Lessons From Backing The Best Founders In Fintech | Micky Malka

Thanks for doing this, Micky.

David, it's a pleasure to be here with you.

There are so many times in our previous conversations when I'm listening to you speak and I'm thinking, “Shit, Micky really does think and act a lot like many of history's greatest entrepreneurs that I read all these biographies about for Founders Podcast.” One thing that I think you have in common with them, and that you said to me before, is that you hate being labeled. Can you say more about that?

I think it's because, growing up in Venezuela and throughout my life, I never had people being labeled. I never learned what that was about. Every time somebody tried to put me on a label, I fought really hard to get out of it.

Someone would say, “Hey, are you tall? So you must be good at basketball.” My first answer would be, “No, I suck at basketball.” I was just trying to get myself out of any particular label, all the way to, “Are you an investor? Are you an entrepreneur?” And I said, “What if I'm both? What if I'm neither? Why do I need a label?”

The more you walk through life allowing things to have labels, the more difficult life is, because then you cannot see through them. You just see what you've been told to see. I think it's part of my rebel cause to never accept labels.

I think if you're labeled, it means you're conforming to an existing mold. The great founders are inherently nonconformists.

Yes, and you have to be a nonconformist because the world can always be better. So why accept whatever is there today?

When you just said, “Are you an entrepreneur? Are you an investor? Maybe I'm both, maybe I'm neither,” how do you view yourself today?

I describe myself as an entrepreneur at heart and an investor by design. It's such a general line that allows me to do anything. Some days I can wake up and be an entrepreneur, some days I can be an investor, some days I can be both, and some days I can be something completely different.

“At heart” means that it comes from a place inside, and if I change my heart, I can change it. “By design” means that if I keep learning how to do something, I can only get better at it. I allow myself to keep learning.

So you're completely fluid. You don't really put a label on yourself.

Correct. I don't. I try to avoid it.

The only labels I want in life are that people say I'm a great friend, I'm a great partner, and I'm a good father. If I can get those labels, I would love to have them. All the other ones, I don't care about.

I'm always interested in how people think about their own perception of their work, because I just had this great conversation with Rick Rubin. I had to interrupt him one time because he said, “I kind of think of myself as a researcher.” And I'm like, “What?”

People think of him as a music producer, and now he's a podcaster and a consigliere to some of the top artists in the world. He's like, “All day, I'm just finding what I'm intensely curious about and researching it as far as I can.”

I think that's what it takes. That's what entrepreneurs do every day, and that's what a great investor does every day. You don't get a label like that, but yes, I agree with you.

I have a question. I went to your website and read a bunch of these. What do you call them? They're not even manifestos. Are they essays?

They're essays.

Okay. I'm very curious. You've only done a handful.

Yes.

I'm very curious about how your writing shapes not only your thinking, but also what you want to build through Ribbit.

Writing is everything. We can sit here and talk about ideas for hours, but if you're not willing to put them in writing, you will never learn what they truly are or how deep they are.

Typically, those essays that you read start by being probably 20 pages long, but I can get a napkin and explain each one to you on a napkin. If you can explain something complex to somebody on a napkin, it means that you've studied enough to know how to articulate it.

What we do is start by writing our essays. What our essays allow us to do is not conform to what the world thinks today, but to conform to what the world looks like in 10 or 15 years. Just imagine and let it flow. Let it go. Let that energy get out there. Let that energy be taken from our brains, our Q&As, our diligence, and our calls. Just put it out there and see what happens.

Why do you think that's beneficial?

Because it gives you conviction. If you cannot have conviction, then you're going to be going through mood swings with the markets—up and down. If something changes, you have to be able to respond.

The only way to really have a joyful investment life, or life in general, is to try to play this very long, infinite game. The only way to do that well is to have conviction in whatever you do. You have to be willing to be wrong for a long time.

But if I write it, put it in writing, share it with the world, and get feedback, it allows us to make sure that the compass is pointing in the right direction.

How long do they take to write?

Some of them can take us a year. Some of them can take us 4 or 5 months. But the whole process of getting to a thesis that we like—sitting down, thinking about it, articulating it, testing it, sharing it, coming back, and working on it—probably takes a year to a year and a half.

I know you're a fan of Buffett. You've been a shareholder for—

All my life.

Yeah, more than 20—

13.

That's crazy.

You know.

I saw one of your tweets. I think it was from 2015, and you were holding for 25 years or something like that at that point. So, even more now. I know you write all his shareholder letters, which I'm a huge fan of. Did that influence your decision to start writing these essays?

Completely. I bought my first share of Berkshire Hathaway when I was 13 years old in Venezuela. It was November of 1987.

How?

Why would a 13-year-old be interested in Berkshire Hathaway?

I don't know. I had read a few articles in Fortune magazine about him, about American Express, about Coca-Cola, and about certain brands. I loved the brands he had in his portfolio. I didn't know anything about float or insurance. I was not very familiar with that line of the business.

I would hope not at 13.

Back then, what he used to say was, “Buy it and get it mailed to you in physical form. Don't leave it in a brokerage house so people cannot margin against it.”

There I was. I was 13. I had had my bar mitzvah in November of 1987. The crash had happened a month before—the October 1987 crash. The stock went down a lot, and I didn't collect enough money to buy one share, so I had to ask my grandfather for a loan.

I asked for a loan, and he charged me interest as a way to teach me. I bought one share and had it mailed to me. It showed up in Venezuela. Luckily, I don't know how I didn't lose it.

Since then, every year I got the annual letters by mail.

Yeah.

I would read them and highlight them. Then I would go and learn. Maybe I had to buy a little book from The Wall Street Journal called Understanding Money and Markets, because there were terms in the letter I didn't understand. My self-learning came from doing all of that since I was 13.

Imagine what a 13-year-old kid could do now with AI if he or she wanted to go through Buffett's letters. AI could be a thought partner and companion, compared to you having to buy a book and look up the definition of a word.

I was thinking about it, and I was saying, if I were to do it again at 13 now, with all of these tools, I would go to AI and tell it, “Take those letters. Find me the Buffett Partnership letters from before, which are very hard to find, but you can find them. Read them, analyze them, and come back to me.” It would be insane what you could do now.

I think you would lose a little bit of the nuance, because part of it is that, if you read them carefully enough—and you've done it—you know that the pattern repeats. What you learn from it is not the decisions he makes, but how, in any environment, he repeats the same pattern of decision-making. That's the most important thing you get from reading it. I don't know if AI can give you that.

Say more about that.

It doesn't matter if you were in the 1970s, when there was a little bit of inflation—or high inflation in America, compared to historical standards—and he talked about how he treated float and how insurance float worked. Or in the era of zero interest rates, when he talked about float and the cost of float.

It didn't matter what the microeconomic conditions of the world were or what the microeconomic conditions of the interest rate were. He used the same pattern every single time to define how to think about money.

Why do you think it's so special that he used the same pattern?

Because I think it's the discipline that he built. He was amazing at taking all the noise away, canceling the noise, and focusing on the 3 things that mattered most. You can only do that if you study enough.

I went to the annual meetings for a number of years, and I got to meet him and hang out with him afterward for a number of years. To me, going there was not about learning anything new. It was about seeing how he applied those principles to the new economic conditions that were present every year.

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This is really special to me right now. Have you spent any time with Daniel Ek in person?

No.

Okay. He’s one of the wisest people I know, and I just did that a couple of days after I filmed that episode with Rick Rubin. Again, I’ve been making episodes with Rick Rubin forever. I grew up loving hip-hop, so he founded Def Jam in his dorm room, which is one of the most iconic hip-hop record labels. For probably a decade and a half, I was a fan of Rick Rubin from afar before I got to meet him.

Then, probably a couple of days—maybe a week—later, I was having a drink with Daniel. He goes, “Well, how was it hanging out with Rick?” And I was just like, “What was fascinating to me is that the aura is still there, but if you actually analyze Rick Rubin and his career, he had basically 4 ideas from when he was 19 and started Def Jam to now, when I think he’s 63.”

These ideas are not complicated. It’s adherence to the love of simplicity, reduction instead of production, always working with the very best people you possibly can, and building the product for yourself first. He’s just—literally, he is patient zero.

Yeah.

“I’m just building stuff that I want to see.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s it.” It’s remarkable that those are the components of it. It seemed that special because they’re just such simple ideas. But who adheres to the same 4 ideas for 40 years?

Yeah.

I was like, “Shit, that is what’s special.” It’s very much what you just said about that.

What’s special.

Yeah.

And that’s why they’re writing it special for us.

Okay.

To adhere to that.

So, do you want to talk about the one that you wrote recently on tokens? I love what you just said. You can read it—it’s very long, and there are charts and everything else—but you’re like, “I can distill it down into a napkin.” I think compression is understanding. Let’s start with the napkin version of the token essay, and then you can expand on it from there.

The concept is very simple. The word “token” means something different to everybody. If we sat with Ryan from Visa, the word he defines as “token” is different from the word that Sundar has for “token” at Google, or the different word that OpenAI has for “token,” or on topic. They’re all different, but they all mean the same thing: machine-readable information.

If you think about the companies, we call them token factories. Just think about the Industrial Revolution example in this token-revolution era, where every company needs a supply of tokens—of information, money, and knowledge—and then they do something and deliver something new. You need basically 3 components to deliver any service, any promise, or any product. You’re going to need to understand identity. You’re going to need to understand value. And you need to understand the intelligence that goes into it.

Right now, we’re in the early innings. What we’re starting to see first is the frontier labs being the token factories. They’re taking all the information from the web, from videos, from the world, and they’re finding a way to ingest it and create a different set of tokens that somebody else can consume. They are the raw-materials providers to these factories.

In the next few years, we’re going to see that evolution go deeper and deeper and deeper. It will be much more personalized, and it will be much more complete across verticals that we haven’t even touched. Today, token factories have not touched money that much. Money has been outside of AI, and we’re in year 4 or 5. It’s funny, because money is supposed to be one of the first, most fungible things that should be playing the game, and it’s not.

Why do you think it should be one of the first things to play in the game?

Because it’s one of the things that flows the most in the world. Everything flows to money. My whole life, what keeps my learning going is that I follow flows. I believe that nothing is static, right? Money is never static. Money is like gravity: it always falls, it always moves, it’s always going somewhere. It’s like water. It’s never stuck.

Energy is flowing everywhere, from the lights that we’re in here to our own energies. Right now, we’re creating all this energy, and we’re sharing that energy. So, I find that, for something as dynamic as money, it is not attached to AI yet in any way.

So, how does it get attached?

I think it’s going to be that intersection between probably what blockchains will do and what AI will do, because you will need to have intelligent smart contracts that will do stuff on your behalf. You can start to see great entrepreneurs and great founders working on it. We can talk about Patrick Collison at Stripe and how they’re building all this.

Literally, when you were saying that, I just heard John Collison talk about this, and basically he said that’s the only thing he’s working on. It’s like gen tech payments for agents.

Yeah. And that’s the future. You can talk to anybody in that space, or Vlad Tenev at Robinhood, doing the same for equities. You can see how they’re tokenizing assets. We’re in the early innings, but we’re behind compared to knowledge. Knowledge went much faster. Money is behind, which is fine.

So, explain, because I don’t know anything about this and you study this night and day. Explain what you think is going to happen with this in the next year or two.

I don’t know about the next year or two. It’s hard to know, because with the speed of AI, what happens in the next 12 months?

Or, yeah, the next few months, whatever.

But what I will say is that what we should start seeing very soon is agents designed for specific functions that will take care of your financial life in ways that you have never been taken care of. Some of the best founders have articulated this really well. David Vélez from Nubank said, “Mobile was the way to put a bank in your pocket. Now AI is going to be the way to get you the banker in your pocket.”

What I expect to see very soon is an AI agent that can go and do all kinds of investment decisions and recommendations. It can go and do all kinds of commerce decisions and recommendations, and it can make any kind of payment decisions and recommendations on your behalf. You’re going to start to see how that’s going to free up time and ideas that you don’t have today. We’re just starting.

The signals that this is going the right way are prediction markets. Prediction markets are an interesting market. Some people call it gambling. Some people call it a place where you can bet on anything 24/7. But here’s the thing: it’s 24/7, and what agents need are 24/7 rails. All of this is building the rails to allow all of this to happen. What we expect is that we’re going to see a bunch of new companies or incumbents shipping these features in ways that we have not experienced before.

That was going to be my next question to you. Who do you think actually wins this? You just named 3 pretty big, well-established companies. You have Stripe, Robinhood, and Nubank. Do you think it comes from them, or do you think it comes from a startup?

I think it comes from them. First, they’re still founder-led. Revolut also—they’re still founder-led. Those founders are pushing the boundaries of all of this. They are at an age and they are at a place where, if you talk to them, they’re still as hungry as they were on day 1. They’re still in that day-one mentality, and they’re just going faster than the incumbents.

For a while, I thought the incumbents were going to catch up. In 2021, 2022, and 2023, I thought they were fair enough. There was not much difference between a financial product offer from an incumbent and from one of these neo brands. That’s different today.

AI has just become a rocket, a nitro rocket, for this breed of technology companies to accelerate even faster and separate themselves again, which is the beauty of the infinite game. The beauty of the infinite game is that you never get to win and you never get to lose. You’re simply ahead or behind.

They were ahead for a long, long time, and then the other ones were catching up. But the rules changed. What happens? You’re ahead again, or the other ones fall behind. But the game never ends.

That's the way I live my life. That's the way I think about everything I do. That's the way I make decisions. I don't think about winning or losing ever on anything I do. I just think about whether this will put me ahead or put me behind in the game, and then I just keep playing the game.

So, I know you play the infinite game. You want to play forever, but do you consider yourself a competitive person?

Define competitor.

I guess the way I think about it is that I'm in a very positive-sum industry. If you listen to my podcast today and another podcast tomorrow, I don't lose because of that, but I still wake up every day trying to do the best job I possibly can.

Yes. So, if that's a competitor, yes. I try to do the best I can.

Not relative to other people.

No. I don't look at other people. Each one is playing their own game. I try really hard not to have a fear of missing out. I try really hard to make sure that I'm playing the best game I can, to play this game until the last day I am alive.

It doesn't matter if I win or lose, because that's not the game. You will fall behind. Actually, I will tell you that I've learned about myself: I'd rather be behind. I'm a much better person when I'm behind than when I'm ahead.

When I'm ahead, it means, "Oh, you guys are doing well. This is going in the right direction. You were right. This happened. This played out." Immediately, my spider senses get all activated and say, "Okay, that means that whatever it is, I've got to change the rules, because it's not good to be ahead. You want to be ahead for a while, but you want the rules to change so you fall behind and can innovate again."

Yeah, this is why I've said so many times when we're talking, "Goddamn it, Micky sounds just like the people I read books about." I just met James Dyson, who was a personal hero of mine, and he said the exact same thing on his podcast. He's just like, "Losing is so much more interesting." He's like, "You just learn so much." He likes being behind.

Yeah.

Yeah, he just has that chip on his shoulder. Well, really, just a desire to constantly improve. He feels you're going to improve a lot more when you're losing or you're behind.

100%. I'm much better when I'm behind. I learn more. Everything about it just gives you much more energy.

I want to go back because I interrupted you. I want to go back to your idea that every company is becoming a token factory. The only token factories that you see right now are the labs?

No. You're starting to see application layers that are starting to show up and are building token factories. Think about voice AI. Think about ElevenLabs, Decagon, or Sierra. They're all companies that are understanding how to create their token factories.

They're creating a service that did not exist before in a way that was not possible. We're going to a world where every single piece of information needs to be read over by a machine. That's how the world will go to the next generation.

So, you finish writing the letter. What do you do next?

We share it with our founders, people that we work with closely, and our LPs, our investors. Why? Because we want them to hold us accountable. This is our thinking: You have a choice. You can walk out, or you can keep believing in our thesis.

So, we put it out there, and then we go out and start talking about it with the founders that we met while we wrote it.

You've not yet invested in?

Most of them are founders that we have not yet invested in, because as we write a thesis, we have not invested in them yet. We're learning from them. Maybe along the way we make an investment or two, maybe. But most of the time we don't.

After that, what happens is some of the best founders will read it and say, "Oh, wow. You guys really understand it. This is deep. Let's talk about it." That's how we build those relationships that take a long time to build.

So, I know you spend a lot of time with people in their early 20s. Do you feel that this is the way they're talking and thinking about building companies?

Good question. I think some of them are. I think some of the others are not, like any other generation.

What I believe the people in their 20s have right now is that they are the smartest, fastest-learning generation we've ever had in history. They learn the fastest. It's because they get used to listening to podcasts at 1.5 or 2x. They don't have to wait for the mail to arrive with the annual letter a month later; they can read it in real time, right?

Their ability to process information is so much faster than our brains have ever been trained for. You can see it in the way they can process.

What I think the best ones can do also is articulate a vision and a story and bring people to follow them, but not all of them have those skills yet. They haven't developed them.

That generation, as much as they're super-smart learners, was also not trained to be great communicators on the other side. So, the few that are great communicators, I think they have it embedded in them.

How do you think they view company building differently than somebody that's, say, 10 years older than them?

I think they look at org charts very differently. I think they look at functions very differently. They don't think the org-chart structure that we inherited and that we grew up with applies anymore in the same way it did.

Humans are key, and they will be for as long as we're alive, in our lifetime. But org charts and the way they organize people are completely different, and you can see it. They are self-organizing, and I love seeing this because one of my mentors is Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, and I spent almost 10 or 12 years visiting him and talking to him.

He's the creator of the chaotic organization. He believed that you should never organize too much. The best expression of humans is in the intersection between chaos and order. If you're too orderly, you don't innovate. If you're too chaotic, you don't communicate and you break. So, chaotic is the right place to be.

These kids are actually doing this. They're doing a great job, by the pure nature of how they were trained and wired in this era of technology, to be in the epicenter of chaotic. That's how they're working, and that's what's different about them.

What else did you learn from Dee? The fascinating thing—a couple of people have asked me before, because I've done 2 or 3 episodes on Dee Hock. He wrote this great autobiography, which tells the story of Visa. But then, when he was a much older man, he also had these 2 books of maxims called The Autobiography of a Restless Mind, Volume 1 and Volume 2.

Yeah.

Again, somebody can compress the language and give you a lot of ideas in a sentence or 2. A lot of people have asked me, "Why do you think Visa is one of the most successful companies of all time?" They're one of the most profitable-per-employee companies in history, and yet not a lot of people talk about it.

A few people have actually asked me this: "Why do you think that is?" It's because it's still very confusing how he actually built it. I've read his book 2 times, and I still don't really understand.

So, what else do you think you learned from Dee Hock? Did he influence the way you built Ribbit at all?

Yes.

Okay, I want to hear.

And not only Ribbit, but my previous startups, too. He told me so much about how to get people to be the best version of themselves in the kinds of organizations that you have to have.

Even my go-to question in interviews is a question he taught me how to ask. I've learned so much from him.

What is that question?

I give people 6 words and tell them to organize them in a certain order. The way they walk through that order says a lot about the person. It was a letter that Dee wrote to his team in 1972, I think, where he articulates all of this. I learned that from him.

Spending time with Dee, what you get is that he understood human psychology better than anybody in that era, in that particular space. He understood that to get bankers who, by their sheer DNA, tend to be risk-averse and care too much about their reputation, he found a way through this model of association.

His biggest success was the legal model he used. No one had ever done a company in that structure. An association model allowed everybody to save face, but at the same time take the credit. That's how he won.

It didn't matter who you were or which bank competed with the other one. It didn't even matter, because each one could compete by themselves while at the same time winning the brand war. That was the beauty of the model.

When you spent time with him, he would say, "It was the model, and people don't get it." I find that his restless mind was alive even in his early 90s, because I would have sworn that he could have been Satoshi Nakamoto if he had been 40 years younger.

He explained blockchain to me, and why Visa was a failure for him, if you talked to him, because he only got to release the simple version of it, which was payments. He wanted to do a lot more, which looked a lot like what blockchains and smart contracts are today. But he was probably 60 years ahead of his time.

Let’s go back to the young kids they spend time with and the way they think about company building compared to some of your older founders.

From what sense?

I think the founders moving forward are obviously going to be way more capital efficient. I think they’re going to own larger percentages of their companies because they’re going to need to raise less money. You used the analogy one time that if you go back and look at some of the robber barons, Henry Ford owned 100% of his company, and some of them would go public while owning 70% or 80% of the company.

I’m just very curious how you think they’re going to be building companies. Again, a 21- or 22-year-old compared to even a 35-year-old.

The first thing about these generations is that they understand that if they play by the rules of the game, they will not win. The rules of society right now mean they’ll be stuck in student debt. They’ll be stuck in a bunch of problems that they’ve been watching on YouTube and reading about on social media.

They’ve been seeing that we have spawned an era of Elons, of innovation, of Edison people—mindsets that are allowing the mind to really flow. Surprisingly, capital is right now at historically high levels, with almost unlimited access to capital. Especially if you’re younger, there’s even more capital than before. It’s a perfect scenario for this generation to really create and take risks in ways that you cannot imagine.

Funny enough, when you talk to them, you’ll find that a lot of them feel that working on software alone is boring. It’s not fun. It’s not challenging enough. They want to build physical objects. They want to touch things. They want to get their hands dirty building stuff that will actually matter and get into our hands one way or the other.

Mhm.

That’s super interesting because that was not the generation of the last 15 or 20 years. Everybody was trying to go capital-light.

Mhm.

Everybody was trying to build software only and go through the cycles as fast as they could. This generation is not afraid of getting their hands dirty. It’s super interesting to see the behaviors. What’s the difference? Why? I don’t know. Maybe they just find that they grew up with a phone, they grew up with a tablet, and they grew up with a computer, so it’s not interesting enough to limit the world to just bits and bytes.

Mhm.

But the more time I spend with them, the biggest thing—and the biggest question that I find myself asking them—is fascinating. The oldest of this generation are probably 25 or 26; the younger ones are 18. You ask them, “What were you doing during COVID?” That is the most fascinating question.

The most successful ones right now were the ones who, during COVID, were learning and were on YouTube sucking up information about anything and learning about everything in life. So, when they go and build companies, they find that, first, they’re naive, so anything is possible. Second, technology is there, so anything is possible. Third, if you’re older, you get knowledge and wisdom, but you may not have the motivation.

So, they need to find out how to bring that from people. What you’re starting to see is that the best ones are attracting some of the best older people to come join them because they feel that magnet.

So, the younger people are recruiting the older ones.

Yes. They’re making them work in little hubs of 2 or 3, with 2 young ones. They’re pairing 2 22-year-old kids with somebody much older, working in teams together. That’s where they’re joining their knowledge of the new ways of operating with the knowledge that you need from 20 years of experience.

If you play this out over the next 5 to 10 years, won’t they have a massive technical advantage, too? Because it’s like me and you—you say a lot, but we have other stuff going on in our lives, whereas they can live and breathe it 24/7.

Yes, and they will. We just got—what, this year’s high school class—sorry, college class—is the first one that actually went to college and had AI for all 4 years. We just started. The rising senior class in college is the first class ever that probably used ChatGPT to write an essay to get into college.

I keep asking questions about these young people that you hang out with because I’ve had founders literally in their mid-30s, and they’re the technical leaders of these really successful companies. They’re like, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore. I’m too old.”

I’m like, “What do you mean you’re too old? You’re 35 years old.” They’re like, “Yeah, I think I’m going to get smoked by a 24-year-old.”

I don’t think they’re too old, to be honest. I don’t feel old, and I feel I can still play the game. But you’ve got to understand that you’ve got to play a different game. You cannot keep playing the same game that you were playing in your 20s or in your 30s.

You’ve got to understand that the way these dynamics work and what you can bring to them is very different. What can you bring to them? Wisdom. Knowledge. Give them experiences—stuff that they don’t understand.

By the way, what the best ones still lack and have to refine is taste. They’ve got to be able to articulate how to build something beautiful. That’s not easy. If there’s something that we’ve lost in society, it’s the ability to build beautiful stuff. Silicon Valley lost that ability a long time ago. We have to bring it back. I’m hoping this generation is the one that spends time thinking about how to deliver beautiful experiences.

Say more about Silicon Valley losing the ability to build beautiful things.

If you think about the last 15 years, the incentive systems and every measure of material success were wired around scale: grow, go bigger, have more—more what? But it was not really about building beautiful products. When was the last time you bought some technology product that you loved, that you were like, “Wow, this is beautiful”?

I don’t even want to tell you. It’s embarrassing. The answer was a Dyson vacuum cleaner.

That’s great. By the way, Dyson comes up a lot when I ask this question.

The Airwrap, yeah. If you have a daughter, or any women in the house—

Yes.

They’re obsessed with Dyson’s products.

Somebody on your team here was showing us that they still carry the iPhone SE.

Yeah.

Why? The small iPhone. Why? Because it’s beautiful. It was one of the first ones designed in a different way.

We’ve lost that ability. Because we’ve given a price and a reward for efficiency, algorithms, and the compounding of those things, we’ve put aside how it makes you feel. In this world, where technology is taking over a lot of our lives—in the way we’re going, more than at any time in history—we’re going to need that feeling back again: how it makes you feel.

It’s not just the brand with a TV commercial; that’s the point I’m less worried about. It’s more about what’s authentic, what’s beautifully designed, and what it makes you feel when you’re around it.

It’s the perfect time that you’re bringing this up because right now, literally a few hours this morning—in the last few days—I’ve been rereading this biography of Jony Ive. I think it’s called Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products, or something like that.

All he talks about is feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling. He didn’t think computers were for him. He thought they were ugly and tacky. He starts using a Mac—this is years before he was even working at Apple—and he’s just like, “Oh, there’s a human behind this. You can tell there’s an actual human who cares behind this.”

All he talks about is redesigning hairbrushes and how it makes him feel, to your point.

I think that if we don’t bring that back, the founders who do that will win. The founders who don’t have that ability don’t have a chance.

Right before you came over, I was on the phone with our mutual friend Neil Mehta, and he keeps telling me about Nick from Revolut, right? We were talking about some unrelated stuff, and I go, “Oh, I’m about to see Micky Malka.”

He’s like, “You’ve got to ask him about the conversation we had, if he remembers, because he said you invested way before I did. I think he’s done the last 2 or 3 rounds now. But I think he remembers calling you and passing on Nik.”

Can you tell me: why do I keep hearing about Nik? And what do you think makes him so special?

You’ve got to understand Nick—how he grew up and who he is—to understand who he was.

Funny enough, I was in London a few weeks ago because they finally got their bank license approved. There was a chancellor there and some public officials speaking, and Nick was there with Vlad, the co-founder. I was looking at my phone, and I was remembering when was the first time that we had shaken hands on our seed round.

Mhm.

Oh, wow.

It was literally that same day 10 years before. I went to them and showed them the phone and said, “Listen, 10 years ago we were drinking vodka shots because we were rushing to do our A round.”

What was it about him from day one? First, the name Revolut stood for who he was. He wanted to truly create a revolution in money. There was nothing in the middle about it. He had come to London, having left Moscow. He was a trader, and he was frustrated with how complex it was to move money, how difficult and expensive it was, and how unfair it was for everyone in the system. He said, “Fuck it. I’ve got to change this.”

So, that core DNA was there from day one. He lived it every single day. He would wake up every day and go swimming. He would work in the office. He was the first one to arrive, the last one to leave, and the first one to arrive the next day again. He would swim and stay fit and just relentlessly focus on getting this mission moving forward.

People either competed with him at that level because it was a performance, an execution at a level where he was just a machine. It was nonstop: “I just have this mission, and I have to do it in my lifetime.”

I’m glad you said “the machine,” because I think that’s how Neil described him to me. He was like, “He’s like a fucking Terminator.”

But that was Nick in his late 20s. That was who he was then, in his late 20s.

Now, the Nick of today, 10 years later, is getting better. He’s getting better because now he can lead. He can lead by example. He can lead by mission. He’s a missionary now, too. He can lead by taste. He has very strong opinions on how things need to go. He still has 20 people reporting directly to him, and he will work 7 days a week. Then, every number of weeks, they take 2 weeks off.

You can see that his behavior at work is fine-tuned to who he is now compared to who he was before. Consistency is what I’d like to do when we back these teams: We try to understand the DNA of the founder, what drives them, and how they work. More importantly, we want to see if that DNA is reflected in the offices, in the team, in the people, in the way they talk, and in the way they move.

You still go to the Revolut offices, which are now in, I don’t know, 15 or 20 countries. I’ve been to the ones in the Middle East, Barcelona, and London in the last year and a half, and you still breathe that DNA. It’s still there. That’s what keeps it going. It’s a very special way of working. You’ve got to understand the founder really well to know, because each organization is very different.

When you say you want to understand the founder’s DNA, how do you go about understanding that?

You’ve got to spend time with them. You’ve got to ask them all the questions, and you’ve got to build a level of trust where, honestly, you don’t have to talk about business that much.

How do you build that trust in a way where they feel that they can trust you back? They can call you when they cannot sleep at night. Those are the things that I spend most of my time doing with the team at Revolut: building that level of understanding and relationship so we know how they behave.

Once you know how people behave, then everything is fine, because you will see consistency, or they will break it.

Explain why it’s important to you to be the person they call when they have problems. You just used the example of when they can’t sleep at night.

Because all of us have something that wakes us up at night from time to time. That particular problem you’re trying to solve is the biggest thing that you have to unlock to keep being the best version of yourself.

When you’re there, sometimes it’s really hard to trust if it’s a vulnerable question. Sometimes it’s really deep and has a lot of strategic consequences, and you’re going through a lot in your mind. If we get that phone call, it means that we did 100 things right to deserve the right to be there to help this person think through it.

We never answer the question. We just help him or her answer the question. That means that you were able to talk about life and family, society and politics, and everything, because that’s the only way you’re going to really help this person answer the question.

You have, in many cases, decade-plus relationships with a lot of the founders that you back. How do you compare Nick to the other ones? What are the traits that you think they share among the people that you spend the most time with?

Well, they all want to win in their own way. They care about whether they’re true to themselves and whether the mission that they wrote on the first day is still present today. When you find that authenticity, they win.

The ones that are authentic are the ones that you can keep seeing. The ones that fake it till they make it, and then they change and move, are the ones that, over time, you just don’t have the appetite to spend time with. It’s not worth it.

Is that reflected in the performance of the company, too?

Sometimes.

You have people that fake it, and then they build massively successful companies.

Yes, they do, for sure. But sometimes, somewhere, somehow down the line, authenticity matters. As long as you’re authentic to yourself, keep your values authentic, remember why you’re doing what you’re doing, and can wake up every day with that energy, you’ll be fine.

If we go back to that idea that Rick Rubin has these handfuls of ideas—could be 4, could be 5, could be 6 ideas—that he just uses over multiple decades, what would be the list of traits that you want the founders you want to build long-term relationships with and partner with over the long term to have? What would your answer to that be?

We have this thing called the Eye of the Tiger. It’s our way of thinking about the people that we want to back and how we want to partner with them. Everything, as I told you before, needs to fit on a napkin. If we wrote it on a napkin, it means that we thought about it long enough that we have it, right?

It’s basically the energy of a scientist, the conviction of a missionary, the heart of a partner, the dreams of an athlete, and the obsession of an owner. When we meet them and spend time with them, we want to make sure those things are present. If they are, that’s the kind of people we want to partner with.

How long did it take you to develop it? Was it over several years, where you figured out these recurring traits?

This took several years. This is probably a decade. We probably put it into a napkin 5 years ago. So, yeah, it took us almost 10 years.

Do you consider yourself a patient person?

Yes.

Several of the questions I’ve asked, you’ve said, “Oh, yeah, that took a couple of years. That took a couple of years.” You started your first company when you were what, 17?

17.

And you founded Ribbit 20 years later, more or less?

I founded Ribbit much later. I founded Ribbit almost—yeah, 20 years later.

Yes.

21 years later.

21 years later. You’ve been doing it for almost 14 years now.

14 years.

Yes. And I heard you say before, “Well, everyone’s like, ‘Well, you’ve had this fantastic record. You’ve done all this.’” You’re like, “Yeah, but it’s super early.”

We’ve got a long way to go.

Yeah.

We found amazing people to partner with. We’ve got great ideas. We’re still building. We built a company with Walmart. Think about it. It’s the first time ever that that has happened.

Okay, I just heard about this. We have a mutual friend, Sebastian, founder of former fabric founder of Rappi. He was like, “Ask him about the deal he did with Walmart.”

It just speaks to a little bit of this value system of ours. David, we had a chance to meet. I’ve been a fan of Sam Walton all my life, right?

Same.

I had read every book. I had never been to Bentonville until a few years ago, but I had read everything about him and followed him. I remember Buffett owned the stock for a particular period of time until he sold it, and that was when I first learned about Walmart back in the day.

In 2019, through Sarah Friar, who’s now at OpenAI—she was on the board of Walmart—she organized a dinner where I had a chance to meet Doug McMillon, the CEO at the time. We had a lovely dinner in San Francisco a few months before COVID.

Doug said, “Listen, if you ever find yourself in Bentonville, come visit me.” I was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do in Bentonville.” So, I left the dinner. I was so impressed by Doug, his way of speaking, his understanding of macro, the world, and the values of Walmart. Everything was so present in him at that dinner.

It was a small dinner, so it could have been something different, but it was authentic to him. We went as a team to a couple of Walmart stores. We tried every financial product we could buy—we did remittances, prepaid cards, and bill pay—and we found bugs. We found all these things that looked like 1990s fintech.

Were they selling them? So, there were vendors?

They had vendors, and they had partners, and they had their own Walmart card. It was a whatever card.

So, I wrote to him in January, before COVID. I said, “Listen, if you’re in Bentonville, I’d love to go see you.” Lo and behold, he said yes. I showed up, sat down with Doug, and he introduced me to John Furner, who’s now the CEO of Walmart and who had been with Doug for a long time. They were there for almost 30 years at Walmart, both of them since they were 17.

John is my age, so we started at the same time on 2 different continents, and we were sitting in the same room talking about this. I said, “Listen, you guys can build something much better with financial services here. This is not your priority number 1, 2, or 3. It is for us. Let’s figure it out.”

They did something they had never done. They created a JV, a company that we both co-own, and we went together and built a rockstar team with a new brand. We bought 2 companies to build the infrastructure, run by Omar Ismail today, and it’s called OnePay. It’s one of the biggest financial brands that you’ve never heard of.

Operating out of all the Walmarts?

You will see it online, on every shopping cart experience on Walmart. You will see it in retail everywhere. If you want to pay with your phone today, the only way to pay at Walmart is with OnePay. If you want to have a debit card, it’s the only way. If you want a loan from Klarna, it goes through OnePay. If you want an installment loan or a credit card, it goes through OnePay. Every single financial product for millions and millions and millions of American consumers.

The beauty of that is that—and this is the beauty of the Walmart culture—John had been in China for a number of years. He had learned how WeChat Pay worked and how Alipay did business. They were investors in India, Flipkart, and PhonePe. They saw what could happen with mobile money. They have been the greatest partners to have.

Together, between the founder team, Ribbit, and Walmart, we have built this amazing journey together that is quite unique for a big corporation like that.

Tell me if I’m connecting things that are unrelated, but I don’t think I am. What was the business that either you or your partner built? It was this bank, this branchless bank in convenience stores, or some shit like that, in South America—in Brazil. What was the name of that?

It was called Lemon Bank.

Okay, Lemon Bank.

Yes.

It sounds like you almost took an idea that worked in Lemon because you guys—you were the founder of that?

Yes.

Okay. Then explain what Lemon Bank is. But then you sell it to the biggest bank in Brazil, right? Is this not the same idea, but kind of with Walmart?

Yes.

This speaks to why you keep—I’ll ask you if you’re patient. I’ll ask you what traits you notice in the greatest founders, because I notice them in you. Patience, long-term thinking, and reputation, which I want to get to in a minute. That’s how you and I actually met, because you helped me when I had a big decision to make in my career. Your reputation preceded you, and I thought, “I actually need to meet this guy because I have some questions for him.”

This is what I mean. You talked about the infinite game earlier. You said, “I’m going to do this till I die,” which you just said and which I fucking love, by the way. I’m hearing you talk, and I knew the rough shape of the Walmart thing. I didn’t know what it was called. I’m thinking, “Wait a minute. This sounds like Lemon Bank.”

Yes.

Okay, so explain the connection between the 2.

That’s the infinite game right there. You just said it yourself really well. When you’re playing this life game and it’s infinite, being ahead or behind in 2003, when we started our business in Brazil, doesn’t matter. I lived there for 3 years and ground it out. A few times, I almost died trying this business, and we almost killed the business twice along the way. We almost lost all the money I had ever made.

Pause there. We’ll get to where it goes. How did you almost lose all the money you ever made?

When we had sold our first dot-com company, we used all the proceeds to start this bank in Brazil. I moved with my wife to Brazil. We were living there.

No investors?

No, we had no investors. It was just my business partner, Wences Casares, and myself.

All your chips back on the table.

Chips back on the table. We were 25, 26. We almost lost everything because the economy didn’t take off. No matter what we did, we just couldn’t make it work, which is how you learn that micro matters. I learned that growing up in Venezuela with hyperinflation and devaluation, but then another thing is to live it when all your money’s on the table.

So, wait. You’re a 25-year-old kid wanting to build essentially a branchless bank. Is that how you describe it? Your idea at the time is to set these little kiosks? What are they even called?

There were 3 models. We had locations inside existing stores at checkout. We had kiosks inside stores, which was a hybrid model, and we had franchisee little stores that only did our payment systems. This was before the smartphone, right? But it was mobile—or a lot of it was—so it was a hybrid of the 2003-to-2007—

Mhm.

—era. We had to build all of this and run all of this. At peak, we had 7,000 of these physical spaces all over Brazil. We were serving 15 million customers. Half of Brazil back then was unbanked.

Unbanked?

Unbanked.

So, that was the opportunity.

That was the opportunity to bank them. We were the first to bank 15 million people.

So, essentially, you did the legwork for the largest bank. You attacked this customer segment that they hadn’t succeeded with, and you succeeded. You essentially rounded up a bunch of new customers for them. They want to buy you, right? So, you sell in what year?

2008.

So, in 2008, that insight then comes into play—what is that, 12 years later? You’re starting to talk to Walmart in 2020.

Yes, and that’s the long game. That’s the infinite game. By the way, you can tie every single one of our decisions—big decisions like that that we’ve made in real life—to something that happened to me 20 years before.

This is really important, especially for young entrepreneurs, because you said earlier that there’s something wrong about how we’re optimizing for just “start, scale, sell,” right?

Correct.

Some of your partners you’ve been partners with for 20 years.

Yes.

Some of the people you’ve backed—you met Vlad at Robinhood when I don’t even think they had a product yet. There was not a—

No, there was. They were—

—public-facing app.

It was—

No customers. So, your relationship with them was for like 15 years.

Yes.

Which is like I always say, when I’ve read all these biographies for the podcast, just stay in the game long enough to get lucky. So much of this stuff is not predictable. I think that maxim is so important: just stay in the game long enough to get lucky.

You built a massive business 12 years after you built a very successful business in South America. Now think about the scale of Walmart. This is not comparable to anything else.

And that’s the power of compounding.

Yes.

It’s compounded relationships, ethics, work, principles, love, passion, and time. Just don’t care about the winning or losing. Just let it be, because the power of compounding is the most important equation in society. It’s everything—friendships, family. Just be consistent, work every day, and be there.

It’s a very Buffett-Munger kind of thing.

Munger has that line where he’s like, “You need to learn the few big ideas in each discipline; they carry most of the freight.” Through all this reading, I was like, my version of this is, “Oh, time carries most of the weight.” If you’re in a good business, just stay there, and time will actually carry most of the weight to where you want to go.

If you’re going to play the infinite game and do things over the long term, you have to protect your reputation, which is another thing Buffett would repeat in the shareholder letters. He’d say, “Hey, we can lose money. We can lose a lot of money, actually. We can’t lose a shred of reputation.” I want to know how you think about reputation, and then I’ll talk about why it’s so important and how it led me to you.

I started going to the Berkshire Hathaway meetings when I was 18. Back then, they were much smaller—like a Friday afternoon at a Holiday Inn, with a couple hundred people. As soon as they moved to a bigger convention center a few years later, they had a movie clip playing at the beginning of the annual meeting, with a bunch of TV commercials or Buffett interviews over the years.

Every time, since I was that young, they were playing footage of Buffett being deposed when he was chairman of Salomon Brothers, saying the line you just said. It got stuck in my brain.

So wait, they replayed it every annual meeting?

It was that deposition where he said that line, in a deposition before Congress, about something Salomon Brothers was doing with Treasuries—arbitraging or taking advantage of the Treasury issuance market. They played it every single year, and I remember it every single year. Part of the reason I wanted to leave that life is because it was natural to me. It was the way you wanted to live life. So, yes, reputation matters more than anything.

There’s a handful of people that I really trust and admire. For the people I trust and admire, I wanted to know who they trusted and admired.

I had a decision to make, and I wasn’t sure how to make it. There was a lot of uncertainty. I didn’t have the information I needed, and I realized that you were actually in possession of this information. We won’t talk about the details of this.

I almost never ask to meet people. I asked 2 separate people, “Do you mind making this introduction for me?” The first time we met, we ended up talking for several hours, and then we became fast friends.

Yeah.

I made a big decision in my career based on how fantastic your reputation was. Charlie Munger has a great line: trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world. The level of trust that you have built up over an exceptionally long time with people I trust made me able to build a relationship and trust your judgment really fast, so I could make a decision based on your reputation.

I think this is super important. It’s also something that comes up over and over again. I did this episode on Jensen. There’s this book called The Nvidia Way, which is kind of half biography of Jensen and half company history. It talks about how he pitched Don Valentine. Don Valentine is still alive, still making investment decisions at Sequoia. Don said, “That was the shittiest pitch I’ve ever heard. I’m still going to give you money because your reputation precedes you, and it’s so excellent—so valuable.”

It is the most valuable asset. It’s the only asset we have: our reputation. Everything else can come and go, but that’s the one thing we have that will always stick to us, even when we’re dead.

You know who also shaped my thinking on this? Have you ever heard Palmer Luckey talk about reputation?

No, I haven’t heard him talk about it.

He says the exact same thing. He says that if people try to destroy your reputation, you should just rise above the fray. And he’s like, “No, this is bullshit, because you have to fight back. The problem is that it forecloses opportunities. If this person is damaging your reputation and it’s not true, it’s going to foreclose future opportunities.”

His whole point is that this is invisible. He says, “If I let somebody destroy my reputation unfairly and 2 years later I ask for a meeting with the guy who heard that story and believes it, he’s not going to tell me, ‘I’m not taking the meeting because your reputation sucks.’” He’s going to make up some other story. So he’s like, “You have to protect it and then fight against it.” I thought it was interesting.

It’s very much a Ben Franklin kind of idea, because Franklin would nurture, protect, and fight back against attacks on his reputation 250 years ago. It’s fascinating.

I love it. I didn’t know that about Ben Franklin. I’m going to read more about that.

I told you right before we started recording that I got the art piece that I ordered at N0DE. I don’t even know how to describe the fact that I could spend about an hour there with you. Can you just describe what the hell N0DE is and why you’re doing it?

Yes. I think it’s in the spirit of being a rebel. My wife and I love art. We find that art is beautiful, and when you find stuff that speaks to you, it has immense value. It’s been around all of us since the caves, right? It’s always been there.

5 years ago, we stumbled upon digital art for the first time. I was on Twitter, scrolling, and I saw an art piece that looked very similar to a physical art piece we had from the ’70s. Then we got into it and started to find other artists in digital art who were doing beautiful stuff that matched something beautiful in history. So we started to pair them together.

That journey, like any journey, took us to getting to know the artists. What’s the difference between these artists? They’re alive. They’re all here, and they’re all using computers; they all study computer science one way or the other, and they just decided to be artists and tell a story in a different way.

Once you start to meet them, they’re rebels in the complete expression of the word, the same way we were describing some of the rebels in companies. Think about it: right now, we’re running a show on Beeple.

That’s the one I saw.

That’s the one you saw. Think about Beeple. Think about an entrepreneur who decided, for 5,000 days, to do an art piece every single day and post it online so he could only get better. His goal was—he read a book that said, “If you do something every day, you will only get better at it.”

He started in 2007, sketching. In 2011, he started using Photoshop. In 2014, he started using Cinema 4D. The software evolved, and every single day he posted an image online that no one bought. People paid attention and just made fun of it, congratulated him, or pushed against it until, in ’21, he sold Everydays: The First 5,000 Days.

What is that? 14 years?

For $69 million. Suddenly, it was like an IPO moment. No one pays attention for a long time; you sell it. What does a real rebel do? He said, “Fuck it. We’re going to double down. I’m going to build a studio. I’m going to start building a lot more stuff that I couldn’t do before.”

Now he’s one of the most prolific artists alive. All he does is digital work.

People see CryptoPunks; I see a movement. I see a cultural artifact: the first art on-chain ever created, and it happens to be portraits. Guess what? Every single art movement in history starts with portraits. They always evolve the portrait.

The story is, we went to the museums and we said, “This art should be seen.” At home, we put it up in our house, and all my kids, when they were teenagers, and their friends—guess where their attention went?

Not art that you have hanging on the walls.

It went to this.

Yeah.

They spent 15 or 20 minutes in front of it, talking to it, interacting, and asking questions. They wanted to understand. We go to the museums, and they said, “Yes, we can do this in 2028, 5 years from now, 4 years from now, and we’ll have to find a curator who’s going to curate what the artist wants to do.”

My wife and I looked at each other and said, “No fucking way. This needs to happen today.”

Node is the first digital art studio designed for digital artists. It’s a space where the artist is his own curator, because that’s what rebels do. You decide how you want to show your art. You don’t let somebody else tell you how you’re going to put your art. It’s a place where you come and get hands-on with the art that speaks to the future.

We put this place in downtown Palo Alto for a particular reason: Silicon Valley needs creativity. We need to bring it back. Our contribution to society is putting it in a place where people can actually walk in and see it.

We opened it 5 months ago, and close to 60,000 people have shown up already. Every weekend, we’re breaking records. It’s free. It’s open. The most beautiful thing is, kids are bringing their parents. So, you tell me the last time you went to a museum where the kids are telling—[laughter]—“Dad, let’s go in.”

Yeah.

Exactly. I think we need to go back to beauty, to taste, to creating authentic stuff. These artists are the most authentic people right now, using digital tools. So let’s show them, let people interact with them, and let that be the driver for entrepreneurs to use it in their own practices.

But this is what I meant about you being way more entrepreneur than investor, because when you start a bank for the unbanked in Brazil, you're like, “Well, I'm not going to open up branches.” You're thinking, “What opportunity? What's the white space that these incumbents are not attacking?” You're a rebel: “What is the white space that these incumbents are not attacking?”

Well, you just said the museums don't even have the infrastructure to display digital art. I went to Node with you. The walls are customizable. How long are the people in there for? 2 months? Something like that? And then the next one comes in. The infrastructure is still there, but now the artist gets to essentially use the infrastructure as a canvas for his or her art.

We think the world will have a lot of these places. Museums will change. They will evolve. It will take a while.

The location that you picked speaks to, again, how you're identifying the way they did it and the way I should do it now. You can walk into it. It's in a very small downtown area. It's not a destination in and of itself; it's something you could just walk into. It's part of the neighborhood, if that makes any sense.

If you read history, which is part of the beauty of playing infinite games, where you have to live in the future but also understand the past, this is not very different from what happened in Paris with the rebels in their art movement, when they were not accepted in the museums. This is how Impressionism came to be, and all the art that was a revolution and changed the way we look at art in the last 100 years.

We're living through that same moment. Funny enough, it's not in Paris. Maybe it started in Palo Alto.

And so you look at the first Node in Palo Alto almost like a prototype.

Yes, because the name Node is meant to be a node in the network. We will be learning here for the next year to perfect our technology and improve our UIs. There's a bunch of engineers working at this foundation. Think of how different it is from traditional art, and then expand it and open in many, many more places.

Another thing that I want to talk to you about: what's with your fascination with rebels? It's all over your website. People who know you talk about this all the time.

Well, first, I must start with generation, right? And I grew up with Star Wars. I'm a big fan of Star Wars. To me, growing up in Venezuela, the only way to survive in that environment is you have to be a rebel. The system, the dark side was all over, the chaos was present. You had to rise above that. And the rebel mindset is one where you know authentically and genuinely that something can be better. And you're willing to give your life for it. To me, being a rebel is just a way of being. It's a way of looking at the world. And when you see something, you can always look at it and ask, how do you make it better? How do you make it more beautiful? What's missing? Just that mindset of always being willing to know that better means it can still be better.

I mean, just a 17-year-old starting a company.

Yes.

That would lead me to believe that you had this like rebel, you know, you were essentially a born rebel.

Yes.

How did you apply that? Cuz people reference you as like one of the greatest like venture capitalists. I'm like, that's not how I think of Micky. I don't think of him as like a venture capitalist. So like, when you're building Ribbit, how did you apply like your rebel, like your inherent rebel nature to your essentially almost like you're almost like an artist in the sense of like this is the canvas that I'm building. This is how you think I should do it, but this is how I'm going to do it. How did you think about it when you started it?

First, I hate labels, and second, I would be very depressed because that's not the label I want. No labels. All I want on my tombstone is to say, “He was a rebel.” That's all I want to be said there, and that will say everything about me: the way I raise my kids, the way my relationship with my wife, the way I treat my friends, the way I make business decisions, and the way I change my mind. I'm willing to change my mind if I learn something different. That's a rebel mindset.

Everything that is the opposite is a mindset that I know too well. My kids are perfect. I'm the best at what I do. I run away from any of those things. Actually, I find that the rebel mindset is one where you are always asking questions. You're a rebel. You are nonstop asking questions. You want to learn and keep learning.

You and I know a lot of people who get to a point in life when they stop asking questions and start to preach. That's past the rebel stage. Everybody has that breaking point somewhere in their lives. I want that to be the last day of my life, so I need to live by that principle in everything that I do, in every behavior.

I'm rebelling now against the traditional art world. I'm trying to allow artists to show art in a different way. We rebel at Ribbit in the way we design it. People were asking, “What are you? Are you a venture guy?” I'm like, “Yes.” “Are you a late-stage guy?” “Yes.” “Are you a fintech guy?” “Yes.” “Are you doing defense now?” “Yes.” Like, yes. What's wrong? I'm not going to let anyone put me in a box. That's the rebel mindset.

You are a founder, but you think so much like a founder. This decision in 2012 to start an investment firm—why?

I don't think of it as an investment firm.

Okay, you have to say more about this.

To me, it's a startup. It's a company. We build our own technology stack, and we have a small team. We consider ourselves rebels. Our meetings are called Tatooine, and we have Jedis—

I didn't know this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, so you're really into Star Wars.

Oh, yes, completely.

Are you backing Jedis? Do you have Jedis?

We back Jedis.

Okay.

We have Wookiees, and we have Jedis. We have the whole theme truly alive in the way we think because it has to be authentic. The people who work with us, and really the whole team, feel that ownership and that teamwork.

Investment firms are very siloed in many ways, and I don't love that. We want to overcommunicate, even internally. Right now, the entire team knows that we're sitting together. Everybody can see my calendar and my inbox. They can see my emails, and I can see anybody's emails. We share all information so we can actually become better as a team. That mindset is very rebel in this environment.

And how we make decisions: we don't make individual decisions; we make group decisions. Somebody asked, “Who's the partner responsible for that company?” It's like, “What partner?” You ask the founders, and they say, “I don't know. I call Micky for something, I call Nick for something, I call Justin for something.” We are just a team that works together in very different ways.

That is the joy of going to the office every day. I love being there and spending time with the team because we just have fun together.

What was the insight, though, that caused you to do this? You started how many companies before this? This is your sixth company?

Yes.

Something like that. Your sixth company looks vastly different from your first 5, correct?

Yes.

What was the insight between 5 and 6, though?

In the infinite game, I just had to learn how to do it right. This time, I do it right because I consider myself—even though they were successful, created a lot of impact, and changed a lot of people's lives around the world—a failed entrepreneur.

That's absurd. But you have to say why.

Because the best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company.

Okay, not a fist bump on that. There you go.

I had to learn for 20 years how to get to the point of designing the structure, the culture, the team, the knowledge, the aperture, the brand compound—all those values—to a place where we can do something forever.

This is the infinite game.

Nick Sleep has one of my favorite lines ever. He goes, “The best investors aren't investors; they're entrepreneurs who never sold.”

100% agree.

Yeah, so that's fascinating. Look, okay, the fact is I'm a failed entrepreneur because I had to exit. You had crazy successful exits, too. For my first 5, I didn't find the vehicle in which I could do this forever.

When I'm new to being relatively known in this community in the last 5 years for a podcast, I didn't understand, because I sat in a room by myself for a decade and just talked into a microphone and read books. I didn't think about the outside world at all. Then everything came to me, and now I have to constantly vet everybody around me.

I get a lot of advice, especially from older, more successful entrepreneurs, who are like, “Man, you have to be so fucking careful, because it goes back to Charlie Munger's point: most people are wrapped up in their own world.”

Yeah.

Right? And so you have to vet them in all different directions. But when I—even people I want to have dinner with or talk to, like you...

You ask a bunch of people, and they're just like, “He's obsessed with this infinite game.”

Yeah.

This infinite game—he doesn't need more money, and he doesn't need to do another deal in his life, but he just can't stop.

But it's this joy. It's this thing where every day you get better and you just keep improving. I sat with Charlie Munger once, after another meeting at the Happy Hollow Golf Club, where Warren had this thing afterward. I was by myself, and I only had one share of Berkshire. I was probably 24 or 25 years old, and I sat next to him. Well, he sat next to me.

I was sitting there, and he says, “Take him.” I said, “No, come on, sit here, Charlie.” We started to talk, and in that room was everybody. Bill Gates was there, along with all these big CEOs of all these companies, and I was the youngest guy by an order of magnitude.

He looks at me and says, “You must be very wealthy to be here.”

I said, “Actually, no. I only own one share.”

He says, “You don't get it. You are the wealthiest guy in the room.”

I said, “You're wrong, Charlie.”

“No, no, you are.”

“Why?”

“You have the power of time. All of us here are in our last chapter. You're just starting your time. You will compound for the next 70 years of your life. So never forget the rule that I'm about to tell you: You only need to get rich once.”

And then that was it. He says, “Now I'm going to eat,” and he just sat down and ate.

I love that. Yeah, time is the only true currency you have.

The only true currency you have.

I appreciate you spending your time giving it to us today. This is awesome.

Thank you for having me.