We're officially announcing the hundred million oversubscribed growth fund and some of the tier one names, maybe all the tier one names. And Edged, Cognition, Seronic, Modal.
Good morning, party people. What is going on?
Jake Paul is one of the biggest YouTubers and influencers on the planet. He didn't just pick a fight with one guy. He picked a fight with an entire sport.
When there's a lot of people watching you, sometimes you want to like take it up to the next level. And then boom, it became a thing to hate Jake Paul.
He is completely unhinged. Today we are talking about the blockhead. Is Jake Paul a boxer?
When we announced Antifund, Jason Calacanis was like, 'You're making a mistake. Jake is not good. You're ruining your career.' And we're just like, 'Whatever, bro.' Mark and Dre and Chris were some of our very first LPs. When you have like the living goats of the industry being like, 'Hey, you guys are good.' It's like, 'Okay, let's do it.'
Jake, given your career, you could have partnered with a lot of different people. When did you guys know that you were going to be such partners?
One way I think about it is that if Jake can just live his life and get a bunch of views, and someone has to light $100 million on fire to get a bunch of views, who do I want to be partners with?
I think a lot of people in the space can have a lot of followers, but not the cash, and cash is key.
Jake, Jeff, we've got some big news. Thanks for coming on the podcast today to discuss it. We've got a growth fund. Why don't you share the big news?
Yeah, we're officially announcing the growth fund that we've been working on for quite some time and some of the tier one names. A lot of the tier one names, maybe all the tier one names. But Andal, Etched, Cognition, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Seronic, Modal. So yeah, the list goes on.
A lot of collaborators in. Um, maybe let's just zoom out first. Jeff, for those who are not familiar, from what you can see beyond the surface, how would you describe Jake's superpowers that led him to be the amazing partner for you here? And then I'm going to ask Jake the same.
I think Jake from the outside could be like an entertainer or professional athlete, but I think to me Jake's always been a constant entrepreneur. One. And then two, I think he's really created himself as a taste maker and a cultural leader of his generation, right? Like all the young kids today look up and want to be an influencer. Jake literally created the influencer term in that like job profile if you think about him instantiating a daily vlog. So I think it's easy to, especially with an internet character, like you take pieces of that persona and just put that as a whole human. But the underlying thread is I think he's a very generous, thoughtful, kind human being who is very ambitious and is going to not stop in whatever venues that he chooses to participate and compete in. So I think if it's entertainment, media, sports, and hopefully with venture capital, growth equity, investing, we take that on together.
Thank you, Jeff. Well, why don't you say the same for Jeff? Obviously, the same question — we'll get into both your stories.
Yeah, I think Jeff is one of the smartest people that I know just across the board, and I think the work ethic and his background being so different than mine as well. We make like such a great team, you know, computer science, Stanford, but deep, deep networks, and we just think similarly, um, in a lot of things, and I think that lends itself really well to being great partners. Um, but yeah, he's non-stop thinking ahead and sees a lot of things before they come around the corner. And um, he actually said no to investing in my first company when I was 18 years old and the company failed. So he was right. Um, so just really great judgment. Um, great people, you know, this is the people business, and so just being able to really read people and have that EQ as well as IQ is really important.
You're just making us like flatter at each other. Yeah, Erik, you're an OG, so that compliment to you as well.
I appreciate it. Well, I mean, speaking of OG, I remember Cory Levy, you know, many years ago said, 'Hey, I've got this kid you've got to meet. He's building something super interesting. He's super talented.' And I was out of town. I was like, 'Ah, you know, I don't know if I...' He ended up introducing him. We never ended up meeting. And I remember sometimes I reflect back, I'm like, 'Holy shit.' Like, first off, Cory's an incredible judge of talent, but two, it's like you've got to take bets on the up-and-coming talent because you never know, you know, where they're going to end up.
Jake, the idea that someone would, you know, become a media sort of mogul, then, you know, a professional athlete, then a tech investor — that's like a pretty distinct path. Say more about what other people can learn from how you took your path. Like, was it all organic or what was sort of your strategy, or how do you even like retroactively make sense of your sort of multi-hyphenate career?
Yeah, it's really interesting. I think always being like entrepreneur first and very analytical, and when things are working, double, triple, quadruple down, and when they're not, just sweep the things under the rug. And so, uh, that's what someone once said about a16z. I love that — they just launch a bunch of stuff and then when it doesn't work, you just pretend it never happened. Seriously, I've failed so many times to get to this point and made so many mistakes. And I think it's resilience in this day and age and in having a public career as well and being a public figure. I think you have to have tons of resilience. You have to know yourself. You have to go through ups and downs.
But I think being an entrepreneur at heart, I always looked at everything from a business lens and always hustled and showed up every single day and knocked down every single door of opportunity and always wanted to grow my network. I think that's been a super powerful thing that differentiates me, is always knowing the right person at the right times to ask them for help or ask them for a favor, and also doing favors for them when they need you and not charging for it. I think people in this entertainment world are very transactional and short-thinking and not professional. They show up late. I've always tried to be the most professional entertainer.
That's lent itself well. And then when I went to box, it kind of started as, you know, this crazy thing. But then it was a million pay-per-view buys, 30,000 tickets sold out. I had a blast doing it. I was like, 'Okay, experiment for you.'
Or did you know you were going to go all in when you...
No, I didn't know I was going to go all in. But after the first one, it was like this was absolutely massive. I'm going to become world champion. And that was like a pivot moment where it's like, yeah, this content stuff's cool and doing great, but I can still do content within boxing. But this boxing match was the most viewed amateur event ever, 30,000 tickets sold. The press conferences were getting tens of millions of views. So I was like, clearly people love this and I love it, and so I'm going to go all in. And then that, you know, lends itself to now being, you know, one of the highest paid athletes on the Forbes list because of just following the numbers. So I think being analytical as an entertainer is also important.
So you have the content, you have this massively high grossing boxing career. Why get into tech?
Yeah, so I think it was actually again just being an entrepreneur at heart, but it was actually my one of my first loves was the valley and coming out here when I was 17 with Cory and Alex Dealov actually, and um, they showed me all these crazy companies and I got to meet some really smart people who were building the future and seeing like even Cory's after-school setup where he had like all the screens and all the employees were there and it was just like so different and so cool. And that's when I fell in love with wanting to make my own startups and being a founder, but also being in the investor world and even understanding how it works and all the VC lingo and started growing my network. And so it's really always been there since I was a kid and it's always been something that I loved. Um, and then when I was 23, I wanted to take a bigger bite at the apple and that's when I met Jeff and the stars aligned and we just decided to go bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and it turns out that we're actually really good at it. So it's fun when things are working and um it's fun, you know, helping shape the future of America with these companies and...
It's like a full story like Mark and Dre and Chris Xman were some of our very first LPs. So, appreciate them for helping us put us into business and also giving us confidence. They've seeded almost every single emerging manager. So when you have like the living goats of the industry being like, 'Hey, you guys are good.' It's like, 'Okay, let's do it.' Yeah. I was just telling the story like I think they were our first pitch call for the fund and I was like all nervous before and like didn't even have like the full pitch perfected yet. And so um yeah, by the end of the call they were just like, 'All right, yeah, we'll invest,' and we were like, 'Okay, great, perfect.'
And when did you guys know that you were going to be such partners? Because Jake, given your sort of career, you could have partnered with a lot of different people, and for you it was also a risk of, hey, you know, it wasn't as common back in the day to maybe partner with YouTubers. How did you know that you were going to be partners?
No, I'll start. And it's really funny because we were just spending the weekend with the All-In podcast besties and Jason Calacanis. And I remember when we announced Antifund, Jason Calacanis was like, 'You're making a mistake. Jake is not good. You're ruining your career.' And we're just like, 'Whatever, bro.' And there's like a full circle moment because I joke about it now, but one, I think like there's no beef. It was fun to play poker with those guys. But two, like Jason Calacanis, you're a podcaster. You're trying to be what Jake invented. You are a VC turned influencer, and I think we will give you guys a run for money from who can be the better investor. Um, no, but I remember...
Um, but I remember that I found that Jake was very wise for 23, 24. And what I mean by that is I think very few people have the amount of like inbound requests, outbound requests for their time across so many different spectrums. I would say that one way I compliment Jake is that he context switches so widely, right? There's like one moment where there's paparazzi, he's going to events and he's like a celebrity on a red carpet and like he's blinged out in influencer gear. Next moment he's a professional athlete training and like preparing for a massive Netflix headline fight. Next moment he's like negotiating business deals and inside the weeds of numbers and like his metrics, and then you pivot off to the next thing. Then he's like filming a TikTok, right? And I think in Silicon Valley there's a lot of smart people and I think the context switching is pretty wide as a founder. But to go from like entertainment mode to like serious quantitative analytic mode that broadly is very, very impressive.
And then two, I think Jake has the one word that you mentioned is that resiliency. Like, Jake has just seen a lot of [bleep] like coming up in Hollywood, going through the influencer phase, going through controversy, like surviving it, having haters. Like, most people do not eat that much pain. And I think that if you think about investing or startups, it's pain tolerance. And if you're literally fighting and punching people or getting punched in the face for a living, and then two, like the internet punching you, right? Which is like the most toxic environment, like internet trolls like hating on you. If you can survive that and thrive in that environment, that's presidential, like head-of-state level courage and resiliency. So those two things I think is what is inspiring to me in terms of like how much can I context switch, how much pain tolerance can I have, and hopefully that's what we can imbue with our startup founders and our portfolio companies and our co-investors, right? Like that human quality that is very rare is inspiring to me and hopefully for the people that we work with.
On that note, Jake, what can people learn from you about resilience and pain tolerance? Is it just something you've had since you were a kid? Is it something you've learned over time? Is it something you've, you know, just sort of like been pushed off the deep end?
Yeah. No, I think it's a little bit of all of those things. I think I had like a very intense father, so I think it started there, and just being able to deal with him and growing up in that environment. And I think the hard work and that led me to a very public career. It all started with people actually like hating on me from day one, like in my school. So there was never like a moment where me making the videos didn't have like a ton of haters. My whole school in high school like turned against me and was like talking [bleep], making anonymous accounts saying things about me. My principal, teachers were saying things. So it's always been there. So I think I'm just used to it because of that, which is pretty interesting.
And then you're like, what else are you gonna do? Like, I don't know. Just be a coward and quit and give up and let people run you? Like, I could just never be that person and I just don't think that way. And I know who I am. I think that's very important as well. And I feel like a lot of people know who they are, but they let the comments and critics like get to them very easily. And so if you could just look yourself in the mirror and be like, I'm doing good. I'm a good person. I'm doing good things in the world. I have a good heart. I mean well. And if you can mean those things, then it doesn't matter what anyone says.
Yeah. When people ask you like, 'Hey, are tools like therapy helpful or other sort of self-care tools, whether physical or emotional or mental, to help deal with it,' what do you tell them?
Yeah, definitely. I fully believe that. I think you just have to be careful. You know, you don't want the therapy to like turn into victimizing yourself and then always being in constant sad loops. So I think you have to be careful and at some points if it feels needed, yes. But I don't think you should get like trapped into the cycle of therapy and always kind of having a call with someone or an in-person meeting with someone that is generally probably going to be negative. And so I think it's very important like who that therapist is as well. But I do think it's important to learn about yourself and unpack things. And I think the childhood like trauma and going back and realizing like, oh, you know, you had this that happened to you and this is maybe why you have anxiety in this moment and these things. And so I really like childhood trauma work that you can connect to why you behave certain ways as an adult. Yeah. And I think it's important to unpack those things and learn about it.
Totally. Jeff, why don't you also make sense of some of like when you reflect on your career? Looking back, you've taken some big swings in some different spaces. When you look back at the threads that have tied your career together, how do you make sense of it? What are some of the big insights you've had that have led you to go deep on certain things?
I guess like I've always been like an almost an academic or an engineer or scientist at heart. How do you like, what is the nature of reality? What is the truth? What are the underlying systems or rules that govern yourself, a company, a society, right? So if I think about some of the things I've been interested in, whether it's biohacking, how do you optimize your singular person? Actually, that's how I got to know the Andreessen family with Ketone IQ. Chris Dixon was our lead investor. I wanted to figure out how we could engineer better brain performance, human performance.
And then you think about at the larger scales, right? How do you impact culture? How do you impact society? What is the right way to organize a company, organize a venture firm, organize a nation state, right? Like that's like the largest scale of optimization. So I think there's like a tinkerer or like a student or an academic that just likes just figuring out the different systems. And then the second part is I think with a little bit of battle scars and wisdom just like fewer things that just compound really, really well. So now I think about why venture and growth is a very interesting problem to play with is that managing $1 to $100 to a million dollars to a billion dollars is kind of the same level of hard, right? It's like hard to spend $100 really well. It's hard to spend a hundred billion dollars really well, but you only need like one or two people or three people to manage a hundred bucks or a hundred billion bucks, right? Like those are the best investors are just like really, really strong conviction folks who just are making big bets.
So that's where I think we've gravitated towards and I think Jake has a different lens on how he can scale his thought leadership and cultural leadership and his ability to convene and bring people together at the higher and higher scales. So I think that's like a shared level of just like shared ambition and maybe arrogance in terms of we think we can play at those highest levels of wielding capital, wielding technology, wielding culture. So if that is like the end point of just like, okay, what are the underlying rules of nature, rules of reality, what's the most efficient way to start pulling and playing with those levers. So I think science, computer science, physics are foundational to just the nature of reality and then capital is the lever of human society and civilization. And I think where Antifund has been quite unique is that in a world where there's more and more capital, is attention more scarce, is the ability to control mind share more scarce. So one of the original questions, like why is Jake an ideal partner? It's like you really can't name a better partner than Jake Paul in terms of wielding attention and driving cultural taste. So if we can really master those two levers, maybe we can control the world, right? Like, or let's just try and have someone stop us.
Yeah, there was a famous tweet of if you're smart, pivot to being hot, or, you know, if you're focused on intelligence, you know, pivot to being, you know, willing attention. You had this blog post of, you know, there's two jobs, AI maxing and looks maxing. Why don't you talk about that?
Yeah. No, I think it's actually true, which is that the only thing that really will matter is that if we assume that like we're pretty AGI pilled, intelligence is just going to be metered out through compute, then what matters then is like one, your relationship with people. And I think looks maxing is like a pretty narrow focus on like, you know, physical appearance matters and like people like people that look good and symmetric and healthy, so fine. But I think it's beyond just looks. It's like your vibe, your ability to just be charismatic and engage with people. So that's like an important skill set in the future. Can you just have better vibes than everyone else? And I think with venture, right? Like I think what you've done with the media strategy for Andreessen Horowitz, I mean, you guys are literally executing on lookmaxing the VC world essentially, right? Like you guys have your own propaganda arm just pushing out your view of the world. And then the second part is that like, okay, if you don't have, maybe you're not maxing out on vibes, then you got to just be best at wielding intelligence. So all you got to do is like play with CUDA and be on the computer all day long and then on the other side work out, sleep a lot and look max. Then you got everything covered.
If you were 22, like just getting out of college today, but in 2026, um, what would that look like in terms of how you'd want to spend your time?
We were just stopping by Stanford and Jake's going to go back to college and, uh, so that might be an answer that he can actually think about.
Yeah, I want to play on the Stanford football team actually. So, we'll see what happens.
He's going to do one year on the Stanford team and then get drafted by the Cleveland Browns. It's happening. Let's go.
Um, I'm actually like old school in the sense that, and I think I saw that earlier in my career where like, oh, is if computer science and math is automated then you don't need to study this stuff and just do like cultural or other fuzzy stuff. I would just go deeper and deeper into actually understanding math, actually understanding computer science because if you actually know underlying how these large language models are actually working, you actually can wield them and prompt them better. So I'm actually like doubling down that yes, like get really good at math, get really good at computer science, right? Like the people that are leading these industries are like math champions, right? Like Scott Woo and all these guys are just hardcore at that stuff. And you know, we were hanging out with Scott at their office a couple months back. So to get technically brilliant.
A version of AI maxing is basically just max your IQ and max your EQ, right? Like that's another simpler way to put it. And like looks maxing and AI maxing are just like the more culturally relevant terms for it. Would you start a company? Would you join Anthropic or OpenAI or...
You just got to gang up with the smartest, most ambitious people possible and that could either be your own startup or it could be joining OpenAI. And I think the most important thing is like team up with like-minded ambitious people that will push you to be the best version of yourself. So if that's a company, then let's go and we'll, like Jake and I, will back you. If it's joining OpenAI, Cognition, some of these like really, really high growth companies so you can learn a little bit before you jump into the deep end yourself, that's also great. Um, but I think the most important thing is just get with really, really smart, ambitious people and team up and grow together.
I'm not technical, so I think there would be a harder place for me, but I think I would probably try to be in VC coming out of college. And yeah, hopefully if I made a lot of good connections at Stanford, my buddies that I would seed their genius ideas. But...
Don't cut yourself short. Like, we had Jake on his MacBook and...
Yeah, I got my GitHub popping so that...
GitHub and watch his commits.
Well, I was going to ask if you were 22 today in 2026 or 18 even, could you run the same playbook? Or is there something about what you did on YouTube or sort of these new platforms when you were younger that wouldn't work in the same way today and you'd have to find a new... Like, to me, it's obvious. You know, boxing, you just got to be the best in the world. You got to beat the other person. But in terms of what works on sort of the creator space, it doesn't seem to be as an outsider as obvious. And so I'm curious if the same kind of media playbook would have worked, you know, 10, 15 years later or...
No, I mean, I don't think it would. I think there's very few, you know, people breaking through on the media side of things. It's a lot harder to grow, a lot harder to amass a following and to be a known brand and to rise to the top. You know, you kind of had to be there from the start. And that's why you really see with brands that have stuck around at the highest level in social media, it's me, MrBeast, and my brother, and there's really no one else.
And what was your... for people who are not as familiar, like what was your insight in terms of like what were you doing that was so new or that amassed such an audience so quickly?
Yeah, I think a lot of it was... I mean, I think you just have to be entertaining and me and my brother were doing that, posting every single day like 15-minute videos that took the whole day to film. So just effort first and foremost, the entertainment in it. And then I think diversifying with like characters. So I basically created like a daily reality show with all of these people on it and all these crazy things happening and that was cutting edge at the time.
And then just always being the visionary of like what's working, what trends. You know, okay, let's make a rap song and then all of a sudden it's like one of the generational anthems of this, of, you know, younger kids know every single word of it. It's like, oh, music worked. Okay, let's make more songs. Let's make a whole album. Let's make a Christmas album. So constantly just like bits of iteration, but you know, spanning the full spectrum of entertainment. So it was like songs, comedy, I would make like scary videos, you know, have the fear aspect of it. Then all of a sudden I'm going into athleticism which is boxing and that whole side of entertainment as well. And so I think the modern-day entertainers have to do it all.
We went to MrBeast's sort of place in North Carolina, Jimmy's place rather, and he sort of gave us a tour and he was showing how just analytical the whole operation is. Yeah. Was yours much more kind of artistic or creative or emergent in terms of like, oh, let's just [bleep] around and find out? Or like, how did you, in terms of like what to spend time on, what to do, in comparison to something like Beast's operation?
Yeah, I think it's similar, but I think Jimmy is like a numbers guy and is super analytical and mine is definitely analytical, but not at the level that Jimmy is with how he does things. And mine is more creative, like entertainment focused and just like kind of like a feeling thing like you're saying. But that's why, you know, Jimmy just maxed out the numbers on YouTube and just did every little thing possible to hack the algorithm.
It's interesting because there are a lot of people who will get big but not be super durable, whereas you, you just mentioned you and your brother and Jimmy are the ones that really stuck out. And I'm curious why some people get big for a period of time, but and I'll hear about them. They're being on TikTok, they be on some platform, but I don't hear about them years later. Like, it's...
