00:19:29 · Molly O'Shea, Brian Singerman
[00:19:29] S1: Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30,000 companies, including one in three venture backed startups in The US. Nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. REX is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, chipping away at it with fees, REX is designed to help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all in one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20 times the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks, and even high yield from day one. With same day and even same hour liquidity, access your funds anytime. Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, Service Titan, HIMS, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood and Platt trust and use Brex. Start today at brex.com/sorcery. That's brex.com/sorcery. Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real world judgment. That's why companies like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces, the kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit turing.com/sourcery. Back to the Okay. So I wanna go through some of the cast of characters. [00:21:02] S0: Okay.
00:21:02 · Brian Singerman, Molly O'Shea
[00:21:02] S0: Okay. [00:21:02] S1: Right? You've been exposed to all of them. You're friends with them. They're characters for maybe the outside world, and they're probably just your friends, so this is also kind of a weird question. We talked about Peter Thiel a bit. I want to know more, so his investing strategy, and the strategy that you formed at Founders Fund is heavy conviction, concentrated bets. I've listened to many of your interviews for preparation of this, and you're like, Reserves? We don't care about reserves. We're just going to raise another fund. How did you think about that, and what were the biggest allocations?
00:21:33 · Brian Singerman
[00:21:33] S0: Venture capital to me is put the most money in the best companies possible at the best price possible. Nowhere in that is like portfolio management and reserve calculations and ownership percentages and all that nonsense. It's like, just, Nope, it's pretty easy. Put the most money into the best companies possible at the best price possible. Sometimes the best price possible is more than what you want to pay. You know what? If it's a great company at the end of the day that you see is going be one of the greatest companies of all time, that's okay. So, it's the best price possible. That's venture capital right there. All the other stuff is just nonsense. The other thing is that we realized that we just knew from early on. First of all, it matched our style, having no fear on these things, but also just like, know, a venture fund like three Xs over the course of ten to twelve years, I don't even think that that beats the S and P. I'm pretty sure it loses to a Vanguard no load index fund. No, seriously. So just like, you've got all these people talking about like, woo hoo, our fund three Xed over these twelve years. Just like so it means your investors essentially lost money because they could have easily scaled money into an S and P no load index fund. We knew that. Beating the market is hard. Let's just be clear. Beating the market is extremely hard. You have to have some real advantage in order to do it. Venture capital, legal inside information. You're not playing the same level playing field as everybody else. It's not like the public markets where I want. No, that's why I don't invest in public market companies. I want no inside information about anything public. I want no liabilities on anything, but private companies do, you know, absolutely. And so, if you've got that kind of access and you can truly see something as a great company, the way to beat the market is to put a ton of money into that company. Like put every penny that you can. Like that's the way to beat the market in venture capital. Everything else just ties it or loses to it.
00:23:28 · Molly O'Shea, Brian Singerman
[00:23:28] S1: And you spread that across funds. Don't even think about like, Oh, we did in this fund, we're maxed out, we'll do it. [00:23:34] S0: Well, mean, you know, there were some advantages. Now, didn't have that advantage early on. Let's just be clear, SpaceX didn't work, Founders Fund would not exist. We bet our careers essentially on SpaceX. And I love that, which goes into why I'm doing what I'm doing now, is exclusively that. But I love elite athletes betting their career on something. Truly elite talented people betting their career on something, that's what I love. I think we were just really, really good at that. At Founders Fund, we weren't trying to do portfolio management, we were trying to put the most money in to the best companies possible. [00:24:14] S1: I think it was really funny when I talked to you on the phone the other week, I think this was maybe the day the SpaceX S1 came out, you're like, Yeah, whatever, I'm not going to read that. Why am I going to read that? [00:24:25] S0: I wouldn't really understand what I was reading. There's probably a lot of financial stuff in there, and to me, it's just like, Oh, Rocket's cool. Elon, greatest founder in history. Great. It's a different calculation for me than pouring over a prospectus. There are other people who are great at that. Some of my partners at Founders Fund are great at that. Napoleon is probably one of the best in the world at being able to really do that and understand the company. Great. There's his edge. It's not my edge. I don't put skill points into it.
00:24:25 · Brian Singerman, Molly O'Shea
[00:24:25] S0: I wouldn't really understand what I was reading. There's probably a lot of financial stuff in there, and to me, it's just like, Oh, Rocket's cool. Elon, greatest founder in history. Great. It's a different calculation for me than pouring over a prospectus. There are other people who are great at that. Some of my partners at Founders Fund are great at that. Napoleon is probably one of the best in the world at being able to really do that and understand the company. Great. There's his edge. It's not my edge. I don't put skill points into it. [00:24:51] S1: And then when you invested into SpaceX, this is 2007, 2008? [00:24:55] S0: 2008. [00:24:55] S1: 2008, they had three failed rocket launches. How did you gain that conviction? You met Elon, what was he like?
00:24:55 · Molly O'Shea, Brian Singerman
[00:24:55] S1: 2008, they had three failed rocket launches. How did you gain that conviction? You met Elon, what was he like? [00:25:04] S0: I didn't really know Elon back then. Remember, I had just started at Founders Fund. Did get to sit through one meeting with him. I've since met him several times, but back then, I was a new junior person starting at Founders Fund. But I did get to talk with the group about it and back then it was just the most amazing thing. It still is, right? There's still no other rocket companies that get up with that kind of I don't know when it's going be air, but a Blue Origin thing just did not work. It's still pretty amazing. And one of my greatest startup camaraderie moments in history in my career was being able to go to the Hawthorne office when we did get the first successful Falcon to actually complete a launch. It was like the most amazing camaraderie experience of my life, even more than the startups that I was at or Google or whatever. And yeah, it's just like one of those things. It's like an end of one historic thing to be part of. [00:26:03] S1: What do you think the key traits are that he has, that he implements within his teams? Obviously vertical integration.