The Weird Club

A conversation with Sameer Singh, angel investor, venture partner at Speedinvest and founder of Breadcrumb.vc about network effects - the phenomenon that is arguably the main thing that makes modern technology companies so valuable, and so powerful

A conversation with Hugo Amsellem, former director at investment firm the Family and VP of Community at Jellysmack about building & investing in consumer companies, the creator economy and the power law distribution of creators, community and much more.

Sahil is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, a service that helps creators get paid for their work—over $400 million paid out to date. They raised money from Kleiner Perkins, First Round, Naval Ravikant, Chris Sacca, and others. He wrote about his journey here.

Sahil got his start in Silicon Valley aged 19, as employee #2 at Pinterest, and since then has built Gumroad into a highly profitable, fully asynchronous, 40 person business with no full time employees, no meetings and no office. He works on Gumroad about 20 hours a week.

Sahil has also angel invested in about 30 startups including Clubhouse, Lambda School, Figma, Notion, Vercel, HelloSign, and Movable Ink. He now runs shl.vc, an AngelList rolling fund, which invests about $12m a year in startups. He raised the first commitments for the fund with a public notion memo and one Zoom call.

He also recently raised $5m for Gumroad via crowdfunding in just 12 hours. He is a radical advocate of building in public, regularly publishing Gumroad’s financials.

Sahil just released his book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur, where he outlines his philosophy for company building.

In short, it’s about:

• Building for communities;
• Starting small, and creating processes (not products);
• Getting people to pay quickly;
• And only then scaling by building software and an audience.
• It is all tied together by a company culture that focuses on radical transparency (the company roadmap and values are public) and ownership (“everyone is the CEO”).

The quote that I think best sums it up (from the podcast) is the below:

In the conversation, we also dig into Sahil’s world view and talk about:

• His political ideas, which are part libertarian, part communist;
• The Sovereign Individual;
• The nature of power and violence
• The future of countries and companies (solo capitalists and new nation states)

I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and I hope you do too! If you like it, go buy a copy of Sahil’s book here.

A very special episode of the podcast with my friend, cofounder and all round awesome human being Mary Lin.

The key theme of the conversation is tribalism, community and the future of how we organise and govern ourselves as humans. This is at the core of why we are building Odin. By giving people the tools to invest in things they believe in, we believe a better future can be built.

We also chatted about Mary’s upbringing in communist China, Brexit, tattoos, that Island Boy thing and all the dumb hot people in crypto.

Today a conversation with Mike Kelly, general partner at New Finance VC. 

Mike is building an exciting firm investing in platforms facilitating a more efficient, fairer financial ecosystem and reshaping our world for the better.

Sometimes this means Web3, sometimes it is companies building within the legacy ecosystem. As you’ll see in our conversation, the point where Web3 and “old finance” collide is, in Mike’s opinion, where the magic will happen in the next 20 years.

Back in August I got together with Jordan Wolfe.

We discussed:

1. Jordan's thesis on investing at the interface of life sciences, financial services and climate technology;
2. Lessons from building and exiting a real estate development business;
3. How the public sector and private sector should interact to drive innovation;
4. The importance of finding meaning in your work and relationships.

If none of those things excites you, there's also an abridged history of Detroit - the Silicon Valley of the Fordist era - thrown in for good measure.

There are two key parts to the discussion. Up to 29:00, we discuss Jordan's learnings in real estate and entrepreneurship.

From 29:00 onwards, we discuss his investment thesis as a full-time angel, which centres on the idea of "biosphere consciousness". Concretely, we cover climate finance and zero carbon supply chains powered by advances in synthetic biology.

I sat down with Dermot to discuss DeFi, which his firm Eden Block invests in. 

In this conversation we covered a fair bit of ground. The key idea? Web3 and crypto will allow us to redesign the base infrastructure of the entire financial and legal systems for the internet age.

Dermot’s view, and something I’m inclined to agree with him on, is that we have an opportunity and a duty to leverage this to build a better and ultimately fairer world.

I recently sat down with Jeff Crusey, investor with Seraphim Capital, to talk about investing in this sector in more detail. We covered Jeff’s journey into the industry before diving into his investment thesis.