I got started investing in public markets when I was around 10 years old. There's this kid who was 19 who made $100 million in Trumpcoin in his basement. I have this edge of being a teenager myself, and so I was like, why don't I invest in teenagers? Well, teenagers invest in teenagers. And so went out, ended up raising $2 million, and that's what Noir Ventures does. I think people are scared that people will disregard them because of their age. I think you should use your age as a weapon.
What are other things that being 16 doesn't allow you to do?
Set up a venture capital fund. It's in my mom's name.
And the venture fund's in your mom's name?
Is that real? I didn't know that.
You followed up 56 times to get Steve Cohen to come on your podcast?
And what made him say yes? You won't be 16 forever.
How do you invest in teenagers when you age out of the category? Welcome back to another episode of Invested. This is a super unique episode. I'm thrilled to be here with Amir Fischer.
Thanks for having me on, Michael.
Good to have you. Amir, just tell our audience, how old are you?
Amir is 16, and he's going to be our youngest guest, probably forever, on Invested, and I think you're going to find this conversation super interesting. Amir, what do you do?
I run a podcast and I also run a venture fund.
Right. So Amir is a solo GP venture capitalist, and he runs a podcast, which we'll get into, with literally titans of the universe. Where do you live, Amir?
Live in Greenwich, Connecticut.
And have you lived your whole life in Greenwich, Connecticut?
Do you actually go to school?
I do. I try to, although I don't end up going much.
Where do you go to high school?
Greenwich High School. The public high school in Greenwich, Connecticut.
In Greenwich, Connecticut. So before we dig into your inauspicious high school career, tell everybody about your venture fund, which is called Noir Ventures.
Yeah. So I had this idea about six to eight months ago. I saw a lot of teenagers starting interesting companies and I was like, why is there no one focused specifically on investing in teenagers? I saw a lot of people investing in Gen Z, 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, teenagers, and all that kind of stuff. And I thought it'd be interesting. There's a market for investing in teenagers in the sense of I think there's a lot of people who had access to the internet very early do very interesting things with it. There's kids who made millions trading crypto in their basement when they were early teenagers. There's kids who now work at these big AI labs in their late teens. And so I think a lot of these people are going to go on to start very, very interesting companies that'll do very, very innovative things.
And I think the focus on this cohort can be very interesting. And I also think I have this edge of being a teenager myself, in the sense of I can probably pick out better talent among this generation than other people can. And so I was like, why don't I invest in teenagers? Well, teenagers invest in teenagers. And so went out, ended up raising $2 million, and that's what Noir Ventures does. I write pretty sizable checks into the most talented teenagers in the world, building the most interesting companies in the world.
Full disclosure, I am an LP in Amir's fund. I'm still a happy LP because he hasn't invested a nickel yet, so we haven't lost any money. It's perfect. What is the most important thing that you think differentiates investing in teenagers versus my job as a 54-year-old guy investing in people who are out of their teens?
I think the one thing is maturity, in the sense of they're going to be this crazy, crazy smart 16, 17, 18, 19-year-old, but if they're not mature, if they're not able to build a team, if they're not able to build systems, if they're not able to really get a company off the ground, they can't do anything. They can't scale to that billion-dollar outcome. And so I think maturity is the one thing.
Why should I think that a 16-year-old can figure out if another 16-year-old is mature or not?
I think I'm relatively mature for my age, and so—
That's what my kids say too.
I've also spent time around a lot of people through my podcast and such who've done incredible things across all industries. And so I think I'm really better suited to pick out the maturity than others in the sense of I've seen people who are able to take that zero and build it up into tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollar companies. And so I've been kind of privy to that. I've been around that, and I've been able to see people who kind of achieve those outcomes, and so I think it makes me better—
It makes you better. So, yeah, just give us some examples of teens that have come your way that you think are potentially high-value founders or people that you're trying to hang around. Literally walk through the stories. One story that I've heard from you is, I think you said there were 14-year-olds who were hanging with Sam Bankman-Fried. Tell the story just so everyone has it.
Yeah. So there were these two teenagers who were working at FTX during the time where everyone was hearing about FTX, like '23 and '24, I think. And so these kids literally got asked to move out by Sam Bankman-Fried. One of them got asked to drop out of high school from Sam and he said no because his parents wouldn't let him. He ultimately didn't, and he was very glad that he did it. But I think—
Yeah, and he's glad cuz his parents stopped him from—
—making an immature mistake.
The other one, I think, is 17 or 18 now and is now working at some kind of crypto lab.
And he did move to the Bahamas with Sam Bankman-Fried?
I'm pretty sure. Yeah, he did, and he did homeschool or something like that. Okay.
And he has a very interesting story in the sense of he started doing e-commerce when he was very young. Then he went on to build kind of these projects on the blockchain, and then he built this yield aggregator for cryptocurrency, got it up to like $7 million in assets under management, and then ultimately went to FTX. So there's kids like that, using the FTX example, who've done these very, very interesting things. There's kids who are now 16, 17, 18, 19 working at places like Cognition or xAI. There's all types of very interesting kids.
There's also kids who come to the crypto world, very interesting in the sense of it gives a lot of people a lot of accessibility very early, and there's no real cap on what you can do.
In the sense of you can be in your basement sniping meme coins, and there's this kid who's 19 who made $100 million from Trumpcoin in his basement because he was the first block on Trumpcoin. And so there's literally no cap on how much money you can make, what you can achieve. But I think the also interesting thing about the space is that people tire out of it very easily. You can't—
When we say the space, we mean crypto.
Yeah. You can't be sniping meme coins in your basement. It sucks into your entire life. You maybe do it for five years when you're a teenager or something, but now this is a point where all these kids, they made their millions, they've done whatever, and they're like, "What next? I want to create actual value." And so I think this is a very interesting pocket of talent. But these are some of the stories, among other things, of these interesting kids.
Yeah. You know what? Earlier in my venture career, we talked about Mark Zuckerberg dropping out of college, and when I got into the business, it was Bill Gates who dropped out of college. And it feels like you're now saying Sam Bankman-Fried encouraged people to drop out of high school. You haven't dropped out of high school, but—
Dylan Field told me to drop out of high school.
Dylan Field told you to drop out of high school?
Did he drop out of high school, Dylan?
So why did he give you that advice?
I have no idea. I think the place where it was coming from was like, you have this opportunity now, which is very, very unique. I don't think there's a single person in the world that has as unique an opportunity as I have right now. And so just take it, give it all you got, and you can always reapply to college or something. And so I think that was where it came from.
Tell me about your current high school experience. What do you— You go—
Every day, or at least I try.
Your parents will listen to the podcast, so we should say every day. Is it a good use of your time?
I want to be politically correct here.
I think you just answered the question.
Yeah. I don't think it's necessarily the best use of my time. I think there's higher-value things I can be doing with the time I spend in school. I also think there's this interesting kind of dynamic in school in which these teachers want to fill out a certain amount of time a day in which they have to teach and ultimately get paid. And that amount of time is not really where learning is maximized. They can maximize learning in maybe 10 minutes out of the hour they are teaching. And so I think spending that additional 50 minutes in every class, five-sixths of the time is just a waste.
And so I'd say as a whole, if I would generalize, I'd say school is probably not the best use of my time. But I think ultimately, I have to get my high school degree and it's something that I have to go through to do so. And so it's the only thing I've got right now. So yeah.
How many kids study at Greenwich High School?
I think it's in the high 2,000s, so 2,700, 2,800.
And how many of them are doing other things on the side? This is not a side hustle for you. This is like a core hustle if you're setting up your venture fund and your podcast, which we'll come to in a second. How many others do you think are doing what you're doing?
I think very few are doing things as seriously as what I'm doing. I think there's some who experiment in dropshipping, there's some who like to trade options or whatever. Nothing really materializes for a lot of them, just because of a lack of commitment and discipline. But some people try. I'd say maybe dozens, or maybe like a hundred of the kids try to do these hustles, but very few do it to an extent of high intensity.
If you're advising another 16-year-old today—not investing in them, advising them—and they're in high school, what's the most important trait you think they need to have?
I think it's just bias towards action and being extremely proactive, in the sense of I think people are scared that people will disregard them because of their age. I think you should use your age as a weapon. And every cold email I send to every person on my podcast, it's their name, Amir Fischer, Greenwich High Schooler. I use that "Greenwich High Schooler." And when I start the email, I say, "Hi, I'm a 16-year-old." And so I think without that, I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the guests I've gotten today, or I wouldn't have met anywhere near the people I met today.
And so I think these people are scared that their age is going to be used against them or whatever. Use what you have now. Use it to your advantage. Be extremely proactive. Put yourself out there and just see what happens. Worst thing that happens, you're back in the spot that you were yesterday.
Right. So super high agency.
Take whatever risks cuz you got very little to lose when you're 15 or 16.
Unless of course you made $100 million sniping Trump meme coins. Then you may have something to lose.
Do you have time for a social life in high school?
My socializing is kind of limited to high school. That's why I see my friends outside. I also play tennis. Other than that, I mean, I'm just kind of heads down doing what I do.
How many teenage entrepreneurs do you meet a week?
Yeah. Amir has this incredible email he sends out to his LPs every week, which summarizes the most interesting people he's met during the week. Give us two or three of the most interesting people you've met recently.
Yeah, I think I'll use just one example. These are particular parts of the story that I can pick out. There's this kid who—there's this rapper called Trippie Redd. He's very famous. He gets like 20 million views a month off Spotify. And so this kid was making videos in his basement for rappers, making edits of them and posting on social media. He got picked up by Trippie Redd when he was 16, toured around the world with him, and then ultimately went back to making films.
He ended up working with this random musical artist that he took a bet on very early and ended up getting them signed to Warner Records, ultimately suing Warner Records because they kind of kicked him out of the deal. And now he is making films out of this company called Circus 17. His name is Dylan, and he's actually getting very, very closely mentored by Ben Affleck. He's just 19. And so that's one of these insane, incredible stories.
There's also a really, really good friend of mine. His name is Kairan. He started college when he was nine years old, graduated when he was 14. It did take him five years, yes. And then ultimately worked at SpaceX for two years. He worked on Starlink, where he owned most of his team's codebase. So he wasn't just a performative hire; he actually did stuff. And ultimately went to Citadel Securities, where he now does low-latency options market making for the biggest market maker in the world.
This is a hard question to answer and this is not judgmental, I'm just asking. What I'm always worried about with all these smart guys who go to quant is, couldn't they be building Starlink? And here's a guy who built Starlink and is now doing quant trading for Citadel. No disrespect to Ken Griffin, but can't you give him a venture investment to do something better?
I don't want to say anything about what his future plans are, being cagey, but I think at some point over the next couple decades, he's likely going to start something to have a bigger impact on—
Okay. Yeah. Give us another person, another example.
I think two of them are the FTX guys. Another would be this: this is not necessarily one who has an accomplished background, but there is this 17-year-old who ended up burning 12.5% of his body in third-degree burns. He got in an accident when he was in middle school, ultimately recovered from it, and started building autonomous drones. He won a couple national science fairs, and now he's building a company building these incredible autonomous drones from his bedroom. He's also building totally unique and novel software within them, and so he has these gigantic server racks in his basement that he set up and everything. And so I think it's another example of someone doing something—
Pardon the question, what does the fact that he burned 12 and a half percent of his body have to do with what he went on to do?
The reason I mentioned that is just incredible adversity. Something like that at a young age really is an incredible formative experience that ultimately flips the switch. I was talking about it, and he was like, "After that, I knew who my real friends were, and I knew what really mattered." And I was thinking to myself, before that, I was just prancing around life, didn't really know what I wanted to do. And after that, I was like, "The real world's going to hit me. Things get serious fast. What do I want to do with the rest of my life?" And I think that gave him an answer.
And so when you talk to someone about something like that, you can really see a change in how they behaved, and you can see how the adversity really impacted them. That's something that I love to see.
What was the adversity you encountered, you think?
I don't think I've encountered a lot of adversity. My parents went through a pretty hefty three-year divorce. I think that was some adversity. The thing that also kind of flipped a switch in me, which was relatively similar to him, is I grew up in an environment where I was kind of sheltered. You don't see any gang violence, you don't see anything particularly harsh, you don't see any war. And so after they got divorced, I was just like, the real world's coming at me and I need to do something. I've always been motivated to do something. What will I do?
Take us back to how you actually got started in this whole thing. Take us really back to the origin story.
Yeah. So I grew up in Greenwich. I got started investing in public markets when I was around 10 years old. I got really interested through a couple YouTube videos I watched about value investing. And so I dug down this really, really deep rabbit hole of value investing on YouTube.
Yeah. Looking for summaries of The Intelligent Investor or Security Analysis through YouTube videos, or—
The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham, yes. Watching "How does Warren Buffett pick stocks?" or watching all these videos on how people pick stocks, ultimately watching some clips of Warren Buffett shareholder meetings and whatever. I ultimately went down this really, really deep rabbit hole from when I was around 10 to 13. I tried to read, watch, and listen to everything the greats ever put out—the Buffetts, the Mungers, the Ackmans, the Markses of the world on value investing. I taught myself how to read financial statements, build financial models, all that good stuff, until I was 13.
Then when I was around 13, I was like, I want to try this thing called short-term trading. I always saw people making a lot of money and I was like, okay, I want to make money. All this value investing that I did was out of a $100 account commission my mom set up when I was 10 years old. And so I was around 13 and I was like, I want to try this. And so ultimately that year was spent trading currencies on my laptop during my homeroom period in my sixth or seventh-grade class. And so while everyone else was playing games on their school laptop, I was trading currencies and whatever. It was kind of funny. It was an interesting experience. It taught myself how to read charts and realized it's based solely off reading charts. But I did that for about a year. It was an interesting experience, taught me how to get a feel for short-term markets.
And then when I was 14, I was like, "Okay, I want to make some real money." So basically on my birthday when I turned 14, I heard about this thing blowing up called social media marketing agencies. And I was like, "Okay, I want to start one of these." And so ultimately I was like, I want to learn how to do Google and Facebook ads, and what niche can I do this for? I realized there was two million real estate agents in the United States. All of them are very competitive with each other. The only thing that differentiates one from another is brand. And so went out, taught myself to do Google and Facebook ads for two months off of YouTube, cold-emailed tens of thousands of real estate agents over the span of like 10 months, and was like, "I'm 14. I'll do your ads for you. Please pay me." Not much more elegant than that.
Ultimately, in around eight months, scaled up to where I did around $15,000 a month in revenue. There was a couple problems that arose out of that, though, because I was growing really, really quickly and it was a one-man show. The problems were that I was okay at what I did, I wasn't great. And so at some point, the charm wore off of having a 14-year-old do your advertising. People started realizing, "This kid's okay at what he does, but he's pretty expensive. There's probably better people out there who are cheaper and can do the same thing that he does." That was one thing. The other thing was my freshman year of high school, my grades were dropping to all D's. My parents weren't very happy with me. I also came to a realization of, am I passionate about this? No. I'm doing it solely for the money. So is this something I want to do long term? Not really.
Ultimately, I put it on pause. And then this is where the things that I'm doing now kind of originated, around last year in the fall. So around last year this time, I started the Generating Alpha Podcast because I always listened to a lot of podcasts in finance, always saw a lot of people talking about their strategies, their perspectives, or whatever, but I never really heard people talking about their stories as investors. We hear a lot of founders talk about their stories, their upbringing, how they got to where they are today, their origin stories, but you never really hear a lot of investors do that. And so I was like, if no one else is going to do this, I want to do this.
I sent out 3,000 cold emails to every billionaire across every financial asset class I could possibly find. Went through the Forbes list of highest hedge fund earners from like 2007, every little piece of information I could find. Cold-emailed 3,000 people over the span of 10 months. And then my first big guest was Jim Rogers, who co-founded the Soros Fund with George Soros. My second big guest was Steve Cohen. And I got Steve on a large amount of follow-ups. And now I've done—
What does it mean you got Steve on a large amount of follow-ups? What does that mean?
I think it was a 56th follow-up.
Correct, followed up 56 times.
You followed up 56 times to get Steve Cohen to come on your podcast?
And what made him say yes?
What made Jim Rogers say yes?
I think Jim now just takes every interview, so I don't know if he's particularly selective, but I got lucky there. But Steve, I was talking with Steve a month or two ago and he was like, "I also said yes probably partly because you're in Greenwich," which I'm very grateful for and take advantage of. And so now I've done 44 episodes as of last Thursday with people like Steve, Howard Marks, Barry Sternlicht, Thomas Peterffy, Jeff Yass, and many more. And then ultimately built up an interesting network, and then this fund came to fruition recently. But yeah, that's kind of my origin story.
Did you interview any venture capitalists, or are they all public markets guys?
I've interviewed Tim Draper, Alan Patricof, Kevin Hartz, and we'll do something soon.
All right. Alan Patricof is incredible. He's 92 and he's just still like—
He's not the OG, he's the PG, the pre-guy. He's unbelievable.
I met him a couple months ago for coffee in New York City. My son calls me after and he's like, "You're this guy's favorite person." And so I'm happy to be Alan Patricof's favorite person, though.
That's amazing. You were born like after his 75th birthday.
What makes a 10-year-old kid get interested in investing in stocks? I'll say for myself that I actually got interested in investing in stocks when I was 12 or 13, and I bought some with my bar mitzvah money. That was the first stocks I bought. I know what I bought: I bought a stock called Tofutti, which still makes soy-based ice cream, and Topps baseball cards cuz I liked to flip baseball cards. And it was like a thing, you know, you should only invest in something you know and love. I didn't love Tofutti, but my mom did, but I did love Topps baseball cards. What makes a 10-year-old get interested in public market investing or trading currencies?
I think truthfully it's a product of my environment. You grow up in Greenwich and you hear about all these hedge funds coming out of Greenwich, like Point72, Bridgewater is right over in Westport, there's Viking, whatever, these gigantic hedge funds. And everyone around you, you go to school and everyone around you can be categorized—like everyone's dad works in one of two places, which is either an investment bank or a hedge fund. And so it's one of the few avenues you explore first, of like, these are probably some of the only ways you can make money when you're growing up. You're like, okay, the way I'm going to make money is going to be a hedge fund investor, or I'm going to work in an investment bank.
And so I think it's one of the more logical first areas to explore, which I also see a lot of my friends starting to trade later than me, but starting to trade stocks or whatever. I just did it earlier because I think I was relatively more proactive. But I think it's just an outcome of my environment, of being around these people who are all investors, and I was like, I'm going to check this area out.
It feels like, though, there's also a unique time in history where when I was growing up, the only way you could find out about the stock market was you opened the New York Times in the morning, you turned to what was the D section at the time, which was the business section, and you looked through this eye chart of stocks listed. And you went out and look, I couldn't learn about investing other than asking people. You went out and watched hours and hours and tens of hours of YouTube videos to train. How do you reflect on that or how do you think about that with this young generation that can literally learn anything on YouTube right now?
First of all, I think it's absolutely incredible. I think people have knowledge at their fingertips like never before, and the barrier to go out and learn is so much lower than it's ever been. You don't have to wait to see reports. I think in the 1970s, there's this manager called Steve Mandel who runs Lone Pine. He was covering Walmart for Goldman Sachs in the 1970s, and when their quarterly reports came out, you could just call the SEC and get the reports because no one else had them, and then trade based off that information, and you have an edge over other people.
That's an example of how even at a place like Goldman in the '70s, you didn't have information at your fingertips. Now as soon as a quarterly report comes out, someone made a YouTube video on it. And so everyone can learn everything. And so I think because there's so much more stuff available for people to consume, that means there's also so much more lazy and slop stuff that people can consume. And so I think people are inherently becoming lazier and lazier. All of this learning is becoming easier and easier to access, and so I think the separation between lazy and proactive is kind of becoming larger and larger, in the sense of not many people are doing these types of things.
I do think that it's only going to get more and more like this. I think with the rise of these LLMs, you can ask them questions, you can prompt them. When I was 10, if I could have used these things, I probably would have learned way faster. And so I think it's just way more up to the person of like, do you want to learn or do you just want to stay like you are?
This comes back to something numerous people are saying right now, which is that the number one skill to have in the modern era is agency. You're either going to be a high-agency person or a low-agency person. You're a high-agency 10-year-old. You've talked about a bunch of high-agency teens, and I think the point you're making is profound, which is if you're lazy, you're just going to drift further and further off of the skew because there's so much information that's kind of sloppy or not interesting to consume. If you're a high-agency person, your learning compounds at a much faster rate.
And that's why we have so many of these super accomplished teenagers that even Alex Karp at Palantir is headhunting teenagers out of high school right now. And Dylan Field is asking you to—Dylan, I can't believe you told him to drop out of high school—Dylan Field is telling you to drop out of high school. And you make the point about that dichotomy. Where does that lead us as a society?
I think it leads us to a society—
The society you're going to grow up in.
Yes. I was talking about this with a mentor and a friend who happens to be the vice chairman of this firm called Sixth Street. I was talking about this with him, and they actually have this house belief, and they call it the Great Bifurcation. Even more than today, there's just going to be these swaths of people that are completely brainwashed. We were talking about this short-form content, and so these algorithms will feed them whatever they want to see. They're going to keep scrolling through, they're just going to keep moving along their everyday lives, and there are going to be these people who very early on chose to learn, chose to take advantage of this technology, and grow exponentially. And those people are going to have so much leverage, so much power.
And so I think there's going to be so much more wealth, power, whatever, concentrated in the very, very few over the next many decades than ever before. And those people will have power and have leverage among—
The comment you referenced is something we talked about before coming on air, which is I asked you what's the most interesting thing you think one of your teenage entrepreneurs is going to pursue potentially over the next year or two, and you said it was an entirely new genre of short-form content.
And I said, "What short-form content?" Explain your thesis.
Yeah. I think it's kind of consensus among my generation in the sense of the way that everyone my age gets their information is short-form. It's just short-form. Barely anyone I know reads books. I barely even read books. I read Substack and articles and whatever.
You make it sound like that's a great thing that you read Substack, because most people don't read Substack either.
Yes. Most people just read unless it's for school—
Your generation doesn't read books, they don't even read Substack. Like you think this is a great accomplishment.
They get educated through short-form content.
I think it's bad because this short-form content algorithm serves what you already believe. And so if you have these already held beliefs—a lot of these people grew up, I'll just use like...
generalize, but you grew up as a kid and your beliefs are mostly those of your parents and what your parents tell you. And so if you spend slightly longer on a TikTok video about something that's like more right than left, you're going to get served more right things.
And so that leads to just like you're going to get served more and more of that stuff, and that leads to extremely, extremely spiky beliefs in one or another direction without any information of the other side, without a fully kind of broad perspective. And so it leads to people that I think are extremely dangerous in the sense of they are extremely radical on one point of view without knowing what the other is expressing, without knowing the other at all.
Are they able to think? I mean, one of the things I keep finding is books help me think. You think it's only because I grew up reading books, and writing helps me think. And I think about all the people using ChatGPT to write, and like you said, no one's reading books anymore. No one in your generation reads books. Like, who's going to learn how to think?
I think for me, I'm learning how to think in the sense of I might not read—I read some books, I read some articles from time to time, but the way I learn, which I've identified very early, is through meeting people. And it's through learning from as many interesting and diverse people as possible. On the podcast, I talk with people like Paul Krugman, who's like very, very left, who's an economist, or people like Jeff Yass, who donate like hundreds of millions of dollars to political figures like Donald Trump,
And so I think getting kind of a broad array of perspectives, it doesn't matter where it comes from. It can come from books, it can come from articles, it can come from people, it can even come from short form if you are able to get that broad array of perspectives, is really what it takes to learn to think. And I think very few people have access to that broad array of perspectives in this day and age.
Very few people have access to a broad array of perspectives this day and age because of the algorithms.
Okay. So, you started this podcast. You've interviewed 54 titans of the universe, which is remarkable. Like, you're 16 now. You've raised a first venture fund targeting teenagers. If I am a teenager founder—I'm having a hard time saying that—if I'm a teenage founder, why am I coming to Amir Fischer to get a check rather than trying to come to Tim Draper or Marc Andreessen or
I think there's two things.
They're not coming to me because the teenagers in Israel are in the army. That's why they're not coming to me. Good. Why aren't they going to Tim or Shaun or
I think the first thing is access. Like, objectively, Marc Andreessen—
You're more accessible than Marc Andreessen.
Come on. Anyone can cold DM you on LinkedIn and I'll see it, I'll respond to it, and I'll engage, or email, or whatever.
Wait, why did you open up a LinkedIn page?
You're the age on LinkedIn. I love it.
Yeah, I'm way more accessible. But I also think I serve at this interesting place of being the node between—a bunch of my LPs are these very successful people like yourself who've done incredible things across many industries, people who've made billions of dollars in hedge funds, people who bought beer companies, people who invest in agriculture, operators, entrepreneurs, investors, all shapes and sizes, all ages, all industries. And the common theme among them is they've all been extremely successful, and they want to give back to the younger generation. But a lot of them don't know how to access the most talented people of the younger generation. And a lot of the most talented people of the younger generation want to learn from all these kind of titans, all these incredible people, but don't know where to go, don't have access to them.
And so I think being that node where I can connect those people—young people, old people alike—really creates meaningful mentorships, relationships. People who can invest in them down the road or even now is probably the kind of place where I am the most service to these young people while being also very accessible. But I think the kind of people I know, the network I have access to is the most valuable thing I can provide these people in this fund. I don't think anyone else across my age, even 10 years older than me, has access to these incredible people.
And I also think the third thing on top of that is like I'm relatable. I'm their age. I've gone through kind of the same stuff that they have. I'm a friend. I'm not as much as an investor. Like, it's not as much as a transactional relationship as just a relationship.
Actually, the one other guy I can think of like you is Harry Stebbings, right?
Did you model yourself on him at all?
I did not. I actually saw what Harry did while I was podcasting, and I was like, "Okay, I never want to turn my podcast into like a VC. I feel like it's way too transactional or whatever." But then I saw this interesting thesis and ultimately came to starting a venture fund. I unconsciously modeled myself after Harry, but now more than ever, after I've made the switch and gone through his evolution, I admire what he's done. And obviously, he raised a much larger fund than me.
