Just Raised

Our guest Wes Kao is the cofounder of Maven, a new online education platform that's raised $25M from A16Z and First Round.

Maven’s classes are like mini-apprenticeships. Live courses where you can learn tangible, hard skills from operators who are excellent at that skill. Writing, blockchain development, product management - you learn by doing and Wes and the team at Maven aim to make each class hyper tactical.

We talk about why professors need to become entertainers, where earlier models of online education fall short, Wes’ Hierarchy of Bullshit, and how you can potentially build your own online course business with Maven’s tools.

Courses are actually pretty fantastic businesses. Maven is prelaunch, but 10 instructors are already making over a hundred thousand dollars per three-week class. Maybe more of us should be teaching.

Check out all of Maven’s classes and their open roles here: https://maven.com/about

Thanks for listening! And give us a follow on Twitter!

Will decentralized marketplaces built on crypto protocols replace the Ubers, Doordashes, and Upworks we have today? That's what we're talking about on this episode with Braintrust founder Adam Jackson. 

Braintrust is a decentralized protocol for hiring. It matches tech workers with companies like Porsche, Nike, and Goldman Sachs. 

We dive into tokens and designing token economies, governance for crypto projects, the potential moats for these projects - or lack there of, and start to scratch the surface on what it takes to bootstrap a crypto project like this.

Braintrust is a little bit like Upwork but it’s designed as a decentralized crypto project. So there is no single company. Braintrust doesn’t make profits and isn’t beholden to shareholders.

That allows it to charge zero fees to talent and only a 10% fee to companies. Unlike the Ubers and Doordashes and Upworks that charge fees to both gig workers and the end consumer  - because they need to make money and maybe one day even a profit - a marketplace run on a decentralized protocol doesn’t need to make money.

The protocol is just a piece of infrastructure and the people who contribute to the network own the network via tokens. There is no CEO. Decisions are made by a vote. Now this is where the crypto rabbit hole starts to get deep, but suffice to say this was a fascinating conversation, so I hope you enjoy this episode with Adam Jackson at Braintrust.

This section of the show notes is written by a human, Joe Sweeny, but at the bottom, I include segments written by Sudowrite.

Amit Gupta is the founder of Sudowrite, an AI tool for fiction writers.

Sudowrite is a very early stage company, only three months old, but it's software can generate writing of a quality that is just mind blowing. It's built on the Open AI Foundation's GPT-3 and other natural language processing models.

Amit is really exploring the future of human AI collaboration. On the show, we talk about what will happen when these algorithms become so commodified that anyone will have access to software that can write novels in an instant.  And maybe even more importantly, what an optimistic utopian view of that future looks like.

Here are a few samples of what Sudowrite can generate based on the text above:

As Amit says, "We're just scratching the surface of what this kind of technology will be able to do in the future."

As he explained, he didn't build it just to write books. It's designed to help people out of whatever need whatever they need it to do.

He said that this is just the beginning of how AI can be used to help humans with their creative endeavors. He said that it's just the beginning, and there's so much more that is coming

The company has a very small amount of seed funding from a few investors. In the future, Amit wants to work on other formats as well as improve the quality of the writing as well as work on other areas as computational journalism.

Here's a short story generated by Sudowrite based on the first paragraph I wrote above:

I was in my office when I got the call.

"Hello?"

"Amit Gupta?"

"Yes."

"This is John Smith. With the United States Department of Defense."

"John Smith? What can I do for you?"

"It's about your company. Sudowrite."

"I'm listening."

John Smith cleared his throat. "We're interested in acquiring you. We want to buy all of your company, lock, stock, and barrel."

"All of it? But I barely started it."

"We want all of it. The technology, the team, the IP, the whole nine yards."

"You mean all of Sudowrite?"

"Yes."

"But there's no way-"

"I've spoken with your investors. They're willing to sign an NDA and come to Washington."

Washington? They wanted to meet me in Washington? I was getting a bad feeling about this.

"How much are you willing to pay for Sudowrite?"

"I can't tell you that. We want to put the deal together first. However, I'll tell you this. We're willing to pay whatever it takes."

That was actually encouraging. I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding. "Okay. I'll talk to my investors."

I hung up and immediately called my attorney. He'd know if this was legit or not.

When he answered the phone, I said, "You're not going to believe what just happened."

I told him about the call. He told me to call right back. "I'm calling my lawyer right now. I'll call you back in five minutes."

He called back five minutes later. "This sounds legit. Someone's really interested in Sudowrite."

The flying car episode. We dive into the drone market and the emerging EVTOL category - electric takeoff and landing vehicles - with Ian Villa, co-founder of Whisper Aero. We talk aircraft design - electric planes vs EVTOLs - breakthroughs in batteries, regulation, the operating costs of electric aircraft, the unit economics of aerial ride sharing, and Ian’s vision for what cities could look like if EVTOLs take off.

Ian Villa is co-founder and COO of Whisper Aero, an electric aircraft company building the first silent jet engines. Prior to Whisper, he was at Uber elevate where he was Head of Strategy working on how to actually get to market with drones and flying cars. That’s where our conversation picks up. I hope you enjoy this show with Ian Villa.

Whisper Aero

Josh Wolfe is the founder of Lux Capital a venture fund investing in emerging science and technology companies. Josh is one of the most talented multi-disciplinary investors in the market and this conversation covers nuclear energy, space, the intersection of biology and computing, his work with the DoD, and how he started Lux Capital. Enjoy!

David Rosenthal is a co-host of the Acquired podcast and founder of Kindergarten Capital, an angel investing fund. This podcast comes from a live interview with the Acquired listener community and dives into all things angel investing.

Sherwin Gandhi is the founder of Jeeves, a global banking as a service startup. This company has seen absolutely wild growth. At just one year old they just crossed a $500M valuation after raising a $57M Series B from CRV, SVB Capital, Tencent and a number of incredible angels. Enjoy!

Ash Egan is the founder of Acrylic, a new $55M crypto fund providing inception capital to crypto founders. We talk crypto culture, the NFT art boom, crypto social companies, and Ash's favorite new crypto projects. Essential listening for crypto founders and investors.

Sponsored by Vouch Insurance

Check our Acrylic!

Today on the show we talk to the founders of Unit21, a no code toolset for compliance. Unit21 is building an engine that allows compliance teams at FinTech companies to build unique, customized defense systems, without needing to know how to code. It both empowers compliance teams and frees up engineering teams who would rather be building product than compliance protocols. 

Unit21 is Hiring!

We have both founders on the show today. Tricia Kothari is the CEO and was formerly an early engineer at Affirm. Clarence Chio is the CTO and has a background in cybersecurity research. 

We start by diving into the product before getting into the recent $38M raise from Tiger Global, the founding story, and the state of the cybersecurity industry.

I also have a co-host on this episode, Joanne Hong on the FinTech team at Silicon valley bank.  Like with all of our FinTech episodes, I leaned pretty heavily on partners at SVB to better understand Unit21. 

This episode is brought to you by Vouch Insurance and Silicon Valley Bank. 

Check out Vouch

Check out SVB

Rob Meyerson is the former president of Blue Origin. Rob was recruited by Jeff Bezos to run the company way back in 2003 and served as president until 2018. He was critical in developing New Shepherd, the rocket which just yesterday brought Jeff Bezos and three other civilian astronauts to space. 

Since then he's become a full-time investor at C5 capital. In this episode, we talk about companies building transportation networks to the moon,  lunar mining and 3d printing, and one of Rob's first investments, Axiom Space which is building the first private space station.