Ep. 6 Hampus Jakobsson General Partner at Pale Blue Dot

Show Notes

Pale Blue Dot is a €87M seed-stage venture capital firm, investing in climate tech startups that reduce and reverse the climate crisis and help us prepare for a new world. Pale Blue Dot is based in Malmö, Sweden, and invests in early stage companies in Europe and the US.

https://www.paleblue.vc/

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Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the learner.co show. Today we have Hampus Jacobson. He's a general partner at pale blue dot John and Greg are, what are you guys excited about to talk with Hampus today? He's he's done a ton of pretty crazy stuff. Yeah. Well,

Jon Larson: Based on, well, is it is going to be an interesting episode. He's he's the, I think the first guest we've had, that's really involved in what climate tech and that's going to be fascinating how he looks at climate tech as a sector and what they're investing in and where he sees that going. I think that's going to be really interesting to explore.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah. I'm, I'm super excited. Cause happiness really strikes me now. I don't know him yet, but he really strikes me as the classic lifelong learner. I mean, he's a guy that has as made his path on kind of uncharted waters, a lot of the time and changed directions to different types of things through the course of his career. Fascinated to see, what the Genesis was for a lot of these ideas and thoughts that he's brought to the world.

Kevin Horek: When I've talked to him in the past, his stories around Google, his Blackberry stuff and a bunch of other stuff that he'll probably talk about in the show are, it's very good. It fits in with everything. I think that we're gonna cover today, but it's just, he's had an incredible career. He's done some pretty incredible things and he'll talk through. I like the brutal honesty of that, which I think a lot of people don't sometimes. It's pretty cool to get that like firsthand from somebody like him, that's been that successful.

Gregg Oldring: Maybe just giddy because he has been super successful and worked on some really cool stuff that we think is pretty neat. I guess I'm excited just about that too.

Kevin Horek: I'm about to show. Yep. Sounds good. Let's go man. Long time. No talk.

Hampus Jakobsson: It was a long time ago. How are you? Very.

Kevin Horek: Well you.

Hampus Jakobsson: Things are good. It's quite intense, honestly, but it's, I think it's self-created.

Kevin Horek: I also have Greg and John on there also co-founders of lender and they sit in, sometimes they feed me questions and they really wanted to meet you, especially after you spent all that time and effort putting together that list of books and courses. And.

Hampus Jakobsson: I guess, yeah, the scary part actually is, was it wasn't actually a lot of time what I did, essentially. It was like, I just did a quick check on things that were starred in one of the systems I use. I just essentially took everything it was started. And then I linked it. The other thing I did is I pruned out stuff that when I looked at the star, I was like, why did I start this one? I don't remember this book actually, or this podcast. The craziest thing is this is a boiled down version, which really scared. Yeah. I know what it's like, I'm sending you like a wall of text and like, yeah, this is like, no, the netlist like, I just felt like, oh my God. So.

Kevin Horek: Thank you very.

Hampus Jakobsson: Much. Yeah, no worries.

Kevin Horek: What app by chance were you compiling that list in,

Hampus Jakobsson: I mean, it was just Google docs, but what I did is I took a, no, what I did is I looked good reads and pocket cast. So, so what I did essentially is like good reads. I use for everything read and I, some things I read on dead trees and some things I audio book listener, and there was actually a bit of a, it's not random. It is actually I only read fiction on paper. Like, I only read, like, it's both directional, like every fiction I read his paper, everything I read on paper is fiction. And then I only listened to textbooks. I think for me, it is like, it is, I think it's actually, I don't think it's, I think it's rather logical because the thing is I can listen to textbooks at like one dot five X speed, but I wouldn't see there's any point of listening to fiction at one it's like, it feels like it's saying you could have sex faster.

Hampus Jakobsson: It's just like kind of one of the points I think is like, being able to sit and really enjoy a book and be like, oh, this is really well-crafted fiction. Or I really like that character or whatever. I think it's a, that's why there are two different platforms and then just like, everything gets to good reads in the end. I use good reads for tagging stuff I want to read as well. I just have a kind of Q and actually a lot of times nowadays when I go on calls like for work and when I needed to meet a new person or if I do recruitment for one of our portfolio companies or anything, if it's kind of a interesting person, it's just like one more person for the company. If it's like a high-level business dev person or like, somebody who's going to be the COO or something where I feel like this person is like, big shots in some way.

Hampus Jakobsson: I think it's a great interview question to say, yeah, what book do you like? If you would recommend me a book, which one would it be? And a fiction book. I think it's super interesting cause people really, yeah. People give really interesting recommendations, like really interesting. Like, so I have it as a standard interview question, which just means I get final recommendations. As soon as the book gets more than two recommendations, I just like flag it as an, I probably should investigate this book. I figured out, I books that have lots of five star, lots of two star ratings. I ended up, I think a lot of books that have like three and four stars are like books that, it's like, yeah, it was okay. Like, it wasn't the best book I read, but it was like, it was nice. I think the books that get like five star and one star or five star, two star are usually books that are like, it's an awesome book if you're the right person.

Hampus Jakobsson: It's a whole book, if you're not the right person. I just look at the reviews and try to figure out, am I in the hate or love camp? For example, any books that has touching anything with religion, like fiction books. I mean, if it's like, this has some connection to Christianity, then it just like, they're like one star reviews, which is like this idiot doesn't understand God. And you're like, okay. I have no, I don't have a problem with it. So then I feel, okay, cool, interesting. So people get five stars. Then I read them. If they say this is the first person that like, blah, then I feel like, oh, damn, this is not politics. Like, it's really interesting to read the reviews on those. Very cool. Well,

Gregg Oldring: I think it shows basically started right now. Like this was great.

Hampus Jakobsson: Because anything I spent on it,

Gregg Oldring: Kevin, I just gotta say, you're one thing you should listen to as a fiction book. If you've got I've listened with my kids now. I'm not always listening to myself, but my kids have listened to the Harry Potter series all the way through four times during the pandemic so far, it's crazy. And it's spectacular. It's actually listened to the fourth time through. So.

Hampus Jakobsson: That's overdosed slightly on Eric Potter. I have three kids. I read a book like one to three on my own because I was in the UK when they were not new, but like it was strange being in the UK and having to read them when I was like 20. It was like it was so 20 years ago it was like, they were pretty fresh. It was strange. People would work, I'd read them. I just ended up reading the first three books. When I got my first kid, like I read all the books for him and then, Hey, there are two more kids. You have a couple of times when you're in a play and then you just happen to like end up watching him. Like right now I feel like I can like speak like some of the characters now. I feel like, oh my God, like, can I, like, I know them too well, but it's a, yeah.

Hampus Jakobsson: I would say like, if you haven't read the graveyard book, I would say that's a, the graveyard book and buy new game and the golden contests, those are like really awesome kids' books for like, for the grownup as well. Like it's kinda like Simpson style. The kid goes like, this is exciting. And you go, this is super smart. Like, this is, I want to read this book. The greater book actually reading from old this kid when he was like 10 and then like read one chapter one evening and it was like, I don't want to read it. I was like, okay, fine. I just like sat and continue reading three more chapters. I more or less finished the book next day, I was like, this is a good book. I told him that after I was like, I actually finished the graveyard book and he's like, what?

Hampus Jakobsson: I was like, yeah, it was really good. And he said, why don't we continue? I was like, yeah, I've read it now. So let's go. And then I read that for him. So I was like, wow. I read it for the other kids as well. I know that book as well, but it's a good book. Cool. Giving you a bit of background. I grew up in, it's actually really fascinating. I'm not like where I grew up, but like how I reflect about like growing up and like what you're shaped by. I think it's a really interesting subject. I grew up in absolutely nowhere land, like in Sweden, in a super small place. It's like, they're 50 houses. It's just, there's nothing. There's nothing. There's no, there's not even like a, a small supermarket. There's nothing like, there's nothing, it's 50 houses out in Overland and it's not like, there's like, you could drive for 15 minutes.

Hampus Jakobsson: There's like a small place where the small shop for half an hour and there's like a supermarket and like a mall or whatever. It's like one of those places and it's not suburbia. It's not that I grew up just next to the sea. It was like an hour drive to like, if you want to buy, I think an example would be like magic, the gathering cards or whatever, something which is obviously not at whole foods. Well, maybe it's actually as whole foods, but what I mean? I had to, like, it was a one hour drive at least. Wow. It was like, and that was like one hour highway, boom. You get to the city and then of course you find the shop. So it was outside a lot. And so Neverland. I went to like, microscopic meaningless school kind of thing. Like it's not that I had anything, nothing happened.

Hampus Jakobsson: I think that it was interesting because I think a lot about my kids. I think that I really feel that I think a lot about education, I think a lot about how do you get shaped by the people around you? How do you get to see the world? How do you get to see different emission levels? How do you get inspired, inspiration and curiosity. I think about my youth was like, there was none of that. Like, I mean, there were plenty of things happening, but it was not that somebody tried to get me into anything like that. My parents are kind of scientists and teachers. I have three older brothers that are not older than I am. They're eight and nine and 11 years older than I am. Essentially I kind of have five parents. That means that nobody really cared what I did. Not in a bad way, but if I suddenly said, oh, what if you get to like top of the tree with a BB gun and you jump out and try to shoot the balloon, then people were just like, yeah.

Hampus Jakobsson: Okay. Because someone else had already done it. It's not that like, and like, it was there. If you run with scissors, when I'm like, literally then one of my parents would probably go, that's not super smart, but to very whatever kind of, and not that they didn't there wasn't, there was not like a household without love or anything. It was just like, I have three older brothers they've done all the students you can ever imagine. And it was fine. There were some things, of course, if you say, I want to do this thing where my parents were like, seeing that don't do it, but very few things. I haven't done a couple of like really stupid things. Like I skied out of a cliff and fell like eight meters. Like really far down onto a snow ledge and then had to figure out how to get down from there.

Hampus Jakobsson: Once when were skiing in Austria, were up on the mountain, took one of those like cabins up, like, far for up in the mountain. I was, I was seven. I was another kid, another family. He was 10 and my parents and that family, this kid, and I started skiing. After skiing for 10 minutes, realize we're on the wrong slope. I realize after a couple of minutes, we're in Italy and this guy just totally freaked out. He was like, we're going to do our own country. My parents realized after skiing for 15 minutes, the guys aren't here, they must've taken the left, turn up there. They're going down to Italy. The other families, parents, they just panicked. They were just like, oh my God, he's another country. Can we walk up? And you can't walk up a slope. That's impossible. Right. My parents were just like, I think it's going to work out.

Hampus Jakobsson: His guy parents were like, oh, just have to speak Italian. My parents were, I don't really know. Of course, like an hour and a half later, I came, like we came with the taxi around the mountain and the taxi driver like came up to our hotel and just asked the parents to pay an infinite amount of money for driving around a mountain. The kid next to me was three years older. He was just shaking in the car. He was just like in total like panic mode because he was never going to be his parents again. I felt, okay, I guess we're going to get down. We're going to get texts driver. I have to explain with him in some way that we're alongside the mountain. I mean, it's going to be fine. I think that's kind of how I grew up. Had to a lot and totally fine with that.

Hampus Jakobsson: Not that there was like a special school program. Not that they were cool tinkering toys, like all of the things we think about now with kids, it's just like, oh, can you find it interesting program? Like where they get to, I dunno, build robots or anything. Absolutely. Like super, absolutely nothing like that. And then same thing. When I went to high school, there was absolutely nothing. I was in a super boring little city. Nothing happened. A lot of people just started like smoking behind the fence and stuff. And it was just nothing happened. And I happened to very randomly. I happen to have, there was an awesome librarian at the school. She was a super peculiar person and a really wonderful person. One of the first weeks I came to school, like went into the library and this really funny woman was there and we haven't talked about books and she treated me completely.

Hampus Jakobsson: And she treated everybody complete like grownup. I remember because I re I like reading and I was the guy who read everywhere. Like when I walked and whatever, I just read and I didn't read like good fiction or anything. I just read stuff, could read like, pulp fiction for kids or whatever. And then she was just like, amazing. She was really interesting. I just, you came in with that. She didn't like fantasy books. For example, I read a lot of fantasy when I was a kid and she completely respect to the fact that like fantasy. I came in with a fence, the book, she was like, what's that? I was like, it's the Bulgarian it's. She was like, oh yeah, I've read about Eddings. I said, oh, you've read about Eddings, but you haven't read that. It's just like, no, I think a lot of times this is very archetypical.

Hampus Jakobsson: Typical is I was like, no, have you thought about not offensive books? There's still like, there's the strong one. Like the brute, like the barbarian guy. He's a bit stupid, but is there a strong, there's the smart one, the magician he's a bit above everybody else in a sense. There's the cunning one that the kind of you can't really trust him. I was like, yeah. And he said, that's our company. Right. I was like, whoa, I've never thought about this. I was like, yeah, you're right. It's pretty comforting. Cause he's just, yeah. In a sense fence, the books is a lot about getting it to feel, how the world works and you still get on an adventure. When she said that, I was like, you're a genius. Like, this is like, I've never thought about this. I just started talking to books about her, with her, like on a weekly basis just, and she said like, oh, you should read color purple.

Hampus Jakobsson: I remember when she said that I was like color purple. The thing is, if you have us, I think about people like have to read color purple. Like, if you're in Europe, nobody, like it's not a subject book at all. I was like, I don't know, I'm 14 years old. Prime time, it's a good time to read the color purple and like pick up the book. I really like it. I was like, this isn't a really good book. She was like, yeah, what do you think about it? I ended up having like, an extra, language teacher, just like an extra teacher who just cared about reading and talked about to her a lot. I think that shaped me a lot. Just broadening my mind a little, I read a lot of books that I wouldn't have read as like a 14 to 16 year old, because you read kind of what you do think is good, which has the right covers and whatever.

Hampus Jakobsson: She was super interesting cause she could really, whatever book you read, she could really disrespect it. She could just say, oh, interesting. You're reading another fantasy and like, very colorful front and everything what's this about. We started talking about it and then she just, she was really respectful. There wasn't like high and low literature. She was just like talking to you. I think that really shaped me as a kid, started reading a lot. Like, it's not something I thought about then actually the freaky thing is that when I was a kid there, it was not that I thought, well, I've got an extraordinary, library and friend. It was just like, yeah. You know, I don't know. Maybe most 14 year olds don't like reflect upon reality around them. Started stuff, started changing. Like I started meeting more people, with my own interests. I think it was, I kind of before that I wasn't a loner, but it was, I wasn't definitely hitting a hard putting back away.

Hampus Jakobsson: Like were crowd that did our stuff and I just didn't bother about other stuff. When I came to college, that all changed, I guess it does for most people. Right. Just started meeting a lot of different people, met a girl and actually kind of in a bit fell out of reading a bit. I kind of more, yeah, more focused on other parts of life in a sense, but we're still read, but it wasn't as magical about it. That's the problem with girlfriend and boyfriends, I guess. So it was good. I liked educational for other aspects and fun. When I went to university also not an extraordinary nursery, any shape or form a good university, but not like, oh my God, if I would pick university that my kids would ever go to, I would pick this university, but like totally fine university. I was only reading textbooks like non-fiction and like I literally only cared about solutions to problems I had.

Hampus Jakobsson: I was thinking a lot about like, how do you structure arguments, whatever. Then I read a book about that. If I thought about how do you run software projects? I read books about that. I read one or two fiction books per year, maybe, but it was, I dunno, when I was traveling or something, but I can have fun out of it. By then I randomly started a company with five of my friends I had during the summers. I started working at different companies in different countries, essentially. It was a trick that I wanted to work abroad. I just wanted to figure out a way to work in other countries. What I did is like when kind of February, March came along, I just tried to find a company in another country where I could work at and do something with this fairly qualified. What this means in reality is that there was a bit of a flexible way of looking at the truth, because if you kind of apply for a job in another country and it's an a, a real job and yeah, it's an internship.

Hampus Jakobsson: Obviously it's not like, crazy qualified, important job, but it's not that I'm going to say, I'm going to carry papers and hold your cup of coffee. What I did is like, yeah, like I found this company in Paris and they did smart cards. So essentially kind of credit card security. Okay. Can I ask them, Hey, can I work here and do an internship during the summer? When they kind of said, I don't know, whatever I have said, I'm sorry. Like, I'm sorry, because like it's mandatory for my school. I can't get a degree unless I've done an internship. Which was that actually true? No, not at all. It was like, not even close to the truth. There's nothing in this at all. Of course what happens then if you're an employer you're like, okay. We'll look at your application because like, you feel a bit obliged, right.

Hampus Jakobsson: You feel like, okay. Let's look at it. This guy like calls me up and says like the cash, I have a couple of questions for you. I was like, yeah, what are questions? So do you know, cryptography? I was like cryptography and like, I didn't know anything about cryptography. I was like a first year of uni. Right. I was like, Hey, yeah, I'm do computer science. He was like, Ooh, impressive with Swedish universities, do eight, 11 assembler. I was like, I didn't really hear what he said. I was like, assembler something. And that's a programming language. I was like, yeah, my fair share. I do computer science. It was like, okay. I would love to have you as an intern. I was like, oh, that was amazing. And of course I had no idea. What happened is like he sends me an email and the two things he says, I like just panic, study them now for three months, because now it's like, it's March.

Hampus Jakobsson: I'm going to be there at Jude. I'm gonna be here for three months and build something important. I did that every single summer. Like I went to Paris and London then Munich and it was in Germany and it was great because you got out of my comfort zone, got to meet a lot of new people, got to work at a real job. Like, you know, really real job. I came there and the first year, I, I didn't know at all, wasn't doing, luckily I had spent three months thinking about it and studied. I actually was fairly good at it, but it was, I was a craftsperson. Like if somebody said any question outside my domain, I hadn't, it didn't even know how to answer it. I didn't know how to count worked. Of course, like I'm an, I'm a student. Right. The next year, because I'd worked abroad, came to the next place I come to London, I haven't done this thing.

Hampus Jakobsson: Suddenly I feel like I can actually have a discussion with my colleagues. Like, and like I can actually like help out with stuff. Had an, a really amazing incident in non-Jewish really funny. Every morning I walk and read a book cause I happened to live in a part of London and my job. Isn't a part of London where there are no direct buses, no direct like tubes like subways or anything. Essentially the smart, like I can switch two or three times and get there, but I could just walk for 30 minutes and get there. I was thinking a lot of times the buying a skateboard and just skateboard through it because you don't want to bike in London. At the end of the day, I just felt I'm just going to walk. I'm just going to get up every morning, get out of the super crummy, small place I'm living at, get a, something to eat and then have the book and read.

Hampus Jakobsson: Every morning I walk with a book in my hand to work for 30, 35 minutes and reading fictional books now got into fiction again. It, the interesting thing is because it's summer, I guess as well, actually, and I'm alone. Like, that's like, more like that. The funny thing is that what happens now and this really funny incident. Thinking about the mood, if you just got out of bed, you didn't have coffee or anything. You're walking with a fiction book and you're walking for half an hour. You're not low, but you're not full of energy. Right. You're just, you're mellow almost. And then I got into work. They have a really awesome espresso machine. It's a really small place where 12 people I come in, I get an espresso. Then, because I'm Swedish and Sweden and it's pretty normal to have joyride like no for teeth.

Hampus Jakobsson: Like so like, so what happens is I drink a cup of espresso. I ruins my teeth because the problem is like, I'm at work now. I don't have a toothbrush, which I feel is a bit off. I like to chew gum and then I have a fluoride. Do you think this has maybe helped my teeth? I go around and talk to my colleagues. I'm the kind of person that if I drink a cup of coffee, like I get quite intense. Otherwise, as you hear now, I'm completely like chill. When a cup of coffee comes in, I'm pretty intense. What happens after three days is one of my colleagues goes up to me and says, Hey hunters, can we just talk? I was like, yeah, of course. Like I've been here for a week. Right? So like, w what's going on? Cause like, so it is completely okay that you do, at work and I'm like, do I do?

Hampus Jakobsson: I was thinking what happened on wrong? I've been here for a couple of days. Like, I've done something wrong, obviously. Right? Thought about what you can't offer it to other people to work hours. And I was like, what? Sorry, you can't offer it to you to us during your work hours. Like, what am I offering? I don't want to spend it out to you, but like, I, you need to spit it out. Like I don't know if public speed has expired. Sorry. It's okay. You can't give drugs to people at work. I was like hard drugs. What are you talking about in the morning? Hampers, we get it. It's like waiting. You get here, you pop a pill. You're honestly intense asks. It's funny, but you can't give it to the colleagues. Nobody can work on Yukon, but nobody else can work on speed. I'm like, oh, they're fluorides for my teeth.

Hampus Jakobsson: My body just looks at me as like, oh, I know it was like, I did it for four days. Do you think I got here every morning? And like, Pop's like, amazing. And you haven't fired me yet. I was like, oh, I love this place. It was an amazing summer working with these people who were obviously the most open-minded people I've ever worked with in my life. It was just like, oh my God, you thought I had LSD. And you thought it was chill. Just like as long as I didn't give no one else. So it was a very interesting summer. It was really great. They had a lot of other funky ideas, but I think then I kind of got back into fiction reading it, honestly, I'd like writing in the summers. Instead of starting this company randomly, because I been all these places, I've seen a lot of different things.

Hampus Jakobsson: A couple of friends that I started this randomly started this company, as I said, five of my friends. It came to inspiration for things we'd done during this operas at different places. This company completely serendipitously, honestly, scales from the six friends of us to 180 people. Wow. The business plan is, was originally learn and like work with nice people and have fun. It's not saying like it was work with good people. It wasn't like have fun as in like, we're just gonna, invoice and just not care. We were really hardworking because I think that what's scared us is that we had a lot of friends who kind of had similar degrees that we did who were one year older, or we have a military service. Like we had like lost the, or quote-unquote. We had a lot of friends who are same age or one year older who were working at these places.

Hampus Jakobsson: Like they were software developers what were, and it was 1999. Like, if you're a software developer, you were kind of hard currency. The thing is, if you're just kind of 20 years old, like nobody treats you particularly. Well, I think it's changed nowadays. I think if you were really amazing developer at something and you're 19 people will just pay you anything. I think back then it wasn't really, so we just realized, like, if we go and work for one of these big software giants, we're going to be like software testers or something. And we don't want to do that. We want to build stuff for real. The first year, our only ambition was essentially to not get hired, but like, to work, do a project, do a consultancy project, do some professional services and do whatever we wanted ourselves, not having to handle office hours or meeting rooms or calendar bookings, whatever, just do fun stuff.

Hampus Jakobsson: And that was the business plan. It was literally the whole thing. What happened is we just stumbled into a place like we stumbled in to just, tripped on a bed on a shell onto having, yeah, it was really absurd. Like during your first year, Sony, the big, like, kind of consumer electronics, giant Japanese company buys Erickson, and Erickson is like one of the leading companies in the world. On mobile phones look like tiny idiotic microwave ovens, like TextUs, Sony obviously wants these to be like entertainment devices. Because Swedish people and Japanese people, neither of them are very direct. What happens is the deputies, people have said that you can build this. The Swedish people were like, yes, we can build this. Like, not maybe kind of saying, maybe not because you just, like, you just don't want to be nasty. The Japanese people are, they're not the people that can push you and like, check one more time.

Hampus Jakobsson: It's kind of a bit of misunderstanding. During like this happened just during our first year, and then one of our friends, it was actually pretty crazy because one of our friends happened to be in one of these projects and he calls us up in panic and says, we have to build this like multimedia phone. And were like, yeah. I mean, you can just buy a computer and do like cool stuff. And like, yeah, you don't get it. Mobile phones are just totally crap. Like they don't have, there's no memory, there's no processing power, the screening. Now their problem is that so many men now to make screens. We're getting a phone now, which has a pretty blazing, amazing screen. And were like, whoa. I was like, yeah, but listen, it has the same processor and the same memory. Essentially we now have a micro vendor trying to run like a screen, like a real screen.

Hampus Jakobsson: We were like, that's never gonna work because I know my ass is on the line. I'm like, oh my God, can we help out? Because like, we'd love doing stuff. So like, can we help him? And he's like, yeah, please. Then, completely randomly, again, were just hardworking. We just put our minds together and said, let's try to build something in this. Very luckily we figured out something smart. When we get to meet them, we need his boss and he says like, can you do this? And we demo it. The boss is just looking at it, staring at the screen and was like, wow, this is amazing. We're like, yeah. Okay, cool. He's, they were like, how much do you want to get paid for it? We didn't want to work in the old phones. We just want to help our friend. We w we just essentially wanted them to say, we'll get it.

Hampus Jakobsson: Thank you very much. We'll pay you. Bye-bye because we felt mobile phones, year 2001, nothing's going to happen here. It's going to be the boring ever. We just said, well, we thought about the biggest projects we've ever done that paid us $50,000. We looked this Sony, Ericsson guy, big shot in the eye. Just like, you don't have to pay us 50,000 bucks. And he was like 50,000 bucks. You mean per, like per phone model? Or I don't really like, oh, he doesn't get it. Like he thinks it's going to be. So were like, yeah. Per phone model as in, just like go away. Right. This is like, it's gonna be really expensive. What's what we thought. Okay. I guess you're going to be paid. You need like, you know, NRI. And we're just like, looked at it. Like, I didn't know, NRI. I don't understand what he's saying.

Hampus Jakobsson: He was like, I mean, integration services and like, yeah, exactly. Okay. And you're going to charge normal fees. I'm like, yeah. I know. Just like, what's this guy doing? I said, okay, I'll get back to you with a suggestion. Okay, great. The, like the friend of us and the, his boss walks out, I'm like, okay, I don't really know what happens. This guy gets back to us and says, yeah, we want to build like 10 phones the first year. Then, you're going to pay ? Obviously 50,000 bucks per phones, that's $500,000. Plus then like, I think it was 60, $70 per hour for the integration service. We expect like, whatever, were like 5,000 hours or whatever, but we just look at this number and we're like, they're going to pay us crazy amount of money. We felt maybe even if mobile phones are done and nothing's going to happen ever, like, why not do this project?

Hampus Jakobsson: We're helping our friends. Like, we're going to be paid any men's amount of money. Which means that after that, we can just do whatever we want, because I mean, they're going to end up paying us, like a million dollars over a year or something, which is just insanity. And that's kinda what happened. Like were 10 people, worked for here, got a million dollars. The thing is that sounds like a lot of money, but if you're 10 people, you kind of need a million dollars to pay your salary. We we, but for us, were students. It was just crazy. That, just that whole thing just snowballed to be us shipping in more than 13, 14% of all the world's phones from seven Erickson, from Motorola, from Nokia, from Samsung. Like, we ended up working at Google. We just ended up working with everybody. It was just, I don't know, we had a view that you just be, try to hire people that we felt were hard workers and serious, and really smart and really fun to work with.

Hampus Jakobsson: We just felt, we're going to be pretty frugal. We're not going to like be silly and fly business class and buy, chairs for the office that $50,000 or whatever. We're just going to be like, if you need a chair, you to get a chair. Right. You don't need champagne just because it's Friday. It's just like, we're students. Like we don't cost anything. Like we have literally zero budgets for things before. Not just scale a company to 108 people with offices in Tokyo and Taipei and wow. So, and Chicago and San Francisco and stuff, and it was just like crazy. And it was really crazy. I think I learned so much and some of the things I learned by asking why people so just ended up asking for help the thing, which I think is a thing. The other thing I learned was actually through reading a lot of books.

Hampus Jakobsson: I think the reason for that is I think that there now it's changed a bit, but I think that back then, if you're 25 and you ask for advice, like, how am I going to be a good leader? I think that back then, this is like 2005 or 2010. Even, maybe there's nobody takes you seriously. Like people would just look at like how you're going to be a good leader. They're like, yeah. I don't know, like, do an MBA and just like do an MBA. I don't want to do an MBA. They're like, no, I mean, spend a couple years in the military. I was like spending a place in the military. Like I have this problem now. It's not that the back then in 2 0 5 or like slightly later, it's not that there were like amazing coaches for 25 year olds. People ever expected you to be, kind of a silver back and have a grownup in the room and all of it.

Hampus Jakobsson: And we'd had nothing. It just ended up being like, okay, who's written anything about this. You just, you find all those books and you read them and you just try to pick it apart, then learn everything. There's so many of those books where it was just extraordinary. I don't remember. I think it was good to great was one of those books where by date, by scholars of Jim Collins, I remember like the first time I got it and started reading it and I just felt, this is, I just wish I read this two years ago. It's just so good. It just explains exactly what I've been going through. What of course, what I didn't understand is if it were a tears earlier, I probably would have said, what's this business book, like, this is just meaningless. Like, this is not a real problem. I think every single book I ended up reading was like a book where I just wished I read it that Harley a year earlier.

Hampus Jakobsson: I think that most of them of course wouldn't have work. There were so many of those books. I just, I just felt this is the truth, capital T truth, and took a lot of time for me to pick it apart and realize that it's not the truth. This is like somebody smart, summarized it. Yeah, like it's like part of it was true. Then part is probably true now. And that's like, that's what it is. That's career-wise I ended up reading a lot and learning a lot. Randomly, we got acquired by Blackberry. They were the top of the world, biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world back then 2010. They had realized suddenly that 2010, they realized that, apple is starting to beat them. Like apple is now integrating. You can do like email on your phone, which now sounds like I'm born in like the seventies, like in the 18th century when I say that, but it was literally like around, I think it was 2009 or 2000.

Hampus Jakobsson: It was actually 2010. I think we're an apple seed. They said, we're going to support Microsoft exchange, which means like people who were not people who were business, people could get like, read their email on their phone. Everything that scared the Blackberry. Cause previously all other phones were kind of a bit of a toy, like for business. Suddenly like they felt this is going to happen. I think what was weird about it is that what apple, what Blackbird didn't do is Blackberry kind of didn't double down on strengths. It was not that they said we're going to 10 X business. They essentially said we have to become an entertainment company as well. Which was very strange in hindsight. I get it part too because Blackberry phones were very dull. I think people kind of felt why would have a boring phone when I come up like a funny fun phone.

Hampus Jakobsson: First they acquired us and ethic was acquisition. The cos ne you want to run a mergers and acquisition for me. You went like buy companies for me. I said, Nope, I have no idea about this. Like, I, I know science because my parents and brothers are scientists. I know engineering, software development, sales, finance, and acquisitions. I don't know anything about like nothing. I love spreadsheets, but I hate other people's spreadsheets. So, acquiring company means you have to read a lot of other people's spreadsheets. I was like, no, I don't think I'm the right person. This wonderful, funny man who I really like Michael . He was like, well, either you do that or either the general manager of this unit, two to 300 people. I was like, I don't want to be the general manager this year. I really don't like, I read it. I want to be that.

Hampus Jakobsson: He said, he said, I know, okay, when do I have to decide? Well, you know, it's been it's tomorrow. So I was like, okay. I have to tell you tonight, if I'm going to run them in a frame, I was like, yeah. Okay. So I'll run a mini. I realize I'm going to do this approximately like a week probably before they realized that it, I don't know what I'm doing. I ended up doing it for roughly two years. It was amazing. I ended up two years after two years actually quit because they started trying to out apple. I had, we had worked with literal land Google and some, so all of these players who, since 2007, try to out apple, and you can out do apple in many things, but you can't out apple them. Like that's the stupidest. Interesting, interesting. It was one and it ended up like, I ended up having all of these conversations and conference calls and meetings with people high up the high-end like up and down the ladder at Blackberry, I was like, we're just being dumb and dumber.

Hampus Jakobsson: Blackberry had never, I think, faced a challenge, which was like this kind of challenge, like an existential challenge where they weren't the smart people in the room. They had that always been like the best. Even if the beavers there were small, that always been the best. Like Motorola was their previous only competitor in a sense of north America. A Motorola has always had always been very different for them. So they just knew everything. There were that, the problem was when somebody came in and like, when I came in and said, you're worth, then it wasn't her appreciated. So, and nobody fired a firearm or anything because when you're an M and a, nobody tries to fire you for telling the truth, people are just like, oh, it's one of DMA, MNA, dyed dudes. Like, but after like couple of months of that in the end, I mean, I worked there for one and a half year and had an amazing time.

Hampus Jakobsson: After like the three next month, I just start feeling that, no, I mean, this is not going to go anywhere. Like this is like, I'm just going to be fighting these people and telling them things they don't want to hear. I got the game more and more kind of polarizing, we, my opinions as well. Essentially I, I just, one day I felt like I'm just going to resign. They said, yeah, you can reassign your stay. Or for this project integration with this company and you can leave. To summarize essentially career wise after that. It shortest way as I started angel investing and the reason it was really because when you're an M and a they're like you would buy companies, right? You see that I had started a company and I had bought out a company and I just met all these amazing people, like these amazing people who build interesting companies and interesting technologies and engineering communities or whatever.

Hampus Jakobsson: I just felt that I, I wanted to get back into it again. Also I felt that I didn't really know where to start. Like, what am I going to do? I ended up just feeling, I'm just going to help people. I'm just going to meet them, hang out with them, give people advice. If I can give advice. I don't, I don't think I can give advice, but maybe I can do introductions for them to customers or something. What happens, of course, if you end up meeting a person a couple of times and you liked them and they're raising a round, like you end up saying, yeah, I can invest maybe. I ended up investing in startups and interesting. So did like invested roughly. It's like, I think to date now I've done a hundred and something companies. It was, I mean, some of them have been amazing and lot of them are long gone and dead little, some had been acquired all over the place.

Hampus Jakobsson: It was amazing because I think for me, it allowed me essentially to kind of get, to see the rug through a lot of people's eyes, which, because, I mean, you get to work with extraordinary people all across the globe. Who's trying to tackle really hard problems. None of them are tethered to anything because like, when you work at, whatever apple or Google or Motorola or any one of our customers, like any of them. Yeah. Your part, your cog in a big thing, right? Like when you're a founder, you can just change. Like you can change what the company does tomorrow, or you can hire anybody want, like, there's just so much freedom. I mean, I'm not saying freedom as in, we can do whatever you want, but like degrees of freedom. I think jokingly, I always try to say to people, the amazing thing we've been entrepreneur, this is not me.

Hampus Jakobsson: This is actually for a living, but you can work any 60 hours you want during the week. It's just like, it's not that you get more free time. It's just like, you get to choose a bit more. I think it was really extraordinary because I got to meet all these people. I think the thing it did for me as well is that it's kind of, I started seeing the world very differently. I started realizing all these things that I hadn't thought about before, because suddenly, like I had to kind of help people with challenges I'd never had. Somebody could have said like, how do I think about, I don't know, like how do I tell my colleagues the truth? I was like, w what do you mean? Like, I mean, you just tell them the truth and they're like, no, you can't tell people the truth.

Hampus Jakobsson: Cause they would just, they can just throw you out if she tells me certain things. It was amazing because then I was like, okay, interesting. I don't feel this at all. Like I tell people what I think there's been other people, this person is not unique. There must be other people who have this problem or proclivity or whatever you would call it. That was great because then I can talk to all the other founders I worked with, or I could read a lot of books about it, interview people. I did do a couple of podcasts. They did a lot of things to just try to solve problems for the people that I was working with. And for me it was extremely educational. Part of it, like I know of course a lot is, was reading. One of the books I've bumped into then was the mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick.

Hampus Jakobsson: It was one of, it was an extraordinary book because what Rob did Patrick realized was when he was building a mobile app, he was building a cookie app and he was thinking, I'm going to do the cooking app for the iPad when it was pretty new. He thought, who do I know that cooks a lot. My mom. He called up his mom and said, Hey mom, I'm making a cooking app for the iPad. His mom was like, oh, that's amazing. That's great, Rob. He was like, oh, we, you use it. She was like, of course I would use it. It was like, got us customer, like in 10 seconds. Right. You started building this app and essentially just runs it by his mom all the time. It takes him a couple of months until they realized that his mom would never use this app. She's only super happy to be working with our son.

Hampus Jakobsson: She's super positive to, be involved in his life. He realizes that's what everyone does when everybody would anybody like, does anything, you try to ask a person who just confirmed that, what you're doing is okay. And that's exactly the wrong thing. He wrote this amazing book, which was like a user manual of how to not talk to people who will tell you that your rights, but talk to people who will tell you're wrong and then how to handle it. I think it was great because previously I didn't have that problem, but I worked with people that have that problem. It was really like really informational for me. Yeah. I think what happened after that, then after that, I ended up working at a VC fund in Berlin, which was a deep science fund. Like very deep and complex questions about how do you generate energy for the whole planet?

Hampus Jakobsson: Or how do you grow in and VAT or whatever. These like really fundamental questions about what is life and stuff like that. I think that was really interesting because then I had to start thinking about subjects, which is one of those computer games when you play and you're kind of, you're gone or whatever it is like you're playing civilization or whatever you have to think about, like, how do you run a planet? Like how do you run a country? How do you run like a city? Because like when you're thinking about deep science, sometimes you have to really think, how can you generate electricity in one part of the country and then transport it to another, how to actually transport electricity. I have no idea. You just have to figure it out. That forced me to read completely different books and talk to completely different people and about certain things which are science, but a lot about life.

Hampus Jakobsson: Just like, why do people do things? What drives people? An amazing book I bumped into then was finite and infinite games by James Carse and a book, which has an amazing story as well. What happened with that book is that James Carse was, he is an American. He is writing this book about essentially, how to live life. That's kind of the, it's a very simple subject. He goes to France. He spends a lot of times in sitting in France, typing out this amazing book. He really thinks it through. Then he flies back to New York. We just publisher and says, I've got the first draft. So were just like, oh, cool. Like, when handed over James looks in his bag, I can find my manuscript. I was like, oh, do you think you might've forgot on the, okay. I was like, no, forgot it in Paris.

Hampus Jakobsson: Instead of just like, I don't know, jumping on a building or anything, it just essentially gets home, takes a typewriter or a computer. Types, everything he remembers more or less over like a weekend just feels, I'm just going to write whatever I remember. He goes to his publisher, like, this is it like, I don't remember most of it, but this is what I remember. The cool thing about the book is that it's, it has no references. Like, it's a, like, it's a manual about like, life it's like, what is life? Like, how do you live life? No zero academic things, no references, because he doesn't remember his references. Like he doesn't remember anything, like, all of the things that are uninteresting, it has rubber that he only remembers like the core and that makes it tiny book and it dense. I mean, I think the technical term is called it's dense.

Hampus Jakobsson: Like it's just, it's really dense and it's really good. Like, you read it and you realize, how can you re like you realize that these nobody writes like this, nobody writes a book, like, which only has the point that because you know that if he would spend like two more weeks or two more months, he will to, you know, tell you how those stories, you know, fact check. He doesn't have the time. He's just sick of this book now. Just write only the point and he's done. He's like, I don't think it's like 120 pages or whatever. It's amazing anyways, work at this deep science fund and that the science fund. Now we're at like it's four years ago, three or four years ago. I just working with all these amazing international people, I get to meet like Nobel laureates and like super impressive people that are trying to change the world.

Hampus Jakobsson: I realized that sun one day, I just felt that so many things that I'm in, that's a powerful people. I don't want any live powerfully put like weak people. Like, we're like a venture fund puts a spotlight on whatever they think is interesting. They say, we're gonna invest in Bitcoin and mobile gaming, whatever, and they then that's the spotlight, right? They they'll go after that thing. The thing is like, this is fun. I was an app, which is an amazing fun and awesome people. The spotlight was like sorrow solve hard problems, but some of the hard problems, I just felt this is actually not really relevant problem because we are obviously in a world right now where we have a climate crisis. I mean, this is where like, so this is 20 18, 20, 19, 20, or sorry, 20 18, 20 19. It is. I started realizing that we're investing and spending time on and focusing on and writing articles.

Hampus Jakobsson: We're working a lot of subjects, not only us the fund, but like the world, the politicians, the, everybody on subjects that are not that important. If we're not solving these climate problems. In the beginning, this was like a little itchy thing. You have like a little exit on your back that irritates you. After awhile, it just turns out to be like a full, like your body is just a rash. Like I could just, if I were meeting an entrepreneur, working on like mental health and I'd worked a lot in mental health, I was just like, mental health will not matter at all. Unless we fix climate change. Like, I didn't want to be a person. I was like in the meeting, I was like really caring. I was waiting for to help them. You go to the next meeting and people are saying, how do we make money?

Hampus Jakobsson: That is not dependent on countries. Like essentially different like Bitcoins indoctrined stuff. Right. I was like, that's the f*****g cares? Like, this is not going to be relevant unless we fix one of these problems. You go to the next person and they're working on cancer. And like, it's super important. Right. But I just felt cancer like seriously. Like if we have four plus degrees, it's going to be constant civil war and feminine. Like, I'm not going to be respectful of cancer. It's super important, but this person should spend their time on counselor because this person is a cancer genius, but I'm not a cancer genius. Like I shouldn't spend my time on this. Like I just can't anymore. That just became like more and more during 2019, I just got, I really felt either as to go off in a cabin in Orlando and read a fiction book and just stop reading the news and just hide from everything.

Hampus Jakobsson: The problem is I have three kids, so it's gonna be tricky to find any place to do that. There'll be a nice person, or I just essentially, just dive in the place I'm most afraid. I just realized that, when you drive on the highway and there's an accident and you just rubber duck and look at this accident, like you don't want to, but you can't not do it. You'd like, if you're not driving you're in the passenger seat, you check on your phone, like you type the highway and just like what happened. Right. And just completely meaningless. I think that there too, I was at this point, whereas like I was staring on this highway, I was staring at the climate problem and I see what I'm doing. I'm seeing him staring at this accident about to happen and happening in real time. Either I just like, throw my phone out the window and just stop reading the news and stop looking at the car crash and just say, I'm not part of this.

Hampus Jakobsson: Like, I'm not like I'm to, I'm just not going to do this. I'm just gonna think about it. Or I stopped by the highway, like stopped by the people and tried to help them. And I go like full. I just go, like, I'm not a nurse, I'm not a doctor, but I have to become one now. Like I just have to here now it's been all my time and dress, work requirement change. And essentially that's what happened. I stood by that like mental road, like fork in the road and realized, okay, I'll just have, spend all my time in class. I started thinking about how, and I built a little mental framework about how to, depending on who you are, how do you try to move a subject and just try to think through that problem in general, like, B build a couple of build, like a thought process of what can a person do about any problem, like give cancer or climate change through that framework then took my self through the framework, like step-by-step and then got to the point where I stared at that point, they realized it's either like a journalist or kind of the climate and venture capitalist.

Hampus Jakobsson: I have invested in 150 plus companies for 10 years. I guess that's like actually where I might be good maybe. Started this fund with two friends and open up shop June 20. We must in 15 companies. Far three in California, one in Netherlands, three in UK, three in Germany, one in Denmark, two in Sweden. And it's amazing.

Kevin Horek: And that's a pale blue dot, correct.

Hampus Jakobsson: That's pebble it off. Yeah.

Kevin Horek: Walk us through some of the companies that pale blue.is invested in and then maybe give us a why you invested in them and anything else you want to talk about them?

Hampus Jakobsson: Yeah, I mean, so we lived in 15 different companies and I think that what I find interesting is I think that a lot of people tend to be very paralyzed when it comes to climate change. Like, I mean, for obvious reason, but I think that it's a lot. I think that people are paralyzed when they're thinking about what can I do. Personally, I think that what people shouldn't do is that people shouldn't like, we can all think about what we can do less than like we can fly less or drive an internal combustion car less and eat less meat. There are a lot of things we can do less than, but I think what I think we ended up doing a lot as being ashamed. People focus a lot of like, okay, I'm just going to have to do nests. If we just do less, I think after I like life becomes kind of meaningless.

Hampus Jakobsson: I think that, of course me, not even me, not driving internal combustion engine, car, not flying those things are not vital to life. I think that when you start going down the line and realize like every single thing you do actually contributes to climate change. Like everything you buy, like if you get kids just everything then like, why are you alive? Like maybe the biggest contribution you can do is commit suicide. I don't think that's very, I don't think that argument is very good. I personally hate when people say, oh, the worst contributor to climate change you can do is get kids. When people say that night, especially if I'm on stage, I just say, what, if none of us gets kids, we don't need to solve climate change. Like we can just do whatever we want because there's enough can be anybody around. Yep.

Hampus Jakobsson: I think it's like, some of these arguments are just so dumb when I feel like if it's like, when you just do the math on something, but you don't really realize what it means for like people. Right? So, so I think that, so we do some and look at some companies that are like do less than things, but generally we tend to do stuff that tries to solve a problem by letting people kind of, I'm not going to say live their life as it is. Like, not normally, but like trying to say, if you want to go from a to B or if you want to eat an amazing tasty thing or whatever it is, like you should be able to do it. You should be able to do a 22 and one, you should be doing 2030. You should be doing 2040. That's kind of the way we think about stuff.

Hampus Jakobsson: We don't think about if somebody says we have a cotton farm and we want to do less like footprint with academ farm, we have less climate effect. We just feel like, I'm not sure because like there might be that we shouldn't have cattle farms whatsoever in 2040. The question is, can you figure out something which is amazing to eat? People will think it's really tasty, but it's not negative for the world at all. That would best, but of course that's a hard problem. So it might be that it's impossible. I think that, some of the companies listed are keep doing what you're doing, but choose a better route. It's going to be, it's going to be cheaper. It's going to be more convenient. It's going to be healthier for you. Like we have to, the person buying it. They can't say I hate, but I know it's good for climates, or it can't be a CFO of a company saying this is going to cost four times as much, but I need to do it.

Hampus Jakobsson: It's because I'm flying. It's just like, some people will, but most people won't and then it's not going to work. A couple of companies we'd done on that. It's like, we've done a company called for example, one company called better fish and benefits is what they do is that they take seaweed, algae out of the ocean. They know everything about I'll do. One of the founders has a documentary film on algae. Farming has just done lots of his years in the world and see what analogy and do the person is a chef and a, like a food scientist. Notice how like, thinking about taste. Yeah. It's, there are perfect, there are super combo. The thing is, if you take kelp or seaweed or any of these, like, big things, it's like, you can take, it's like, think about it as a tree. Like if you say like, oh, it's a big Chestnut tree.

Hampus Jakobsson: Like, you can take the chestnuts, of course you can take the leaps, you can take the barks, you can take the twigs. All of these things have different properties that taste differently than different, like things you can do with them. Obviously the same thing. Like, if you take one of these like big things, and then of course on top of that, there's not only chestnuts. There's like hundreds of different species of algae just as trees. Jacob he'd like, he knows like all of these species and he knows some of the properties there's no to tastes necessarily, but there's some, a lot of communities in the world eats algae one or another. There's something you just know like, oh, this one is like, very good for this. Or it's good for that. Very tricky to do this with her expensive, whatever. And then Denise, there's a founder.

Hampus Jakobsson: She's like, okay, let's try that out. The first product they made like delicate tests and like, caviar kind of thing, but made out of seaweed. Not like a complicated thing because caviar kind of tastes like seaweed in a sense, but it's it really like, well, you've made kind of luxury caviar, but there's no fish involved. Right. Right. The second product that made is canned tuna and it tastes and feels like canned tuna. It's like, it is so close that when we met them, they send us a box of like tuna, Mayo, corn sandwiches, like, the classic kind I'm trying to assign just like in bio and supermarkets. Yeah. Send us a bunch of those. We unwrapped them. I took a bite and let's like vegan. It says vegan may on it. I was like, okay, it's totally fine with me. Take a bite. I just spit it out immediately.

Hampus Jakobsson: I'm like, literally like in the room, my two colleagues, I was like, my colleagues were like, what's wrong. They, this is tuna. And they're like, what do you mean? They send us tennis hunters. Do they think it's funny or something? This is tuna narcotics. Like, why is it tuna? Yeah. This is tuna. Like, like opened it, the sandwich. I don't think it is too much. I know there's like a couple of seconds later. My two colleagues start biting into it. They're like, is it? We just started seeing it started eating these sandwiches and like, I don't know. It's like, oh my God, they made something which is exact like tuna. The cool thing about it is that tuna, it's not super good for people. Like it contains a lot of heavy minerals. Tunas are big fish. They, a lot of small fish, small fees eat even smaller fish.

Hampus Jakobsson: Soon as there's anything like, I dunno, mercury in the ocean, the small feats eat, the fish, eats them and it just like gets higher and higher concentration. The higher up you go. Some of these bigger fish have a lot of it. Secondly, tuna, you'd go out and start her on a big animal on the sea, pretty nasty. Also you have a big petrol boat doing it. Like you have big fridges on the sea where you throw these two names so that they won't get bad. Like you have all of the things we know is bad for climate. You have a big, I mean, a boat is like a big ass car. It's just like, it's spewing out oil. Right. Secondly, have a huge fridge or freezer. And the freezer is open. Like, it's not that it's a big door on it. It's open because you just throw in efficient.

Hampus Jakobsson: Like, if anyone has had our freezer open, we know it's bad. Like we just like, this is way it's the majority, this is this, but on the sea all the time. Like pretty like, if we can replace it with something that's good. The other cool thing about seaweed is that seaweed. It is, it grows in the oceans and it's like, it just increases by diversity. It's like grateful fish. It's just like the whole place has got to end. It sucked down carbon from the sky, just like any plant. The crazy thing about this is that it's healthier for people. It doesn't contain mercury and stuff at the same extent that whatsoever it doesn't kill animals. It doesn't spew out a lot of petrol and freezers, refrigerants, whatever it regrows oceans. It's sucked down as carbon for the sky. It's cheaper to buy and make than to like, what's wrong with it.

Hampus Jakobsson: Like, there's just like, there's nothing wrong with it. Those, when we meet those kinds of companies, we just feel like this is too good to be true. Are there a couple of those companies when I think it's so fascinating, because when I feel like when you're going into a problem, seeing climate change as a problem, like if you think, oh no, we can't use steel. Then we can't build this thing. Of course you can't build that thing. If you go in and say, Hey, what if we can make it out of something that has a lot of carbon in it? Like, so when we make this thing, we have to suck down carbon from sky and dill it out of carbon. And then like, that's crazy. If it works, that means every time we build this, you would need more carpet. Can we do that every time we build this thing, we actually sucked our car from the sky and then suddenly realize, oh my God, carbon fiber is really hard.

Hampus Jakobsson: Suddenly realize all these good things about it. Instead of coming in and saying, we can, you kind of say, what is, and I think that's, it's so cool with some of these companies. I mean, we've done 50 of them so I can talk forever, share, keep going. This is awesome. The company would done fight a forum, a UK company, this one, but a beneficials in Germany, finding out what they do is that when you, when we have plans, right, like in a normal times, potatoes and tomatoes and whatever we have tried to improve those since forever. Like, 14th century and going on, like, we try to make potatoes better. They think about these. Like we have hundreds of years or monks that are trying to cross breed these. They select the biggest ones that we do, all these things. Lo and behold, the last a hundred years, you have people like Monsanto would just say, Hey, we can just go into the DNA, which is rip it apart.

Hampus Jakobsson: We can make a new plant. The reason that worked was because almost everything that missent and those people did was that they changed the plan. Do you handle pesticides that you can spray it? They just said, we'll just make it really resilient to Roundup or something like that. Something really like a poison because when you plant it, if you failed with the editing and you spray, it doesn't matter because then it's going to die. Like, if you have like a Frank and monster corn, well, if you spray the whole field, it's going to die. So it doesn't matter. Like, it's fine. You can just, you can be pretty clumsy when you edit these things. Because the ones that are right, they're going to have the things you want, the ones that are not right. They're going to die. So not a problem. Now we know we don't want all these things prayed.

Hampus Jakobsson: We don't want these things. Like we don't, like some of these edits are brutal to like, to the soil. So, okay. We can't like, we can't crossbreed like the, amongst it, cause that's, what's going to take us anywhere. Like we can't get weeds to grow in salt soil. The problem is with climate change, is that because we have these storms, we get saltwater. On land, if you get saltwater in a rice Patty, well, I guess what, you can't go rice in it anymore because nothing knows, nothing loves salt, got nine groves. Most pens don't really cope with it. The question is, can you make wheat handle salt more? Well, if you're a 17th century monk, it's going to take you hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, if you're a though, well, you can do it maybe. The thing is, nobody wants your product because you have to spray out of this thing.

Hampus Jakobsson: There a way we can do precision editing? And what's super cool. What fighter for realized is that you can, but you have to go about it completely differently. The simplest way of explaining what to do is like, if you take a fiction book, like a comedian on reflection book, and then you have this crime novel and you went to remove, you can prove that you can change the story because then it's like, that's pretty brutal. And you're like thinner or something. You can just cut and paste chapters. That's what miss had to do. They just put in a new chapter route, got a whole chapter. It's going to be a really weird book. Do you want to remove, like you can think about what can we do now here? You say, I want to make it very hard to understand why she killed him in the book.

Hampus Jakobsson: Can we make it like, just really hard for the reader to get why the murder, she killed the dude in the book. You find every part of the book where they talk about intent and thoughts about why she killed him. You just take those sentences and you make them very hard to read you take, but you don't like put a new text. You take, you change the sentence order. You pick an, like, you move the sentence as far apart. You essentially, you just make it harder to read. By just like, not by throwing a new text, but by moving the text around and DNA like interpretation, like what happens in the cells of the body, it's high school students. Like if you have a book which is really hard to read, well, nobody's going to get it. We have DNA in the, in a plant during the body, which is not really easy to understand.

Hampus Jakobsson: Nothing happens. The body just goes, okay, I guess this is nothing that nuns continue. That means that you can remove traits, identified it from said, we can remove traits. How do we figure this out? They built an amazing, super complex machine learning solution that emulates all these different things that a DNA does and then looks at what's the smallest change you can do because you don't want to do the big changes to have a lot. There's a lot of problems if you do big changes, cause these are unpredictable. What's the, what's the key sentences in this book. Like, what way can we move this lettering around and word or surround and maybe move the sentence around a bit so that it's going to be really hard to read and then emanate that in like machine learning style and like in massive tests. We'll get a couple of versions.

Hampus Jakobsson: They say, okay, let's print this book. Like let's make a plant. Then make that plant. They test them this super smart way of verifying what they did and all the things they get in the, out on the plants that are growing. They take all that data and they move that back into the machine, learning other with infancy. This is what happens. They can just bloop this a couple of times. They figured out how to actually edit the genome of plants without doing anything brutal. Like you're going to be super high position. Very cool. Yeah. There are a lot of fun companies working with a lot of really fun people and it's super cool because some of these people there, I mean, I like what I love the most about what we do is that we get to meet and work with people who they know stuff and can do stuff that if I spent 20 years on it, I probably couldn't do what they're doing.

Hampus Jakobsson: Like they have, 20 plus years of the thing they do. Some of them, of course, they started this thing five years ago, whatever, but they're all uniquely capable of what they're doing. They might have to spend, 20 years in doing vegan tuna or whatever, but they have done stuff that means that they are, and they're focused. They're spending all the time, just like we did our first company. I think that's such a luxury because I am just spending time with people that I'm in awe of and live really I'm impressed by at the same time as I am in a lecture suspicion of being able to help them with it. Because when you invested in a hundred plus companies and build a couple of them yourself, I've done so many stupid things that I can see. Somebody's about to kind of drama to cliff and say, whoa, don't do that thing.

Hampus Jakobsson: Like I've done that thing. It's really useful to kind of have hurt yourself so many times before, or haven't been like with the other companies have seen people hurt. That's, it's a really wonderful thing to work with. Even if it's like very time consuming.

Kevin Horek: No, that's amazing, man. For people that maybe have some of these revolutionary ideas, how do they go about potentially getting a pale blue.to actually invest in them or get your attention?

Hampus Jakobsson: Yeah. It's actually, it's in a sense it's fairly easy. Like you can literally go to our webpage pale blue.to BC as in.com but.vc. Like on the page, there's a button you can click and you send in stuff to us. It's fairly easy. The thing I would say though, is, I mean, we receive a fair share of like infinite energy generation of machines. People are like, I came up with a thing. If you make a wheel spin and you do this, you could just print energy. Wow. It's really tricky because you can get our attention. The thing which I think is how do you actually bug down the thing you do to kind of its core and make it fairly easy to understand. So, if you're making something, which is crazy, amazing, energy generation or one of these things, we're probably not the right people. Like we are not energy scientists.

Hampus Jakobsson: Like none of us build the future director, at least not multiple times. Typically you have to think about how can you make it so that you get somebody interested in it. The thing is, even if you talk to like a deep science fund, like where are were before. I mean, it's not that like, even if you're a scientist, you don't want a paper sent to you. I usually recommend people to, it's kind of, trying to figure out what is, what I think I can do. What, like what's the thing. First of all, do it, like just don't write down the thing and say, I'm going to look for money. I think that we live in a very strange time where I think that a lot of people, like, if you take analogy with startups, because everybody thinks like startups is kind of normal or whatever.

Hampus Jakobsson: If you'd like to, let's say you send, were talking about writing a New York times bestseller. Like you think, I think I've got a New York times best seller. I mean, like, I think I got this amazing book and I'm a publisher, like pivot off the publisher. You contact me and say, Hey, I've got this amazing story. Like I like, it's really cool. I've seen like, I've seen it like your publisher. You're amazing. I love the front covers. I love like all the help you do. Like all the lists you're on. Can you help me? I feel like the first thing a publisher will tell you is like, yeah, just write a small draft and send over. I'm happy to read it. Right. Lot of people they say either a, I can tell you just like, what you, like, what do you want a million dollars in advance?

Hampus Jakobsson: I'm gonna write the book for you. I'm like, dude, I can't give you a million dollars. I don't know what the book you're. Right, right. Like I get asked a hundred times a day by people want to write a book for us and, get it into the news, like, getting onto the shelves. But my story is uniquely good. The thing is, what would you do? The thing that you would do that is, you write the first chapter or you write a novel, like you just try to boil down the simplest or you write a synopsis. You just say, this is the story. This is thought this is dangled. This is the unique part. You just try to boil it down. You contact the publisher and says, this is cool idea. What about this idea? Then, I would read it if it takes me 10 minutes to read, I would totally read the novel.

Hampus Jakobsson: I'd be like, I think this is a great novel. I think this is, it could be a really good book, but let's go. Of course, I'm going to figure out, do you have any grip whatsoever? Like, do what it means to write a book? Like, it's a lot of work. It's not like an oval. You can crunch out a weekend. I mean, writing a book, it's a year-plus project. Like, of course I'm going to ask about questions, right? Like what I recommend to people when they talk to a VC or any investor is just try to like boil down that synopsis or write a full, like, novel, like just start doing it. Just if you think, I think I can make a vegan vending machine, that hospitals and this, I was like, yeah, why don't you do it? No. Why do you need a million dollars?

Hampus Jakobsson: Why do you need a million dollars? Cause I needed like a high-end kitchen. I need a gourmet chef. I need vending machines. It's like, whoa, you don't need any of those things. You essentially need to go to hospital with stuff you made and you need to be able to sell those there. Maybe you shouldn't start at hospitals because hostels might be really tricky to get into. Like, people might not allow you to sell food at a hospital. Can you do it at a school? You're like, I don't want to go to school. I want to do a hospital. And I want to have increment check. I was like, no, just start by something easy. Do it at a party. Like just do something super simple. It's like, yeah, but I want a vending machine. Yeah. You just put up a shelf, maybe just like go to a university and just put up a shelf.

Hampus Jakobsson: The shelf, you put the food and you write a note, Hey, Venmo, me money. I cook those things and the picture itself, and you're standing like 20 meters, like 20 yards away from it and look at people and you just try to help out. Everybody's like, yeah, I want a million dollar first. It's like, no, you don't need to know. You can probably start doing it now. I think that's the thing I was trying to figure out this. Like, I, we just want, like, we just want somebody to just say, this is awesome and here's the money. Here's like a whole army of people behind you and we're going to help you. The only people who get that treatment is like, if Elon Musk wakes up tomorrow and says, he wants to build a railway company that has like, luxury vacations to Canada, I needed the first rail starts from Wisconsin.

Hampus Jakobsson: People were just like, here's a million bucks. Here's $10 million. Here's a hundred million dollars. Just go build it to get on. If you're not Elon Musk, people would just say, okay, like, have you thought through this thing, why would you take the train from Wisconsin to Canada on vacation? I think that I think the easiest way of doing it's just make a small thing, get a group of people around you get something together that kind of works. When you have those things, you can usually boil it down to a couple of slides, stupid, super stupid dumb slides, just like keynote PowerPoint, kind of Google slides. Just explain what is the problem I'm trying to solve. I'm trying to solve the problem. That's going to go to the hospital. There's no vegan food, no food is healthy for you. You're sick. You need healthy food and you can't have people standing around because people are in hospitals, 24 7.

Hampus Jakobsson: So we're making a vending machine. By the way, now you're thinking, oh, you can buy it like, from whatever door dash or delivery or whatever. No you can. You explain why, like you tried. This is why you need a vending machine. We've done it. We've done it differently. And Hey, we sold this many meals. Now we're scaling up. I think people read it, go like, this is interesting. Let's talk to these people.

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's actually really good advice. And I think you're right. Many people overcomplicate something or don't try something simple at first, just to see if what they're trying to do is even viable at like a simple, basic level. I think that's actually really good.

Hampus Jakobsson: Yeah. I think you can do that about absolutely everything. I think that I I've personally done this for things that I'm like, I know nothing about, like, I think a lot of people would say immediately, if you're a fusion scientist, you can start a fusion reactor company. Like yes, of course you could. Right. You could also start something completely different. Like you don't have to spend 20, 30 years of your life with this background. I think that I've had personal experience of this in a really fun way, because I had a couple of times I felt, I want to learn about this subject and I can read a lot of books, but I really like talking to people about it. You're running into these people. They don't realize the best we can do that is either a you're printing to be students. You just say, I'm writing a thesis about vending machines in hospitals and legislation risks.

Hampus Jakobsson: And can I interview you? We like, just like I did. He fell when he got the job in Paris, people were just like, okay, I'll talk to you. It's like nicer a student, right? Like it's part of your work. Nobody's going to check out if you actually go to Columbia or anything, people would just be like, yeah, you're a student. Like, I mean, unless you're obnoxious and like ask crazy stuff or something, people would just be like, I'm going to be nice to you if you're nice to them and don't waste their time and the other way to do it, which I've done a couple of times, I've been a student quote, unquote, quite a lot of times it's thing I've done is I started a podcast or something. So, so 10 years ago I thought like, how does governance work in the future? What I did is like, I just felt I got to figure it out.

Hampus Jakobsson: I started a podcast which is called a governance, future of governance of the future. Sorry. I just interviewed people who work with governance problems and like, how do you make sure that things don't, like how do you coordinate a lot of people? How do you coordinate country? The thing is these people they're not being asked a lot. So it was amazing. People were able to talk to amazing people. I did another podcast where I thought, I want to talk to science fiction authors about how they designed their worlds. Because if you read a science fiction book, think about how extraordinary of time that goes into like the thing, which is not the story. Like all the, like how do you transport yourself? How do people eat? How does like the job market work? How does punish it works whatever in the future. I realized when you read a science fiction book is like all of those things.

Hampus Jakobsson: A lot of times we don't really care about them. They're not like we can smile when they happen, but it's not that re like spend a lot of time on it. So, so an author thought about that for sometimes an hour, sometimes hundred hours. It's like two places in the book it's mentioned any nice. These people must like, they must have thought about it. I want to talk about it. I really want to know how to boot world bidding. I did, I started a podcast and it's like, essentially the whole question is I wouldn't talk to you about the world. You've built not about the story, not about the characters and the cool thing. What happened is the editors and publishers. They loved it because they don't want you to talk to them about the story because they don't want a podcast where they tell the story, because then people don't read the book, but you talking to the authors about the world, go knock yourself out.

Hampus Jakobsson: This is amazing. Go the author. They love talking about it because they've thought about it for thousands of hours and nobody seems to care. They really want to talk to you about it. I ended up talking to like some of the most amazing science fiction authors in the world. And it was amazing. Like you emailed the editor and say, I want to talk to and lucky about this. I like, oh, sure. Let's book a conference call with you. I was like, are you kidding me? Like, it wasn't that hard. And like, that was amazing. I did it for a year and a half, but then after that, I just felt like I, I, I, I was like, this is almost a good, like, I don't know how to take it to the next level. I just quit and felt like, I just felt so happy what it is.

Hampus Jakobsson: And I didn't want to feel it. I didn't want to, like, I just felt it was done. So I quit. I think that's, that is the thing you can, you don't have to like bring together the 80 and raised like $3 million. You can just start by, like, let's just research the problem. Let's try to do it. Then, maybe we are able to do it without anything at all. Maybe then when we figured out, maybe then we raised money.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. I think that's amazing advice, but I know we're sadly out of time. So how about we close the.

Hampus Jakobsson: Seats? You mean?

Kevin Horek: Well that too.

Hampus Jakobsson: Yeah.

Kevin Horek: Well, you're working on it. With a bunch of companies, but let's close the show with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, pale blue dot and any other links you want to mention.

Hampus Jakobsson: These, these things, these places to find me is probably on Twitter. I that's definitely the easiest place I would say. I am H a J a K as in Hampus Jacob's son with a K I'm on Twitter. And I, I'm pretty easy to find. And I interact with peoples. If people write me something, I usually just respond to them. If they say, I want to email you, I usually just give them my email. It's not part of that. If people say, Hey, I want to take you out for dinner and have like a three hour conference call with you. I say, Hey, can we just chat over, like over her, like Twitter or whatever, like, we don't have to meet. You don't know anything. I'm just going to waste your time maybe. It did want to know more. We pickle dots. It is pale blue.to DC.

Hampus Jakobsson: You can, like, you can see the, most of the companies that are announced, like some of the companies we haven't published because the companies have said they want to publish a debt. We have we're opening up our research. It's like, you can find our notion where we publish a lot of the research we do, where we go through. Like, we did a big piece on the seaweed analogy. For example, we've done, we're done one a whew, we're doing what we've done. We're doing one hour seminar. And we just publish what we found. We just go like, this is what we found. This is what we thought. Super happy to talk to you about it. The one reason we do that is because, like if you don't a lot research and something, it's pretty retaining that it's not getting used. One of the reasons is we just feel like let's just, publish it at least.

Hampus Jakobsson: So yeah. That then you can find that there as well. Yeah. I think those are the best places.

Kevin Horek: Very cool at this. Well, again, I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to be on the show and look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your night.

Hampus Jakobsson: Great. Thanks. You too.

Kevin Horek: Thank you. Alright. That was great. What'd you guys think? Good.

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