"Age of Miracles"

ReFi (Regenerative Finance) is having a moment. ReFi is a reimagining of the financial system that accounts for the needs of all stakeholders, current and future. It puts a price on externalities: charging those who create negative externalities and rewarding those who create positive externalities. Celo is becoming ReFi's home. Celo is a carbon-negative EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain designed...

When Adam Smith began writing about an invisible hand, a metaphor for the market’s self-correcting mechanisms, in 1759, the world was very local, and information moved at a more leisurely pace. Today, though, information zips around the world instantly, the talent pool is becoming more liquid and global, venture capital has more money to deploy than ever before, and the scope of the world’s ambiti...

Shane Curran is the founder and CEO of Evervault. Evervault is an encryption infrastructure company that makes collecting, processing, and sharing sensitive data ultra secure. When a company encrypts with Evervault, they could put their database on a billboard and no one could get at the data. The company’s mission is to encrypt the web. Its goal is to end data breaches. To support the podcasts, p...

Not Boring just turned two years old. Packy reflects on the last two years of Not Boring and looks to the year ahead. Each of the first two years of Not Boring had a defining "thing." Year 1: Grow the newsletter and survive Year 2: Not Boring Capital For Year 3, Not Boring is building a Liquid Super Team. Packy discusses why he was originally hesitant to build a team, what has changed, and what th...

Mariam Hakobyan is the co-founber and CEO of Softr. Softr is an easy-to-use no-code platform to build powerful websites, web-apps and client portals from Airtable, in 10 minutes. With Softr, non-technical users can easily build web-apps that previously would’ve required engineering resources. Softr is riding the No-Code wave, and in this discussion Packy and Mariam discuss the progress of No-Code,...

Hadrian is different than the companies we normally talk about in Not Boring. While it relies heavily on software, its main focus is in the world of atoms. It uses big machines to make precision parts for rockets and satellites. It blends automation and high-skilled labor. It’s an incredible example of something we’re going to see a lot more of in the coming years (partially because Hadrian exists...

Bryan Pellegrino is the co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs. LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that enables the realization of cross-chain applications with a low-level communication primitive — simply put, LayerZero enables more secure and affordable cross-chain activity. During the podcast, LayerZero announced it had raised a $135M round co-lead by Sequoia, a16z, and FTX. For...

Kaeya Majumunday is the founder and CEO of Swaypay. Swaypay is a platform that allows customers to get cashback for posts on TikTok. Customers earn cashback for posting about their recent purchases and brands can get free content and distribution from authentic brand ambassadors. Kaeya and Packy discuss Swaypay’s recent copycats and why she takes it as a strong signal of success for her company. K...

Elon Musk sparked The Current Thing Meme. There's another meme happening: The Current Financial Thing.  Everyone agrees that things are bad, and they agree in the same way. They even agree on how things are going to play out.  Groups of humans aren't typically right when they all agree on what the future will bring. Will they be this time?  You can read the full post at Not Boring. Thanks to our p...

Alice Albrecht is the founder and CEO of re:collect. re:collect is focused on augmenting human memory and creativity. The product tracks what you're reading and ingests other content information (like notes, highlights, ect) and hands you "thought building-blocks" in the moment of creation. They are building an automatic bridge between you, your digital knowledge, and your ideas.  But re:collect i...

Ben Rollert is the co-founder and CEO of Composer. Composed is an automated trading platform that allows users to build hedge-fund like strategies with a no-code visual editor. Ben and Packy first met while working together at Breather over 6 years ago, where Ben established himself as "the smartest person Packy has ever met." Composer aims to bring modern software thinking to asset management --...

Today, Ramp announced that it raised $750 million -- $200 million in equity and $550 in debt -- at an $8.1 billion valuation from existing investors, led by Keith Rabois at Founders Fund. Not Boring Capital participated. It also hit $100 million in annualized revenue just two years after launching.  For this piece, Ramp's co-founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh let me peek behind the curtains to...

Rushir Parikh is the co-founder and CEO of Popchew. Popchew is a platform that allows creators to build their own restaurant brands at a national scale. When Packy first met Rushir, he passed on investing -- in this conversation, Packy explains how he (thankfully) was able to invest later on and Rushir lays out the massive vision that Packy missed the first time around. Popchew has three main stak...

Vance Roush is the founder of Overflow. Overflow builds infrastructure that makes generosity frictionless across every major asset class. The inspiration for Overflow came from Vance's other calling -- he's the founder of Vive Church, an Bay Area based church that now has over 4,000 members across 10 locations. As Treasure of Vive, Vance realized that the church's tech-focused congregation had no...

Fount is running the Elon Musk Company Formula on health. The Starting Point is that healthcare is broken – we spend too much money on managing diseases versus preventing or curing them, and we rarely optimize for performance. We’re wasting human and financial capital. Today, Fount is in the “Sustainable Business Model” phase. Just like rich people have always been happy to spend on nice cars, the...

Rohit Mittal founded Stilt to give loans to immigrants and underserved people for whom traditional underwriting models didn't work. He came to the US as an immigrant and experienced the pain of establishing credit without any, and after years of working within the system and learning, he built the product to fix it. That meant rebuilding everything -- new underwriting models, license, tech stack -...

Flow, the blockchain for open worlds created by Dapper Labs, is a normie blockchain.  In a world in which L1s are battling for 300 million crypto users, going for the other 4.7 billion internet users is crazy differentiated enough that it just might work.  You can read the full essay at Not Boring. Thanks to our presenting sponsor, Masterworks.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spot...

Abrar Ul Haq is the co-founder of Tazah, a B2B agricultural marketplace that provides access to market and access to capital to millions of farmers in Pakistan and in the middle east region. Prior to Tazah, Abrar and his co-founder worked at Careem, a regional super app that competed with Uber, beat it in its home region, and then got acquired by Uber. In this episode, Abrar shares the lessons he...

Today, Quaestor is announcing a rebrand to Standard Metrics and a fresh $23.7 million Series A to build the data and relationship graph for the private markets.  In this episode, we'll discuss why the private markets, and especially venture capital, needs an Entropy Wrangler, and the two key strategic decisions that Standard Metrics is making to ensure that it becomes the platform on top of which...

Neuro-ID and Alloy are teaming up to tackle the $721B in estimated losses from identity theft, stop fraud ring attacks, and create smoother experiences for good customers. We dig into the direct fraud problem and the even bigger problem caused by stopping good actors who want to purchase. Plus, Jack and Tommy share how a partnership like this comes together in the first place.  Disclosure: Neuro-I...

I recently read two books on quantum physics by Carlo Rovelli: The Order of Time and Helgoland. While this isn't a quantum physics podcast, I think they're actually useful to think about in our context in three ways. Understanding the current state of the science. It’s at least interesting, if not practically useful to most of our day jobs, to understand where the cutting edge of physics is today....

In five years, Snappr has gone from graduation photography to the leading on-demand marketplace for professional photography and now, to end-to-end visual content workflow software used by many of the world's largest companies and marketplaces. Matt Schiller is running the the API-first playbook in reverse, and the business is growing like a weed. You can read the full post at Not Boring. --- Send...

The American Dream is on life support, but it's not dead. We need to stop focusing so much time worrying about protecting peoples’ downsides and start spending more time working on getting more people more upside. We can revive the American Dream by making ownership an explicit economic strategy. You can read the full post at Not Boring.  Thanks to our Presenting Sponsor, Masterworks.  --- Send in...

Last week, Not Boring crossed 100,000 subscribers. In this episode, we take a quick look back, brush off the trolls, and re-commit to taking risks, getting things wrong, and being unabashedly optimistic. You can read the full post at Not Boring. Thanks to the Presenting Sponsor of Not Boring's Audio Editions: Masterworks. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmi...

The dialogue around web3 has turned into a full-fledged debate and the focus has shifted to winning instead of the truth.  I actually debated in high school and college, and started a Debate Club in NYC. I think the web3 debate is silly, and that the right answer is always in the middle, but after Prof G dropped his rebuttal against web3 for the Opposition, I had no choice but to jump in for the P...