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Kevin Ryan says Pollan’s book changed his view of psychedelics
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2 min read
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134 docs
Kevin Ryan’s account of *How to Change Your Mind* is the clearest recommendation: he ties the book to a specific change in outlook. The other picks offer perspectives on product governance, AI-era creative judgment, and Shakespeare’s historical context.
The clearest case of a book changing a reader’s mind
How to Change Your Mind — book by Michael Pollan. Kevin Ryan says he had never considered or tried psychedelics before reading it and that it “literally did change my mind.” He says the book led him to see potential for these medicines to help with PTSD, depression, and anxiety, pointing to academic results; he had found it on the New York Times’ 2017 best-books list. This is the most compelling recommendation because Ryan describes both his starting point and the shift; the health claims remain his account, not an independent clinical assessment.
Other useful reading
Incorruptible — book; the transcript renders the author’s name as “Eric Reese.” Marty Cagan explicitly encourages readers to read it after describing a corporate-governance problem: product teams can get better at shipping great products yet see their work pulled in another direction by people with different motivations. For product leaders, the recommendation points beyond execution practice to who governs the product.
Shakespeare’s Professional Career — book by Peter Thomson. Paul Graham, writing about what he is reading, praises its density and says it nearly amounts to a history of the Elizabethan period. The draw is a Shakespeare book that broadens into the surrounding era.
An article on what makes art great — Nabil Koreshi. Katie Dill calls it insightful; in her summary, great art combines unexpected details with deeper meaning or recurring themes that hold together as a whole. Dill connects that to AI-era editing: judge details and coherence, not just whether an output looks finished. The passage gives no formal title or URL, so this one is harder to track down.
Kevin Ryan says Pollan’s book changed his view of psychedelics
Lenny's Podcast
The speaker, who says he had been a product leader for two and a half decades, recommends the new book Incorruptible (the transcript renders the author’s name as “Eric Reese”) during a discussion of corporate governance and the risk of products being pulled in a different direction by people with different motivations.
Tim Ferriss
Profile
Kevin Ryan credited Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind with changing his view of psychedelics; he said it helped persuade him that these medicines could be useful for conditions including PTSD, depression, and anxiety. He found the book through the New York Times’ 2017 best-books list, which he checks for reading ideas.
tobi lutke
Tobi Lutke recommended @IterIntellectus’s Claude-generated video on Western civilization, praising it as an outside perspective on Western culture and suggesting schools play it weekly with their local anthem .
Lenny's Podcast
The speaker endorses an article by Nabil Koreshi about what makes art great, highlighting its idea that strong work combines unexpected details with deeper meaning or recurring themes that create a coherent whole—qualities the speaker says AI is not good at.
Lenny's Podcast
The video speaker praises Claire’s talk on ambition and invokes it while arguing that PMs should automate small, reactive loops so they can focus on larger work.
Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin
Jason Lemkin (@jasonlk) endorses Gorgias’s e-commerce customer-experience competitive evaluation report as an example of how to publish evaluations transparently: https://evals.gorgias.com/report. The report open-sources its harness and covers 8,356 live conversations across 18 vendors; it names Gorgias #1 in support while also showing Yuma resolving more conversations and Envive leading in pre-sale.
Paul Graham
Paul Graham recommends Peter Thomson’s book Shakespeare’s Professional Career, praising its detail and saying it covers far more than its title suggests—nearly amounting to a history of the Elizabethan period.
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg recommends haiku.blog, calling it “one of the best blogs on the internet” and praising its beautiful photography and daily haiku.
How to Spot 10-Year Trends and Build Billion-Dollar Companies — Kevin Ryan
Tim Ferriss
YouTube channel
Tim Ferriss
Host
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0:00I start with a business crush, meaning there's an idea and I can't stop thinking about it. And then a week later, I'm still thinking about it.
0:09And now I'm thinking, "Oh my god, this would be good and we could do that and we could add this person." And it's just building in my mind and I'm falling in love with my idea intellectually. And if that sticks with me for like two weeks, I generally do it.
0:25Kevin, thank you for making the time. So nice to see you.
0:27Happy to be here. So, I wanted to just give people a scan at 30,000 ft of the landscape, meaning your chronology for a second. So, this was prepared by the robots. So, don't believe everything you read, but let's just go through some of the basics. I'm not going to spend too much time, but please indulge me for a second. So, 1985, graduates from Yale. I think that was economics. Begins his career at Credential Investment Corp., all right, New York and London. 1990,
0:56earns his MBA at INSEAD. subsequently works at Euro Disney in France. Then United Media. We're going to come back to all of that. 1995 helps launch the blank website. I'm leaving that blank for a reason. We'll come back to it. And then after that, Double Click. That's where if people interview you, I know you don't do very much media, but in the few that I've seen, that's where a lot of people start.
1:16We will not start there. Then goes on Double Click sells for 1.1 billion. Ryan steps down 2007, founds Ali Corp. We're going to spend a lot of time on Ali Corp. Co-founds Guilt Group. Business Insider Ten, later renamed to MongoDB, then co-founded Zola, a wedding registry company, and Nomad Health in 2015, a marketplace connecting clinicians with temporary healthc care jobs. I'm trying to give people an idea of the breadth of fields. 2015, Axel Springer acquires control of Business Insider. Got some
1:45numbers here, but who knows? 442 million, something like that. Hudson Bay buys Guild Group for an announced $250 million year deal. MongoDB in 2017 goes public on NASDAQ 10 years after its founding. I know there's a lot of stories behind that. 2021 we met I guess or had dinner next to each other 2 years prior to this roughly co-founder therapeutics developing new medicines for psychiatric conditions. We will certainly talk about that. 2023 skis 101
2:12km to the south pole. So that stands out as an outlier. Then June 2026, OTSKA completes its acquisition of Transcend 700 million upfront plus up to 525 million contingent on future sales. July 2026 announces Ali Corps 335 million second fund focused on backing companies at their earliest stages. I think you're doing a lot more kind of deep tech investing also. This is a crazy bio, Kevin, and [laughter]
2:41there are so many reasons I wanted to chat and learn from you. And I wanted to start, we're eventually going to get to things like recruiting and talent scouting, but I wanted to talk about trends and gazing into the crystal ball, looking into the future.
2:57So, I've read that you sometimes do an exercise of listing trends on a whiteboard, right? Throw 20 trends up.
3:03And I'm going to read a bit. This is from foundersjourney.org. So one exercise I do is to list 20 ideas on the board of trends that I believe are going to exist for 10 years and then what are the implications that come out of that and you can look at societal trends healthy eating automation and restaurants gig economy and this is this is where I think I miss step so first I get the first part you ask if I bet that's going to continue for 20 years the market's going to grow by 5x he asks what will exist that doesn't exist today
3:30so sometimes I miss that second step but could you perhaps just walk me through how you think of trends and spotting opportunities in those trends. And it's it strikes me that I think that 10 years is important as opposed to like one or two years, but could you speak to that?
3:47Yeah, first of all, 10 years is important because to build an important company, unfortunately, you can't do it in two or three years. It does take 10 years. And so, you've got to bet on a long-term trend. So, if it's something that is hypy today and is going to be done in 2 years or started 5 years ago, you're too late.
4:03And it's very hard. I've gotten it wrong many times, but sometimes you get it right. So, double kick was internet advertising was going to be very important. And that trend we absolutely got right. Unstructured data in databases was and that was a 20-year trend. Psychedelics was a very important trend. I became a big believer that that, you know, would be significant for mental health and that we are five years into that 10-year trend. Mhm.
4:28Nuclear energy is something that we made a bet on, a very significant bet on two and a half years ago and are in an incredible company there. [snorts] The creator economy is something that we made a bet on several years ago and have an extremely successful company there. That's a trend that is continuing. There are other trends out there and more specifically valuebased care is a trend.
4:52What does that mean? Value based care is a way the government has structured it so that you can go to multiple hospitals or doctor's practices and work out ways for them to reduce their costs by focusing on a specialty often and if you reduce their costs then you can share in the savings and so we have multiple companies there and sometimes there are trends and I I'm not able to think of the right way to
5:21benefit from or the right product longevity and this focus still haven't come up with the right thing. I have a I have a conference called doc which is in Napa Valley in October that is longevity and science and so that's to learn more but I don't have a product idea yet on that. Why do you do events? Are the events opportunity and talent scouting mostly? I understand that learning is sort of a bedrock beneath both of those two but what was the impetus behind an event
5:50like that? Yeah. So I I have four now and some of them are linked to my business. So Deep Tech New York, it's 450 people talking about the most fundamental deep tech trends that are happening out there, material science, things like that.
6:02Then I have one digital health New York, which is next week. Then doc, and then I have one that's called Odyssey, which is just ideas that's less commercial and just getting a hundred very smart people together. And I look at that as more intellectual nourishment. Mhm.
6:18I don't think of it as directly, you know, generating business. If I meet fascinating people in different areas, good things will happen. Some of them may be businessoriented and some of them may not be.
6:29Could be dragging a 100 pound sled behind you.
6:31Yeah.
6:32In Antarctica.
6:33Yeah. No, I'm leading 20 people as part of Odyssey to China in a month. And the theme is what does China do better?
6:40There are things they do worse, but there are things they do better.
6:42There are definitely things they do better.
6:43And I haven't been in a long time. I don't do a lot of business in China. So I just felt like I need to see that. And so I'm bringing heads of VC firms, bunch of interesting people on that trip.
6:54You know, we did one took 16 people skiing that are off piece skiers to a place in Baldair. Fascinating conversations in the afternoons. I'm going to take 30 people to Switzerland on a hiking trip next May. Anytime I'm surrounding myself with great people and we structure it in a good way that these conversations are happening, then I'm going to get a lot out of it.
7:18All right. So, I had planned, but plans change when the conversation gets flowing on hitting early chapters and I want to hit early chapters.
7:28But before we get there, I remember sitting next to you in Portugal, how whenever it was 2019, and the first thing I thought was, "Good God, what does this guy do for exercise?" I [laughter] mean, you take seem to take, unless your genetics are just like Usain Bolton or something, fitness, movement, exercise very seriously.
7:49And we'll probably get into what that regimen looks like a bit later.
7:53But when you organize these trips, so I organize a few trips a year for friends.
7:57How long are the trips? In the case of say the hiking off piece, like you got to check some boxes before someone's going to be like avalanche ready and so on. In the case of the hiking trip, how do you think of composing the group? How long is the trip? What goes into creating that?
8:12So, the hiking trip is 3 or 4 days. It'll be probably 30 people.
8:17Mhm.
8:18And my structure will be probably a 4hour hike 8 till 12, which is a good size hike. You can go longer, but four maybe five. And then in the afternoon, we'll have sessions. So, there'll be someone talking about climate change.
8:33There'll be someone who's talking about yeah psychon nuclear or whatever is happening that we think is interesting or you know consciousness and so you should feel like you had great content you got to know other people you had great conversations and then at dinner a lot of that comes together and you get to hopefully come away knowing 20 of these people who have been selected Mhm.
8:53because they come from different walks of life but are doing something very interesting.
8:57So with 30 does that mean that you would have something like 10 who end up getting up to speak? Yeah.
9:03And at dinner, is that structured in any way? And the reason I ask is that there can be unstructured events.
9:10One of the characteristics of dialogue that I really enjoyed in the early days when it got bigger, it changed.
9:16Yeah.
9:17Also didn't realize I was in Peter Thiel's secret society when [laughter] it came out in the media. Who knew? In any case, in the early days, I remember they had very small tables, four to five people, and there would be a question at each table, and someone would have to take the responsibility for effectively acting as moderator.
9:34And there was frequently assigned seating to ensure that you would get exposed to a variety of folks. And I thought that was really an astonishing way to squeeze a lot out of a few days. But in this case, if it's unstructured, how do you think about seating and grouping people?
9:51Right? Because if it's just one long like red wedding Game of Thrones thing, then if somebody's at one end and someone's at the opposite end, they're not going to interact necessarily, right? Is it Jeffersonian or like No, at 30 it's too big to have one conversation.
10:05So, what I would generally do actually is in the first two nights have seating so that it forces people to mix it up and maybe on the last night not do it. So then you can say, you know, the person I really want to catch up with is this.
10:18And you should have that opportunity of someone you spent some time with. On my bike, I have an annual biking trip where we just classic 4 days do a lot of mountains. Last year in the Duro Valley in Portugal, might be in Italy, things like that. There's only eight of us. And each person has a topic that they one meal is going to be a 20-minute conversation that you're going to lead.
10:38And it can range from very early on we were talking about crypto when it wasn't so obvious. A good topic when you are relatively well off how do you handle money with your children? Always a tricky issue when all of us had kids.
10:51So wide range of of topics.
10:53Mhm.
10:54On the trend side personally I remember for instance way back in 2008 2009 I met Toby who was still CEO of Shopify and they had 10 employees something like that. got very lucky, ended up becoming the first adviser to Shopify. But in part, the reason I committed to that is I thought, okay, one year, two years, who knows? But in 10 years, will there be more people online? Will there be more e-commerce? I
11:21feel like that is a no-brainer. Toby and his team, Harley and everyone were also very focused on being basically first movers on mobile. And I was like, okay, well, will there be more mobile phones, more broadband? I mean, that seems obvious, of course. And so ostensibly someone will probably win a decent part of that market. Sure, why not give it a shot, right? And there's a lot of luck involved with these chance encounters.
11:48But I feel like you over time have probably developed a more sophisticated lens or kind of multi-dimensional lens of looking at trends. So, if you're hosting a company offsite and they're imagining where different industries are 10 years from now, can you walk through maybe common pitfalls or mistakes that people make when extrapolating trends or forecasting? Are there any follow-up
12:15questions or frameworks that you use to hone in on something that might be an opportunity or disqualify something that is shiny but is actually uh suicide mission? Well, one of them, and again, if this were formulaic, we'd all be doing it and it would be easy. So, there's definitely some gut feel and some instinct, some guess work in here, but I'm always thinking about let's imagine Shopify does very well.
12:41Mhm.
12:41Who else works with them and supplies them?
12:44Mhm.
12:45That's a second order.
12:46Mhm.
12:46And so, let's think about that. You know, the people who are providing the fix and shovels to data centers are doing very well.
12:52Yeah. Exactly.
12:53And how does behavior change? Mhm.
12:55You know what does that mean? Sometimes that has a result that people will stop doing this and be doing more of this.
13:01Can you give an example of that?
13:02Well, I'll give you one example in second order that we sat down in 2003 and didn't quite do it and thought about bandwidth price is going down and they were going down.
13:11The reason there was no video in 2003 is because it cost about $10 per thousand to serve content and you could get about a dollar in advertising.
13:21Mhm.
13:22So that model doesn't work. But we looked at the trend and thought, you know, by 2005 2006, there's going to they're going to cross. And we should have started YouTube and we didn't. And it's not a coincidence that YouTube started in 2005 and then crushed it.
13:36And that was the second order that led to a company that today is worth $300 billion.
13:40That was a good acquisition.
13:42Incredible. [laughter] Incredible acquisition. So I won't belabor this, but I I think it's well number one deeply fascinating to me. If we look at for instance guilt group, right?
13:57And maybe you could give just a brief description of of what it was. Why don't we start there just very brief?
14:06What did what did guilt do?
14:08It's a good news and bad news story. So this was an unusual one where I spent a lot of time in France. I have a French passport, speak French, and everyone in France in 2006 knew vont pre which was basically guilt of France and they were doing a billion dollars in revenue doing this concept of flash sales where during the day at one moment they would have discount merchandise of high-end brands on sale. Mhm.
14:34So the equivalent if you had time to go to a sample sale which you don't and I remember walking by a sample sale in New York and there were 200 mostly women in line and I remember thinking you know the person who lives in Philadelphia or Austin you don't have sample sales is really the New York brands and there's a lot of people who like to be in that line and these guys had figured that out. So I started it it became a phenomenon. So in our second year we did 175 million in revenue which is crazy. it's
15:03merchandise. You have to buy it and package it and sell it and return it and things like this. And we did an incredible job of providing that. And so in year four, we were doing $500 million in revenue. This is quite a while ago. And then the problem was, which does happen, is the market changed on us, right? This is the part I want to ask about.
15:21Okay. Yeah. And so what happened was when we started it, let's use Mark Jacobs. Mark Jacobs did not have a website in 2008, 2009 because they sold to Bloomingdales and people like that. They were a wholesaler. Why would they have a website? They got a website. They started discounting their own things.
15:37You had been filling that gap.
15:38I had been filling that gap completely.
15:40And at the time, Macy's had a terrible website. They at least got it to mediocre by 2011, 2012. And so did other department stores. Then Farfetch was there. So all of a sudden, I'm competing with a lot of people for that merchandise. It got a little commoditized. And we couldn't figure out a way around that.
15:59So this leads to my question. because you have to take shots on goal and sometimes the competitive landscape or the evolution of the competitive landscape is difficult to glean. But did that experience with guilt inform how you think of durable capitalization on trends? In other words, like how you capitalize on that window but avoid getting crowded out when you have 10 other
16:29people do effectively the [clears throat] same thing.
16:31Yeah. Yeah. And it gets back to do you have a moat and we were trying to get to be big enough that we would have that moat.
16:36And we got to be quite big but not big enough. I mean, I was talking to Theory once and they had 20,000 items at the end of the season to sell. I could buy a thousand.
16:47Mhm.
16:48Good, but doesn't move the needle for them. And so I just didn't quite get there to have an impact on the market. It's hard to know exactly how big you're going to get, how fast, how much success you're going to have over your vendors. And so we almost got there but didn't. And one of the lessons there, you know, I went to the board and said, I think we should sell the company.
17:06And everyone's like, well, we were worth a billion dollars. We thought we could sell it for 400. It's disappointing. But I said, we have a falling knife here. And so we went out and we only got $250 million. Sachs came in and paid for it. And 3 years later, they said, I'll sell it back to you for $5 million. Wow.
17:23Better late than never.
17:24Exactly. It wasn't a great sale, but it was a lot better than it would have been because I I didn't like where things were going. And the conclusion has been that I haven't touched really e-commerce since then.
17:34Too mature.
17:35It's solved. Startups have to solve a problem. Even if you don't realize that problem is there, when you see it, you're like, "Oh yeah, that is a problem I had." And right now I can't I mean I can get anything delivered to my house in like 27 seconds. I can return it. It's inexpensive. So I don't know how to do better.
17:51Mhm.
17:52I don't have any ideas. I mean whereas in many other fields cure for cancer, nuclear energy, psychedelics, there are things to be built that have not been built that will improve the world a lot.
18:06Let's wind back the clock as I promised listeners earlier.
18:11So we're going to get to the helps launch the blank website before that we have Yale economics credential investment corp investment banking inad Euro Disney. Was there anything that you learned or developed in those chapters that then helped you when you moved to United Media? Like is there anything sort of crucial or critical? The key thing is I was quite financially oriented and very comfortable. I've always been very
18:40comfortable with numbers and understanding the fundamental trends and the business and that is a component of business and life and so all of that was business and then I wanted I finance and then going into operations at Disney so we had to manage hotels and it was a it was exciting project we launched Euro Disney you know 15,000 hotel rooms 50,000 people every day huge project launches one day so I learned a lot about that but I decided I didn't want to work for large companies anymore so I thought there's a lot of training
19:09wasn't incredibly enjoyable. I then wanted to go back to New York. I got a job to be the CFO of 180 person division of United Media. For me, that was a big job. I was managing 50 people. I managed all the operations and the finance. And it was a turnaround. Made a lot more money. For me, it was a huge step up. I was now CFO and COO.
19:30And what is the blank that I'm leaving out here? I still remember I read an article in Business Week that talked about a thing I did not know which was called the internet. You may have heard of it. And I remember reading that thinking, "Oh my god, that is incredibly cool." Like we could all be in touch with each other. We can send each other messages. We could buy things. And remember there was no browser at the time. So by 95 I launched because we owned a lot of intellectual property and one of the things was Dilbert. And so I launched the Dilbert website which
20:00became extremely successful and the reason was there were a lot of tech people who could use the internet without a browser and so we had enormous traffic. I started selling advertising which was a hard-coded ad just up there. IBM was the first person. They they took it for two weeks. I made up a price on the spot. I mean how do you price something that's literally never existed? We did our own merchandising.
20:23So we started selling t-shirts and ties and things like that. And so a year later, we had a very successful business. I went to the parent company and I said, "This internet thing is going to be big and we have a head start. So why don't you give me I was thinking he's a loyal corporate citizen.
20:36Give me a couple million dollars and I'll build up an internet division. We could do it for other companies." And the disturbing thing is the guy I was talking to was very nice, smart, traditional media guy. And he said, "No, because we're going to wait for the next internet."
20:51What's that even mean?
20:52I'm like, first of all, I know you don't know what you're talking about. there is no next internet. And the disturbing part is I remember thinking, you're just really too old for this.
21:02And he was exactly the age I am today, [laughter] 61 or 62 and a very successful executive and other things just wasn't in touch with what was happening right at that moment. So I then concluded this is not my future and that but I believe in my thesis. I thought this might be and it turned out to be true.
21:20Was that a gut feeling or were you tracking numbers outside of traffic?
21:24What made you feel that?
21:25I could see at that time if if you're around in '96, it was just early but starting to boom. Companies were starting, more and more people were online. No one was getting offline. They were starting to buy things. They were starting to use maps. You could just see it worked. The things we take for granted now that you can buy something from anywhere, see content from anywhere that never existed.
21:46And now I saw that I'm like, this is a no-brainer. Everyone in the world is going to be doing this. So I think it was like your point on is e-commerce going to grow? Yes, it is. It's just better. It was a sort of it was a no-brainer. And so I said, I'm going to go out and start an internet company. I met it was a very tiny world at that point. People in Silicon Valley wanted to bring me on to join existing companies like I don't know if you remember Excite.
22:10Sure.
22:11A bunch of companies like this. Drove by them on the 101.
22:14Yeah. And at that point I had a year of internet experience which made me one of the most experienced people at the time. So people were super excited to have me join and do something. And then I ran across two guys who had started double click six months before and who were very smart, very technical and I still have great relations with both of them.
22:32And so they said why don't you come join us and I wanted to stay in New York. I thought that was going to be a successful company and so I joined. I was the 10th or 12th person and then became I started for a couple months as CFO became the president and then became the CEO. What do you think contributed to that ascension to CEO?
22:51What skill set or otherwise contributed to that?
22:55I felt like a founder. Technically, I'm not, but I felt like I was. And so, I just was a team player and wanted to make this company successful and I adapted extremely quickly to making decisions very, very quickly. You have to make your decisions faster than other people because if I wait so for example we opened offices in 25 countries in those first three years and our competitors were only in six and when I
23:23went to Microsoft or Proctor and Gamble they're like we do business in a lot of countries we need to work with you and then once you had all them the smaller players were like well Proctor and Gamble and Microsoft and we're working with you so we'll work with you. So we just ended up almost dominating our space and I think I did adapt to that of fast decision- making, understanding the numbers, willing to take risks.
23:46Mhm.
23:46We were in 20 countries before our first country was profitable. [laughter] Like if it never worked, you'd be like, what were you doing?
23:53Yeah.
23:53And we made some mistakes along the way, but in general, we built the world leader. Double click today as an independent company would be worth 100 billion.
24:00So I want to talk about that. Not exactly building the parachute on the way down, but the Ali Corp model, let's just say, especially in the first few years, because I hesitate to put it under the label of incubator because it's different in a lot of ways, unlike say a Y Combinator. It's not a bunch of people coming in with their own ideas that you select, then you take a tiny percentage for a tiny amount of money
24:28and teach them how to pitch a demo day. It's not what you do. My understanding is I guess in the early days you and your partner were putting in maybe 500k each into each company acting as co-founders.
24:40Yeah.
24:40Right. Building each for about 6 months as a proof of concept and then going out to raise venture. Is that a fair description?
24:48Maybe a year.
24:49A year. Okay.
24:50But we really built the product generally launched the product.
24:53Mhm.
24:54And then went out to raise money. And so we were really focused on those companies and we did three and then we did another batch of three. We did a total of six.
25:02Three of them were hugely hugely successful.
25:05Guilt Business Insider and After the formation of Ali Corp, when were those founded?
25:13All between 2005 and 2008.
25:16And the last three were started in the same year at that time. Were you doing eight companies a year or did that end up?
25:22Much later.
25:22Because it was really only two of us.
25:24and my at the time my partner he's retired now but Dwight Marman is one of the most brilliant technical minds that we've seen. So he's really the brains behind the double click technology and the technology along with one other person [snorts] and so we had this great partnership where everything technical he really handled. I didn't even worry about it and then everything on the business side finding the CEO you know building it raising money things like that I focused on that. It seems like you have a number
25:53of incredible strengths and I'm sure there are more but there's the trend opportunity identification there is recruitment of talent capital formation being able to raise money right in some cases a lot of money depending and as you mentioned with double click right getting to 25 countries before the first is profitable because when a larger your company wants to partner with you, they're going to
26:23want that global footprint and you raise the capital necessary to reach that critical mass, escape velocity, choose your metaphor. And I'm wondering how you think about that when in the say first three to five years of Ali Corp when you were founding companies and some of them took longer obviously MongoDB I think stands out as an example of that but let's just say with business insider for instance right I listened to an
26:50interview we did with Samar and Sean Pur and you mentioned how in the beginning you had a handful of people covering everything. Yeah. And we could talk about the problem and the gap that that addressed, but just for the time being, I think this is worth spending a moment on. So like in the beginning, you had a handful of journalists handling everything, right?
27:09No, they were only handling New York technology.
27:11Okay. They were handling New York technology.
27:12It's important to start narrow. So they handled New York technology and then at a certain point though that I imagine right they were spread thin but then once you got the traffic that allowed you to hire more and so you could stairstep it in a way that I think a lot of people would be hesitant to but ultimately that allowed you to dominate the space and I'm not delivering that in a very eloquent way. So maybe you could explain it. And I'm just wondering how that type of thinking manifests in other
27:41companies that you start. And Guilt and Business Insider, even though they're very different businesses, we did the same way, which is that guilt started with one sale a week of women's clothing and then we went to two and then three and then five and then maybe a year later added men's and then kids and then travel and then home. And in Business Insider, we start because it's better to do one thing really well than a bad job on everything. And so we started with only three people. So we discovered New York tech which wasn't that big.
28:10Yeah.
28:10But we did a good job and then expanded and had a Wall Street vertical.
28:14Mhm.
28:15And then added another vertical and then as we added more people they would add a vertical eventually defense, retail, things like that. And then got to 600 journalists at one point and did a great job. Roughly when we sold her afterwards we had six people covering defense.
28:31That's great coverage. when you and Dwight were putting in the initial million dollars split 5050 presumably you're taking I don't know 30 plus% of the company something like that day one more and then it gets diluted down exactly right you're planning for that dilution with the later raise in the early let's just call it the 2005 to 2008 period how did you get very very smart capable people to quit their jobs and come run these companies
29:01they have to believe that one the idea is a great idea.
29:06They have to believe that we are adding value and that there's something here and that we should do it together and those are the only two things they have to believe and then we can help them. And so we had just sold the company in New York City that was the most valuable startup company ever created at that time. So we had credibility in they thought we're going to get you in to raise money and help you do that and we did and we're able to do that. So that was the pitch. But we've, you know, Henry Blah is a perfect example.
29:33Business insider. He's an incredibly talented person at the time. Had a mixed reputation because what had happened on Wall Street years before, but a great writer.
29:43Just for clarity, he basically said he was uncomfortable with something that was standard practice. Right. That was his sin.
29:48Yeah. No, I stand by what he said and did actually. But he came on board and I knew him a little bit, but brought him in and after 30 minutes, he's like, "This is a great idea. We should do it." What did the pitch So the idea look like?
30:01So simple now you won't believe it.
30:03There was no business news site that was online that was inherently online. And at the time Wall Street Journal and Business Week did not update their sites during the day.
30:13Yeah. [laughter] Got away for the paper.
30:16And so all the things we did, we're not maybe the only ones, but we're one of the very first ones are standard today. Meaning we posted multiple stories as it built, got more information, had punchy headlines. Mhm.
30:28tested our headlines.
30:30Mhm.
30:30So, it's just hard for people to switch mediums. So, Business Week doesn't worry about their headline in the magazine, right? Does it a good headline give them more revenue?
30:39Doesn't matter.
30:41Cover, but they don't care about the headlines of the article.
30:43And so, we would try four headlines, which was incredibly innovative at the time, for five minutes a piece.
30:49Mhm.
30:50And then see, oh, this one is pulling better. Let's use that one. So, all these things are absolutely standard today. And Henry was very good. I mean, he's incredibly talented. And we got Peter Kafka, some people who are still very significant journalists today. We got them early on in their careers, but it took a long time. I mean, it took years, but luckily, we had enormous growth. Also, it was hard to raise money for it. Our strategy was, we're never going to do marketing. So, by the way, you've never seen an ad for Business Insider. We're going to write stuff
31:20that's so good that eventually we'll have 100 million uniques.
31:23And everyone's like, that's not a strategy.
31:26[laughter] is not a strategy, right?
31:28And that is exactly what happened.
31:30Yeah. All right.
31:34Now you have how many full-time employees do you have at Ali Corp now?
31:3823 24.
31:40Okay. So, still not gigantic. No.
31:42All right.
31:43When you go back to yesterday year, back when when you and Dwight and maybe there one or two other people, how did you do the opportunity analysis to decide on what you were going to launch? Like how did you stress test what seemed Yeah. No, it was just the two of us.
31:58Okay, great. So, how did you choose what to do?
32:01Literally just sitting there in the conference room, brainstorming ideas, talking about it, thinking about it. Sometimes we'd go months and had nothing.
32:09Mhm.
32:10And then you have to just trust at a certain point that you know be no different if you met someone who's single and is out there dating and said, "How do I know this is the person?"
32:18Yeah.
32:19You have to hope you know when you know.
32:20What does it feel like with some of these ideas or any others, but preferably earlier examples?
32:26What does it feel like?
32:28I recognize it because I start with a business crush, meaning there's an idea and I can't stop thinking about it. And then a week later, I'm still thinking about it.
32:39And I'm now I'm thinking, "Oh my god, I this would be good and we could do that and we could add this person." And it's just building in my mind. and I'm falling in love with my idea intellectually and if that sticks with me for like two weeks I generally do it.
32:55Mhm.
32:56Like I don't actually spend more time. I know if I feel it and see it because there's no sense doing a business model.
33:03I mean who knows how many people are going to be looking at business inside it. If you don't know that you don't know anything. The question is is are people going to read their business views online? Can we do a better job than the established players?
33:16Mhm. And can we do it differently? Do we have a vision for that? In the beginning, I want someone who is going to focus on product. I don't need a finance person. I don't need marketing.
33:27I need a great product. And Business Insider was a great product, which is why we got to 100 million. And Guilt was a great product. Also, Business Insider was in a sense in your sandbox because presumably it's dependent on advertising, right? So like you knew that once you had the eyeballs, you could Yeah. But that's develop that as a business.
33:47You know, it's harder to get the eyeballs than it is to sell advertising.
33:49Sure.
33:50You know, if I hand you 100 million uniques, you just go out there, hire a guy to sell advertising, and he'll sell it.
33:57Getting the 100 million uniques is 90% 95% of the job.
34:01At what point in the process are you like, you know what, I know exactly the person at Union Square Ventures or fill-in-theblank friendly VC who would love this idea if we can show a proof of concept.
34:12Yeah. No, I don't think that way. I think, and I'm always wrong, sometimes I'll think, I bet this person would like it. But the way to do it, once we go out to raise money, then at the time we would go out to 20 firms, 25 firms, and half the time the person I thought wanted to do it didn't want to do it for whatever reason, and someone else fell in love with the idea.
34:32So, I don't reset that. I'm always always shocked by Yeah. The fundraising is a we'll solve it later.
34:41Yeah.
34:41Kind of situation. as also I never think about exits. We need to focus on the product. Do we have a product that everyone wants to use?
34:49If you solve that, everything else follows. You can raise money. You can hire people. You can do everything.
34:55When did you guys, and I'm going to mispronounce this, invest in Veiler Atomics. Is it Veiler?
35:01Valor. Valor.
35:02Yeah.
35:03I had a 50-50 chance. That's V a L. When did you guys invest?
35:07Nuclear.
35:08Exactly.
35:08Company. Three years ago.
35:10Three years ago.
35:10Not even three years ago.
35:11Okay. So this is small modular nuclear reactor.
35:15Exactly. So the nextG nuclear reactor.
35:18How did you approach this? Because [sighs] you know nuclear is is pun intended hot.
35:23It wasn't hot.
35:24It wasn't. No.
35:25Because fusion was kind of on fire. I mean there you had the Commonwealth you know fusion systems at MIT and you had you know Sam Alman raising his SPVS. I guess I'm wondering how you decided on that investment.
35:37Yeah. And so this came directly from my deep tech team. So, it wasn't my relationship, but we just thought like always that there's an incredible team idea and that they're going to execute well. It was at a $20 million valuation 3 years ago. They just raised, it was announced publicly from Sequoia at 6 billion and they have been crushing it. Where we got lucky is that the US government was not behind nuclear at that time. Mhm.
36:03And I'm not always the biggest fan of the Trump administration, but on psychedelics and nuclear, I think they're right on both, and they have moved both of them forward in a very substantial way.
36:14Yeah. I hope you talk to some nuclear folks when you're in China because they are crushing their energy production gap.
36:20Yeah. By the way, most people know France must have 70% of its energy for 50 years from nuclear. Absolutely no problems. Great thing, stable. I am convinced that this should be an important part of our our energy future.
36:33Do you guys as you're raising or as the companies the portfolio companies are raising money? I mean that's a crazy markup, right? I mean just an amazing markup. Does Ali Corp take money off the table in these large rounds along the way strategically or do you guys just park it and wait until the end? How do you think about handling that? So, we've done it once so far and in the past I
37:01would personally take some money off the table, especially the QSBs enabled money, which can make sense.
37:08That's a small business exemption for tax purposes for people listening under whatever the asset cap is.
37:14You get $10 million taxree and so it's worth doing that. in general now we think it's a good idea for a smaller fund like us in in rounds four or five years in to sell a third of our position. So over the next year we will be hedging in some ways and we will go out there even though we feel good about these companies but I think that's a sensible thing. It returns some money to everyone. It returns some money to the team and you know some of these will do really well some won't. So I think that's a good idea.
37:44What does your LP base look like? It's very small. I'm the largest LP and then we have mostly family offices and some institutions, some small endowments. So, we have maybe 40 or 50 LPs. I mean, you have a spectacular track record. And the second fund, correct me if I'm getting this number wrong or correct me if Astra is getting this number wrong. July 2026, 335 million second fund, something like that. The first fund is at the end of
38:13this quarter will be roughly at 60% irr. And my family office, the fund you were talking about before also is at 60%.
38:22And the $335 million fund is in that ballpark. We haven't had anything to date in our three sort of funds that's been below 50% IR. So, we've been very lucky. We've had some great companies and things are going going really well. You could raise a huge fund if you wanted to and maybe you could do more follow-on investing. Maybe you could have a separate fund for growth rounds etc etc.
38:48Why not do that? What are the reasons for not?
38:51So one what I like to do and what I think we are very good at and the team like to do are build companies whether we start them most of them we're investing in and we think a lot of the true value ad is in those first five years.
39:04Mhm. There are plenty of funds. We're not trying to collect assets. You know how VC funds are typically 2% and 20% on the upside. Big funds focus on the 2%. We focus on the 20%.
39:16So, I just I don't want to be in that business of accumulating assets. Our funds will get bigger, but it'll because we add verticals, we add some time, we might add a geography at some point, but I want to keep doing what we do well.
39:31Mhm.
39:31And what we find fun. I gotta wake up every day and feel like I love what I'm doing. And I think we're, you know, in our own small way helping to change the world. You mentioned Zola. There'll be, I don't know, 150, 200,000 couples this year who will use a wedding registry. That was an idea I had 12 years ago.
39:48That's great. The nuclear company, I sat down and had drinks with the governor of New York 3 weeks ago. She's doing a great job. One of the things you wanted to talk about was nuclear and how we can bring that to New York State because we need to lock down and get more energy costs and bring down costs of energy and help data centers and we're a part of these things and psychedelics. I hope there are if we're sitting here 10 years from now I hope 100,000 people who have PTSD have been helped by methylone because we
40:16discovered that compound and you know are going to help bring it to market.
40:20We can chat about methylone. It was a beautiful molecule and we will talk about it. Before we get there, I want to take a break from some of the investing stuff just for a moment. How did you end up pursuing a serious level of ping pong?
40:32You know, it just started in high school. I had a table in the basement.
40:35So, I was one of the better people in my neighborhood and then we had a high school tournament and then I sophomore year and I I won that and I realized I was pretty good. Then they had a regional tournament. So, I went to that and I won that and then I finally found the state level tournament and I got my ass handed to me there.
40:51[laughter] Then I started playing in New York cuz New York has great ping.
40:54Was that the defeat that you needed? You were just like, "Oh, okay."
40:57Yeah. All right.
40:58Well, I just didn't play enough. I didn't have a coach. I didn't I was just playing in my neighborhood.
41:02So then I found a ping pong club that doesn't exist anymore on right near here on White and Walker. Found a guy named Musa who was the 14th in the Olympics in 1992. He's from Nigeria. He's a freak of nature. And started playing with him. And so then I played some tournaments.
41:19And then when I went on the board of Yale, I called up the ping pong team and said, "Hey, can I come play with you?"
41:25And they're like, "Sure." And then I went and played with them and realized that I could hold my own there with the varsity team. And so I would go play with them. I still do when I can get up to New Haven. And so I just like to play with, you know, I'm not incredible, but I'm I'm pretty good.
41:40How often do you play and what kind of coach or coaching do you have?
41:43So I actually weirdly still play with Musa and then with another guy as well. My son is pretty good and so he and I, he's 28, he's in New York and so we'll be playing tomorrow actually. You know, I probably play every 2 or 3 weeks. I just love it. I It's incredible.
41:59Sounds great for your brain. Also, you know, the Chinese will all say, and I think they're not wrong, that it's unbelievably good cuz brain is hand eye coordination, reacting extremely quickly.
42:11Mhm.
42:12And subtly, and so that's got to be very good for you. All right, talking about the brain. We are going to get back to meth alone, but I want to talk about vacation.
42:23First got a quote here. Again, feel free to fact check. This is attributed to one Kevin Ryan. I think everyone should take four to five weeks of vacation. I would rather have somebody who works 47 weeks of the year pretty intensely. All right.
42:35And then it says, knowing that a CEO will be influenced more by his behavior than by policy, he takes 8 to 10 weeks off annually. No, but you're not entirely off the grid when you take that time. Can you tell me what your split looks like and was it the same in the early years of Ali Corp?
42:51Like how long has that been the case?
42:53I told all my cos that when I was building Double Click obviously as you heard pretty intense and we went public 24 months after we started just another project.
43:04Different world now, huh?
43:05Yeah. Yeah. It was a good old days and I knew I had to change my life and I could only do three things that family. I took my kids to school.
43:14I got it. So, you were burning the midnight oil on that one and that led to the realization.
43:18I've never burned out at all because I paced myself and so I needed to be working hard, spending all the time I needed to with my family and staying in shape. Everything else I cut by like 80%.
43:32And that's costly. That's time with friends.
43:35Mhm.
43:35I used to be guy who'd do the cool cultural things all over. Gone. I used to watch my 20's sports on Sunday afternoon, all gone.
43:45I prioritized those three things. And then eight years ago, my kids went off to college and things and I could layer in new things and different things and have more time. And so it's always became more interesting. But I didn't ever want to be in a situation where my kids are 18 and I thought, "Oh my god, I didn't spend time with them." And we did spend at least four to five weeks vacation doing great things together, great memories.
44:08Mhm. That's extremely important. Today I spend 8 to 10 weeks out of the office. I do work every day, but sometimes it'll be 2 to three hours just keeping things moving. But I can do that. And sometimes it's a full day. Like I'll be week after next I have a wedding in a visa. So I'll be there for 4 days. And the first 5 days before that I'll be in my house in France. And so in the morning I will be doing intensive sports, incredible
44:37biking there. You need to come at some point.
44:39I love great biking, tennis, swimming.
44:43And then I have already blocked out that I'll do the 3 hours 9 to 12 New York time locked in for meetings. And then one of the days I'll also do the night shift. So I'll do eight hours the next day.
44:56But that's an amazing day. or if I ski in France back by 3:00 and then work from 3 till 8:30 and then have a great dinner. It's an incredible day.
45:05That is an amazing day. How to change your mind by Michael Pollen. What did that do for you?
45:10So I reached the age of 54 which was 8 years ago and had never thought about psychedelics at all. Certainly never tried anything. Just never and didn't know very much. Read the Michael Pollen book. It was on the New York Times in 2017, 10 best books of the year, which is something I always go over to see what I should be reading there. Read the book and it literally did change my mind. It was called How to Change Your Mind. And I realized later than most
45:39people that I was wrong, that these medicines could be very useful for people and that there was a lot of academic results even at the time that showed that they could help PTSD and depression, anxiety. And at the time, I was still on the board of Yale. So I went and I realized at Yale and I think you talked to John Crystal at one point interviewed John Crystal on his work on ketamine foundational work with respect to depression and much more. Also have had conversations with Ben Kendi who I'm so happy for.
46:07I just spent a week in the desert with Ben.
46:09Never met him in person.
46:10Oh you only fun.
46:12Fantastic. Anyway, John Crystal is great. I'm trying to get together with him in the next couple weeks.
46:17Realized Yale had done amazing work.
46:19Got them all there. They have a Yale Center for Psychedelic Research. And I just became persuaded in terms of long-term trends. I wasn't thinking about investing at all at the time. I was just thinking this is something I am persuaded that most people don't realize is going to be very effective and very important. I'm probably one of the bigger donors to the Yale Center for Psychedelic Research doing great work.
46:40Then in 2021 I decided in talking to Ben who Ben Kmendi who was a professor there superstar that the next phase was going to be a for-profit phase and it was the right thing and the reason is it takes whether we like it or not it takes roughly $200 to $250 million to get one compound through the FDA process.
47:02Mhm.
47:03And I wish that were less but it is what it is right now. And we're not going to be able to raise that money from a nonprofit point of view. even though you know I think you contribute I contribute but it's not going to be enough and so then I said you know we should look and see if we should start a company in the space and then worked with Ben and a guy in my team who was on the alleyp team Blake Mandel and so we worked on the idea came up with this methylone largely due to Ben and then said let's let's start this we think it has very promising Blake spun out of Ali
47:33Corp which sometimes happened to be the CEO of the company and then we started the company methylon For people who don't know, I want you to hold me in check here, but methylone, if I were describing it, I had my first methylone experience probably 2015.
47:49Oh, wow.
47:50Early. But it had to basically fall off the back of a truck. It was very, very hard to find even on the underground.
47:56Mhm.
47:57But an incredibly beautiful, gentle experience. And maybe the softspoken, shorter staying cousin. MDMA. So rather than coming in and you're like, when's this guy going to leave 6 hours, it's more like, wow, that was so pleasant. Came over, didn't overstay as welcome.
48:17So I'd love to hear how you landed on methylone or just whatever you'd like to share about methylone specifically because I think it is it was I mean just the bullseye. I mean, what a good choice. What a good choice in terms of horse to bet on. Let's start there.
48:32Let's start with methylone itself because it's one that many people will not be familiar with and even more so at the time. So from a business point of view and impacted society point of view, we wanted to find something that people didn't know about but had some preliminary results that meant that we thought that it could be impactful.
48:51Mhm.
48:51And so what most people didn't realize at the time that it has some advantages over MDMA. And by way I think MDMA is fantastic both recreationally and therapeutically. Mhm.
49:00The results in the trials were very good, but there are some advantages. And so what you were referring to, put another way, you can take methylone once a week in our trials. You actually can't take MDMA once a week.
49:13It's a little bit more toxic. It depletes your serotonin a little bit more.
49:16Yeah. Sasha Schulgan would say if more than four times a year, it loses its magic. Yeah. A lot of people become resistant. Yeah. Non-responsive.
49:23Sometimes slightly softer substance has advantages. Also, you tend not to have the downer that some people have in MTMA and the duration of action is much more compatible with healthcare as we know it. Right?
49:37It had those advantages. We still don't know until you do a full double blind study and so then we started that process or raised the money and the results ended up to be incredible.
49:48And the results this is within the indication of PTSD.
49:53Yeah.
49:53Right. We have a patent for PTSD, depression, and anxiety, which is very valuable. So, no one else can use it for 20 years in these three categories.
50:01But you can only start with one indication because it's it's $200 million each time.
50:06Yeah.
50:06And at the time, if you remember two years ago, we went through a period in psychedelics where it was the desert period. It was hard to raise money. It wasn't easy. So, there was no way we were going to be able to do all three.
50:16Well, I think part of the reason it was hard to raise, there was stigma, but there were plenty of enthusiastic capitalists who wanted to make something happen. I think there were a few common mistakes. One was assuming it would be easier than it is to get something that lasts four to 6 hours. Let's just call it. You have to prove that it can be scalable as a treatment. You can deliver certain quality of of care. But what does that mean? You have extra nurses. you have
50:44extra people and suddenly the cost is very out of reach.
50:50separately I would say the combining we saw this with loose the combining of psychotherapy right the bundling of psychotherapy and then you put it in front of the FDA advisory committee and they're like we don't know how to evaluate or standardize psychotherapy and since we don't no pass I mean there's a lot more to that story as you know how did watching the ecosystem maybe seeing some of the early unforced errors inform how you guys approached oh it definitely did and there's a
51:18saying there early worm gets the bird, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
51:23Oh, the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
51:26Yeah. So, sometimes it's better to be the second mouse. First mouse, meaning gets first gets smashed and the cheese is still there and then you can you have it. [laughter] It's like the iPod. I mean, so we tried to learn from what we saw out there and changed certain things.
51:41I think also FDA, you know, has changed over time and the Trump administration has sent a signal for sure that they would like this to happen. And I think as you know, I mean, you were super early in 2015, but now I would imagine that huge percentage of your random friends have tried psychedelics.
51:59Oh, sure. Yeah.
52:00In 2015, that number must have been small.
52:02Well, it was small. And unless you happen to be like me, living in the Bay Area, people were pretty mom's the word about it.
52:09Yeah.
52:10I think maybe the pendulum in some cases swung too far. Like if I have to listen to one more trip report about neon crocodiles, this is like listening to somebody's dreams every morning, you know? It's like, okay, I get it. At the same time, yeah, it was very different.
52:23Yeah.
52:24And I mean, look, I I don't want to take us too far a field, but even though I did a podcast on Ibegan in 2015.
52:30Did you really? Wow. Wow.
52:32Yeah. With Martin Palano and Dr. Dan Engel looking at some of the work that was being done in Mexico, but it was way I mean this is early days.
52:41Wow. You were early days.
52:42Yeah. first Hund Monkey shot in the space, right? I was not going to sign up for it, but I never would have guessed that I began would have been the one that gets mentioned in the Oval Office as an executive order is being signed.
52:54Yeah. [clears throat] And in retrospect though, it makes a lot of sense. And I have to imagine the application of PTSD to this politically immune group. Like if you're on the left or the right as a politician, you cannot say the veterans.
53:06Exactly. that the indication of PTSD also as sort of a tip of the spear has that benefit.
53:12It does. And one thing I haven't mentioned to you is that we set up Transcend as a public benefit corporation.
53:19Yes. I wanted to talk about this. Yeah.
53:21And that means that the initial initial shareholders had committed to give 10% of their gains to what is essentially a foundation and that Blake and I will be giving out that money. And so we will be giving $20 million in the next 9 months to causes linked to psychedelics. And so we're in that process right now. I've hired a parttime person to do that. But it has come up because we focus on veterans for PTSD for political reasons. We being the entire
53:50industry.
53:51Sure.
53:51The number one source is sexual assault.
53:54Absolutely. Yeah.
53:55And that's why [clears throat] our trials were actually 60% women because more women have PTSD than men.
54:01And I think [clears throat] it's a little bit undercover. And so we're going to look into some causes and support that and try and see if we can give some of that money out into that area.
54:11So I guess a few things. The first is kudos to you because and I want you to correct me if I'm wrong, but like a public benefit corp has its charter.
54:20It's stateated admission. I've interacted with a number of them. But ultimately, I remember one of the questions I had for somebody else running one of these is I was like, "Well, if you change your mind later, how are you held accountable?" and he was like, "Silence, right?" And I was like, "You can kind of break the rules and get away with it."
54:36So, the fact that you guys are following through means a lot. How are you thinking about I'm sure it's not just an open casting call cuz you'd get a million whackle things in your in the inbox that somebody would have to comb through.
54:48How are you thinking about how to allocate that 20 million?
54:53So, we're still thinking about it. We already have 50 organizations that I'm not meeting with with companies, but yeah, you seem like a busy guy.
55:01Yeah. [laughter] But Nicholas Bo, who's the person who is in charge of this, has been meeting with people. We're assembling it, looking at the world. There's going to be a big PSFC meeting in October. And then we're going to start diving.
55:12This is the psychedelic science funders collaborative. Although now they've [laughter] they've expanded beyond just the science, but PSFC, but it's the largest collection of donors in the psychedelic psfc.co I think.
55:24Yeah. And they do great work. But the point is what we're going to look to do is not make 500 grants, but make like 20 and have real grants. Most of these organizations are small.
55:37So there's a good chance we'll be the largest donor to the psychedelic industry in the next 12 months, just for 12 months.
55:44And I don't have the full answer to that yet. We're starting to think of where can we have impact? What can be done that other people are not doing? M we probably won't give as much to pure academic research. Even in Oregon and Colorado have legal psychedelics or at least decriminalized.
55:59Well, there's a program in each state that is legal to you know give it out and do right with the sort of parallel structure. Yeah.
56:07Yeah. But you know not even.5% of people with depression or PTSD have been able to access this yet. One of the biggest challenges we have it's too expensive. And one of the things I am interested in is trying to show that group therapy works as well.
56:23So I think maybe even better in some maybe even better. My bet would be better.
56:28Yeah. Same here. There's a reason that AA does it in a group setting because you get support from other people.
56:36Mhm.
56:37And you've probably been in some group ceremonies and they can be very powerful.
56:42FDA has been very nervous about that.
56:44That's a whole new thing. How do you monitor that? So, we need to get to the point. We need to bring down the cost is the bottom line.
56:49What would your hope be for the for-profit ecosystem? Would your hope be that more people would follow in your footsteps? If so, how can they as the better version of themselves or the best version of themselves ensure that when incentives get really tempting later, they don't change their mind on the public benefit?
57:12On the public benefit corp. Exactly.
57:13Right. I have been incredibly disappointed with how many centmillionaires, billionaires have had their lives changed by these things, but have in no material way supported the ecosystem or the science upon which ultimately a lot of their work depends.
57:31It's been personally very upsetting to me as someone who put like 20% of his entire net worth in at one point. So that is not to say that I think academia is the cure all for all the reasons you said like the marketdriven solutions for the very expensive FDA processes involved incredibly important right what do you think can be done to maybe gently encourage people I mean you're doing a great job by doing it right just
58:00showcasing it and I think a lot of good will radiate from that any thoughts on how to encourage more people to get involved.
58:10I don't know how to force them, but one of the things I know I'm doing is I'm actually having a series of conversations with people and talking through who have called me and what I'm doing, I'm going to be speaking at the smaller PSFC group to give an example of why we did it this way. What we did, you know, we did for a couple reasons. One, at the end, we thought it was fair. Two, it reminded everyone in the company that this is a mission-driven company. You know, yes, at the end it may be a good exit, but we
58:39are doing this and everyone needs to join this company because they want to make the world a better place and we want to help these people who have PTSD and it is 10 million people and it's a real problem and then eventually depression as well.
58:52And so everyone joining knew that the original shareholders, board members, chairman had already committed to do this and we're going to put their money where their mouth is. And I think we just have to push everyone on this to do it. I don't know a better way to to force them. Well, I'm so glad you're doing it. I hope more people follow suit.
59:13Friend of mine who's a VC, very successful as an angel, joined a venture capital firm, very well known, did incredibly well, and a while back he started kind of stepping back. And I've had people suggesting I start fund forever. And I for a host of reasons am not convinced I'd be good at it or particularly enjoy it. I don't know. But he said, "Oh, early stage venture is dead." And I was like, "What do you mean early stage venture is dead?" And what
59:40he meant was, "If your bread and butter is a lot of consumerf facing tech, he's like, I just made a clone of [snorts] Twitter in 12 hours as a non-technical [clears throat] person using vibe coding and X, Y, and Z. Ultimately, that's not enough to just displace X, right? But is the deep tech focus because there are more defensible
1:00:07modes in deep tech or is there more to it?
1:00:10It's partly that, but it's also partly that that world is changing.
1:00:14Mhm.
1:00:14So, in that consumer idea you're talking about, you know, there 164 soft drinks.
1:00:21Yeah.
1:00:21The odds of you coming up with one that stands out is pretty slim. Yeah. Whereas the changes that are occurring or have occurred in solar or wind or geothermal or nuclear, there are going to be billions and billions and billions of dollars of contracts signed to produce energy. Robotics, the same thing. We're seeing extraordinary developments that we're getting 10x and 100x improvements in robots which will change the world.
1:00:51Mhm. I just don't see the same thing in e-commerce. Healthcare can be done better in this country. We spend a lot.
1:00:58We don't have great results. Complicated issue, but that's why we really do what I call traditional software. AI is one group, healthcare is one group, and deep tech is one group. And those are our three areas of focus. We have dedicated teams, but we do more deep tech than we did four or five years ago. Absolutely. That's the one that's grown the most for these various reasons. And it's intellectually interesting.
1:01:20It's fun. I mean, you learn a lot.
1:01:22You learn a lot. Space, we have an investment in space company called Portal that can help move satellites from one area to another. And there's just a whole ecosystem that's sort of a second order implication of having 10 times more satellites, which which we'll have.
1:01:37On the robotics side, what are some second or third order effects that might present opportunities? Because investing in someone who actually like a Boston robotics way beyond my pay grade, but I'm like maybe if that's where the focus is, I'm saying this in a very simple way, but if a lot of people are focused on that, maybe like the second or third order effects are more neglected. Yeah.
1:02:00So, let's look at the movement and societal shifts and are there going to be more robots in 10 years? Yeah, I think so.
1:02:06100 times more. I mean, this is one where it's literally going to be somewhere between 100 and a thousand or 10,000 times more. And so I think the business opportunities are going to be in very vertical uses, a textile factory, you know, things like that or a car factory or things like that. And so and those are happening right now and they're going to continue to happen. You know, where it's harder is in things like a restaurant because robots are best early on when they can do one thing and do it really
1:02:34well. when they have to chop vegetables, take the garbage up the up the stairs and go to a nearby deli to buy a product that we need.
1:02:44Humans can do that quite well. Robots, that's tougher.
1:02:48So single use is the best way and factories are the best way for that. So that's going to be colossal in every single factory. Are you still bullish on robot massage? And to what extent are you looking at unfilled jobs? Yeah.
1:03:04As a maybe one criteria. I am bullish and we're you know we were an investor in escape which is doing that. That's a product that's still evolving but it's going to work. I mean I remember as of two years ago there were 17,000 unfilled jobs in massages in this country. And you must have gone to a hotel like I have and you arrive, you're like, "Yeah, can I get a massage tomorrow afternoon like totally booked up?"
1:03:29Yeah. How about 3 days from now at 9:00 a.m. and you're like, "No, I'm not going to be in the hotel." Or you say 8:00 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. No way. No one works at that time. 7:00 p.m. No one works. If you had a machine and 25% of people prefer to have a robot.
1:03:47Some people think it'd be much better to have a person. Yeah. There are a lot of people that don't like to take their clothes off, don't feel comfortable with it, and feel better about a robot.
1:03:55So, it's just a another example of something you wouldn't think of, and it is a solvable problem, and we're probably 70% of the way there to solving it.
1:04:03Any other jobs with lots of unfilled positions that make for appealing terrain?
1:04:09Yeah. Again, we haven't solved the restaurant one and food and that's a big one.
1:04:14Wonder I mean to what extent? I mean, I'd love to have a conversation with Travis Kalanick about that. I mean, he is more than anyone I know. Certainly put a lot of thought.
1:04:22Yeah. And he is industrializing, so he has a better chance of doing it.
1:04:26The truth is most restaurants are big mom and pop shops, and so it's harder to do that. But yeah, I mean, we're watching customer support. We had a incredible call where one of our AI agents was on the phone with someone and after 15 seconds said, "I'm sorry. Would you be more comfortable in another language?"
1:04:47And the person said, "Well, actually, yeah. Could we speak Spanish?" And he goes, "Mubian." And then just handled the rest of the call in Spanish.
1:04:56What a cool example.
1:04:57And if you listen to it, it changed completely the call because she had trouble explaining. It was a medical thing. She had a lot of trouble explaining in English. And then right away, no issue. And solved the problem.
1:05:07That is such a good example. Wow.
1:05:10It's coming fast. It is coming so fast. If you think of an example of one of the companies, ideally one that you co-founded that was like pushing a boulder downhill. It's like wow this is really things just fell into place in a sense ideally not just through luck and then one that was pushing a boulder uphill. I'm wondering what the biggest differences like what comes to mind and what were the differences between the two.
1:05:35I mean I'll give you a good uphill one which I'm still disappointed at. We realized there were going to be a lot basically Shopify for healthcare companies cuz we were building these healthcare sites and we found we were building a lot of the same things scheduling for time and this is 3 four years ago scheduling information all the stuff didn't matter whether it was for your cancer care or your back problem.
1:06:01A lot of repeating features and it has to be HIPPA compliant which most sites are not. So we set up a company to be Shopify for healthcare sites and we for whatever reason we put $6 million in eventually didn't just didn't get there. People were reluctant to sign up. They didn't see someone else. Maybe it wasn't good enough execution.
1:06:18Felt like that should exist and we never pulled it off and then had to make a decision to close it down.
1:06:25Doesn't seem like you were too early.
1:06:27Are the reasons unknown?
1:06:29They are unknown for me. Did we not do a good enough job? Did we need have to wait just another year to get the first 10 marquee clients and that was enough?
1:06:38Obviously, most companies at the time were reluctant to outsource to someone else.
1:06:42Mhm.
1:06:43So, I still don't know. And sometimes you don't know. It's still not quite uh playbook there.
1:06:49Double click was public 24 no 48 months.
1:06:53No, no, it was public for 7 years.
1:06:55I'm sorry. After its form.
1:06:57Yeah. Yeah. 24 months after it start. I mean there's like marketing conditions and all that stuff also. But then you have something like MongoDB that was a decade.
1:07:06Yeah.
1:07:06Right before IPO. Why was that?
1:07:08First of all, we didn't have any revenue for three and a half years. And if you're taking notes, don't do that because [laughter] it made it hard to raise money. It's a hard product.
1:07:19It's also if I said, you know, a database is like a pacemaker. If I said to you, I've got this startup pacemaker idea. Do you want to try it? And [laughter] you're like, "No, no, call me when a thousand people have used your pacemaker for two years, but if everyone says that, I can't get my pacemaker out there."
1:07:36Mhm.
1:07:36So, it took us a long time. We had to give away for free for a long time, used for inexpensive things, and then slowly got there. So, even after 8 years, we were doing 40 million in revenue, which is not that much.
1:07:48But the usage was growing dramatically.
1:07:51The product worked, the product was getting better.
1:07:53And today, it's worth, I don't know, $30 billion. and it's an incredible company.
1:07:59What are your personal rules for what you do when a company goes public? What is your policy for holding, selling a portion, selling all? How do you think about that? Cuz I know some angels, so they're like, "Look, public market, not my game. As soon as it goes public, I'm going to sell 50% and then just let the rest ride." And they keep it really simple.
1:08:18I definitely don't have a policy. I hold it as long as I still feel this is a great investment and I think it's going to grow for a long time. At at some point you do need to get money if you have a firm to invest in other things. So I did not sell in the first year or two when it was public and then the price went up and I just slowly started selling and I still have shares today but I've sold a big percentage of it over time.
1:08:44We're going to land the plane now. So Kevin, if if you could put anything metaphorically speaking on a billboard, right, to get a message in front of millions, billions of people, we can just pretend that they all speak English. AI, you know, AI, I can figure it out. But what might you put on that billboard? Could be a motto, could be a quote, could be anything non-commercial.
1:09:05Does anything come to mind?
1:09:07So, I'll give you something different than you think. I would love the United States to be a more balanced society.
1:09:14Mhm.
1:09:15And a more open and a more caring society that we take care of other people. I'm not worried about our startups. Our startups doing great. Technology funding, all that's great. Lots of entrepreneurs. I do worry long term about the income inequality in this country.
1:09:28Mhm.
1:09:28I don't think we're addressing that issue. I think the ability for people in this country to move up the ladder has we statistically has been diminished. And I think all of this is going to catch up to us.
1:09:40Mhm.
1:09:40And it's not right. People have schools that are bad. they don't have support. We're going to have this transition. There is no doubt. We can debate the time we're going to lose jobs to AI.
1:09:50And I don't think we're in a good position to help people have successful lives. So I would like the country to be thinking about that. So whether we're at the highest levels of state government or you're in the Oval Office and it's like Kevin Karplanch, you get to pull two levers.
1:10:07What are the levers to try to make a bit of progress in addressing some of the issues you just mentioned? So, one that's going to lead to it, we're going to have to address the budget deficit at some point. We don't know where that point is, but it could be sneaking up on us right now. We're going to have to end up having a more equitable tax system where the wealthy pay 30% taxes, which they don't right now.
1:10:29We have to decrease that budget deficit because that decreases the interest rate, which impacts everyone to do that. And then we're gonna have to just agree that we're going to do a better job of helping people go to the right colleges, get the right degrees. I don't mean necessarily colleges, I mean professional training, retraining, things like that. We have to get to the point where a higher percentage of people are doing well and and they feel like their kids are going to do well.
1:10:54When people when families don't feel like their kids are going to do better, they get desperate and they go to the far right or they go to the far left. And neither one of those solutions is going to be the right solution. we're going to have to get more immigrants in this country.
1:11:08How do you think you do that? Because I agree with you and I mean I've seen so much headache in say recruiting in Silicon Valley and this that and the other thing. It's it's wild. I mean this is a country of immigrants.
1:11:21So how do you how do you think you tackle that?
1:11:24Look the message has come down in the last several years from the president that immigrants are bad.
1:11:31Yeah. And I just find it unfathomable.
1:11:33And everyone in Silicon Valley that has been supporting this has made their money backing immigrants.
1:11:39Yeah, it's pretty gross.
1:11:40I mean, look, should we have unlimited people coming over the border?
1:11:43Absolutely not. No one's saying that.
1:11:45Should my companies have trouble getting PhD people in AI to come from other countries to come to the United States?
1:11:54How is that a good idea to stop those people from coming in? Mhm.
1:11:58We should be opening our doors and saying, "You have a masters in AI and computer science and like that. Of course you come work here. Come work here." You think they're going to go on unemployment? I doubt it.
1:12:09They're going to make $500,000 a year and they're going to join some company and 3 years later they're going to start their own company, employ 5,000 people. I mean, as you said, we're all immigrants. This should be the country where the most talented people in the world are coming to right now. Mhm.
1:12:25And we shouldn't take a 100 million of them, but we should take, you know, a million of them.
1:12:30Yeah.
1:12:302 million of them. Population is going to be going down. That has some negative impact on us. We should be supplementing that because our entire history, our immigrants do great. You know, the data shows our immigrants from Haiti do great, from Nigeria do great, from Kosovo do great. They're just scrappy people who want to work their ass off in whatever they do. And I I want more of them.
1:12:55Yeah.
1:12:56And that's a contrarian view today.
1:12:57I agree 100%. I mean, I've seen the same thing where it's like, okay, let me get this straight. You're going to keep these PhDs in X, Y, and Z out of the country. And guess what? They are talented. They're going to get used with great leverage and they're going to create something incredible. The question is, [laughter] is it going to be here or not? At Yale, we're seeing pressure on not getting academics in on some academics feeling not comfortable.
1:13:21We had one who left for Oxford and Cambridge. People left for to go to Canada. That should not be happening. The Premier League in English soccer is the best league in the world. Not because of English players.
1:13:33Yeah.
1:13:34Because they have Norwegian players, they have Egyptian players, they have people from Ghana. Basically, they don't care. They want the best people.
1:13:41And that's what we have always been and need to continue to be.
1:13:45Yeah. Here. Here. Kevin, before we wind this to a close, anything else you'd like to say? Anything else you'd like to point people to? People can find Ali Corp online, of course, spelled as it sounds. Alcorp.com. I'll include the LinkedIn and Alcorp X and all these things in the show notes. Anything else that you'd like to The only thing I'd say and the fact that you're in New York for a month or two makes the point that New York is just booming.
1:14:12Yeah, it's booming right now. And we had an incredible summer with the Knicks and the World Cup and the US Open, but the restaurants, the startups, I could not feel better. You know, we're very focused on New York, but I see so many people moving from Europe, coming to New York, starting up companies. was run by someone who was an immigrant. Data Dog was started by French entrepreneurs. Those are the two most valuable tech companies here.
1:14:37Despite what I said, we're going to get more people coming here and New York's going to be very, very successful.
1:14:42It's on fire. Yeah, it's really on fire. I mean, I'm Look, home base is Austin. Austin's a boom town for absolutely a million different reasons. That's not going to slow down anytime soon. But New York is New York. There's just, you know, having grown up as a New Yorker, it continually blows my mind.
1:14:59But this particular season, this season of New York has been just on fire. It's really exciting. And the higher level thing is the more I go I spend a lot of time outside the United States but the United States from a business tech point of view is just crushing it and we all see this but the future industries and we have to worry about China because China is doing a lot of great things but we're doing a lot of great things and everyone in Europe and Latin America looks to us and is both concerned and impressed.
1:15:27Yeah. Well, thanks for the time Kevin.
1:15:29Lovely to see you. And for everybody listening we will have links to everything in the show notes. tim.blog/mpodcast blog/mpodcast, the one and only Kevin Ryan. Just type in his name and everything will pop up. And until next time, be a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.
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Tim Ferriss
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Kevin Ryan credited Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind with changing his view of psychedelics; he said it helped persuade him that these medicines could be useful for conditions including PTSD, depression, and anxiety. He found the book through the New York Times’ 2017 best-books list, which he checks for reading ideas.