"Age of Miracles"

Oscar IPO’d on March 3rd at $39 per share and started trading at $36 per share, good for a market cap just north of $7 billion. Since then, it’s down nearly 77%, its market cap hovering around $1.5 billion. As The Abstract Investor summarized, the challenge, and opportunity, is that: Many tech analysts aren't paying attention to insurance, while insurance analysts won't quite know how to look at a...

Not Boring Capital is launching a $30M Fund II.  In this episode, we go behind the scenes of raising and running a small venture fund, share the most recent LP update, and talk about the value of pushing out the weirdness and risk curve.  This podcast is brought to you by our Q1 Presenting Sponsor... Masterworks. If you want to join me on the platform and get priority access – click this Not Borin...

2022 is the year that web3 starts making a meaningful impact on atoms-based challenges like healthcare and climate. Web3 is a global, real-money economic and social simulation, a digital laboratory for complex problems. We dive into Allen Iverson, complexity economics, and non-fungible olive gardens to understand why, and what that means.  This episode is presented by Masterworks. If you want to j...

Medici, Not Boring Capital's first anon founder and Not Boring Founders' first anon guest, is the founder of Abacus, a decentralized NFT appraisal protocol. Launched in late November, Abacus has already been used to appraise millions of dollars worth of NFTs, including multiple Bored Apes, an XCOPY, and a Parallel. In this conversation, we discuss:  - Why go anonymous as a web3 founder?  - How Med...

Brandon Arvanaghi is the CEO of Meow, which lets corporate treasuries play offense with their balance sheets by offering potential 4% yields via crypto lending. We discuss:  The importance of building compliance-first. Building a crypto-native financial institution.  How it's possible to get such high yields with crypto.  Building in-house versus plugging into existing DeFi protocols.  How and why...

I only have one prediction to make for the next year: If you thought that 2021 was wild, 2022 will make it look normal. The best is still yet to come. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Web3 is a vortex for talent, money, culture, and brainspace. I’ve been trying to figure out why, and explain it in the simplest terms. I think I have it, my tailwit explanation: Web3 pushes out the Pareto Funtier. The Pareto Funtier is the set of options at which you can’t have more fun without making less money or can’t make more money without having less fun. Web3 pushes it out by baking money i...

Regy Perlera is building the future of retail with Seasons, an access-oriented rent-to-own platform for men.  What most impresses me about Regy is that Seasons, which is very much designed for a world in which people go out, came out of COVID even stronger, and with a broader vision, than when the company started. We'll cover that story, along with:   - Lessons learned from Rent the Runway   - How...

Chris Dixon tweeted that "Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance." Money builds on money; software builds on software; the results are exponential.  While it's harder to measure or intuit, the same is true for ideas. Each new idea is an idea lego.  Read the full post at Not Boring. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/messag...

Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus, a product-led sales platform backed by First Round Capital. Alexa started the company while getting her MBA at Stanford GSB based on her experience leading up sales strategy and operations at Dataminr. We discuss a wide range of topics including defining a new category, setting up a co-founder relationship for success, how to get the most out of ea...

As we speak, thousands of people are contributing funds to the ConstitutionDAO in order to win a copy for the last remaining private copy og the US Constitution when it goes up for auction at Sotheby's on Thursday night. It's expected to fetch roughly $20 million.  We'll cover the backstory, what a DAO is, and the significance of a group of people using web3 tools to buy the US Constitution togeth...

Imagine a place...     Built for gamers Home to everyone playing the Great Online Game Has 150 million MAUs Generates $130 million in revenue Is a web3 sleeper This week, I teamed up with Mario Gabriele of The Generalist to tell Discord's story. You can read the full piece here.  We cover: The circular origin story. Discord’s lore involves more headfakes and false starts than almost any other busi...

Neuro-ID is a real-time behavioral analytics tool that analyzes all of our very human and unique taps, clicks, and swipes to help its customers fight fraud and better understand their customers. The company, based out of beautiful Whitefish, Montana, announced a $35 million Series B yesterday, in which Not Boring Capital is participating. I sat down with CEO Jack Alton to discuss:   - What Neuro-I...

Last week, Facebook announced a rebrand to Meta and an all-in bet on the Metaverse. Zuck said all of the right things about openness and interoperability.  The question people are asking is, "Can we trust him?" The more interesting question is, "Do we even need to?" In a world in which people are more used to ownership of their digital assets and identity, Meta’s best strategy will be to operate m...

Since February, I’ve been writing an accidental series on how web3 is impacting culture, work, and the way that we all interact with each other.  Power to the Person was about how technology is empowering individuals as the new atomic units of commerce, The Great Online Game was about how the internet blurs the line between work and play for those individuals, and The Cooperation Economy was about...

Lauren Rothwell is the co-founder and CEO of Retrera, a platform for remote employee engagement that makes it really easy to host team offsites and retreats. Every founder that I talk to with remote employees, even those who have offices, is organizing at least one offsite per year, and often one per quarter. They love getting the team together in a new location to build bonds, but organizing it a...

Not Boring Capital has invested $8 million in 79 companies over its first two quarters. That's fast. This weekend, I sent an LP Update to Not Boring Capital's LPs. In this episode, I share the update with a particular focus on Not Boring Capital's strategy and the trade-offs I need to make to lean into my comparative advantages and away from areas where I'm weaker.  You can read the full post at N...

ScienceIO decodes the language of medicine to unlock the full potential of healthcare data. Its industry-leading clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform structures data in real-time to enable search, analysis, and insight generation.  Not Boring Capital invested in ScienceIO's $8M seed round, and in this episode, I'll explain what they do and why I invested, covering:  The Investment T...

Ayush Jaiswal is the founder and CEO of Pesto, a Not Boring portfolio company that connects companies with the most valuable resource in the world: engineers.  Ayush founded Pesto because he realized that remote was coming even before COVID, and that companies working anywhere meant that they could hire the best talent from anywhere. He also saw that in India, his home country, some of his friends...

Nick Greenawalt is the co-founder of Wanderers. I've become obsessed with Wanderers since discovering it a couple of weeks ago. The current batch of 8,888 NFTs are 8 second animations of space ships hyperdriving through space at warp speed, soundtracked by spacey music. That's just part one of Phase I of the Wanderers master plan. Next up: every Wanderer holder gets a free planet NFT dropped in th...

Power is shifting from institutions to individuals. Remote work, web3, the Great Resignation. When careers, jobs, or institutions are no longer as reliable a source of meaning as they once were, how do we find our own meaning? How do we keep it all from spinning out of control?  Today, we're waxing philosophical. We'll explore Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartres, and why now might be a good time for...

Going from 0 to 1 -- taking your company from idea to real live working product with customers -- is hard.  In this special edition of Not Boring Founders, Packy and Thrive Capital's Gaurav Ahuja sit down with Stytch co-founders Reed McGinley-Stempel and Julianna Lamb to discuss how they've done it. In the past 18 months, they left their jobs at Plaid and Very Good Security, raised money from Benc...

Unit is a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform that lets tech companies embed financial features into their products. It's growing spectacularly fast and has raised over $70 million from some of the leading investors in fintech since its founding in July 2019. What makes Unit special is that it believes that tech companies with existing distribution are in the prime position to grow fintech over t...

What kind of company would Jeff Bezos start if he were 30 years old today? We look back at four '90s Bezos interviews to try to figure out what he would look for and how he would approach starting a company today. (Hint: it's probably a crypto company).  Read the full post at Not Boring. Give your answer and join the conversation on Twitter.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify...

Chris Toy is the co-founder and CEO of MarketerHire, a talent marketplace for the world's best marketers. MarketerHire is quietly putting up some all-time great growth numbers and is perfectly positioned to help companies and talented people make the transition to the future of work -- not just where we work, but how we work. We dive into Chris' background, why marketing is the Apex predator of in...