaning like on-chain native assets, Bitcoin, Ethereum, attention-based assets, et cetera. But we're soon going to launch globally access to equities and perpetuals, non-US, obviously. We'll kind of work with the government there as that comes. But the goal is to be able to give global access to markets to individuals that don't have that access. It's also social. So you could see what your friends are holding in real time. Follow them. I know everyone's wanted like a real-time Nancy Pelosi stock tracker. So maybe if she trades on FOMO, we could finally get one.”
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 going to be a hot take, but I don't think I'm driven by either too much. I think it's more of like doing the thing for the pleasure of actually doing the thing. Like me and my co-founder talk about this all the time where I think the biggest fear is losing what we have now. I think like every day waking up, going to the office, getting to work with an incredible team and building what we're building, I think one specifically because of what we're building, but also just getting to work on something really cool, like an interesting problem with amazing people, I think that's what actually motivates us.”
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 we gave non founders a percentage of the company that usually founders get for the first eight months to building, no one on our team took any pay. The best people are just so much more valuable now. One thing that I discovered was if you're trying to raise another round, wait to announce your last round. Everything is about momentum.”
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