Being a missionary in any field beats being a mercenary. When you're a missionary, you're not doing it because of the number. You're doing it because you believe in the thing. Success is an anti-pattern. Most things that people try will fail, but when it works, it's actually 100x bigger than you think it's going to be. Let's apply this to crypto. Let's start with Bitcoin. How high can this thing go based on what we just talked about?
Avichal Garg, the co-founder and general partner at Electric Capital, former Google and Facebook leader, and an early investor in 25 unicorns including Figma, Solana, Kraken, and Notion.
Is Bitwise your main sponsor?
He's one of the sponsors, yeah.
What do you have to tell us about Bitwise?
I was the first investor back in '16 or '17. Hunter, who's the CEO founder, used to report to me at Facebook. He's a really good friend of mine. He and Hong would come over to my house and we brainstorm ideas. And so they went through 12 or 18 months of iteration before they even arrived at the Bitwise idea. Eight years later and it's just a monster business. It's definitely going to be a multi-billion dollar company.
Self-belief was the biggest fuel to it. I think some people are predisposed through genetics or through early upbringing to be wired in certain ways. And so I don't think you could create a system that would create another Elon. You know, it's just sort of like random lottery. But I suspect that there are at least 50 to 100 more Elons out there. If Bitcoin gets market share from gold and then if it becomes much bigger because it's on a phone, you don't sound crazy anymore.
We're 15 years into Bitcoin. We're 10 years into ETH. If Bitcoin can be as big as gold, once you put it on a phone, once you put it in front of 5 billion people, the market size actually goes up by 5 to 10x. Bitcoin's going to like 5 or 10 million, you sound like a crazy person. But it's not that crazy once you reason through it. Let's maybe finish today with applying this concept to an ETH or a SOL. I mean, maybe a SOL is too early. I don't know. How do you think about these things?
Um, it's a good question.
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How does the makeup look on you?
Makeup's pretty good.
I would, you know, now we understand what women feel, right? Boom. Magic. Boom.
Yeah.
Makes you look better. I'll tell you that.
If I were a politician, I would probably wear makeup.
That's why the orange man is orange.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's this whole... it's a weird tangent, but there's this whole... you can put this in the excerpts if you want, but I'm like pretty convinced it's changed plastic surgery. Like I think what people are doing is getting plastic surgery so they look good in photos even if they don't look good in real life. Does that make sense? Like the way the distortions would work with like an iPhone, you would want your face to look really good in like Instagram photos even if you don't look as good in real life. And so I think that's like the direction that a lot of plastic surgery has gone.
So you're saying that the plastic surgery matters less for in real life, correct?
Than for how we look online.
Correct. And then that creates a flow in a particular direction of proportions and what you emphasize and what you don't emphasize because the camera distortion with like an iPhone will make your face look a little bit different. And so I think a lot of plastic surgery optimizes for looking good on the internet because from like a CPM perspective, if you think of your face as a business, most of your impressions are happening on the internet not in real life.
I wanted to ask why does that make sense? So you in terms of business person or big personality at some point they say, do you think there's this conscious decision or maybe from the plastic surgeon saying do you want to look better in real life or do you want to look better online, correct?
Yeah. Yeah. And so I think then it creates style drift basically. So you get all these celebrities that look a certain way because actually that set of proportions is what's going to look best on camera. That's my conspiracy theory.
Okay. Just conspiracy theory. Yeah.
Well, it's just market forces. If you believe in market forces, that's what would happen, right? So, for example, Kylie Jenner or Kim Kardashian will say, 'Listen, I kind of...' I mean, the truth is I don't know what they look like in real life. I know what they look like online. Absolutely.
See? Exactly. I know. I know what they look like online. Absolutely.
Makes a lot of sense.
Well, we don't have this issue as men or less, right?
Well, not yet anyway.
Sometimes we wear makeup once a year. Well, if Brian Johnson has his way, we won't need it. We'll just live forever. So, it'll be great.
Just got this one here.
Sure. What is this?
It's a Cast card. Spend your stablecoin. A gold card actually.
So, it's worth more now than a few months ago. You know, Cast.
Yeah. Yeah. Dude, this is awesome. Wow.
They actually have this Cast card, the gold one that you can... I mean, you can buy it. I think it's for... you buy it for 10k and you can just spend with it. And this is like the kind of test version where they have the full version that is full gold.
Now it's 5k worth of gold. I think 37 grand or something like that and you can just go and spend.
I think they said the founder said there's only two companies offering like this full gold card. Robin Hood and them basically. I don't know if you're familiar with Cast.
Yeah, I've heard of them. Not deeply familiar. I mean when you understand stablecoins, I live my life on stablecoins. I understood the... I moved to London to build my first company in 2015. Yeah. And it was the Monzo, Revolut beginnings, right? 2015, 2016. And I mean the first time you just press three buttons and it works. It just works, right? You're like, 'Holy shit.' So I never used the bank ever again in my life. Yeah, I had maybe two bank accounts but like with 200 bucks and the rest was Monzo, Revolut.
Until Revolut banned me in 2019 because I was sending too much money to Coinbase to buy Bitcoin. Too much money was £7,000 by the way. Right. Was not too much. But I was like I might be doing something right if Revolut bans me because I'm buying Bitcoin. Right. And then so basically you understand, oh no banks. Wow. And then the next level is stablecoin banks, right? And you're like, 'Holy shit, like I can just get paid in stablecoins. I never offramp and I just spend.' It's so good. It's very addictive actually.
Yeah. To spend your stablecoins.
That's how you get in trouble, not the 7,000 in Bitcoin.
Good, man. It's good to see you. Thanks for having me.
Good to see you. You mentioned before too about your cap.
You wear a cap all the time or most of the time?
Yeah. I'm just... I'm very photosensitive. I get migraines. And so like if I'm in the sun too much or like with these podcast bright lights, if I sit under this for an hour, I'll just have a crazy migraine and so I have to... I mostly I live in the shade.
Like why is that? Do you know?
I don't know. It's just from a young age that was a thing. So, you'll usually see me like if I'm on stage because the lights are usually really bright and so there's something about the lights going into my eyes that it's just like after an hour I'll just have like a killer migraine and it just kills half a day.
How do you choose the hat?
Oh, this is just Electric branded so it's... most my clothes are free actually if you like... free like I get them right. This is like Electric gear. This a friend of mine sent me this.
How many of those hats do you have?
Just two. Blue and white. Yeah. Actually, no. I have some black ones, too.
So, for everyone, Avichal is not trying to hide, right? We had this comment because we had this woman on the podcast a couple weeks ago. I mean, on our other podcast, Drops, which is for upcoming founders. And she was wearing this hat and we didn't realize while we were recording that we couldn't really see her face. And then afterwards, it was recorded and we're like, 'Oh shit, we actually can't see her face at all.' Like at all. Like, she was just like, 'I'm real. I exist.' And then people obviously crypto, right? Complaining saying, 'Hey, what does she hide? This looks weird.' Yeah. Anyway, it's good to have you here. The David in the detail.
That's right. Very detail.
Yeah. Tell me about... is Bitwise your main sponsor?
Uh, he's one of the sponsors.
Yeah, that makes me happy.
They're amazing. Great guys.
Yeah. What do you have to tell us about Bitwise?
Um, well, you know, I was the first investor back in '16 or '17. Hunter, who's the CEO, founder, used to report to me at Facebook. He's a really good friend of mine.
I learned that yesterday, actually.
Matt told me, Matt from Bitwise, the CIO of Bitwise, told me, 'Hey, their story goes way back. You were his boss.'
Yeah. Well, I had the unfair advantage of, you know, at Facebook at the time, we used to do company level calibration. So, you like stack rank everybody. You know, like who's good, who's not, who's doing a good job. And so, I used to do it for the product management organization with some of the other senior product people. And, so I knew Hunter's performance scores. And so, I had the good fortune of knowing how good he was before everybody else figured it out. So, when he was leaving, he was literally top of his class. And so when he was leaving, I just said, 'Here's money. Like, do whatever you want.' And then we would hang out. He and Hong would come over to my house and we would brainstorm ideas. And so they went through, you know, maybe a year, something like a year or 12 or 18 months of iteration before they even arrived at the Bitwise idea. They were playing with like some SaaS stuff, some esports kind of related ideas, like some AI related ideas before they finally evolved to Bitwise like a year later. I have a lot of fond memories of just like jamming, they're like hanging out on my couch and we're just like jamming on ideas trying to figure out what to do. And then you know here we are eight years later and it's just a monster business. Like it's a...
Yeah. 15 billion in the asset under management.
More like, you know, I don't... I probably shouldn't give away any of the stats but it's a pretty monster business. Like it's definitely going to be a multi-billion dollar company.
I think what's really interesting here is what you said first, you said they spent 6 months, 8 months, a year trying to figure out and doing different things. Which shows that we might always think... I mean you are from Silicon Valley, we're going to talk about Silicon Valley later so you have this kind of clear view of what's happening here, right? Most people who might read the Bitwise or the Coinbase success story online might think these guys are geniuses. They just had this amazing idea and then they made it happen, right?
Well, that's not how really things happen in general in entrepreneurship. Yeah, it's half true. Yeah. It's like I think you have to be a particular kind of orientation and agency to say I'm just going to go do the thing. And I think that part is absolutely true. But you know, as much as I love and respect Hunter and Hong and so many other founders, I think there is a big realization that people have after they've seen a bunch of successful founders, like they're not that different from a lot of other people, you know.
Well, the other day I interviewed Brian from Coinbase.
I asked him the same question I'm going to ask you right now. I asked him, 'Who are you?' You said I'm just a normal dude.
Yeah. Yeah. It's... I mean and there's like two ways to interpret that. One is that you could be... it's not trying to pull down founders or anything like that. It's actually suggesting that everybody is capable of doing great things. And actually a lot of the times the real bottleneck for people to go do these amazing things is internalizing that they can do them. It's like the belief system that you're actually capable of doing things is almost always actually the bottleneck. It's not... there's plenty of talented people in the world. There's plenty of smart people in the world. There's plenty of hardworking people in the world. But like this belief system is actually really really important and it's self-reinforcing and it's mimetic. And I think it's one of the really really difficult things to replace about Silicon Valley because the belief system and the mimetic belief system of like you just look around and you're like, 'Oh, I was hanging 12 months ago at this hackathon thing with this person and now they have a billion dollar company, right?' And so like the timeline from being a nobody to being somebody, seeing those people when they were, you know, 22 or 25 or 30 or however old and just getting started and realizing that they're actually no different than you. This little sort of switch goes off in your brain and you say, 'Wait a second, I can do great things, too.' And then all of a sudden the belief system gets unlocked. And that self-referential mimetic belief system I think is one of the really hard things to replace about Silicon Valley. It's like every time somebody says, 'Oh, we'll create a culture, a startup hub somewhere else.' That belief system is a really really important unlock which is really hard to replicate.
Quick one. I want to thank our partners who help us make this show possible. I'd like to thank our friends at Jupiter, the DeFi super app. Anything you want to do on chain from trading to earning yield, you can just use Jupiter. Personally, I'd recommend getting the Jupiter wallet on either your laptop or your phone. 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper than the competition. You're going to love it. Thank you to the awesome team at Castard, my go-to card to spend my stablecoins directly with my Apple Pay to buy anything, food, coffee, hotel night, or plane tickets without having to use a bank ever again.
So this self-belief kind of skill, right, or thing, what's the biggest fuel to it? It's literally the context or it's something that happened before.
Um, it's a good question. In some sense, I think this gets at this related question of like can you make entrepreneurs or can you create more entrepreneurs or is it an inborn thing? And I think it's some combination of both. I think some people are predisposed through genetics or through early upbringing to be wired in certain ways and so I don't think you could create a system per se that would create another Elon, you know, that's just sort of like random lottery. But I suspect that there are at least 50 to 100 more Elons out there. And so then the question to ask is okay well we may not be able to create a system that out of seven or eight billion people produces a million Elons. But if there are 50 to 100 out there, how do we find them and what are the bottlenecks? So, identifying them or cultivating them. And I suspect a lot of that actually between access to good education, access to basic nutrition, access to capital, we're actually working through most of them. Like, if you think about it, right, like if Brian Johnson has his way, we'll all live forever. Crypto lets you get capital to anybody in the world. The internet got information to everybody in the world and got everybody online and now you can learn to code. AI is going to give everybody a doctor and a teacher and you can write code. So we're like if you think about all of the bottlenecks to potentially identifying the next 100 Elons, most of them I think kind of tip pretty fast like in the next 10 to 20 years like it's pretty likely that we address most of them. And so then the question is well what are the remaining bottlenecks? And it very well might be that just like those 50 people believing that they can do the thing and being inspired and having the agency to do it and finding themselves surrounded with a bunch of other people who say, 'Yeah, you can do it.' That might actually be the bottleneck because that's the thing that science can't solve, right? We can't... how do you change culture? Like culture is a bunch of humans and our inner relations and the way we communicate and all these other things, right? So that part actually might be the slow part.
Do you think that the next 50 or 100 Elon that actually exist already need to be found or that if they're true Elons they will find the way on themselves to get there?
A little of both. Yeah, I think there is something to be said for in the modern world when you do have access to the internet and you can just sort of put your thoughts out there that you can be some random person in some part of the world and kind of bubble up. At the same time, I think it would be irrational just like looking at the reality of life that, you know, let's just take the numbers, right? By the numbers, there's a billion Chinese people, there's a billion Indian people, there's a billion people on the African continent. Let's say you had somebody that was truly as gifted as Elon is. You know, what's the probability? It's like 50% probability that that person is born into a household that has less than $100 a month or what... you know, you could do the math and say like what is the household income for that person? And so could they in theory? Sure. Could they get lucky and go to like a great university and get a scholarship and come out? Yeah, absolutely. Would I expect all 100 of them to be able to pull it off just by the rules of random chance? Probably not. And so I think it's a fair question to ask, you know, what are the sort of either barriers to identifying those people or how do we identify those people and sort of get them out of those situations? And I think this is actually one of the things that crypto is really good at, right? I mean, if you look at... let's take Malaysia or Southeast Asia as a context here. Like the number of good DeFi teams that have come out of those ecosystems in like Singapore and Malaysia is pretty remarkable. And that's not a market that Silicon Valley was paying attention to. And you get CoinGecko and Jupiter, you know, you have Camino and there's like a bunch of great teams actually in that ecosystem. Etherscan, right? These are all sort of like legitimate, you know, seven, eight, nine figure revenue kinds of businesses that would have been otherwise ignored, right? So, there's clearly talent sitting there and all of a sudden the crypto capital could find them. They could use that to springboard to international sorts of scale. And so, yeah, I suspect that there's more talent out there that is unidentified and untapped. And it's not just the case that they'll kind of bubble up on their own. We could argue about the numbers, you know, is it like 10 of them will find their way out or 90 will find their way out, but I think it's probably, you know, a very very large percentage of those people are sort of unidentified and untapped right now, which actually is very, if you think about it, is quite optimistic about the future of humanity, right? Like one way to interpret that statement would be to say there is a 100x potential left in humanity, right? Like we've only managed to tap 1% of our true outliers, which is like a pretty crazy thing to think about if you think about the amount of progress we've been able to make in the last 50 years at a global scale. That if you had a 100x the talent that you could tap or 50x the talent or even 10x the talent, that's pretty remarkable actually that we have that much talent left to untap.
So you would articulate your mission as finding these talents to unlock the next 100x in humanity.
Yeah, it's interesting. It's been... so I started my career as an entrepreneur and we built products and we got to millions of users and we built some really cool tech and so the way I got to Facebook was they acquired our company and...
