DavidHaber

LubaDavid, thank you so much for coming on the show.Link

DavidMy pleasure. Thanks for having me on.Link

LubaThere is so much to talk about. We're gonna cover, obviously, your famous firm over fund thesis, your time with Andreessen and your time as an entrepreneur. But I want to start somewhere else. A lot of people call you the most connected VC in New York. So I'm curious, where does that come from?Link

DavidYou know, I've always believed in kind of what I call the karmic boomerang, of kind of putting more out into the world than you expect to receive. And I think I just get a lot of energy by sort of making connections and introducing people to one another. And, you know, it's always served me well in my personal life and my professional life. You know, and it's definitely paid back, you know, I don't know, a thousand fold, you know, at least, even karmically. And so I think that's really kind of maybe the origin of it. It's as simple as that.Link

LubaWere you like that since you were a kid?Link

DavidYeah, I think so. You know, I think I've always kind of, like, lived between worlds in some ways. Like, I grew up in this sort of very funny Mexican Jewish community in South San Diego. And so I always sort of had this, like, split identity to some degree of, like, am I American, am I Mexican, am I Jewish? I think the answer has always been sort of yes. And I think I've always sort of prided myself in having friends from lots of different, you know, walks of life, and being able to sort of, whether it's make connections or just sort of live in lots of different, you know, places, I think has been core to my personality.Link

LubaYou grew up around San Diego on the Mexican border. So how did that happen? Like a Jew that ended up in America, specifically on the Mexican border. What was the story?Link

DavidKind of circuitous. My grandmother is from what is present-day Ukraine, but at the time in World War II was Romania. She grew up in a small town called Czernowitz. Obviously survived the Holocaust. Moved to Israel when she was 16 and got married to a guy from her same, you know, shtetl, and couldn't get into the United States because of immigration quotas, and so ended up moving from Israel to Nicaragua.Link

You know, no money.Link

LubaThat's very random.Link

DavidYeah. No money, no Spanish. You know, my uncle was born in Nicaragua, and then they tried to get as close as they could to the United States, which is...Link

LubaHow did they end up in Nicaragua specifically?Link

DavidHer brother-in-law had started a business there. I mean, it was just sort of economic opportunity.Link

LubaI see. And I mean, it was wild to think, like, you survived World War Two, moved to a different country and then moved literally across the world, different language.Link

DavidYeah, yeah. And so they ended up, again, trying to get as close to the United States, which was Tijuana, which was on the border with San Diego. And so, you know, my dad grew up in Tijuana, as did my uncle. My grandfather unfortunately passed away when my dad was 11. So my grandmother became an entrepreneur, raised three kids on her own.Link

LubaOh, wow. What was she an entrepreneur in?Link

DavidShe had sort of, like, a leather, you know, curio store in Tijuana at the time. Nothing, you know, incredibly successful, but enough that she could afford to have somebody drive him across the border to go to school. And so he ended up learning English in the third grade, and then, you know, he ended up going to college in San Diego. My mom grew up in Los Angeles, but also went to college in San Diego. And so I obviously was a product of that connection. Like, grew up with the offspring of that sort of Tijuana Mexican Jewish community in South San Diego, which I joke is like the long lost tribe.Link

LubaWow. But were you entrepreneurial as a kid?Link

DavidI was. You know, my parents were basically like, if you need gas money, you got to, like, figure it out. And, you know, I remember, you know, a couple of months working at Target, you know, like, just stocking shelves, and as, like, a cashier, basically. And I'm like, okay, this is, like, a hard way to make a living, or, you know, make gas money. And so I just started a bunch of little, like, side hustles.Link

LubaWhat was the most successful?Link

DavidWell, I went to a really big public high school. So, you know, Friday night football games were like, I don't know, 2,000 people. And we used to sell microwavable pizza and popcorn, like, kind of terrible food. And again, lived on the border. So I convinced the school to let me bring a taco guy to set up a taco catering stand at the Friday night football games, and he just crushed. So, you know, it was a great setup for me. I would, like, watch the game.Link

LubaThat's amazing.Link

DavidHe'd sell, like, thousands of tacos. The amazing thing is, like, he's still there.Link

LubaWow.Link

DavidSo, like, 20 years later, and his business has expanded. So he started doing all the quinceañeras. He started getting pulled into all the other regional, you know, high schools. Like, I definitely made this guy millions of dollars over the subsequent, whatever, 20 or 20-something years.Link

LubaThat's incredible. So you were spotting entrepreneurs early on, spotting talent, I guess.Link

DavidYeah. Anyway. But yeah, it was a lot of fun.Link

LubaSo your sister works at OpenAI. She went to Berkeley. Your brother's in finance. You went to Harvard. What was happening in your household that the entire family ended up so successful?Link

DavidYeah, I don't know. You know, I'm very grateful, I had great parents. You know, my mom was a public school teacher, and, you know, I think she was always very involved in my education. And it had a big impact, because I think if left to my own devices, I would have been probably very distracted.Link

LubaGive me an example. How was she being involved?Link

DavidI mean, she would just hold me accountable, first and foremost. You know, like, did I actually do my homework? But I think she was always engaged, like, from a very young age, teaching me how to read very early, and, but even again into, like, middle school and high school, was always sort of a strong presence.Link

And again, like, you know, I went to this big public school where, you know, most people didn't go to the East Coast, didn't go to Ivy schools. And I remember, like, her basically saying, like, look, you didn't work your butt off to not apply. You know, I didn't know anybody that had ever gone to Harvard before. And, you know, and so I applied there and a number of other places. And, you know, it changed my life.Link

LubaSo your parents were pushing you and showing you, like, hey, why won't you expand your horizons? There is something better for you that's possible. Why wouldn't you at least try? And other kids and parents weren't doing that, potentially.Link

DavidAt least mine were, you know, were definitely pushing. And, you know, I think me and my siblings are sort of maybe a byproduct of both my parents. Like, my mom was very sort of academic, but was also a bit more introverted. My dad is sort of this gregarious, you know, kind of very direct, kind of more business person. And so we maybe got a little bit of those, you know, personality characteristics as well.Link

LubaSo you ended up going to Harvard. How did you pick Harvard, and why did you pick biology?Link

DavidSo, I mean, it's funny. Originally I thought I was, you know, from, like, 7 to 17, my dream was to be an orthopedic surgeon. I have flat feet. And when I was a kid, I went to this sort of, you know, San Diego famous kind of orthopedic surgeon, and I was like, okay, I want to be that guy. And so he had gone to Stanford, and so that was sort of my dream, was to go to Stanford. And so applied early to Stanford, ended up getting in, but didn't get any financial aid.Link

LubaI see.Link

DavidAnd I remember my parents actually, you know, basically contested that decision in person. And, you know, quote, were told there were plenty of people willing to make the financial sacrifices needed to come to our university. Basically told my parents.Link

LubaWow.Link

DavidWow. And so, you know, I ended up applying to Harvard and a number of other schools, and, you know, Harvard ended up giving me, I think, you know, more than half tuition. So partly it was sort of an economic one, but I'm, yeah, very grateful for that. And, you know, ended up meeting my now wife there, and so many of my closest friends. So really worked out.Link

LubaWorked out. Yeah. Financial aid, and the situation that you might be in when you're applying, plays such a big role. So I was applying to three schools from Belarus. It was University of Toronto, University of Waterloo and Drexel University. You might be asking why Drexel, but it was, like, a school that had a co-op program, and I really wanted to do co-op. And then ultimately it was, you know, Drexel, and schools in America were much more expensive than schools in Canada. And I was also thinking, okay, because Waterloo has a co-op program, that means that I would be making money, paying for my tuition myself, and that was the ultimate decision. But, you know, if you don't factor all of those things in, then you might end up in a completely different situation and place.Link

DavidBut, like, again, I'm super grateful, you know, for the endowment and all the alumni that donated for, you know, for financial aid. And it really did change my life.Link

LubaSo you went to study biology, quickly realized that you didn't actually want to be a doctor, and you end up in financial services.Link

DavidKind of. I was a bit more curious than that, to be honest. But yes, I studied biochemistry, originally thought I was gonna be a doctor, had always been entrepreneurial. Got my first exposure to Silicon Valley, actually, in my sophomore summer.Link

LubaHow did that happen?Link

DavidThere was a guy named Jeff Hammerbacher, who was one of the earliest employees at Facebook, who had started the Facebook data team. This is probably 2007.Link

LubaWow.Link

DavidAnd he was a few years older than me at school. His girlfriend, now wife, at the time was working at this early stage edtech company in SoMa. And so he was sort of recruiting people on her behalf, basically, to go kind of intern there.Link

LubaAnd how did you know him?Link

DavidHe was a few years older than me.Link

LubaGot it, got it.Link

DavidAt Harvard, back on campus. And, you know, somebody I kind of knew. You know, there weren't that many people in tech at the time, at least from sort of my age group. I was a bit younger than, like, the Facebook generation. And so, yeah, ended up going to the Bay Area and working at this company. You know, Wiki had just started. Yelp was, like, I think a 30-person company at the time. The Facebook platform had just launched. And the company ultimately was not successful, but they had hired some really brilliant people. So I sat next to our lead engineer. I remember this guy, Nathan. It was his first job out of Harvard, and I was pitching my business ideas. And then he goes on to start Airbnb.Link

LubaOh my God, Nathan is so sick. That's incredible. So you were working with him at that time?Link

DavidI was. I was working next to him. Yeah, he was full time. I was sort of, like, a, you know, a lowly sophomore intern, but yes. And, you know, we stayed in touch. He ended up being an angel investor in my company eventually. He had this very funny, you know, Facebook Messenger thread with him of him being like, hey, I'm going to be back on campus. I would love to show you this new app I'm building, AirBed and Breakfast. We're hiring for our first non-technical hires. You want to come in? My parents are going to kill me if I drop out. That was a very expensive mistake. But he's an amazing guy, an amazing company, obviously.Link

LubaAnd then do you think you could have told that Airbnb would have been huge, based on meeting him then, and knowing what you know now?Link

DavidWell, you know, what you knew then, you know, it's always hard to say in retrospect. What was clear was that the business was really working even then. You know, going into, I think it was the 2008 elections, they had become sort of the platform for people visiting, I think it was Denver at the time. And so the volume of kind of people that they were housing, you know, it was just insane. And so they were taking this sort of, like, unique latent supply and creating a marketplace for it.Link

You know, many years later, kind of inspired by my partner Andrew Parker, who was at Spark at the time, I wrote this piece on unbundling Craigslist. And this was in 2012.Link

LubaWow.Link

DavidAnd it was sort of a direct analogy in some ways from Airbnb, but people building all these vertical kind of marketplaces across different categories. And so, still would have been a good idea to join Airbnb, probably, in 2012. But I've always been very inspired by that business, and also just how they conduct themselves. Like, Nathan, even today, is the same person that I knew in 2007, despite all the incredible success. And that has always stuck with me as well.Link

LubaSo coming back to your internship at that edtech company, that was your first interaction with Silicon Valley. Tell me more about how that changed your perspective on what you wanted to do and who you wanted to be surrounded by.Link

DavidI mean, I think part of it was just, you know, I never really had any direct exposure to technology growing up in San Diego. You know, I mean, it's funny, but I came back from that summer and met Julia, who's now my wife. She was a year younger than me at Harvard as well. And I was telling her about this kind of crazy summer I had in San Francisco. And she said, you really need to meet this family friend who does something in science and business. And I came back down to New York and met this guy named Rory, who I found was this unbelievably successful kind of serial biotech entrepreneur.Link

So we hit it off, and I ended up spending a summer working with him in 2008, and then two years after graduating. And it was a very unusual kind of first job. You know, he had started three companies, three biotech companies he took public. He was the largest billboard company in Japan, ran a railroad, and started this very large, essentially private equity business called Royalty Pharma, which has become the largest buyer of pharmaceutical royalties in the world. And, you know, maybe it's not the biggest business in the world, but it's one of the best, because I think they have 50 employees with a $25 billion market cap.Link

LubaWow. Crazy.Link

DavidI don't know any other business on the planet that has more market cap per person than Royalty Pharma.Link

LubaThat's crazy. Like, what about that business makes it work with such a small amount of headcount?Link

DavidSo a few different things. One is, you can think of it a bit like a private equity business, but instead of having funds, they started with permanent capital. They started with an LLC. And he had been the banker to biotech of the period in the late '70s at King Weber. He started the business with another guy named Pablo Legorreta, who still runs it today. And they were buying, essentially, intellectual property that was sitting at the time on university balance sheets.Link

So, you know, scientists at NYU might have developed a drug, you know, like Humira. I think it was actually one of the first drugs that they bought, which treats, you know, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. And, you know, they would go to the school and say, listen, like, you know, you're generating, I don't know, $30 million a year in royalty income, but that's a lot of risk in a single asset. Like, let us buy this from you today for $300 million, at a discount to what they perceived to be the future cash flow of the drug. And they did just that. That drug became, prior to GLP-1, I think it was the most profitable drug on the planet. Because it didn't just treat, you know, rheumatoid arthritis, it treated psoriasis and Crohn's disease and a bunch of other autoimmune issues. And that pharmaceutical company would just run on its own. They would be, as a private equity owner... So they would buy the royalty interest that the university retained.Link

LubaI see.Link

DavidIt had already gone through clinical trials. It was being licensed to, I forget, you know, the specific company, but a large pharmaceutical company who would pay to commercialize it. And they would just collect those royalties.Link

LubaAnd so it's a very scalable business model in that respect, because you weren't buying a whole company, right? You were buying an income stream and intellectual property.Link

DavidVery much. And then they pooled a bunch of these together, which allowed them to raise larger and lower-cost forms of debt. It was a very complicated thing. And so there was sort of this, like, economies of scale, cost of capital advantage. Anyway, it's a fascinating business. It's one of the things that sort of inspired this notion of, like, firm over fund, because I think it's one of the purest expressions of compounding competitive advantage in an investment organization.Link

LubaComing back to Rory, I've always been fascinated with people who can do so many different things in their lifetime. So railroad, bio companies, taking companies public. Now that you've met so many entrepreneurs in your own life, what do you think differentiates a person like Rory from someone who takes a more linear path?Link

DavidI mean, I think it's still very rare, right, to find somebody who's had that level of success across multiple industries. You know, often you find, still rare, but you find an entrepreneur who has very deep domain expertise, and then they build many successful companies kind of in and around that same category. You know, I think what Rory's, at least my perception of him, he was very good at identifying large macro trends early and sort of riding these waves. You know, I think that was true in biotech. You know, he started getting into it post-PCR, I think, in the, like, late '70s, early '80s.Link

And then he has this sort of, like, amazing, you know, like the Jobs-ian sort of, like, reality distortion field where you just, like, want to work with him. And so ultimately, you know, it's about assembling a team and, you know, finding people that are better than you at doing the thing and kind of getting out of the way. And so he was always, I think, exceptional at that.Link

LubaAnd what about him makes people want to work with him?Link

DavidIt's hard to describe. He just has sort of this energy, like he's... I mean, he's very generous, right? One of the things that I reflect on, when I was a kid, when I worked for him, right, I worked as a junior summer intern, and then it was my first job out of college. And it was, like, four of us and him sitting around the table every day, and he was like, listen, you have an unlimited book budget. Go read about modern portfolio theory. Come back to me and tell me what sounds real, what sounds like BS. And really pushed us to debate him, which, you know, I think taught you the value of your ideas and not your pedigree, right?Link

And I think the level of, like, confidence that that inspired at a young age, again, if he was interested in my ideas and he was already incredibly successful, then, you know, I think I can trace that through line into, you know, my time at Spark, when I was sort of pounding the table for an investment, or, you know, the confidence to go start your own company, or at Goldman to kind of, I don't know, speak truth to power, maybe, in an organization. And I think it's just a rare thing to get at that age. And for an entrepreneur, obviously, it's super important to be able to be that magnet for people and for resources.Link

LubaDo you think that's a skill that someone can develop? Or is it like you either have it or you don't?Link

DavidI want to believe that you can develop it, but I think it is probably fairly innate. You know, because I think a lot of it comes down to, like, EQ. You know, it's like, how do you understand what somebody needs? You know, how do you... I don't know. The things that I think are coachable, though, is, like, how do you sort of develop a vision? How do you sort of, like, you know, identify a talent pipeline, maybe do it more systematically? But I think, like, selling is hard. It's hard to coach.Link

LubaHave you seen anyone who was able to learn the sales skill and be really successful at it?Link

DavidFor sure. For sure. You know, I think helping people understand how to put yourself in other people's shoes, you know, is a core part of that, right? Instead of just sort of talking at somebody, listening and trying to better understand, okay, what are they trying to get out of their career, right? What are their motivations? And, you know, not overselling, right? I think, like, tackling the potential reservations that they have head on, right? And the more you can learn from somebody else, I think the better and more effective you will probably be at selling them. And so I definitely worked with, you know, founders where I've had to coach them on sort of, you know, trying to listen more.Link

LubaSo you were working with Rory, you then worked at Spark, as you said. What gave you the confidence to be a founder yourself?Link

DavidI think, you know, the people I'd always admired most were people that had built something from nothing. And again, maybe I was inspired, you know, to be entrepreneurial by my parents, you know, to get gas money as a young kid. But, you know, I kind of always thought of myself more as an entrepreneur than an investor. And so once I had something I was particularly passionate about, I kind of knew I needed to leave and go build the thing.Link

And the timing kind of worked out, right? You know, I ended up getting married in 2013. My kind of eventual co-founder, Peyton, was running engineering at Venmo. They just got acquired by Braintree and PayPal at the end of that year. And so...Link

LubaAnd how did you meet Peyton?Link

DavidHe was a few years older than me at Harvard. We didn't overlap. He was, I think, '04. But we met in 2009 when I first moved to New York, and, you know, kind of had always hit it off. And even in 2009, we were sort of brainstorming different business ideas, and none of them were particularly great. But we always stayed close. He was at D. E. Shaw at the time and then was at Venmo. So, yeah, I always kind of had him in the back of my mind as somebody I would want to start a company with.Link

And then, you know, credit to my wife also. She was the one who kind of really encouraged me to go start. I think she recognized that I was not going to be happy unless I tried.Link

LubaWhat did that conversation look like at home?Link

DavidIt was basically that, like, you know, I loved Spark, candidly. Like, I'm very grateful for that experience, because, you know, it was, like, seven GPs and me. I was the only kind of non-, like, junior person at the firm. I was, whatever, 23, 24 at the time. You know, they're incredible pickers even today. I mean, you know, they recently backed Anthropic. I mean, it's amazing what they've done. You know, I think once I finally found something that I was personally particularly passionate about, it didn't feel like risk.Link

LubaDo you still see yourself as an entrepreneur now, or do you now see yourself as an investor?Link

DavidI think today I feel best somewhere in between, you know.Link

LubaAlways between the gray lines.Link

DavidAnd this is, again, partially where this, like, firm over fund kind of phrase came from, you know, because I was trying to identify, like, a description for where I feel best, which is somewhere between being an investor and an entrepreneur. And so I'd always been more interested in helping build a firm than run a fund, sort of the way I described it. But yeah, in general, like, I think I resist, like, categorization.Link

LubaLike, why is that?Link

DavidBecause I, you know, again, maybe this is sort of my own bias because of my upbringing, but I do generally believe that, like, opportunity lives between fields of expertise, right?Link

LubaHave there been any times where you were boxed in and that was clearly disadvantageous?Link

DavidYou know, things are, like, priced in, in some ways, right? And so I'm always... maybe I just get a lot of energy by sort of exploring the frontier and exploring the edges of things. And I think often... I mean, by the way, this is, like, both, in my head, a metaphor for a career. You know, it's like, am I an entrepreneur, an investor, an operator? Am I Silicon Valley, am I Wall Street? Am I American, am I Mexican? Like, I think it's just sort of yes.Link

And I think even from an investment perspective, again, if it's too easily sort of bucketed in one category, it's very understood. And so I found myself, even at ingress and particularly Andreessen, inspired by sort of, like, running around the firm and finding opportunities kind of at the seams, and locking arms with other GPs and kind of doing deals at the intersections. But again, I think part of that is, like, I genuinely believe that opportunity lives in the cracks, but also that I probably do get energy kind of exploring the edges of markets, of people.Link

LubaSo does it ever disallow you to focus on one thing, if you're always trying to attach yourself to different things or identities?Link

DavidPossibly. Although I think it becomes easier in some ways to find through lines after you've gone deep. You know, like, I ended up somewhat unintentionally going very deep in financial services. Somewhat naively, inspired by my time at Spark. Nobody was really covering financial services at the time, in 2011. And I'm like, oh, it seems like a big part of the economy that hasn't really been transformed with technology. You know, the firm had made a lot of money and had a bunch of people focused on consumer internet and other things. So it's like, I'm just going to go spend time there. And it's partially what led to some good investments there, partially what inspired me to do Bond Street.Link

And then, you know, you wake up and you spend, I don't know, like, almost ten years focused in that space, as an investor and an entrepreneur. We sold the business to Goldman, as sort of an operator, troublemaker, maybe. But I think that depth of that expertise helped me find other through lines of financial services and other markets. And I think it's why I've actually always believed, you know, fintech, if you want to call it that, was more of a horizontal than a vertical, right? It became sort of an embedded business model in lots of other areas of software.Link

LubaSo, about your time at Bond Street, what was the hardest thing about building that company?Link

DavidThere were a lot of hard things. It was very challenging. I think, you know, we were doing small business lending, and we started the business in 2013 largely because a lot of the data that we thought we would need to sort of understand the financial health of small businesses at that point in time was just becoming available online via API. So Intuit that year had just launched the QuickBooks API, but also Xero and Stripe and Harvest and Braintree, and this whole kind of ecosystem of, you know, accounting, invoicing and payments companies were sort of beginning to open up. The IRS had just started accepting e-signature, so you could get access to a tax transcript programmatically. And we knew we could write, you know, integrations into credit bureaus. And then we had just seeded Plaid, which meant you could get access to bank transactional data.Link

And so, you know, the simple idea was, like, come to the site, auth access to all your accounts, we'll make a lending decision in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. That was sort of the premise. We got a lot of things right, by the way. First and foremost, the thing I'm most proud of by far was the people. I think we recruited an exceptional team.Link

LubaHow big was your team?Link

DavidSmall. We were about 40 people total.Link

LubaThat's like a mid-sized company.Link

DavidYeah. Yeah. You know, many people, many of whom have now gone on to either start companies or have had very successful careers elsewhere, which I'm very proud of.Link

LubaWhat were some of the examples? People who went on?Link

DavidOh, man. I mean, Eddie Cyril, I think, is one of the best, where he eventually became kind of my right hand in running the business. He was our CFO. He helped open the Stripe New York office, built Stripe Capital, I think was their chief risk officer. You know, I think it's like probably 8,000 people now. Yeah, he's an amazing operator. And many, many other examples. Jeremy Rausch, who was one of our youngest, who started a bootstrapped outsourced sales company. Florrie ended up starting an amazing kind of crypto business.Link

LubaSo that's incredible.Link

DavidYeah, it's a good crew.Link

The hardest thing, just to answer your question very specifically, was how do you find the small business owner at the transactional point of intent? Meaning nobody takes out a loan unless you're, like, immediately ready to do something with it. You're not going to take out a mortgage unless you're ready to buy a house. And we didn't have, I would argue, like, any unique visibility into that transactional intent, right? We didn't know. And so we were constantly sort of, like, trying to pull people into the funnel, as opposed to being able to push a product to the right person at the right point in time.Link

And I think this is partially why I've always been more interested in the software-led approach, in part because, you know, had we owned, let's say, an accounting platform or even a payments business, you could use that context on somebody's financial health, a business's financial health, to be able to identify working capital gaps or capital needs, and then again be able to sort of push the right product to the right person at the right point in time. And the cost of acquisition, the whole sort of funnel, changes dramatically if you're able to do that, right, versus constantly trying to sort of pull them in.Link

LubaYou guys were thinking about brand in very innovative ways for the time, because you started a podcast where you were interviewing all these different small business owners and even famous restaurateurs.Link

DavidYeah.Link

LubaHow did that idea come to mind?Link

DavidI think I've always been, to some degree, a creative person and gotten a lot of energy from, you know, building a team, a brand, a culture, a product. I remember Eddie chiding me at one point for, like, spending too much time designing the Bond Street office, which actually was partially inspired by Nathan at Airbnb, because each of our conference rooms were designed after our earliest customers.Link

LubaOh, that's amazing.Link

DavidSo Gin Lane was our very first customer, which was, yeah, an amazing digital agency, you know. Joe Coffee, Cafe Grumpy.Link

LubaThat's really cool.Link

DavidYeah. Anyway.Link

LubaAirbnb actually went as far as having employees contribute to designing the conference rooms. There was a whole program around it.Link

DavidI love it.Link

LubaYeah. I used to work at Airbnb, and I collaborated on this, like, one Russian listing somewhere, and we were sourcing different items to make it as close to the listing as possible.Link

DavidOh, I remember staying at an Airbnb in Hong Kong, and they literally recreated that entire apartment. It was, like, a black patent leather couch with a neon sign. I mean, they had the exact artifacts.Link

And so for me, it was like, how do you put your customers front and center, right? And ultimately my belief is, like, your brand is going to be built through the lens of your customers. And so how do you spend time and resources telling their stories, right? And for me, it was always, I didn't really want Bond Street to be known as, like, a lender, right? I wanted to sort of be the financial advocate for the entrepreneurs we served. And there are just really rich stories, if you think about it, you know, in terms of why is somebody taking out a loan? It's like, well, they're reaching for something.Link

LubaYeah, there's a dream, there's a...Link

DavidStory, there's an inflection. And so, you know, we served small business owners across so many different categories across the country. And so I also believe there's no sort of one size fits all of entrepreneurship. Like, obviously I operate in the tech world, but there's incredible stories that we, you know, funded and met, you know, in building self-storage businesses, and gyms and coffee shops. And I mean, it's just... yeah. And I'm still friends with, by the way, some, like, you know, Jonathan Rubinstein and his sister Gabby from Joe Coffee. He opened probably eight locations here.Link

LubaWow.Link

DavidAs an example.Link

LubaThat's really cool. And I think the way you talk about it, and the way you put the customer front and center, is testament to your overall curiosity about people, and what we started with, with being a connector and wanting people to meet, and being focused on their stories and listening.Link

DavidI sort of often half joke that I don't feel like I know much, but I feel like I know people. And it's always kind of kept me grounded, right? It's like, technology changes. At the end of the day, like, how do you recruit a great team? It's sort of having an intuition around a person. And how do you make a good very early stage investment? The best investments ever made were just deep conviction in the individual.Link

LubaWere your parents like that too, or was it literally, you know, growing up between the lines of culture, between the lines of identity, that allowed you to find commonalities between people?Link

DavidI think my dad was sort of a consummate salesperson also. So I think he always had an ability to probably read people well. But I think it was also the, you know, the sort of environment, you know, for sure. Like, you know, I could easily hang with the AP and Ivy kids in my, like, you know, classes. Like, my best friend was the, you know, captain of the football team. I could hang out with the gangster kids, like, Mexican. Like, I could kind of span, you know, at least the entire orbit of, you know, Bonita High School at the time. But anyway, that's sort of always been my personality.Link

LubaIf someone listening really wants to get better at getting to know people, connecting people, where do they get started?Link

DavidI think just finding ways to help, to be honest. You know, again, kind of without expectation. You know, certainly every entrepreneur has, like, a hundred things, you know, that they have to do, but certainly, like, ten, and they only have time to focus on three of them. And so if you can figure out what number four and five is, and just, like, do them, or offer to do them, again, without any expectation of a job or whatever. Again, it's one of the fastest ways to sort of meet people and get networked in the field. So I think just putting yourself out there and not asking for something, but showing up with something to give, I think, is maybe the best way to get networked, to meet people.Link

LubaGive me some examples of how you did that throughout your career.Link

DavidI just... I know I've probably helped, yeah, hundreds of people get jobs at this point throughout my career. You know, I've helped...Link

LubaSo what would you do specifically? So someone would reach out to you, being like, hey, David, I'm looking for a job, do you have someone in mind? And then you kind of go through your notes and in your mind about the companies that you know and connect them directly?Link

DavidYeah, basically. You know, even at Goldman, I remember, like, when I was there, I would often ask myself, like, what does it mean to take risk inside of a big company? You know, because that was sort of my natural disposition. I'd just spent four years, like, running through walls. And partially it was like, let me just completely disregard my job description, you know, speak very plainly to, like, the most senior people and most junior people. I just started firing off emails to, like, Marty Chavez, who was the CFO at the time, and the heads of banking and asset management, just being like, hey, I'm here. Like, how can I help?Link

LubaYeah.Link

DavidAnd, you know, I mean, I think I was a very weird, weirdly shaped Goldman employee at the time, but I was sort of sourcing deals for different pockets of capital. I was helping do, you know, debt transactions during Covid with PPP, and technology strategy, and trying to push M&A. Like, you know, it was kind of running around the building. So I said sort of troublemaker earlier.Link

LubaWhat about the time management piece of it? Like, let's say you fire off 50 emails being like, hey, I want to help, how can I help? And then everyone responds to you being like, help me with this. How do you manage those expectations?Link

DavidIt's hard. I mean, the reality is you can't say yes to everybody. But I think if somebody crafts you a very thoughtful note, you know, looking for help, I always take those very seriously, regardless of who they are, you know, college kids or entrepreneurs or executives. And, I don't know, I think people remember how you make them feel, you know. And so I don't have, like, a ledger, you know, where I'm like, okay, this percentage of my time is going to go towards, like, helping others. You know, I don't know, for me, it's much more organic than that. And it probably means I'm not, like, perfect at time management. But again, it's always that sort of karmic boomerang. It's always, you know, paid real dividends with me.Link

LubaI know you said you don't really think about it from the time management perspective. But being tactical, what are the tools you use to stay on top of your network?Link

DavidOh, man. A bunch. I mean, well, one, I have an amazing assistant, Jody. Shout out Jody Lynn, who's just the best. She's incredible and proactive, and I don't think I could do my job without her, honestly.Link

More recently, I've been building a lot of my own tooling internally at Andreessen. You know, I've just gone really down the rabbit hole of all of the kind of agentic coding tools, and had been building this product, I call it Vantage, which basically started by recognizing that last year I took, like, 750 meetings in Granola. And there's just a ton of latent context that lives unstructured in these voice transcripts. And so I started by essentially ingesting all those, categorizing all my meetings. You know, it'll recognize, okay, the difference between a board meeting, a monthly update, a one-on-one, a candidate interview, a podcast.Link

LubaYeah.Link

DavidAnd then fire off work kind of in the background, in hopes, again, that it frees up time to spend time with people. Like, that's sort of my orientation for why I'm building this.Link

And then we have kind of a great internal, like, data engineering team that has sort of a pipeline of every company we've ever met, hydrated with all the metrics you can imagine. And so I've started also, you know, using that to identify companies that fit within, you know, the kind of thesis that I'm most interested in, but also using the data to drive sort of inflections and bubbling things up at the right point in time. And it's just expanded a lot. I mean, we have a whole Slack agent surface, and it lives ambient in our key meetings. And so increasingly I find myself working with Vantage almost as a thought partner or employee, you know, counterpart, to not just do time management, but do a lot of different things that I...Link

LubaAnd now Vantage is rolled out to your team specifically. It lives in Slack. It gives you guys ideas, contacts, takes.Link

DavidYep, yep. Yeah. I think we only have several dozen people on the platform today. You know, I brought in a new kind of deal partner who's been helping me build this, Fabrizio, who's actually an engineer, sort of by training. So it now lives on Databricks, and it has its own, more, cybersecurity kind of built into it. But yes, like, people, you know... it now sort of serves everybody individually, again, trying to make them more efficient.Link

But the kind of broader idea was, there's signal that lives everywhere within the firm, right? Every conversation you have, every pass note, every investment memo, every investment you make, lives sort of decentralized across the organization. We've never really had, like, a central nervous system or a brain to kind of pull that context together, right?Link

LubaAnd how do you sort of... Like everyone's individual notes about a company, all the pitch decks, it's all super unstructured, right? Do you think everyone will move towards the world where we're building personalized tools and internal tools? Because, for instance, Town comes to mind, and they have a lot of the same capabilities, but I assume there is certain guardrails or certain customizations that you would want to have control over, and that's why you're building your own tool.Link

DavidYeah. We love... I mean, my partner Alex Rampell sits on the board. We led the Series A. So shout out Jean-Denis.Link

LubaJean-Denis. Awesome. He's the best.Link

DavidYeah, I think people will. And that's kind of my, you know, one reflection just from the past few months, is that, like, context is really the rate limiter, right? It's why I'm getting so much energy from doing what I'm doing. Like, I always think back to my time at Bond Street and how slow the feedback loops were building software. You come up with an idea, work with the engineering team, it might take a few weeks or a month, it's not quite perfect. And that sort of iterative cycle was very long.Link

Now, like, anybody, you know, can build software and jump into Codex or Claude Code or any of these tools. And if you just know what good looks like, your ability to iterate through and create a great product is, like, remarkable. And obviously a lot of that changed with kind of Opus, you know, in December. But I think it's only going to get even easier and easier. And the aesthetics of these products, the ability to host them, like, the model capabilities are such that I think it's just such an empowering, kind of democratizing force of building software. And then taste and context becomes the sort of, you know, rate limiter, or that arbiter.Link

LubaSo how has that changed how you pick founders? What are you looking for right now?Link

DavidI mean, I think it's just agency. I think founders always had agency, right? Like, did you take whatever earned secret or unique insight you have and go apply it? But I think now you can get much further, you know, earlier, whether it's, you know, like, an early MVP of the product, you know, getting real customer feedback, in some cases generating revenue. So I think the expectations of sort of what you can deliver earlier in the company is much higher. But I think the same founder qualities are always the things that we look for, regardless of kind of the tech segment.Link

LubaWhat are the founder qualities that you look for?Link

DavidI mean, I think a few different things. One is, like, do they have clarity of thought? Do they know what they're building and why? Can they articulate why they are sort of uniquely qualified to go build this particular business idea? You know, another way to describe that is sort of, like, founder-company fit.Link

I think, relatedly, like, are they students of history? You know, if you're going to spend the next ten years of your life building a company, like, you want to go really deep, right? And so I often want to feel like I'm learning, you know, from them. If I happen to know more about a market than they do, that's really a red flag. And the best founders, I think, have a sense of, like, humble confidence, right? You know, they don't sort of disregard prior attempts. It's like, oh, those guys were idiots, we're the geniuses who are going to go figure this out. In many cases, they've actually, like, gone back and met with all the founders who've tried a similar idea and learned about the pitfalls, right? And in some cases actually invited them on the cap table as angels. And so I think that sort of sense of humble confidence is something I look for.Link

And then Alex, my partner Alex always describes this notion of, you know, can they materialize, you know, capital, labor and customers? You know, kind of like, can they sell?Link

LubaYeah.Link

DavidBecause in my experience, as a founder, you're going to spend 95% of your time selling, whether it's your co-founder, your customers, you know, employees, the press, investors. And so wanting to believe that they can kind of pull that organization together, something to do.Link

LubaSo with this ability to pull resources around you, in the meetings that you have with founders, what is your framework to be able to tell whether they have that capability?Link

DavidI partially just ask them, and I want to understand their story. You know, like, why did they choose to build what they're building? You know, kind of the same conversation we're having. Like, how did they grow up? Get deeper into, like, their motivations. You know, what are the things that sort of drive them? You know, again, in my experience, like, building a company is really challenging, and you have to have sort of both, I think, an irrational self-confidence in yourself, to sort of push through, or a particularly deep passion for whatever it is that you're focused on, because it's just too easy to give up. And so partially what I'm looking for is sort of what I call, like, the fire. And it's hard to articulate.Link

LubaYeah. What would you say makes for a bad motivation to build a company?Link

DavidI mean, certainly anything, like, purely monetarily driven. I think that comes from having a successful business. But I think it's too mercenary. I think I'd much rather back the missionary than the mercenary, you know? But, you know, there's a lot of motivators, right? Going through a challenging upbringing. You know, Alex also likes to talk about, his favorite book is *The Count of Monte Cristo*.Link

LubaSo, okay. Great book.Link

DavidEven revenge can be a very powerful motivator, if channeled, you know, in the right fashion.Link

LubaRevenge can be even a more powerful motivator than trying to prove yourself wrong or push yourself.Link

DavidTotally. Well, yeah, I think it's very complementary in some ways to that. So, yeah. I mean, there's no perfect formula, which is, I think, what makes this job so fun and interesting.Link

LubaWhat was your motivation when you were starting Bond Street?Link

DavidThat's a good question. One is just, I think, being able to have a big impact on the entrepreneurs that we were serving. Like, I was very inspired by their stories. And I think most people, you know, don't start businesses because they want to be the CFO. They start businesses because they're passionate about the product or the service or their craft. And I think the idea of abstracting away that kind of financial complexity was a big motivator, and sort of the impact of that on them and their families and their employees' lives.Link

I think there's a sense of, I don't know, legacy, you know, or maybe the, I think it's the Bezos, like, regret minimization framework, right? I didn't want to wake up when I was 60 and not have tried. And so it was definitely a path to stay in my venture job, I'm sure, and maybe even economically that would have been more rewarding. But I think I would have always had the same question of, like, can I do this? Can I do it? And what would it be like? And, you know, it wasn't, like, the most successful business, you know, candidly. But I learned a tremendous amount building companies, about myself, about people, that I think actually now has made me a much better investor than I certainly was back then.Link

LubaI want to come back to lending, Bond Street, and also legacy, because I think that's a really big topic in your life, from what I'm seeing. But another question on people. I had a brief interaction with your friend Micky Malka, who suggested I ask you, what are the differences and similarities between people that you decide to work with versus people that you back?Link

DavidOh, interesting. I mean, they're not terribly dissimilar in some ways, right? In the sense that a lot of the aesthetics that I was attracted to at Andreessen, and probably, honestly, one of the reasons I really admire Micky as well, is that, you know, most of the people at Andreessen are entrepreneurs who happen to be running an investment organization. Micky himself is an amazing entrepreneur. I think he started the first, like, Wendy's franchise in Venezuela when he was 17. And, like, he just had an amazing kind of history. And so I think I'm drawn to that kind of entrepreneurial spark.Link

And I think it sort of manifests culturally in the organization in terms of a healthy amount of self-reflection, like, a willingness to ask the hard question, like, is this working? If it's not, just, you know, tear it down and rebuild. To take risk and put real chips on the table. To kind of press your competitive advantage when you have it. And I think all of those qualities are things that I also, you know, often look for in entrepreneurs. They might be more independent initially, to want to build it on their own, but ultimately you have to sort of inspire and motivate a team. And, yeah, I admire a lot of those qualities in Marc and Ben and Alex and Martin and many others that I've worked with.Link

LubaWell, let's talk about Andreessen. So you started working at Andreessen after your time at Goldman. Goldman acquired Bond Street. Tell me, how did it come about?Link

DavidAgain, somewhat randomly. But I'd known my partner Alex Rampell for a long time. Actually, Eddie Cyril, who I mentioned earlier, that amazing kind of operator, used to work for Alex at his prior company, TrialPay.Link

LubaOh, cool.Link

DavidAlex eventually had led a later round in Plaid, so kind of got to know him through that. And then, you know, I would always, I think since, like, 2017, I was tweeting a lot about this notion of firm over fund, kind of like the institutionalization, to some degree, of venture capital.Link

LubaAnd you were tweeting about it when you were still at Spark? That was before Bond Street?Link

DavidThis was back at Goldman.Link

LubaOkay, got it.Link

DavidYeah. I don't know, maybe further conceptualizing this there.Link

LubaAnd what triggered your interest in institutions?Link

DavidI think it's just the entrepreneurial journey, right? It's like, I, again, get a tremendous amount of energy running around and hopefully making good investments and working with entrepreneurs and helping them avoid a lot of the mistakes that I made, candidly, as an entrepreneur. But I also find that I need a place to channel my own kind of builder energy. And I think, again, this is sort of the genesis of this notion of firm over fund.Link

Like, through my definition, a fund is, you know, the objective function is, how do I generate the most carry with the fewest people in the shortest amount of time possible? And obviously you can be very successful doing that. Most people, I would argue, run funds. A firm, in sort of contrast, is: you have to deliver exceptional returns, that's sort of a prerequisite, obviously. But the second question is, how do I build sources of compounding competitive advantage? Like, what are my moats? And I think that question is a very entrepreneurial question.Link

And whether it's thinking back to Royalty Pharma and the sort of incredible moats and competitive advantages that Rory had built in that business. You know, whether it's looking in from within a firm like Goldman Sachs, which isn't just an investment organization, but I would argue they've built a tremendous amount of moats, whether it's sort of the connection between, like, the private bank and the merchant banking business, and its ability to sort of raise capital for those funds. Whether it's looking at entrepreneurs across other asset classes. You know, I interviewed, like, Marc Rowan recently, who's the founder of Apollo. And I think they've built a tremendous amount of moat, if you will, through Athene, which is their insurance subsidiary and kind of the source of their permanent capital.Link

I could go on, but I think, like, if you think about Andreessen as a company more than a fund or collection of funds, I think it's a very interesting canvas for sort of asking that question of, like, how do you build sources of competitive advantage? And I think I'd always viewed them very much as a firm and not a fund. And again, I think part of that is driven by it being run by entrepreneurs, and kind of the intensity and aggression that I think people have internally. And I think some of the things that they were early on, and I don't take any credit for, you know, things like...Link

LubaThe operating team, CAA model.Link

DavidYeah.Link

LubaReinvest.Link

DavidYeah. Reinvesting basically all the management fees back into the operating platform. Being early to content, you know, and kind of building a brand, and now, you know, even deeper investment with the new media team and our mutual friend Erik Torenberg in that org. And it's just this notion of, like, yeah, it feels much more of a team sport than it does sort of an individualistic one. And I think that's also a hallmark, in some ways, of a firm over a fund.Link

LubaAnd what have you seen to be moats that can compound over time? Are they the same across different organizations that you studied, or is it very organization-innate?Link

DavidI think there are some commonalities. I mean, I think in venture capital, and I would maybe argue in other investment organizations as well, like, brand and reputation is still paramount, right? Ultimately our customers are the entrepreneurs that we serve. And, you know, we want them to have a good experience that they tell their friends, and, you know, the first call. It's, again, it's like, how do you build the brand through the lens of your customers, right? It's why we spend so much time and effort telling their stories. I think it's the exact same thing, whether you're building Bond Street or you're building Andreessen. I think telling the stories of the entrepreneurs is kind of first and foremost. And if you serve them well, the world will go around, and you're going to be successful, deal flow. You know, we can help our LPs, you know, make more money, obviously, for ourselves.Link

And that sort of success begets success, in a weird way, in venture capital, differently, I would argue, than in other asset classes. It's one of the reasons why I think firms like Sequoia have been so successful for decades. One, because they managed generational transitions, and I'm sure they have a competitive intensity and culture, but also because people want to be associated with that brand. I think that's different in other asset classes.Link

And, you know, you think about, like, some of the big quant hedge funds, they invested deeply in technology or data. You know, Goldman might be distribution. Royalty Pharma and Apollo had permanency of capital, which gives you sort of duration and longer time horizon. Permanent capital was a big sort of common thread across both of those, right? Apollo's business is sort of decreasing the cost of liability in selling insurance, and then originating, you know, yield-bearing credit assets at every marginal unit of risk, and basically maximizing the distance between those two things. That's sort of similar to a bank.Link

It's not to say that, like, we are trying to become any of those other firms. It's just, intellectually, I'm really interested in, how do you build moats? Oh, and by the way, I want to have a thesis on a source of compounding advantage for any entrepreneur that I back, too. But I think trying to answer those questions and identifying those is just a really fun, entrepreneurial thing that I get a lot of energy from.Link

LubaWhat do you think is your personal source of competitive advantage?Link

DavidYeah, I mean, again, I think if one exists, it is that sort of, I believe opportunity lives between fields of expertise, and I resist sort of being too easily bucketed. And so I like living at the intersections of things. I think that's definitely one, if it exists. And I think maybe the second, which we've also talked about, is just sort of being curious about people and connecting, knowing people. And, you know, I think, again, that's helped me be a good, you know, early stage investor and entrepreneur. You know, my karmic side hustle we were chatting about was also matchmaking. So I think it's, like, the same skill set. It's just like...Link

LubaWell, you got to boast here. How many marriages have you set up? How many kids do they have?Link

DavidOne of them that I recently set up just had their second kid, which was...Link

LubaThat's incredible.Link

DavidI was very proud of. You know, it's like you invest in a unicorn or something, and this is actually more impactful.Link

LubaResume.Link

DavidMaybe, you know. I'm just very happy for them.Link

LubaSo with Andreessen Horowitz, you were in touch with Alex Rampell for a while. You were already thinking about firm versus fund.Link

DavidYeah.Link

LubaHow did that conversation get started, with you joining the firm?Link

DavidSo, I mean, Alex and I would catch up every, like, six months, and, you know, he pinged me in early 2021. And I'd actually already left Goldman, kind of was off doing another thing that wasn't the right fit.Link

LubaBut what was the thing?Link

DavidI went to go work with a friend of mine named Alex Clayborn, who had started, like, a very interesting holding company called Ancient, where his thesis was, how do we sort of acquire and transform legacy businesses with technology? That was sort of...Link

LubaI love how there's the silver lining everywhere, of legacy businesses, building institutions.Link

DavidYeah. Yeah, totally. You know, I think Ancient is and was an expression of opportunities between fields of expertise. Like, I wasn't a private equity person. He was sort of doing private equity, but I understood technology, I understood fintech. The first expression and the first sort of investment that they made was into Sotheby's, the auction house. And he took over the financial services division of Sotheby's, which we worked to turn into sort of a very upmarket embedded fintech business. I had connected them to, like, Emilie Choi at Coinbase, and they started auctioning, in 2021, NFTs, and...Link

LubaWow. You know. So they were behind the Sotheby's NFT auctioning?Link

DavidRight. Just, you know... In that business, through one lens, you could think of it as, it was the oldest publicly traded company in America. It was, I think, 275 years old at the time. And one of the world's, I would argue, like, best luxury brands. Through another lens, you could think of it more like an online marketplace, or, again, a canvas for embedded fintech. And so intellectually I just think that idea is super interesting.Link

Alex pinged me, was like, how is Goldman? I'm like, I wouldn't know. Haven't been there for six months. And he was like, oh, can I put you in front of Marc? You know, Marc is very much also a student of history, probably more than anybody I know. Certainly the amount of information he's able to hold in his brain is absolutely insane.Link

LubaHis brain needs to be studied.Link

DavidYes, he is the galaxy brain, for sure. But, you know, when we first spoke, I remember him, you know, maybe he knew his audience, but, like, going through the entire history of J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, and drawing a through line to what he's trying to build with Andreessen, and sort of being, like, the J.P. Morgan of the information era. You know, that was, like, catnip for me.Link

And then Alex actually invited me to a GP off-site. Coming out of Covid, I think the team hadn't seen each other in, like, over a year. And I didn't have an offer yet. And so it was sort of this interesting, what felt like a one-way door, you know, walking in. But it was amazing, because I could sort of understand the team chemistry, the culture. You know, they were literally walking through every portfolio company line by line, and, like, here are the ones who are going to do well, here's how, you know, organized by GP. I mean, it was an amazing peek into how the company works. And of course they were also interviewing me, you know.Link

And I remember David Ulevitch, I was sitting out on the terrace, and he's like, so, like, do you work here yet, or...? I don't know. Like, I feel like that's your decision, not mine. And, you know, it's funny now in retrospect, but Alex is like, yeah, it was, you know, unanimous, what do you say? And so we often do this with entrepreneurs, where we, like, do a handshake and take a photo. So it's like, okay, let's do the handshake, take the photo.Link

LubaYeah, yeah. Then it's really hard to back out.Link

DavidSo they were definitely running the Andreessen playbook on me, I think. But, you know, I think one of the reasons I just loved it so much, obviously the firm's been successful, but I think there's no daylight between Alex and I. And there's no, you know... I think he genuinely wants me to be successful. Obviously he benefits, but, like, he's just such an intellectually honest person. There's no posturing, there's no politics. And, yeah, I'm just very grateful for that.Link

And then I think the other one is just that Marc and Ben had made the firm feel like a platform for smart, entrepreneurial people to build on top of. You know, most investment organizations have, like, a single decision maker. Most hedge funds run this way. You have, like, a single CIO. You know, you have other partners, but they sort of bubble up, and then one person makes the decision. That's not how Andreessen Horowitz is run, which is surprising to me. I didn't anticipate that necessarily. It's almost, each fund is its own little division that sort of runs its own P&L. And I think it's allowed them to attract and retain great talent. I mean, people like Chris Dixon in the crypto fund, or Martin, or Ulevitch, or Alex, or others. I don't know that they would work at Andreessen if Marc or Ben had to approve every deal they wanted to make, right? I think what they want is, you know, the biggest canvas, the nicest paint and paintbrushes, to go...Link

LubaThey're really giving you the power to make your own decisions.Link

DavidAnd it's because they're entrepreneurs, right? Again, they're running an investment firm.Link

LubaYeah. They're entrepreneurs.Link

DavidAnd I just think there's such both humility and kind of forethought that Marc and Ben had in sort of architecting the firm that way. I think it's why the firm will be very resilient, because you don't have the same, I would argue, like, key-man risk.Link

LubaYeah.Link

DavidThat exists in many other places, where it's like, the king...Link

LubaYeah.Link

David...decides to... is sadly hit by a bus or something, like, the whole firm kind of collapses. That happens all the time. And I think if you want to build legacy, you want to build an institution that endures. I think the way that they've architected it is really, really smart.Link

LubaHow do you think you personally are contributing to the firm over fund thesis within Andreessen?Link

DavidI think it's evolved. I mean, you know, I helped open the New York office, and that was sort of one piece of this, which felt like a unique opportunity to sort of plant the flag, at least in the city that I grew up in professionally. We now have about 100 full-time people here in New York City, across kind of all...Link

LubaOf our beautiful office, also.Link

DavidYeah, we're opening two more floors, which I'm very excited about. So it feels more real.Link

You know, I think I help lead the apps fund with Alex and Anish and Angela and others. So I think, you have to make the fund successful also to make the firm successful. You know, I helped Scott Kupor stand up a wealth management business called Perennial, which I think is ultimately a service for our founders, right? And it brings the most influential people on the firm closer to the organization. And then I'd like to believe, in its very early and humble beginnings, but, like, a product like Vantage, I think, can have compounding advantages in the firm, if you build sort of the hive mind, or sort of collective intelligence of the organization.Link

LubaAnd it would be compounding as well.Link

DavidI think so. I think it reduces the fragility of individuals. And how do we learn from incredible people who used to be at the firm, like a Jeff Jordan or others, and sort of institutionalize that into the decision making and culture? Or, what is somebody learning in another part of the organization that other people should be aware of? And again, I think AI is so powerful, because you can now sort of organize all of that unstructured information and provide signal, which I'm, yeah, very energized by.Link

LubaSo you just had your second baby, and you're clearly doing so many different things. What's your productivity system?Link

DavidI feel like I'm running downhill, honestly. I mean, look, we're very, yeah, very fortunate in that I can have a nanny and a baby nurse. And, like, I don't think I could do my job, or be as good of a parent or husband, without that help. And I don't pretend that that doesn't exist. It's not how I grew up, exactly, but I'm very grateful that we can do that now.Link

I have an amazing wife, too, who is, like, a super mom. And, you know, I think she frees me up to be able to focus on my work life, because she is the CEO of our house, basically. And you can see it in our kids. Like, our daughter June is, like, exceptional. And it's really, you know, not because of me. I would argue her role is much more important. So it's all the things... I don't know. There's no...Link

LubaDo you have any boundaries around, like, oh, you have a family dinner every day, or family breakfast, or weekends, no phone?Link

DavidI wish it was that clear-cut. You know, every morning, I'm often the one to wake our daughter up and give her breakfast. I try to be home as much as I can for bedtime, and, like, reading books to her before she goes to sleep. And that's, I think, one of the most clarifying things of having kids. It kind of, you know, forces you to be much more clear thinking about, like, how do you want to spend your time, right? Do I need to go to this random event or dinner? And the answer is, like, no, I'd much rather be home, you know, bathing our daughter and putting her to bed. And I actually think it's made me more productive. And so maybe that's the...Link

LubaThat's what every parent says.Link

DavidMaybe that's the secret. It's not easy, to be clear. Like, it's chaos, and we're not perfect, and we're, like, stumbling. I often use this metaphor: when I was an entrepreneur, it felt like I was running downhill, and you're just, like, trying not to trip and, like, slip flat on your face. Parent...Link

LubaI think the cliches of entrepreneurship and parenthood, there are a lot of parallels.Link

DavidFor real. And they're real, because I think there's a lot of truth in those.Link

LubaHas your appetite for risk changed, or how has your appetite for risk changed since becoming a parent?Link

DavidI think they've been incredible motivators. You know, it's made me want to, you know, work harder, and maybe it's legacy, or, I don't know. But I don't know if it's risk so much as, yeah, being a role model for them in some ways.Link

I would say actually, like, from a risk-taking perspective in particular, in the short term, I'm probably maybe slightly more risk averse, to some degree. I mean, I was 25 when I started Bond Street. Yeah. You know, I was just married, but, like, I had no real life responsibilities. And I remember feeling guilty in some ways about not starting another company, because I thought, wow, it'd be so much better the second time around than the first time around. Like, I have all this painful wisdom now. Like, shouldn't I go build another company? And, you know, part of that, with AI, you feel the pull even more.Link

At the same time, I think I've come to recognize that, like, you make decisions in the context of your life, and it's okay. I think it's okay to say, this feels like the right platform for this moment in my life, right?Link

LubaRight.Link

DavidAnd, you know, who knows what the future holds.Link

LubaDo you think you have another company in you, though?Link

DavidI feel really aligned with what we're trying to build. But never say never, right? I have some colleagues who are like, I'm never going to have another job. I really love what I do, as you can probably tell from this conversation. But you never know. Right now, by the way, it's not my decision. Like, my name is not on the door. And so, you know, my hope is that, you know, I continue to have success there. You know, we build an organization that we're all proud of. But you never know. Like, there may come a moment where, you know, in the distant future, let's say, that kind of creative itch, you know, is something you can't kind of give up. So we'll see.Link

LubaWhat do you feel like you're still insecure about?Link

DavidI think maybe that Bond Street wasn't more successful than it was. You know, I think some of those were on execution. I think I would argue we executed well in a challenging business. I think the other thing, which is painful to recognize, is that sometimes timing is out of your control. Like, the online lending market kind of died in 2016 into 2017. And when the tide goes out on the market, it becomes very challenging. But could that business have become a Ramp, or, you know, something else? Like, maybe. Or Square, you know. Like, it didn't.Link

Again, I'm very proud of that experience, and the team we built, and the customers we impacted. But there's a lot of things that I didn't learn in the company building journey. I'm like, you know, we went 0 to 40, but not 40 to 400, or 400 to 4,000. And there's a ton to learn in that, which, again, I feel like I'm now learning through some of my own portfolio companies that have had a lot of success. But I'm self-aware enough to realize that that wasn't my own individual experience either.Link

LubaAnd David, to wrap it up, what are you still becoming?Link

DavidI think I feel very early in this journey. I feel like I'm just getting started, whatever that means, right? I feel like I'm just getting started as a father. You know, as a technologist, maybe, in my understanding of how to build product. As an investor, you know, building companies takes a really long time, and the feedback loops are long. But that's the fun of it.Link

LubaThank you so much for your time.Link

DavidThank you so much for having me.Link

LubaGive me a hug. Awesome.Link