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This week on episode 4, we talked about:
- Jake's train station
- A disappointing dialog at the end of Diablo 3
- What’s so incredibly great about hoodies
- Teddy Ruxpin, the original edtech product for kids
- Curiosity Labs, a Character portfolio company building educational AI companions for kids
- The founding story of YouTube Kids
- Getting new product ideas from real-world customer behavior
- Two different ways to pitch the same company
- Should founders follow “best practices” when pitching investors or try to stand out?
- Fathom’s Series A
- How we found Fathom (and then decided to invest)
- Authenticity in sales
- Why we go out of our way to pitch ourselves to founders
- Our Design Sprint with Fathom
- Almond butter in oatmeal
- A great book: Against the Gods
- And much more
📩 Get an email about every episode at JakeAndJZ.com
💸 Learn more about our seed fund Character Capital
Chapters
00:00 A diabolical dialog box
03:54 The importance of throughline
05:45 Where is Jake's sweatshirt?!
07:39 How sweatshirts work
09:13 Teddy Ruxpin
11:24 Building the pitch for Curiosity Labs
17:04 How a side project became YouTube Kids
22:49 A better way to pitch VCs
33:56 How Fathom got to Series A
40:30 How VCs do outbound sales
45:48 How authenticity shows up in products
53:21 Good beans
57:14 An extended self-congratulatory ad for Character and Design Sprints
03:54 The importance of throughline
05:45 Where is Jake's sweatshirt?!
07:39 How sweatshirts work
09:13 Teddy Ruxpin
11:24 Building the pitch for Curiosity Labs
17:04 How a side project became YouTube Kids
22:49 A better way to pitch VCs
33:56 How Fathom got to Series A
40:30 How VCs do outbound sales
45:48 How authenticity shows up in products
53:21 Good beans
57:14 An extended self-congratulatory ad for Character and Design Sprints
Creators and Guests
What is Jake & JZ?
Weekly podcast about startups, design, marketing, technology… and anything else we’re thinking about. 🤓
Hosted by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, co-founders of Character Capital and bestselling authors of Sprint and Make Time.
JZ (00:00)
When you texted me a couple seconds ago to say that you were hustling to the train station, I was like, my God, where is he? Where is he going? for those of you out there you may not know that Jake lives on rather small there's not a train station. I mean, there is a train station. There is not a normal conventional train station on the
Jake (00:15)
There is.
you
No, there isn't there. It's probably the topic for a much wider ranging episode or series, but there is a, there is a railroad track on our farm and there is, there is a little train station building, which is where my office is. So that's, that's where I am. That's where I am as we record. I am in the train station, which is, does not on the inside look a lot like what you think a train station looks like.
JZ (00:26)
Ha ha ha.
And that's where you're sitting right now, right? Yeah.
Once my what you had said, I was like, okay, yeah, he's just on his way to the office.
Jake (00:51)
Well, I was going to tell you about my experience recently with the Diablo three. as a video game that I've been playing with my son and he's, he's been sick. He's, but we, all got COVID for the first time. Hate it. I absolutely hate it. And we've been slow to recover. during this slow recovery time, we've been every day for an hour or so my son and I will schedule time back. All right, let's go play video games.
So I've been playing this game Diablo three and it's a very highly produced video game. I have to say it's a bit Diablo four is out now. So people are probably like, if they're gamers, you're yawning right now. But for you and I, John, this is like very cutting edge, you know, and it has.
JZ (01:28)
You
Especially for me, I haven't touched a video game in like 20 years.
Jake (01:34)
Yeah, right, right. You'd be blown away. I was blown away. It's got these cut scenes and a cut scene. Again, if you're, if you're not a gamer, the cut scene is a video or a bit of storyline that shows up in between gameplay. So you're playing the game, you reach a certain point, know, beat a boss or something and be level. And then there's a cut scene and actually fun side fact, the very first.
JZ (01:48)
Yeah. Okay, cool.
Jake (02:01)
cut scenes are in Pac-Man. They're like after you beat a level, there's like a little like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, you know, showing something happening that you were, weren't playing, but you're just watching. so in Diablo three, there's these big cinematic cut scenes. It's computer animation, but it's almost real. It looks like real people and the game is divided up into acts.
JZ (02:05)
No way. yeah. Yeah.
Jake (02:24)
it was very pretentious. It's like act one, act two, act three. you're just hacking and slashing and trying to kill all these sort of demons and things. And you make your way up and you beat Diablo and it's really tough. And he's going back and forth into like hell and you have to follow him into hell and he comes back. And anyway, and then we beat him and then there's another level, there's act six and we're like, wow. You know, the end of act six, what's going to happen? It's probably going to be.
JZ (02:48)
You
Jake (02:50)
All the bosses together or something. So we make our way through. get to what appears to us to be a really tough henchman. we beat that boss. And we go and talk to this, guy, a character you talk to you, like a, a non-player character and NPC. talked to this guy and this dialogue comes up and it says, basically you've congratulations. You finished the game. It was just a dialogue.
JZ (03:12)
A dialogue.
Jake (03:13)
And yeah, and after all that, know, no, usually two, three, four minutes of cinematic, hyper realistic animation. We finished the entire game. It's a dialogue box.
JZ (03:24)
What were the buttons? Like we talking OK cancel here or?
Jake (03:28)
Okay. Okay. Yeah. I think it was, I think it was just okay. I think all you could do was just kind of say, you didn't have an option.
JZ (03:34)
Yeah, because how would you cancel that? I do not accept the conclusion of this game.
Jake (03:40)
Yeah, man. And I don't know, that was just really an interesting, experience.
JZ (03:43)
What a let down.
Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of something that we talk about a lot, which is the importance of through line. And we usually talk about it like a through line from the marketing, you know, what a customer learns about a product through their experience of using the product and then hopefully their experience of like telling other people about the product. But this is kind of an interesting example of that too, where the through line of the game is incomplete and it breaks down at the worst possible moment it sounds like, the very end.
Jake (03:53)
Yeah.
Well, it was such a good through line all the way through. mean, you know, you're enjoying it and it's true that another thing we talk about a lot, or I think about a lot is the power of moments. This is a book by Chip and Dan Heath, and they talk about the importance of moments and how much we experience things as moments rather than as a continuum. And so those certain moments have an outsize effect on our memory and our experience. And one of the predictably
JZ (04:19)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jake (04:42)
super important moments is the ending. How does something end? I don't really know what I think of Diablo three. Like I know we enjoyed it enough to play it for, I don't know, like 20 hours or something to get to that point. But the ending just totally changed the way I think about it. it seemed really cheap at the end. they ran out of steam. just gave up.
JZ (04:48)
Yeah.
Yeah, well, you always hear about like game studios are notorious for having these insane crunch periods to get everything done at the end. Maybe that was it. Maybe they just ran out of time.
Jake (05:06)
Yeah.
Yeah, they were just grinding and they saw the finish line and they were like, you know, I think this is good enough.
JZ (05:14)
Yeah.
All right. Should we record a podcast?
Jake (05:22)
Let's record a podcast.
JZ (05:24)
Let's do it.
This is episode number four of Jake and Jay Z, the weekly podcast about startups, design, marketing, strategy, bunch of other stuff. I'm John Zyrowski, co-founder and general partner at Character Capital. And I'm here with my co-founder, co-author, co-host, co-laborator, Jake Knapp. You can read, listen, learn more at jakeandjayz.com.
Jake, what happened to Nike zip-up sweatshirt that you are wearing on 99 out of 100 Zoom calls I've ever seen you on?
Jake (06:15)
Hahaha
Well, my wife's, what was going on, which is that you wear a different outfit every day, which as, what, you know, should probably do. I have. There'd a different colors in the same outfit. I have a blue Nike sweatshirt that I came across a few years ago. And, know, for a long time,
JZ (06:34)
different, at least different colors of the same. I usually wear this t-shirt or like, yeah, a few other shirts.
Jake (06:48)
I shunned the sweatshirt. I tried not to wear the sweatshirt. That is a very tech bro, like classic thing. so we were, you know, you, you lived in San Francisco, I live in San Francisco. There's a lot of sweatshirt wearing and there's like a connotation of that. I was like, you know, it's not me. I'm not going to, I'm not going to do that. The zip up hoodie. Yep. It's a classic. And I, I kind of shunned it. And then I came across this.
JZ (07:02)
Specifically like the zip up hoodie. Yeah.
Jake (07:14)
sweatshirt and I don't know why it caused me to like try it on or try it out, but it, just checked all the boxes. was like, I can see why people are so into this, you know, and this I'm also, have, I have very tall and I have very long arms. It's hard for me to find something that fits this Nike makes this extra tall sweatshirt. If the arms are long enough, it's, it does zip up. It's got the hood. And I realized that.
JZ (07:27)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jake (07:39)
The advantage with the hood and the zip is you have so many temperature options available to you. know, you're a little too warm while you unzip, you know, or you're a little too cold. You put the hood on. I mean, it's, it's great. It's great. You push the sleeves up. I had so many options. So anyway, people know about sweatshirts, but the thing is I bought like five or six of these, right? About five or six of these sweatshirts and I would wear it all the time. Same sweatshirt. And I do, I still, I still do. wear it all the time, but yeah. My wife is like, you can't.
JZ (07:43)
Yeah.
The secret is out.
Jake (08:09)
If you say this thing is going to be on video, you can't be wearing the same sweatshirt every day. You got to, you got to mix it up. So yeah, you'll probably be seeing different outfits for me now cause she's checking.
JZ (08:18)
Well, that's exciting. Yeah, yeah. Exciting to see more of your wardrobe.
Jake (08:22)
Yeah, it'll probably look familiar because I have to go back to the pre sweatshirt era.
JZ (08:27)
Okay, so this will be the image of Jake Knapp circa 2015 living in San Francisco.
Jake (08:32)
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to buy new clothes, you know, but now I have that extra cognitive load. What shirt to wear, the sweatshirt you always know.
JZ (08:36)
Right, no, no. At this point.
Yeah, yeah, We wanted to talk about a couple of character portfolio companies today. companies who are in very different situations, but I think both are kind of interesting. Which one should we start with?
Jake (08:56)
Well, shall we talk about curiosity labs?
JZ (09:00)
Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Well, you were just talking to them the other day, which is actually what prompted this idea for the podcast. Do you want to give a little background on the company and what you were talking with them about?
Jake (09:14)
So the company is very early stage. They've been a participant in character labs and what they're building is sort of an AI kind of educational companion for kids almost like, like if you think about, you're really old, like me, you might think about Teddy Ruxpin when you were a kid, Teddy Ruxpin was an actual Teddy bear.
JZ (09:34)
Yeah.
Jake (09:39)
God, I didn't have one, I think the way it works is you put like a cassette in the back and then he was sort of animatronic a little bit. I'm way off track here. This is not painting.
JZ (09:47)
Yeah, no, I think that's right. think we had one and I think that's right. I would not have guessed about the cassette until you said that, then that sparked a memory and I think you're right about Teddy Ruxpin. Great name too.
Jake (09:59)
I mean, we're talking amazing name. This is like 1980s technologies. So if they were going to have the bear say different things, cassettes is kind of what you'd have to do, I think. So I don't think I've set a very helpful anchor though for this project. Yeah. Yeah. I think a better anchor for this is a tutor. Imagine you're a
JZ (10:09)
Right.
So it's like Teddy Ruxpin, but with AI.
Jake (10:28)
billionaire and you have a kid and you hire like the best, most engaging tutor. You you hire like Solcon to be the tutor for your kid. Right. And, the tutor gets to know your kid and kind of knows like what your kid's interested in at any given time. so when your kid sits down with the tutor, the tutor ready to not only talk to your child, but meet them in a way that's entertaining. Hey, you're into this thing. This is.
JZ (10:30)
Yeah.
Jake (10:55)
together this lesson plan. I wrote you a book. It's like if there's a magic wand, if your tutor is also a wizard, I wrote you this book that's illustrated in your favorite style. It's got all the things you're interested in. And by the way, it's going to include some lessons that are right where you're at with your progression of learning. I think that's kind of the idea is that it's an AI. Obviously we're talking about AI, an AI powered tutor. so
JZ (11:05)
Yeah.
Jake (11:24)
This is a really cool idea, an idea that you and I got super excited about. But do you want to talk a little bit about the founder? Cause the founder is interesting.
JZ (11:32)
Yeah, so we've established a couple of facts. One is that this company is very early, so they don't have a lot of traction. They don't have really impressive metrics to speak of. We just described the product, so that's what the product is. It's an interesting idea, but evidenced by our long rambling description it's not the easiest to describe because there is nothing like it today.
But the third fact, the third really important thing about this company is that the founder was the founder of YouTube Kids. And I know sometimes when we hear like, this person was a of like this thing inside of a big company, it doesn't necessarily sound that credible. like, well, did that project really have a founder? But in this Shiva is the name of the founder of Curiosity Labs. He really was the founder of YouTube Kids. And you were telling me that the other day
Jake (12:16)
Yeah.
JZ (12:24)
He had this idea. again and again, he tried to like get this project off the ground to pitch it. He was just, it was like all the things that you would go through as a founder of a startup where you, you remain tenacious and you persist in believing in your idea and telling others about it. And at some point somebody believes, you know, one person believes and then 10 people and then a hundred people, and it turns into something. But that was very much the nature of,
Jake (12:26)
Yeah.
JZ (12:52)
Shiva's experience founding YouTube kids like what 10 years ago, maybe not quite 10 years ago.
Jake (12:58)
Yeah, I think it started in 2013, the process of what eventually became YouTube kids. So yesterday we're about the pitch deck. He's working on his pitch deck for raising a pre-seed and we're going through and looking at the story and the screenshots and demos of the product and what they've got some really, a small set of super engaged customers. kind of seeing what,
JZ (13:01)
Okay, yeah, yeah.
Jake (13:23)
what those parents are saying about the product and, one thing that kind of caught our eyes, we're going through is it says, you know, co-founded YouTube kids. And I was like, you know, Shiva, could you tell me that story?
JZ (13:35)
It's just like text on one slide, right? It's like on the team slide, which is like has him and his co-founders there's pictures. You can picture the slide, right? It's like the picture, like a little text underneath, like some logos. one of those co-founder of YouTube kids. It's like record scratch. Wait a second.
Jake (13:38)
Yeah!
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, I know, you know, I know that about Shiva, but I'm actually curious. Like, just tell me, tell me the story about it. He's very humble. He's not like, let me tell you the story of this thing. Yeah. So he, so he tells the story and it's, it's phenomenal. You know, the, the backstory is basically they started off he and a couple of other folks at Google with this
JZ (13:57)
Yeah, you've never heard the full story. Ridiculously humble, yeah.
Jake (14:18)
20 % project and for anyone unfamiliar with Google, and I don't even know if they still do this, but back at that time and the earlier when you and I were there, there was this notion of 20 % time, which was a policy, I guess, that encouraged everybody to spend 20%, every Googler to spend 20 % of their time working on whatever they wanted. If you wanted to.
JZ (14:24)
Yeah, I either.
Jake (14:43)
chip in on another project, whether that was an engineering project or some kind of internal project, you could do that, you know, sort of one day a week or however you parceled out those hours. If you wanted to start your own project too, that was a thing you could do. You could start your own 20 % project and. Notably the Gmail came from a 20 % project. And so with YouTube kids, he and his co-founders start this 20 % project.
JZ (15:12)
were the reasons they felt this was necessary? Why wasn't it good enough for YouTube, regular YouTube, to be a place for kids? Why did they think that there needed to be a special product?
Jake (15:26)
As I understand it, it didn't start with, think we should build this new product for kids. It started with the three of them investigating what's going on with this kind of explosion in 2013 that they were seeing of educational content or like content for kids. Like, let's research that. Let's find out what the experience is like with these parents who are, their kids are looking at this. What's the experience like for the kids? Let's just kind of research it. And so they dug into it.
JZ (15:32)
okay.
Mm.
Jake (15:56)
And as they dug into it, what they found was, you know, it's a, it's a real hassle to have your kid navigating YouTube because YouTube has all kinds of stuff on it and you're going to get that other stuff. And so there was, the, sort of safety rails or whatever, we're not really cutting it as a, as a great experience.
JZ (16:16)
So there was like this emergent behavior. There was this workaround, which is something that is usually a good sign of like a product opportunity. People were doing this thing. Kids are on YouTube, parents are trying to monitor their usage, but it's not quite there, but they're doing it anyway, right? They're doing it despite the fact that YouTube wasn't very good at facilitating that experience for the kids.
Jake (16:37)
Exactly. Yeah. And, and Shiva has this insight and actually they, they ran a, I think a design sprint to figure out what should we do with this stuff. It's pretty cool. And they, they come up with this, this video and it kind of talks about a day in the life of what's it like when for parents, for kids who use YouTube and they could see all the gaps there.
JZ (16:48)
That's so cool.
Jake (17:04)
But I think the organization was really as you know, as it happens with big companies, they don't want to build a new product. They just want to adapt the one they've got me. Okay, sure. Like this is really exciting. And this, this video Shiva said it got like over 2000 views, which doesn't sound like a lot. We're talking about a YouTube video. This is inside Google, like just 2000 views, like within the company or within YouTube. And it's just, it's just wild and, and really took off. So.
JZ (17:27)
wow. Yeah, yeah.
Jake (17:34)
so people get really excited about it, but all that the exact same are thinking is we'll modify the existing YouTube product. Maybe we'll have like a kid, like switch that you flip or something in settings. And, Shiva had this vision that, you know, the sort of insight we can create a new product. And that's the way to create a really great experience for, for the families. But.
Like everybody else kind of was like, okay, his other co-founders on the project went off and were kind of doing their own thing. And, he, he just kind of kept pushing, kept pushing on it. And then, Susan Wojcicki came to be the CEO of, of YouTube. So they had a change at the top and Shiva had been continuing to push this idea and kind of flesh out what it would look like. And he, he managed to get Susan excited about it. And so then it became a project. They built it out.
And, it took off. so Shiva though, he stick with it. So he was, he worked on the project for a few years until it really, I think he had like 40 million users. And the, thing that's really cool, I think about curiosity labs, this new company is that he's kind of seeing a similar, it's a similar thing. It's like the same story again. Like if you go back to 2013, he sees this really powerful technology.
JZ (18:39)
Yeah.
Jake (18:58)
platform and this way that it's being used that people want to use it, but it just doesn't quite work for that. And modifying that big monolith is still, it's gonna be really hard to get a great experience by modifying it. So his insight was we need to build a unique, special like thing just for kids. And now same thing you've got to today, the big, massive platform that's out there, obviously it's the AI, but
JZ (19:05)
Yeah.
Jake (19:26)
It's really hard to get a great experience for kids with this, this technology and this potential that could be super powerful. So he's saying like, I've done this before. I know how to do this again. It's just really cool. Like it's the story as we were talking about it, the thing that I think we, he and I both realized is, you know, this maybe is, something that should be in the pitch deck. It should be more than a line. It's at the point when you're raising a pre-seed, so much of the investment is about believing that.
this team can deliver on this vision. And I think if you're steeped in your own life, you know what you've done, you know how you got to where you are. And so you don't think about telling other people about it. It's rude, it's boastful, it's not the way you wanna talk to somebody that you meet at a, I don't know, a cocktail party or whatever.
JZ (20:06)
Thank
Right.
you
Jake (20:21)
You don't want somebody to just tell you their life story. So we don't do that. You know, generally speaking, most of us don't do that right off the bat. And like we said, Shiva is a very humble guy anyway. And it's like, yeah, you know what? think you actually need to like tell the story and tell some of it because it shows this pattern that now you're saying again.
JZ (20:24)
Yeah, yeah. Right.
think this is so interesting because the conventional way to pitch this company, and I think if you went out on the web and you looked up best practices for a pre-seed startup pitch and you downloaded the best pitch deck template you could find, it would be something like, well, here's the opportunity. Billions of kids around the world are using the internet to...
try to learn things, they're spending a ton of time on screens. It's not a great experience. Most of that content is very low quality. We think the solution is to create this AI companion that's like having the world's best tutor, but it's available to every kid on earth. We're the team that can do it because we've worked on all these impressive products, including YouTube Kids, by the way. And here's what we've done so far. We've built this thing. have some families using this, some kids using this who really love it.
that's the pitch, right? That's the conventional pitch, but you can tell a totally different story about the exact same company, which is the story that you just told, which is like, you start with the founder and the unique experience of the founder and how history is repeating itself. And this is a really special moment where we can kind of write history as it's happening, as, as this story is being repeated.
Jake (21:39)
Yeah. Yeah.
JZ (22:04)
and I, I just think that's so fascinating that you could tell. And I guess it's always true, but, particularly when so many startup pitches start to look and sound the same, this idea that you could tell that story in a totally different way is just really fascinating to me.
Jake (22:21)
What's your experience? You look at a ton of pitch decks and I look at fewer because the way we do our, our deal flow, I usually don't see the deck until you and Eli have already looked at things and we're pretty far along. So I have less of a sense of this. When you look at decks, what are you looking for? Are you looking for the, those pitch deck template items that I want to see the opportunity. want to see the market size. What are you looking for?
JZ (22:49)
there's a set of almost checklist items that I want to see. And that's usually the standard stuff. Like what is the opportunity in the market? What is special about your approach to solving that problem that you found? Like what's your unique insight or your unique strategy? The kinds of stuff that we like to help founders with in foundation sprints. Why is your approach different than what exists today? And so those are things
both of those need be believable to me. think that having a great founder is essential and having a founder who brings that unique perspective or set of experiences to the opportunity is essential. But you can't just pitch a, you can't just raise money, you can't just pitch a startup on, I'm a great founder and you should give me money to go figure out something to build.
But it's interesting when I'm looking at, so I, so I usually look at decks ahead of a meeting with a founder, not always, but most of the time. And I'm usually just kind of looking for those checkbox items. Like, does this seem like it, the opportunity is big enough? Does it seem like there's a unique approach? But I usually spend most of the time when I'm on a call with a founder, just trying to learn about them as, as a founder, as somebody who builds products, what they've worked on before.
Jake (24:06)
Yeah, interesting.
JZ (24:10)
why they decided to focus on this opportunity. And sometimes there's a little bit of tension because the founder has rehearsed a pitch and they want to take me through their slides. And I've already looked at the slides. I don't know if all of you VCs do that ahead of time, but like I make a point of looking at the slides ahead of time. And then I have different questions that I want to ask the founder about, but they're very much about the things that you've emphasized about Shiva's story about
Jake (24:25)
Yeah.
JZ (24:40)
Curiosity Lab story, which are about that founder's experience and why it's unique and why this is the right person to create this new thing. So yeah, it's a little bit of a split situation, I guess.
Jake (24:52)
It sets founders up. if the VC they're speaking to has already looked at their slides, it sets you up as a founder for one of the worst situations you can be in as a presenter, which is where you're presenting something. You're saying words that the other person has already read. I always think something I never want to have happen is that I'm, I've got a slide behind me and it already has all the text and now I have to.
JZ (25:09)
Right.
Jake (25:19)
get through that text because if it happens, this is in real time, but people can read faster than I can speak. And that really goes for probably everyone except maybe the micro machines guy. anybody who, who got the Teddy Ruxpin reference might remember micro machines ads. Yeah. There are TV ads where the guys spoke like, 300 words per minute, you know, it's cause part of the whole, the whole thing.
JZ (25:36)
micro machines. Those are those tiny little toy trucks, right? Or toy cars? Yeah.
Yeah, man, that's great.
Jake (25:47)
very memorable to me, but anyway, that it sets you up to, be reading slowly while somebody's like just waiting for you to finish. And you're doubly set up for that. If you've sent somebody the deck ahead of time, they've already looked at it and they had to look at it pretty somewhat closely to decide whether to talk to you or not. And then now again, with the same deck, which is text heavy, and now you're, you're reading through it.
JZ (26:06)
Right.
Jake (26:12)
And it's, brutal. That's a brutal situation to put yourself in. So I don't know. mean, I don't feel like I know enough about the expectations of every VC out there to say, Hey, you should try to go a different direction when you do your pitch. But it seems like the structure of these decks often misses something. It's very hard to, for me, when I look at them to extract the story about what's really special, what's really going on here, because they're so, wedged into what feels like kind of a business school 101.
approach to things a lot of the times. Like just feels like that standard template is just frankly kind of boring. it does have some boxes that need to be checked, but it's kind of boring. And then, and then in the pitch, they're rehash, what feels like rehashing what you've already seen. So.
JZ (26:56)
Right. think part of what leads to that situation is founders try to use one deck for everything. They try to have a single version of the deck that they send ahead of time. And the point of that deck is to basically to convince the VC to have a call with you. And then they try to use the same deck for some presentation that they want to give during that meeting with the VC. And then also a third
application, is in case some other slightly off script question comes up from the VC where the founder wants to be able to be like, actually I have a slide on that in the appendix. Like, let me pull that up real quick and show you just so that you know that I'm prepared, just so you know that I I've thought about that. And like, I put that together. So it's really three different uses for a deck.
I've seen founders, it's pretty rare, but I've seen founders actually have different versions for those things. Like have a version that's the like six slide or 10 slide, like send ahead of time, the pre-read deck, which is like just meant to check those boxes and get through to like, let's have a call. And then on the call, they're not really leaning on a deck. They're just telling you their story. They're satisfying that.
Jake (27:55)
Yeah. Yeah.
JZ (28:08)
why me part of it? Why is this the right team to build this startup? And then they have a bunch of other slides. have an appendix of, know, sometimes recently there was a company that we were meeting with and their appendix had like 30 slides in it. It was really interesting. so everything I asked about, they like had a slide for it. They're like, this is, it's a visual aid. It's, it's instead of having the slides behind you, you know, on stage, like talking through them. It's like back when we were kids in school and the teacher would put
the transparency on the overhead provide a diagram, a visual aid for the point that they're making.
Jake (28:38)
Yeah.
That's really, that's really changed us the way I think about this. I'm thinking how much I enjoy talking to founders when most of the conversation is it's a discussion and a, and a prototype or demo with like, they're showing what they've been thinking about. can just jump right into it. If we assume that we all have enough context going in that we know what problem you're trying to solve. Let's see.
JZ (28:59)
Yeah. that's such a good point. Yep.
Jake (29:10)
what you're doing and let's let those hopefully, I mean, you can tell it emerges as you show a thing, a product, a mock-up, a prototype. This is the problem we're trying to solve. This is how we solve it. And I think that's, that makes it like really fun. maybe, those are, those are fun calls, but
It's very high stakes for these founders. All these conversations are really high stakes. So to do it in a different way than everybody else has done it in a way that VCs may not expect. And you may, you might pitch me and John and Eli and we'll say, great. we, we're happy. We love to see this new approach. This is fun, but you might, I don't know, you show another VC, maybe they have a more traditional look at it and they, just want what they've always seen.
I wonder if there's a, if there's an unmet need here and this would really help people better communicate their stories. Cause that's one of the things that's so surprising maybe to me working with founders is how hard it is to get the story out to, to the VCs who are, it's not just even to your customers, that's hard, but even just to explain it to VCs whose job it is to understand things when they're nascent, when they haven't been developed yet.
That part is really hard. And I think that the standard tool is just not up to the task.
JZ (30:30)
Yeah. Yeah. I think at the very least taking a different approach in your pitch is a, it's a pattern interrupt. if you know, many, many VCs have a calendar that's full of, you know, four to eight, let's say meetings with founders during the day
If that's the investors day that they're meeting with founder after founder after founder after founder, and then they meet with you and your pitch is different than those other six pitches they had that That's gotta be worth something, right? there's gotta be some inherent value in just standing out from that crowd, especially if everybody else is using the templates and they're, doing things the quote unquote, you know, normal
Jake (31:04)
Yeah.
JZ (31:19)
I have to believe that being different is better in the sense that it will help you occupy a little bit more space in that investor's brain.
Jake (31:31)
Do you ever read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg?
JZ (31:35)
Yes, I read it. was a long time ago, though. was right when it came out. And around when we were working on Sprint, I remember it was a very influential book for me, just in terms of the way it's the positioning of it. It's been a while. Yeah.
Jake (31:38)
Yeah.
Absolutely. It's a wonderful book. Very, just page Turner. It's the, one of those nonfiction page turners. And even if you've, suppose everybody has a copy of atomic habits. have a copy of atomic habits. I haven't read it yet, but power of habit. I I'm sorry. I can't comment on the overlap, but power of habit. If you start reading you'll keep reading it. It's just, it's just so engaging. Charles Duhigg's amazing writer.
JZ (32:11)
Yeah.
Jake (32:14)
this thing that pops into my head is you're describing the VC who's all day in these same kind of calls is there's an illustration in there. It's a, it's a chart of brain activity. And I guess it's in like rats or something as they're going through a maze, you know, to find cheese or whatever the reward is at the end of the maze. I don't know if they really use cheese in labs. Yeah, whatever they do. Yeah. So, so this is some study that, you know, some
JZ (32:31)
Whatever rats do when they're in a maze.
Jake (32:40)
Scientists said, this is not very compelling now, but if you read the book, you'll be compelled because I can't remember the study details. But what's really amazing is this chart. You've got the brain activity of the rat when they go through the maze for the first time. And then the brain activity of the rat going through a maze that they've already been through. And the first time the brain activity is spike, spike, spike, spike, spike, It's like, it's very active and everything's new. And the second time the brain activity is very low.
JZ (33:01)
Mm-hmm. Everything's new. Yeah.
Jake (33:08)
And this is what happens when we do things that we've already done before. Our brain constantly trying to conserve energy is like, good. I don't need to burn so many calories now. I'm not going to shut down as many of these switches in here as possible. Let's go on autopilot. Yeah. Habits are like an autopilot to save our brains calories. Right? So this idea that you break them, you show them a new maze.
JZ (33:11)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, power down. Yeah.
Jake (33:38)
It's really powerful. It's going to crank up that brain activity. And that's probably something that you want. I certainly find the standard pitch deck. I'm like, okay. And I'm just like very hard to, I'm distractible easily, but I'm just like, okay. Like, like trying to pump myself up to get engaged in the standard slide deck format. Cause it's Like where's the story? I just like, I want the story. I want to be entertained. So.
JZ (33:56)
You
Jake (34:06)
Yeah, I don't know. I think that's a great idea. I think that's a great idea. Well.
JZ (34:11)
The other interesting thing that happened in our portfolio recently was Fathom announced their series A a couple of weeks ago. mentioned that there were two portfolio companies we wanted to talk about and that they were different. It's Curiosity Labs just starting out, just in the first months of building their product in their company. Fathom has been around since, I think basically since the pandemic, because the reason that Richard White,
Jake (34:18)
yeah, that was very exciting.
JZ (34:40)
the CEO of Fathom. The reason he started the company was during the pandemic, like so many of us, he was finding himself on a ton of Zoom calls and he was, you know, when you didn't have to get from meeting to meeting to meeting, you could have back to back Zoom calls. You could just talk to a lot more people. And he couldn't keep up with the notes, with just writing down the notes from each call as it was going on. then
Jake (35:00)
Yeah.
JZ (35:05)
at the end of the day, you know, trying to type all those notes up and put them in the right place. It was just overwhelming work. And it was taking him away from really engaging in the, you know, the conversation that he was having during all those zoom calls. So, that has been around since, since 2020, guess. And they've gotten to a point where they, they raised a series a, so the company's doing really well. The business has grown a lot. and yeah, it was an exciting.
exciting milestone, really cool to see so many people excited for them and about them. Their users are very enthusiastic about Fathom.
Jake (35:42)
my God. Yeah. People ourselves included. And of course we're biased because we're investors in Fathom, but people love it. They love Fathom. And so this is obviously a very biased endorsement of it. We recommend you check it out, but we're not, we're not just blowing smoke here. it's number one on G2. that right? 2023 was the top rated product.
JZ (35:50)
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. G2, which is sort of like a Yelp for B2B software, a place where people can go and they can rate, the software that they use at work. And Fathom is the number one rated product. It, it still has a perfect 5.0 rating after like, I don't know, thousands of reviews, whatever it has. Yeah.
Jake (36:24)
It's crazy. It's really...
JZ (36:26)
Nobody went there and gave them even one four-star review. Nobody was like, I like it, but it could be better.
Jake (36:32)
there must be a four star. They must, with thousand you can have a few, but I am always amazed by a products that have five star reviews. Actually, I think Atomic Habits is an example of something that has like one, grillion reviews and has like five stars. so you have maybe the rare grumpy troll who hates it, but they're just getting washed away in the flood of fives. Yeah, it's phenomenal.
JZ (36:34)
It rounds up.
It gets rounded out. Yeah, yeah. But we do come by our enthusiasm for Fathom authentically because we were users of the product before we were investors.
Jake (37:04)
Tell me the story because you and Eli found it and tracked down Richard. And I was peripheral to that process. Remind me how that went down.
JZ (37:10)
Yeah.
Yeah, so at Character, we use kind of three different approaches to finding companies that we might invest in. The first one we call Sprint Inbound. we're, one thing that is very fortunate about the situation that we're in is that a lot of people have read Sprint, they've heard about Sprint. Sprint is on the curriculum at a bunch of universities and we've given a bunch of talks. And so pretty
Frequently people will come to us and they'll say, hey, I love Sprint. I read it. I used to run design sprints. I'm starting a new company. I would like to talk to you and maybe raise money from you. So that happens sometimes. The second way that we find out about companies that we could invest in is through founders that we already know because we ran a Sprint with them at some point. And at this point, think we've run in the neighborhood of 300 Sprints with most of those with startups.
And if you just assume that there were five people in each of those sprints and that most of those five people were either the founder or the first few employees at a startup, that's just a lot of people who we've been in the room with. a lot of times the investments that we make are from those people. It's people were like, Hey, we worked together, you know, in 2014 at Flatiron Health and ran a bunch of sprints and now starting a new company. And we should talk about that. But the third.
approach that we take to find companies is outbound. So it's us going out and trying to find really interesting products and companies and founders, and then figuring out a way to get in touch with them. And one of the ways that we do that is by monitoring product hunt, which is there's a website where every day people launch products. And then there's like a leaderboard where other people vote on this. I like this product, I've used it. And so there's sort of a winner.
of each day. And, and I found Fathom on product hunt. get their daily email and I, every day I scan through like the top 10 things and occasionally I'll click through and say, this is interesting. I'll add it to our internal database, which is a notion. I'll get Eli's feedback on it. But, Fathom was one that just kind of made it through all those steps. It was like, Hey, this seems really interesting. We should check this out. Let's try to use it. One of the reasons why it's so successful is that it's
really easy to just start using. There's not, you don't have to, you know, set up a demo with them or a call and like go through the typical enterprise sales process. can just like click, install it and start using it immediately. So we did that. We started using it and within days we were like, this is a potentially game-changing product because just like I was saying earlier, if you have a lot of calls, you suddenly don't have to worry about.
keep taking notes in those calls because Fathom is recording and taking notes for you. And then at the end of the day or after those calls, you don't have to do all that busy work of like putting the notes in the right place because Fathom creates a really good summary, sort of an outline of what you talked about on that call. And that's something that you can use for yourself. You can share with the person you were talking with. You can share with other people on your team. It's really useful. So we've...
figured out how to get in touch with Richard. I don't actually remember how, I could probably look it up, but we somehow figured out a way of getting in touch with him. And Eli wrote him this really long email, about all the implications of what would happen if Fathom was really successful and why we thought it was so exciting, how it could help change the nature of how people do work. And yeah, and he responded, so.
Jake (40:34)
Thank
It's a...
interesting situation where we have to do outbound sales, right? Like that's a, that's a challenging thing. That's a part of a lot of companies. And if you design and build products, if you're creating things, if you're writing code, whatever, there's so much of what goes on in a, in a startup, any kind of tech company that you can be insulated from sales.
JZ (41:06)
Yeah.
That's such a good point, yeah.
Jake (41:27)
If you're, if you're the founder, if you're starting off, you cannot be insulated from it. You have to do that part too. But if you're, if you're building something and you know, like earlier in my career, certainly like working at Microsoft, working at Google, building things, I was totally insulated from selling those things, which I think is, is really a problem. I think it's a, it's a deficiency that happens as companies grow that the teams who are building get insulated from their customers.
And particularly from the moment when customers make decisions about is this worth paying attention to or not. And here in our tiny company, we can't be insulated from the selling part. We have to sell to founders as well as provide our help and guidance and service. sometimes we're the buyers and they're the sellers.
JZ (42:14)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes we, well, I should say we always have to sell ourselves to founders when it comes to the moment of making the investment because founders have a lot of options. They can raise money from a lot of sources. They don't have to raise money. There's, you know, other ways of financing the company. And so every single time that we say, and we actually, the language that we use internally is offer. We make an offer to that founder where we say we
Jake (42:28)
Yeah. Yeah.
JZ (42:50)
This is what we propose. We would like to make this investment and we have to sell ourselves. But sometimes like you're saying, we have to sell ourselves even earlier in that process. We have to sell ourselves to even have that initial conversation. We're not just the stereotypical, you know, investors who wait for the warm intros to come in from their network and only take those meetings. know, we're sort of out there pushing and really trying to sell ourselves to founders.
It can be an uncomfortable and hard part of doing the job, but it's a really important one.
Jake (43:22)
It is, you have to, I think, find a way to do it that you feel authentic. You feel like this is, this is really me. This is really a reflection of us. We really think this would be good all the way around. what's, what's been your experience with like your comfort level with those conversations, those cold, the cold conversations?
JZ (43:29)
Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
If it is authentic, then it feels very comfortable because, and this was the case with Fathom. Like I said, Eli had sent this email and it was based on our experience using the product and our enthusiasm about how good the initial product was, but then also imagining what an impact it could have on the ways that people work in the future. So it was very easy to just put that.
you know, put those words down in an email and, and have a conversation authentically and organically with Richard about those things. I think there have been times when maybe we've, we've chased something because it seemed shiny or interesting in some other way that was less authentic. And in those cases, it feels, I don't know, it's what I imagine being on like an awkward first date is like, I've been with my wife for like,
Jake (44:40)
Yeah.
JZ (44:43)
over 20 years, so I don't really know what that's like. what I see on TV and movies, awkward first dates where there's not a lot there and you're trying to say the right things and ask the right questions. But yeah, when it's authentic, and I think that's true for all sales processes, when a company that builds a product is reaching out to
Jake (44:44)
Go way back in the memory banks for that.
JZ (45:10)
their customers, their potential customers, they're authentic about why they care, why they started this company, the problem that they can solve for their customer. I think those are the cold outreach emails. Those are the sales calls that go really well.
Jake (45:25)
Well, Richard and Fathom as a whole are relentless about the customer experience, I think. And that's something, I mean, I, I feel like that's true of us as well. In this case, our customers are founders and we're, trying to be as relentless as possible to give them the best experience possible to give them the best chance to succeed.
JZ (45:47)
Totally.
Jake (45:48)
So I think one thing that's kind of cool about having those conversations and trying to figure out what's authentic and what's not, what feels authentic to us, feels authentic to them, is that I believe the most successful companies are driven by people who authentically care about what they're delivering. And not a hundred percent of the time, but a large percentage of the time, we're going to be able to tell if it feels authentic to us because
JZ (46:09)
Yeah, totally.
Jake (46:18)
We care about products in that way, about the experience for customers being paramount and that you have to always be trying to solve their problem and always trying to deliver something better. That we'll find that in those emotions where sometimes like, this awkward or not? Sometimes there's some truth in there.
And have to be careful because there are all kinds of reasons why an interaction with someone might feel awkward. But if you have enough exposure to it and enough reps at it, it seems like it's, it's not an unimportant signal. One thing that I really admire about Fathom is, and again, it just sounds like this total advertisement for Fathom, but this
push for the customer experience to be better and better and better is really what's put them in the situation that they're in. Because when you get right down to it, the idea of AI making a transcript of your video call and then doing an AI sort of like summary of that, that's not a thing that many companies couldn't jump in and do right now. That's a thing that...
The tech is out there. It's possible to do that fathoms ahead because Richard saw that this was possible before the AI explosion. So he's going to realize like AI is going to get better and better and better. And if we start working on this thing, we're to be in a great position to capitalize on that when it happens. you know, then after that, like chat GPT comes out, people are like, wow. Like, look at this. So they're kind of at the forefront of it. But the other thing is just, if you deliver on the customer experience better.
than other products, there will always be a place for those products because most things that we interact with in, on our computers and our lives, they're not that good. There's always room at the top for, you know, an excellent, excellent experience. think that's one of the things about Fathom. And I just noticed recently that the summaries have gotten so good that they helped me understand what happened in the call afterwards. We're talking about the Power Pumas, we're talking about Diablo 3 earlier, right?
JZ (48:03)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Totally.
Jake (48:27)
The end of Diablo three made me like, it rewired my brain about the rest of Diablo three's experience. And I can't even honestly tell you what the game's like now, cause I was so disappointed with the ending. For Fathom kind of does that for calls. It's like, it helps me at the end be like, this is what happened. This is kind kind of gives me this armature for those still half baked memories of what happened in the call to kind of coalesce into like, that's what happened. Right. That was the most important part.
JZ (48:32)
Yeah.
You
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Jake (48:56)
That's the structure and it's, it's remarkable because it, the earlier days of their summarization, just the way that AI is tuned, it wasn't that good. And now it's that good, you know, and it's, it's everything down to like where the buttons are, how you interact with the tool as you're in the call. All these things are just very well considered. And, if you are always pushing to make things better and better and better, sure. People can come along and copy you.
JZ (49:08)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jake (49:26)
but they can't copy the next thing you're gonna do and the next thing and the next thing. And that's a thing that's been, I think, cool about working along with them.
JZ (49:34)
Yeah. And we talked earlier about through lines, how ideally the marketing, the product experience, and then the recommendation of that product from one customer to another will all be part of the same line. They'll all be consistent and connected. and a good example of that in Fathom is that in this round of funding, which is a series A and their previous round, which was sort of like a seed extension that we led, they
reserved a part of the round, a pretty big part of the round for their users, for their customers to actually invest in the company, which is just so cool. It's such a good example of the through line because A, it speaks to the enthusiasm and the engagement of those customers, just how much they love Fathom, how excited they are. But then it creates a really, I think, authentic and natural
Jake (50:10)
Yeah, it's cool.
JZ (50:32)
way for those customers to say, hey, not only do I use this thing, but I just invested in it. I've got skin in the game, which makes their recommendation of it to somebody that they know, somebody that they work with that much more powerful. And I don't see a lot of companies do that. I think it's a pretty rare tactic. And we know from the way that this round came together that they had to fathom, had to make some tough decisions to say no to some investors that wanted to put in more money.
to reserve this part of the round for their customers to invest. again, like you're saying, I think that speaks to how relentless they are about staying focused on their customers and continuing to build that through line.
Jake (51:16)
Why do you think more companies don't do it that way?
JZ (51:19)
I don't know. I don't have a good theory.
Jake (51:22)
I suppose part of it could be that it requires a large enough and engaged enough customer base that you can say, you know, we're only going to convert X percent, but that'll be enough to get us there because you have to allocate it upfront. You have to turn people down and say, there's sorry, there's not going to be room for you. And then you have to announce this thing and you've got this progress bar going. Yeah.
JZ (51:32)
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
So there's some risk from that perspective. Yeah. That you said, you said no to these other investors and then you couldn't get enough of your own users to, invest, to, to fill that space.
Jake (51:59)
You need a lot of confidence that you'll be able to do it. And that's, that's no knock on others that they might not feel that confidence. mean, these are after all still young companies growing, forming relationships with customers, pretty cool.
JZ (52:02)
Yeah.
There is a flavor of that some companies do. know, Fathom, think, is uniquely situated to use this tactic because they have a lot of free users, a lot of people using the product who aren't paying. that's kind of how it works. That's intentional and that'll always be there. And then they have a subset of those users who do pay. But we're talking like tens, if not at this point, hundreds of thousands of people. And so
They have a funnel to convert, if you will, from free to paid. then some of those paid users convert into investors in the company. for companies that are selling directly to large enterprises where they may only have 20 customers total, I think their version of it, their kind of flavor of allowing their customers to invest is a lot enterprise companies will have angel investors who are executives.
at companies that are in their target market. it's kind of the same, I think it's the same strategy fundamentally. It's just a different tactic based on the size of the number of customers in their market.
Jake (53:21)
Yeah, right. That's an interesting way to put it.
And I suppose the effect is similar where you have those enterprise customers are then very invested and their recommendation might carry more weight. It's like, well, these guys are really invested, extra special when you know there's hundreds or whatever, thousands of people who participate.
JZ (53:41)
Yeah. The other cool thing about Fathom is that ran a design sprint with them pretty early after we invested. mentioned that tried the product, we reached out to Richard, we talked with him. He had already raised some money, but we negotiated. We made him an offer. We said, is what we'd like to do and here's why we think you should say yes. And we invested, that was part of their seed round. And I think just a few months after that, we...
Jake (53:48)
All
JZ (54:08)
we run the design sprint. And if I recall correctly, it focused on really the core experience of using Fathom, little UI that's on your screen next to your Zoom window and the buttons that are there. we were trying make that experience as seamless and as lightweight as possible, but not too lightweight.
We didn't want it to just be a recording where you don't really think about Fathom, but we also didn't want to have a ton of During the sprint, came up with this, think actually Jeanette, who's researcher who works with us sometimes. She came up with this notion of screen real estate and brain real you don't want to have a bunch of stuff on your screen and you like, have your brain taking notes, but you also don't want none because if it takes up no real estate,
don't really think about Fathom. You don't care about Fathom. But if you have just the right amount the UI that Fathom has today, which is one big button, which is sort of like, this is an important moment. Remember this moment. And then you can type in a couple of quick notes about it as you're doing your call. That the Goldilocks screen and brain real estate to keep people engaged and keep people thinking about
And it's worked really well. But that was an interesting sprint. It was a fun one.
Jake (55:27)
Yeah, I remember it was clear from working with them that they really understood consumer products very well, That Richard and, and his team, they, get it. And that's, the beauty of a design sprint. I always think this worked really well when we work with founders.
JZ (55:35)
Yep.
Jake (55:49)
When, you know, we're not necessarily, there's always a chance that you and I are going to come up with a sketch or a solution or something that is, is great. And they, and they use it, but that's not really the idea or the promise. The promise is, look, if this is going to be a great cup of coffee, we can offer you like, we can offer you a grinder, but they're like, they have to be your beans. Like it's only going to be as good as, as the beans. Right. So.
JZ (56:13)
Hahaha
Jake (56:18)
I think they had good beans.
JZ (56:20)
To summarize, they had good beans. Yeah. And then the other cool thing from, so this is, think part of what is unique about our approach is that we're investors, but we also run these sprints with founders the sprints are useful to the founders, are useful to the teams to make the best cup of coffee out of the beans that they already have to continue this.
Jake (56:25)
you
JZ (56:47)
delightful coffee metaphor, but it's also really useful to us because what other investor gets to hours or 30 working with a founder and seeing their ideas, seeing how they work with their team, seeing how their customers react? We get to watch those customer interviews at the end of the design sprint. That's just such a unique experience for us.
Jake (56:47)
you
Yeah.
JZ (57:14)
When invested in Fathom Seed and when a couple of years later, maybe a year later, and they wanted to raise a little bit more money, but weren't quite ready for a Series A, we just had so much confidence. We had so much conviction in the team and in the company because we had had that really special up close experience with them that it enabled us to have the clarity that we should invest more. And then it also meant that we had a pretty unique relationship with Richard.
so that we were able to invest more. It made that pitch, that offer that much more successful because he really knew what it was like to work with us.
Jake (57:51)
pretty fun. It's a good little, little setup you've cooked up for us. Cause this is a, those, those sprints in those moments when you've got a great team and they're at the very beginning of something. It's really fun. is really, truly fun to be in the room and see how, how they solve those problems and ask them some questions, you know, get to participate a little bit. It's, it's wonderful. And, thanks. Thanks man. Same, same, back at you. This is a.
JZ (57:55)
Yeah.
Yeah, well, couldn't do it without you, bud.
Jake (58:21)
This is real. This episode is real content marketing and know, affirmations. There's a lot of good stuff going on in episode four.
JZ (58:28)
I have feeling the rest of this day is going to just feel great. Should we wrap this up? What do you think? yeah, yeah. Yeah. What have you been reading, watching, doing other than Diablo recently?
Jake (58:34)
Just give people some recommendations. What do you got?
A thing that I have been doing for a while that I thought I would bring up is eating oatmeal with almond butter or peanut butter on top. A culinary recommendation. Yeah. This one comes from our mutual friends, Eric Skogsberg, great, great guy and very thoughtful about food. And this may be a thing. I don't know. Maybe this is the thing that people are like, yeah, almond butter on oatmeal.
JZ (58:52)
Ooh, a culinary recommendation. Okay.
Jake (59:11)
avocado toast, whatever, that's just a trendy thing. I've already heard of it. I had not heard of it. And it's quite delightful. And it solves for me, the primary problem with.
oatmeal, the problems are oatmeal on its own. If you don't have something in it, could be a little on the bland side. And then oatmeal doesn't really necessarily stick with you that long, right? There's not as much like protein in it. So here you've got some flavor, you've got some more protein and it blends in. You know, it's, if you've got hot oatmeal and you put that nut butter on top, it's going to kind of become this slurry of goodness, which are probably three words that have not been combined before, but that's my recommendation.
JZ (59:34)
Mm. Mm.
That sounds good.
Yeah, I like that. We're recording this at approximately breakfast time, so I think I'm getting hungry.
Jake (59:53)
What about you?
These will always be breakfast recommendations because it's all going be on my mind.
JZ (1:00:01)
Yeah, right. Yeah. I've been reading an interesting book recently, which is called Against the Gods. It's very, very intense sounding. And it's, it is a book that I had heard about for a long time that a lot of people recommended, but I just couldn't quite get myself to read it until recently, because it is a book about the history of risk, which just sounds like weird. It's like,
Jake (1:00:11)
man, what a title.
JZ (1:00:31)
What do mean? How could risk have a history? But the fascinating thing about it is a long time ago, hundreds of years people didn't really have the concepts or the words, not to mention the mathematical framework for thinking about Even the notion of an average, which to us seems like the most obvious thing in the world, a range of things that happen the average
but the mean, it's a mathematical concept that represents kind of those things in general. Like that didn't exist until a couple hundred years ago. and so like normal distributions, you know, bell curves, like all these things that are associated with that, like this idea of observing things and then extrapolating or trying to understand from those things, what else might happen. It just was not, it just didn't exist. People didn't talk about it. They didn't think about it. They didn't use it.
So anyway, the book is really fascinating.
Jake (1:01:25)
You know, that what popped into my head was how many of the frameworks from a pre probabilistic era or whatever you call it, have probably stuck with us in what forms they might've stuck around. I'm thinking about the saying better safe than sorry, which is very catchy. It's a very great slogan and
JZ (1:01:39)
Yeah.
Jake (1:01:50)
Certainly you can think of a lot of situations, where I'm like, yeah, it's really true. I would rather put my seatbelt on than be sorry I didn't or whatever. But it also represents, if you hear that as a kid and you're like, that's a thing I should follow because my parents told me that or whatever. that's a thing that could get transferred from generation to generation. Cause when you have kids, you tend to tell them things that you heard when you were a kid. And that actually has a very conservative bias to it in terms of risk. It's like, do not.
do something as risky, And, you know, obviously like that's just one that popped into my head. That may not be the dominant one or whatever, but it is very easy to imagine sayings and ways of making decisions that come perhaps from centuries ago, persisting through the generations and still persisting today, even if they fly sometimes in the face of things that we know to be true. We don't have sayings for probabilistic math.
JZ (1:02:28)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, because you don't have.
Yeah, maybe we should come up with some.
Sounds hard.
Jake (1:02:48)
Very good. Well, should I say goodbye? All right. Until next week. See you guys.
JZ (1:02:50)
Yeah, sounds good. Thanks for listening. Yeah, see you soon. Bye.