Rod, welcome to the podcast.
Great to be here, Jake.
Thank you so much for joining today.
I've got a long list of questions for you, Rod.
First of all, just want to highlight how cool it is that you get different touch points with different people,
whether it's online to start with or maybe a physical interaction,
and then, okay, we've got to do a podcast, and that's the case with you and I today.
So very excited for this conversation.
um first question for you rod is the the nostre network like why why does it exist why are you
even using it and let's spend lots of time talking about that because i'm super excited about it as
well but you're building on nostre and i'd love to dig into like you know your your process to
get into today yeah great jake i mean i'm a big nostre fan um let's i mean if it's okay i'll just
give a bit of background in terms of who I am and how I ended up here. Absolutely, please.
Because that'll explain it all. So my background, I started a technology company about
January 2012. I grew that up for six years to list it on the ASX. In January 2018, I then ran
that for six years as a public list co. And, you know, then I stepped aside and new management have
taken it forward and they're doing their own things. But the, you know, that journey of raising
and building technology over a number of years taught just so much, right?
I mean, we were, you know, I guess 2012.
So, you know, a good period in the middle of that free money era
that I think Bitcoiners who know about monetary policy
will know what zero interest rates does to venture, for example.
You know, we started at a good period there where capital was available,
where we were able to grow something really quickly and we did so.
and then you know we were able to to i guess be successful at that right early investors invested
you know at a say a million dollar pre-money and ipo was at 40 million we were australia's first
ever equity crowdfunding exit uh you know even then kind of listing and running through covid
we were able to you know take a essentially a travel technology company through the end of
travel as far as public investors were concerned of at the time they said you know this is it
And so we're there on the receiving end again of more, say, policy decisions that, no, we're not allowed to leave Australia.
Right. And so we can say again that maybe there is there are policy impacts here to running a business in a vertical.
It has to be a favoured vertical. But we got through. Right.
We reduced costs.
We got through on a kind of a method that didn't involve raising stats of dilutive equity at the bottom of a kind of a valuation trough.
Instead, we cut costs, but we took care of people and we got through.
We made sure every supplier was paid.
We came out the other side.
It's a really interesting story.
And so then again, on the flip side, we benefited.
you know there was a moment there in markets where if you were uh you know seeking a say a
barbell to your the world is ending pandemic thesis but what if i'm wrong well you really
want to invest in a flyer and so you know here's a travel technology startup that i can invest in
and we became you know able to i guess on the outside benefit from that uh raise a large sum
of money attract some very exciting investors uh we were the 10th fastest growth company in
Australia that year, just flying out of the traps. And I took the thing to bigger than it was pre-pandemic
and said, I've done my six years public and we've recovered the company and it's time for me to go
and explore other things. And I guess through all of that, a few things. One, learned the importance
of monetary policy and fiscal policy on markets. There's stories to tell about how capital works
that both in terms of private market investing
and also public market and accessing capital there
that is just so dependent on the environment you're in.
And then also through the pandemic learned, well,
what happens when suddenly narratives are completely controlled?
What happens when suddenly your industry is completely shut down
and started to listen to what Jack Dorsey had been through,
sympathizing with them as the head of a smaller list co and saying, well,
I can understand exactly the kind of purchase he was on. But then, you know, hearing, hey,
there's this solution, you know, and a solution that seems reasonably resilient. If you're talking
about, you know, communication, resilient to different policy decisions. If you're talking
about monetary policy, well, it's riding on Bitcoin, which is resilient to certain policy
decisions and we're sitting here as you know I've built this company from zero twice I'm looking for
my next run to be built on something resilient quite besides what AI has done which is a whole
other thing as well but these these are the things that lead me to kind of Bitcoin and to Nostra
I mean I'm super excited to unpack them all for you but that's roughly why I'm here. Awesome Rod
okay and it's always interesting where conversations go because today I was like I've got
so many questions for Rod about the last decade, but I was going to try and maybe weave them in
later to like the NOSTA story today, but let's flip it around and do exactly what you've done
because actually the chronological order is also really nice. So the business that you set up and
IPO was called J-Ride and you kindly shared a link yesterday, which gave some great context on like
the problem, the solution that you came up with. Most of the people listening to this won't have
listened to the equity investors that you were talking to. So as a founder of a business,
The philosophy of build it and they will come in Satoshi, in my mind, has never been better represented.
Like he just built this thing, he, she, they, and we've ended up using it.
It's built on the back of a lot of other work, which is often overlooked.
But then on the flip side of that, you've got, okay, do as much customer research as you can.
Maybe you came across a problem of your own and do other people need the solution that you can create and go and fill that need?
and listening to the interview that you did yesterday you came down more in that side of
like okay I think there's a need for this business and clearly there was so take us right back to like
the genesis point of like okay I know I want to start a company what skills did you have who did
you know how did you even begin to get it off the ground yeah so it's a good question so uh look for
those who don't know Jay right uh and at the time that I was running it and it's doing something
different under new management now but at the time that I was running it broadly speaking it
went like this. Jake have you ever traveled? Yes a lot yeah. And so you kind of be familiar that
there's a couple of important parts to travel one is you know what is great to do in a location
and the other is how on earth do I get to that place and the travel industry is very good at
selling dreams about you know amazing things to do and it's very good at selling certain parts of
those experiences but it was very bad at the time that i started about actually helping you get there
you know flight aggregation had become a thing right webjet and sky scanner these sorts of
businesses have become a thing but what about that last mile and you looked at travel travel
at the time again that i had started this and was running this had built a stack of really nice
aggregator models right so you had booking.com hotels webjet for flights sky scanner for flights
so forth but no aggregator for the last mile this was pre-uber even right you know taxis all around
the world we're all completely different companies uh how do you as a person actually work out how to
get around and and not just work it out how you access it and so we stepped into that vertical
we said well like as a macro kind of idea that makes sense as a traveler with a lived experience
i've been stuck in places and i wish i knew how to get around you know let's step into that with
with um aggregate them all uh it made sense from macro point of view it made sense from markets
point of view, you know, taking a look at how Australian public equities had, you know,
played out over the previous years, Australian equity investors were starting to get familiar
with marketplaces, right?
Because you had, you know, seek for jobs to marketplace, you know, domain for properties,
it's a marketplace, car sales for cars, it's a marketplace.
So they kind of understood marketplace dynamics, marketplace defensibility, all of these things
We said in a macro sense, it makes sense.
In an equities sense, it makes sense.
Okay, let's go raise some money and let's go build a company.
And so, you know, we did.
But I guess the thing that is, I guess, the lesson that I didn't know at the time and that I've subsequently learned, I think this is an important lesson for all founders.
Because when you're a founder, and I think I'm probably speaking for most founders, you're starting a company because you don't actually want a job.
right you you want to be in charge of a thing right you don't want to be an employee
the very moment that you raise equity funding you are going to become an employee yes well
maybe not the very first moment you might have a very amazing seasoned investor who says you know
you're the visionary run with it but you always have to go to the next stage right because that
investor is looking for fast flow if that investor is looking for a future liquidity point therefore
you must be courting other investors.
Those investors are going to want still further amounts of control.
You will get still further diluted and so on.
You're on track.
And eventually you end up on a publicly listed board
with multiple other board members
holding a single digit percentage of your company
and they'll disagree with you.
And they'll tell you what to do.
Interesting.
And that sounds like a job to me.
And so I think a lot of people at that early stage,
they don't kind of realize that they're buying themselves a job
with the moment you raised, Mike.
And there's lots of opportunity these days.
And again, if we're going to talk about AI,
to avoid that track completely if you wanted to.
Yes, and for sure we should talk about it.
Truly interesting time.
Yeah.
And again, just to reference the kind of starting point is
even just recently, I am in Byron Bay at the moment with my family
and we had some tickets to go and watch Oasis in Melbourne,
which is freaking awesome.
and so we were flying down to Melbourne and it's a it's a trip I've done a lot over the last two
years and almost every single time we land in Melbourne I'm like how are we going to get from
the airport to wherever we're going whether it's my mother-in-law's place or to a hotel
and I've used different chauffeur companies essentially transfer businesses whatever you
want to call them so when I heard you describe the problem of j-ride like oh my god I've experienced
that problem so many times when you you basically reach the end of one travel company's service
or product but it's like well now i don't know where the fuck i'm going next and yes like uber
might improve that you could get a car directly somewhere but even then it's like well actually
now i've got 12 bags and three kids and two strollers and do you know what i mean it's like
they're obviously more niche in terms of what you're looking for you might have a surfboard
you might be disabled who knows right and so that that problem point really echoed to me is like ah
what a great idea of course there's a good marketplace for aggregating that step um and
clearly it worked right you'll hear how many years later um yeah well i'm no longer running that
company but the business really went you know yeah that's right and so the business now continues
it's a it's a listed enterprise it's under new leadership and they're they're doing exciting
things in sass uh you know i look forward to that business kind of continuing to make big runs but
But the journey of being a founder there was kind of a really interesting layup into why Bitcoin, what it sold in capital markets, why NOSTA, what it sold in go-to markets.
And there was a moment in, wow, it was three years ago now.
Three years ago, I was still in Jayride and GPT-3 came out.
Do you remember how much of a splash that made?
Yeah, people were excited, yeah.
Yeah, suddenly everybody's talking about AI.
And it was a really fascinating moment.
So there you are, right?
You put yourself in these shoes.
You're CEO, managing director, founder of a listed tech company that spent, oh, $25 million over a decade building software with the expectation that that's going to be a technological defensibility that no other company has been bothered to invest the same amount of money in solving the same problem because you're already there.
and GPT-3 comes out and, you know, it's,
I think we all remember now in retrospect how average it was
compared to current models, but GPT-3 comes out
and, you know, you can see that within a few years
you're going to be able to say, you know,
hey, model, give me a replica of JRide's code base.
Give me a replica of ABC company's code base
and that it will go, okay, there you go.
It's done, yeah.
for broadly free and broadly instantaneously.
And, you know, that wasn't what GPT-3 was able to do,
but you were able to look at it and say,
how many years until that's possible?
And all of that technology note that you'd so painfully built
over so many years is just, you know,
holding a residual value of zero.
And how many competitors can now suddenly come
and be a fast follower of your, you know, successful model?
And it was three years ago when I said,
it's probably a decade away, but still, you know,
changes your investment horizon.
You're no longer building for the eons.
You're building for, well, I've got to make sure
that this thing delivers within a five-year span
because within 10 years I'm going to have fast followers, right?
Which brings us to now, right?
So I've stepped out of J-Ride and I'm doing essentially
AI-led development.
Six months ago I said, I wonder if I was wrong by seven
and a half years.
And I can confirm I was wrong by seven and a half years.
The moment where you can sit down with a robot and say, I'd like to duplicate X and have it not instantaneously, but pretty fast and not free, but pretty cheap, completely duplicate somebody else's business model and code.
It's right now.
It's possible to do today.
Wow.
And the ramifications of that are just so extraordinary, aren't they?
um rod to to just dwell on this for a moment the the job that you found yourself in as the founder
of a business that was quote-unquote your idea and your business but suddenly you're stock listed
and you've got single digits of the business you're no longer in control yes there's value
that you've generated which is great but um in some ways you're an employee which is a fascinating
insight that a lot of people won't have considered 2023 you mentioned that the the management of the
business changed um how did that feel you know 10 years of your life going into something and say
okay well maybe this isn't what I want to do with my time it was an interesting moment um but I
wouldn't I wouldn't say it was a negative moment you know you you can become too much single track
on a single idea for too long and I think I was also kind of really clear with myself that my
special skills are turning nothing into something and that's a very different game to running 150
person headcount listed entity um and i mean a very different game and you know i learned that
game and that's fine but you know given the opportunity to continue to run you know 200
person listed entity uh or you know get my hands dirty again and get on the tools and build
something that's not been seen before.
I mean, that's the thing that excites me.
So, Rod, keep going.
So where is that excitement taking you today?
I think that's awesome, by the way.
What a great vibe.
Yeah, look, so the...
It just comes back to AI.
So think about just how profound this is for a second.
You know, 10 years ago, you are a non-technical co-founder
who wants to start a technology company.
Okay.
First step, get a technical co-founder.
You need that, 50% of your equity.
And then second step, go and raise a venture round
for another 25% of your equity so that you can plow that money
and some stock options into getting some more engineers.
Okay, great.
Now you've got a technical team and you're off.
You get to start now.
You own 30% of your company, right?
Yeah, wow.
And you go.
And you go for 10 years and you end up with a single digit.
Now, compare and contrast.
You're a non-technical co-founder today and you go to Claude and you say, give me a prototype of X.
And it just can.
And you can get out the gate, you know, without the venture, without the technical co-founder even.
You can get out the gate holding 100% of your company.
And very fast as well.
Yeah.
But even without speed, even if you had to, you know, beat it to death over many months, you can still do it.
Yes.
And you can learn the skills as you go and it'll teach you the skills as you go.
Wow.
And so, yeah.
Please don't carry on.
Oh, no, I was going to say.
And so how fundamentally does that change what it means to start a technology company?
Well, it radically changes things.
And to share an experience of mine.
So I have tried many times to found a company and failed many times.
And there's all sorts of different reasons why.
But one experience I had was going through what is called talent investing.
So there's some programs, one's called Entrepreneur First, another called Antler.
I don't know if you've ever heard of these, but they're basically big funds that raise money on the idea that you can put two people in a room together, give them three months to come up with a prototype, and they're going to build the next Google.
And it's like a real dragon's den, in a sense.
and everyone's in there scouting each other out like 100 people in the room it's like who do you
want to work with who do you not want to work with and again as a non-technical founder it's like okay
i've got commercial skills i've got industry expertise in this one specific niche but don't
really want to work in that um i need someone who can build this thing so immediately given 50 away
and then as you said you've also got to raise the money and so between the two of you then selling
more equity to the program that you've come through.
And so the headache involved in A, getting the talent
and B, getting the funding is massive for someone
who's basically an ideas man that can make something happen.
You given away more than half just to get to the point of starting So it a massive change and affects someone like myself hugely as well Yeah one of the smartest investors and wealthiest kind of investors we ever had
was very straightforward that if you really think
this is going to be a big and exciting company,
then you should try to hold on to as much equity as you can.
Because why wouldn't you want to have all of the shares
in this thing if it's going to be as huge as you say?
and that's obviously them being a uh you know them slightly negging the investment thesis and
asking for me to respond but it is also true and it it flies in the face of what you used to read
about in tech crunch which was fundraising round fundraising round fundraising round now these two
things can't both be true you know either it's important validation that you're successfully
getting investors all the time or you actually want to hold on to your company as one of those
I mean, they can't both be true statements all the time.
And I'm sure there's a middle ground,
but I think a lot of people are attracted by the glitz and the glam of the funding.
And also in an era of free money, you know, there's money.
So you can get it.
Go and get it.
Today, you don't need it.
Not only is it scarcely available, but also you don't need it.
That's kind of a radically different play.
You raise your venture.
You're now on a track.
You know, the VC-fueled hamster wheel.
you're going to keep raising, you're going to keep growing, you're going to keep hiring,
you're going to keep diluting. And you end up having to build a very, you know, a tiny little
narrow window of valid businesses fit that mold, right? It has to be, you know, in 100 million plus,
and it has to be a trade sale to a industry dominant player, or it has to be an IPO,
because we as investors who are putting in the money need our liquidity.
Where's our exit event? The little window that you get to play in becomes increasingly small,
But the moment that you instead own the company, I mean, the opportunity to build different templates of business become wide open, wide open.
I mean, how much money do I truly need to happily live by the beach with my daughter and play volleyball on the beach?
It's probably not, you know, a multi-hundred million dollar company, to be frank.
You know, and with venture, you can't play that game.
You can't decide to take, you know, three months off and come back to it soon.
You know, these sorts of things are forbidden.
they can't be done and so again ai is fundamentally i think changing this game for founders
and what a great time to be on the outside and go after it oh my god i couldn't agree more one
small example but something that's happened for me in just literally the last few weeks
is i had i had a strategy for the podcast that um was incorrect and i went 10 10 months absolutely
hammered it hired an editor hired a producer we threw a lot of content out there hit almost 250
000 views across all the kind of traditional platforms which i'm really pleased with but
what i realized is that i was chasing something i didn't need to chase and i was getting stressed
about something i didn't be stressed about and selling views is a commodity business and therefore
how am i any different to someone down the road with another podcast with another opportunity to
sell a banner or a bio mention or ad real or whatever you're in advertising and given the
the fortune i've had to invest in bitcoin when i did it completely shifts the playing field because
you have a deflationary savings tool that's increasing in purchasing power whilst you do
nothing and i say nothing quote unquote you know homeschooling kids or whatever but you can choose
to do different things with your time and chase the funding and so i have let pat and michael go
cheers to those guys for getting me there this far but it's like what does ai mean for a podcaster
what does a one-man media business actually look like and of course this is where nostor comes into
it because the platform risk of traditional things is huge like you can just get kicked off you can
have hundreds of thousands of subscribers on youtube and they're like oh do you know what
these guys pay us more ad revenue over here and you're talking about stuff they don't like so
you're newt and it's going to be some small term in the community guidelines the point of explaining
all this being I have produced and released only one episode since this decision and I've got one
waiting in the wings to release on Friday but I've been able to use Riverside to produce you know to
edit to get clips to create captions and I've been able to do it to the standard I want rather than
necessarily pay someone else to do it for me that does it to what they want and I'm comfortable with
how it's been and you think wow i've just probably 20x like i've cut the cost by 20x essentially if i
think about what the monthly running costs were and what they will be now i'm not paying for my
time but that's a big big big shift in just that one tiny example as to how you can be more efficient
as a solo operated business and i call it business quote unquote really what it is is a
creative venture that I wrapped up as a business and got carried away. But I'd love to know, Rod,
so what I love about someone like your story is you had an idea, you took it through the
entrepreneurial route, you had an exit, and you're now refocusing all of that expertise to go, I'm
going again. So what are some of the problems that you've stumbled across that you're like,
oh, that's something that's caught my attention, or this has caught my attention? And how do you
decide where to point your energy and your skills?
So I'm running a new NOSTA venture called Show Show at the moment.
I guess we'll get to talking about Show Show in a roundabout way.
But the challenge that I set, I guess challenge,
the thing to validate that I set myself six months ago was,
can you right now start a tech company with no technology people?
Because again, three years ago, I had the view that's going to take 10 years.
I thought maybe I'm wrong by seven and a half years.
And so let's say you want to do that.
That's your chief risk that you're going to try and fail and that it's not possible.
And in startup, the number one thing to do always is validate your riskiest assumption first.
So that's the riskiest assumption.
How do you then subordinate all other concerns to validating only that assumption?
Well, what are the other risks when you're going into business?
Funding risk?
Okay, I'll bootstrap it.
Business model risk?
Okay, I'll copy someone else.
So how do you just get focused on just the development side of the problem?
Can I train an AI?
Well, I'm not going to do a model-based.
I'm not going to teach a model.
I need something that's in the training data already.
Okay, great.
How do I build something that's going to ride on existing open source rails
so that I can just feed this thing, read this GitHub,
and tell me how it's done?
All right, so I'm looking for something I can bootstrap, something with no business model risk because somebody else has already run the model successfully and it's a growth vertical, something that's going to sit on existing training data that's already in the models and also many open source GitHub repos that I can feed it if it's missing.
to narrow the playing field down, right?
And then that's where you want to play.
And within that little playing field,
then you can say, okay, well, now let's validate.
Can the AI do its work?
I'm giving it the easiest layup in the world.
Can it do it?
And so that's how we ended up in the playing field
that is where Shoshosh lands.
Just to pitch you Shoshosh for a minute, okay.
Have you ever tried to sell product online, right?
You go to eBay, you create a boring listing.
Maybe it's got a nice photo.
Maybe you were too busy.
And you spend a lot of time writing a whole bunch of copy.
And now it gets lost amongst 20,000 other people that are selling the exact same product.
But you, Jake, have a podcasting platform.
You're an influencer.
You have a social media presence.
You have all of these other assets that you apparently, in traditional e-commerce, aren't allowed to bring to bear.
You have to play within their little boxy shape of creating a listing.
Well, no longer because there's a new vertical.
and it's called live streaming sales.
And there's lovely businesses in this vertical
like Whatnot or Show Show or TikTok Shop.
And these businesses have become
an incredibly fast-growing vertical.
Live streaming e-commerce.
You hop on a live stream, you're here,
you're on video and you have your product.
Okay, now this is for sale, guys.
Sold.
Okay, next product.
think about how engaging that is to be there in a live chat with everyone talking and bidding and
buying together you know for you as a social media personality or an influencer or somebody
who's just a content creator to be able to create that content and turn your sale into a real show
is something that the traditional e-commerce platforms don't do and it's a way for you to
clear vast amounts of product really quickly in fact that that vertical in china is the fastest
growing vertical in e-commerce. In 2020, it went from roughly zero to roughly 10% of e-com.
They reckon when the numbers finally settle for 2024, it'll be 25% of e-com in China is going
through live streaming videos. 25% of e-com in China goes through this new vertical.
That's massive. That us in the West are completely sleeping on besides,
you know, a tiny feature in the back of TikTok that most TikTok users probably don't know.
and I'd never even heard a TikTok shop till just then yeah yeah and and what not I mean they're
they're lovely they're growing fast they're doing 6 billion US GMB a year but they sell Pokemon cards
unless you're into Pokemon cards you probably haven't heard of what right so there's this
there's this vertical it's fast growing business models very well worked out it's it's e-com it's
the oldest business model on the internet and what's it actually boiled down to it boils down
to e-commerce shopping technology, which is, I mean, I've been doing it for 12 years, but
also there's vast amounts of open source code on that. And live streaming, which is also,
I mean, it's also, it's literally in the training data, right? You know, OBS was an open source
foundation from the get-go. So open source training data, fast growing vertical, well
worked out business model, can the AI do it? And so just from the get-go, here's whatnot,
here's TikTok, here's a whole bunch of NOSTA software,
here's a whole bunch of e-com software,
work out how to use that to build this.
And that's how we got started.
And again, the takeaway is it can absolutely do that.
It can over the course of time, you know, again,
if you're willing to spend the money on the tokens
and really grind it out,
it can build a feature for feature competitor
to any business you want to point at.
Fantastic.
And so one thing that springs to mind for me
is the, and if there's anything that Bitcoin teaches you about,
it's counterparty risk.
There's many things it teaches you,
but one major one is counterparty risk.
And so having your value stored in self-custody,
no one can take it from you,
can't be debased on the back end.
When you really understand how safe your value now is
versus how it was before in a diversified portfolio
of stocks and bonds with a finance manager somewhere,
it completely changes your life.
and I wonder with AI
and you touched on using open source for example
is there kind of counterparty risks
to building what you're creating
i.e. like how do you actually do that
so could Grok switch you off
if you were using Grok
or something along those lines
I think it's quite early still
I think there's lots of ground to cover
in that landscape
you can if you want to run your own models
I don't
I mean I could
you could if you wanted to have your own hardware sitting in a rack
and have your own models running on it.
I guess I see enough competition to believe that the model companies
aren't yet going to pull the rug on people.
And we're not just talking about the famous US-China competition
where China wants to defeat the US's AI advantage
or whatever the tabloids would say.
Just the pure and simple of is it Grok or Anthropic
core chat GPT that's going to win as the best coding model and attract all of the dead income
because we're spending a lot of money in aggregate not much each relative to the cost of hiring an
engineer but in aggregate I mean there's there's money being spent there and so who's going to win
it and I look at the companies and I say they're all broadly I mean they'll they'll haggle at this
point if you ask them but they're all broadly interchangeable right and if chat GPT turned me
off tomorrow then i'm using someone else and i don't care and literally the software will allow
you to switch an api key and away you go it would take me five minutes uh and so i don't i don't know
that we're going to get rugged by ai companies just yet but even if that kind of in the future
becomes a risk i i guess i imagine it's only going to become more accessible than it is now
and it's only going to become easier and easier to run your own capable credible model on your
own hardware. One which as a builder, like the trend is your friend. And I would agree with you
there completely as you lay that out. It's like, hang on, there's probably gonna be more of these
things. It's probably gonna be more of a commodity style business as a product. You know, you're
gonna be competing on price against people. Yes, some of them will be more sophisticated than
others. There'll be different reasons you might use one from a different one. But should you get
into hot water with one particular company, well, there's going to be armies of others that you can
go to. So that risk actually is very low as I think about it.
Although it comes to margin, well, if we just dwell on this for one more point,
at least some of the AI apocalypse sort of stuff you hear about is, well, you know,
if we're going to subordinate all thought to these computers, well, then which company
are we trusting to do this?
Well, then we're in a lot of trouble.
Right. And are we actually going to end up where all surplus margin of all technology
businesses in the world simply accrue to open AI? And again, if you ask open AI, their answer is
absolutely, we're going to command all margin in the world. But I don't think it's true. Because
again, the models are broadly interchangeable with each other and clearly very imitable because
look at the field of players that has cropped up in just three years. I would say actually that
none of the AI companies will ever be able to hold on to surplus margin because they are so,
I guess so boilerplate and imitable.
So where does the margin go?
If it's not no longer living with, you know,
fat, juicy Silicon Valley companies
because their technology mode has been eroded
and it also doesn't accrue to chat GPT and clones
because they're so able to copy each other,
I think it goes to us.
As founders of small businesses and consumers
who use those businesses,
I think it ends up with,
let's call it instead of fat company i think you end up with fat user which is the same premise as
nostr actually and the same premise bitcoin is the power accrues to the individual uh and so what a
what a wild time to live yes oh rod and what an awesome explanation so let's unpack that a little
more the the technology moat for the large well-funded cantillon effect in many way
businesses is actually filtering through to the user so as the founder of a business you can
essentially be more efficient in the marketplace so you still provide a service or a product to
someone and they're willing to pay for it but within your business the operations can be more
efficient as a result of applying ai and so the customer gets a better deal and the founder gets
a better deal but the technology provider is actually getting slowly eroded over time because
of the nature of how that technology is created. Imagine being the CEO of a listed Silicon Valley
tech co and you maybe your DocuSign right you make you make software that signs PDFs which
Acrobat also does you've got a 13 billion dollar market cap somehow and you have to turn up every
quarter and say how you've defended every dollar of that and how you're going to come up with some
amazing growth play to double your investors returns over the next decade. And meanwhile,
literally anyone with an LLM and five minutes can make a clone of your software.
What do you do? I don't think you can do anything. I think that there's a landscape within 10 years
where there's 100 competitors nipping at your heels, stealing customers one by one,
which you can't afford to lose because you need to continue to provide a growth outlook to your
investors. How do you? I mean, you possibly can defeat one fast follower by saying, oh,
I've got a bigger marketing budget. But how do you defeat an army of thousands of fast followers who
are all building exact clones of your software with a few tokens in their weekend? I don't know
that you can. DocuSign, $13 billion market cap. How do they defend that? Slack, broadly speaking,
Nostra does what Slack does. People will argue that there's more to it than that. That's fine.
$26 billion market cap it was acquired by, right?
It was acquired for.
These companies, how on earth are they going to,
without any technology mode, defend themselves?
You might say some sort of network effects.
NOSTA can defeat network effects.
NOSTA has its own network effects.
You know, I see that that value is going to get distributed
from these selection of just a few sanctioned,
beautiful US-listed companies,
distributed through thousands and millions of small businesses
and entrepreneurs to the people.
Because, again, starting a company like Jay
and raising the money that we raised with a view we had
to present that big outcome.
But to start again and not raise any money and to bootstrap it,
I mean, I don't need to have a company that's that big.
I can be small and nimble and fast forever.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's an absolutely brilliant conversation, Rod.
Thank you for sharing all of this.
I have so many questions in different ways I want to take it,
but let's do this.
So you're building Shoshow,
and I want to make a shout out to Anders L,
who came up with a question just on NOSTA.
So when can we get multi-user stream?
Me and some friends want to do some live streams,
podcasts on NOSTA hashtag NOSTA only Yeah I love the enthusiasm eh There so many businesses to build here Oh my Yeah You know and Shosho is going to be quite focused
from here on out on the e-commerce part of that play
because that was, again, I'm trying to make that business.
But how easy is it to fork something like Zapstream
and add whatever features you want to it using a model
and publish it under your own brand name
to achieve whatever thing that you want.
And if you're not going to do it,
then to put the idea out and somebody else to do it.
You know, that sort of creation becomes just so,
shall we say, just accessible, right?
And so whether or not ShowShow ever gets to doing
kind of multi-party live streaming,
I don't know, I can't say,
but I look at just how easy it is for anybody else to do that
and I say, it's going to happen.
It's a certainty.
there's a little thing in Nostra
I don't know if you've noticed it where people these days
are forking Jumble
I haven't seen that
so do you know Jumble?
no
so Jumble is a Nostra client
it's a web client written by a guy named Cody
it's a beautiful web client
you should totally try it
it specializes in the Twitter feed type thing
it is very focused on
and it's a Jack Dorsey quote
it says
make every detail perfect
limit the number of details and then make every one of those details perfect.
That's what Jumble has done for kind one notes.
But it's open source and Cody says, here's my code base.
Go for it. And people have.
You fork Jumble, you tell your LLM to add a feature to Jumble,
and then you publish it under your own domain.
And so now you don't just have one Jumble,
which has like, I guess, the reference implementation
of how this author thinks a kind one note client should be written.
you're starting to have a swarm of jumble clones where even if it just has an audience of one me
i'm building this just for myself because i want a fancy zap button that works like x when i press
it people are now forking that adding that feature just for themselves and publishing it
wow so again there'll be there'll be a landscape where you can grab your you know favorite live
streaming client and fork it and add the thing that you want and publish it under your own name
or grab something that already does three-party live streaming
and just stick it on Oster and publish those notes.
Wow.
It's such a big shift, isn't it?
Okay.
And where I wanted to then go with this is a fascinating conversation
I had earlier this year.
I don't want to mention who it was with because I'll box them if I do,
but I was looking very closely at investing in Satlantis
and I was super impressed by some of the progress Alex made
and I previously interviewed him a couple of years back.
I really love how in just two to three years,
how much people who've been building with Bitcoin behind them
have improved basically in their grasp of what's going on around them
and what they want to build.
And I decided not to invest.
And the reason was largely based on a conversation I had with a friend
around return of capital rather than return on capital.
And it was just like, Jake, what are the chances of you getting your money back?
I said, you know, I actually don't know. And it was a he described it as a lottery ticket for wealthy people.
And it's a great description in some ways. And the the conclusion I came to, though, was like, OK, this is a hit and hope.
And you just don't quite know what's going to happen. But what's interesting is, like, first of all, the venture side of things is shifting so much.
It's like, how do you as a venture investor start to justify putting money into software companies that can be replicated at the click of a button?
Like the defensibility of the position you built for J-Ride.
And equally, this is what Jeff Booth talked about in his Price of Tomorrow experience as a technology founder.
It's like we spent millions of dollars building this thing.
And the trend was quite clearly that the cost of that production was going to zero.
So how do you defend that?
It's very hard.
where the conversation went was really around the the moat becoming physical attributes and so i'd
love to know what your view is on this rod as someone who's building a business as a non-technical
founder using these off-the-shelf tools absolutely the efficiency that you described is filtering
through to the user and the customer which is great but how do you defend that position and
And it got quite niche, to be honest.
I'll dig it up in a second.
But let me leave that with the questions.
How do you start to defend yourself as a software business
when you can create it as quickly as you described?
Well, the first part that I'd cover is I think the answer to that question
that you've got about lottery ticket for rich people
is the portfolio approach that you issued earlier.
And certainly, angel investors, they don't just back one company.
if you're going to do this well,
you're trying to get a beta
on the average return of all your companies.
You're trying to hope that you back enough companies
that you get the one that's going to go 100x
and return the whole fund.
But in order to do that,
you have to back a whole bunch.
You have to pay a bunch of bets.
You've got a quarter million to invest,
make 10,000, 25,000 clips and spray and pray, right?
This is not an uncommon approach to doing venture.
And I think that's where a lot of venture funds
have added value, shall we say, in the past, right?
Because they are the ones who actively go out
and solicit the deal flow.
And then you as an LP or whomever,
you don't have time for that.
And you're banking on their ability to go and find the gems
and back enough of them that one of them will hit
and return the whole thing.
And I look at that and I say,
well, that's fantastic for investors,
but what does it mean for founders?
because now we've got a Jeff Bezos quote, right?
Here's a Jeff Bezos quote.
Nine out of 10 businesses fail.
I think we know that.
But one out of 10 businesses will return 100x.
And so if you can play that bet,
you'd play it every day of the week, right?
Because 9-10 in the trash,
but one becomes 100, go again.
Or you can see how if you're playing the odds that way,
it compounds and your typical early stage venture investor has been doing that forever,
but it's never been possible for a founder to do so because nobody has time in their life to go 10
times. I mean, I've just come out of a business that took me 10 years. And again, what's changed
in the realm of AI, start a business, launch it, took six months. I could do that 10 times.
right if that was if i didn't get sufficient traction to be excited to continue with show
show which i mean i'm getting some interesting traction it looks exciting let's continue
i mean park it do another park it do another and every time you do one your ai practice gets faster
every time you do one you know you probably build a useful reusable code base especially if you're
building on something that's open source like a like an austin right so suddenly you as you know
following that, you know, nine out of 10 fail, you get to go 10 times. And so this opportunity to
make sure that you eventually get a hit, which was always reserved in the past for the investor class
is now starting to accrue to the founder class. Really cool. And so how do you then to loop back
to your question, how do you defend that? Well, you just get ready to go 10 times. I think at a,
at a, I guess at a high, at the highest level, let's assume that we, we're right. And, you know,
all value is about to accrue to users who can spin up exact copies of your you know company and run
it for themselves for you know pennies with their own llm and even the llm doesn't make margin on
that and all margin accrues to the user and let's imagine that beautiful future and that we're
heading there that's great but i still think that we've maybe got a window right now of let's call
it five to ten years where we're actually just going to go and steal silicon valley's cheese
well and also it's like you know how many people have even got an ai app on their phone
look at global internet adoptions some people don't even some people aren't even online in some
countries you know just it's it's extraordinary in terms of the the macro setup to to think about
okay if you're if you're basically faster to market with ai than other people there's an
opportunity there's no doubt about that um and what a cool insight so yes so as a founder the
you just get ready to hit it 10 times.
So I was thinking it's like the execution risk is lower
because if it fails, it doesn't matter.
It hasn't taken as long.
You just try another one.
Would that make sense?
Yeah, interesting.
Okay.
And so where we went with the, again,
to reference this conversation I had was like,
okay, but what if defensibility is not just an iteration speed
like you describe, or the opportunity to be like a first mover with AI. But what if the opportunity
to defend was actually around real world physical assets and competencies and looking at, okay,
well, it's actually quite difficult to fulfill the creation of a house, for example. What about
applying AI to house building or a boring business like laundry? Like people still need to get their
laundry done. Okay. What if you're faster into that business? And I found that quite compelling
as a investor, at least, because it's like these are services that people are going to need ongoing.
And you've also got this class of boomers that are retiring and selling businesses. And maybe
you could take one of those on. Now, I didn't do any of those things very much just like
spitballing ideas around. But to put a cherry on this idea of defensibility then, Rod, so in your
opinion, it's about speed as a founder. As a founder, your defensibility will be, I think,
and the practice that you build around getting up and going
and getting up and going.
I think your speed to market is part of it,
but also just your reusable methods and processes.
The thing right now, the thing that separates AI-based users
who are using, I don't know, Base44
or some sort of rapid prototyping tool
that have no experience and skills,
but they're getting something out the door right now.
The thing that separates them from those who are going to actually win
is not the model because everyone's got the same model.
It's the process.
It's how do you build your dev practice
so that you have the process that runs faster and more repeatably
and more confidently than anyone else.
This is not a new idea.
Rocket Internet, this was their idea.
Take no business model risk.
copy an existing business model
choose a market where it doesn't exist
hire
have a process for all of these things
hire an
absolute go-getter in that market and say
here's your funding and here's your business model and I want you
to do exactly this
and then repeat that
as often as you can with as many
verticals as you can and as many countries as you can
using
their little
repertoire of
which businesses are worth copying,
which markets are worth entering,
and how do you hire the right founder
for each of those businesses?
And that's their little repeatable process.
And they just ran it.
And this is how Rocket Internet created,
I can't even name how many beautiful companies.
And I see that happening again here, right?
Because if you build your AI dev process, right,
and you work out the little things
that make you and your team go at impeccable speed
with repeatable confidence,
and it doesn't matter how many businesses models you want to attack before you find a hit
because you know for sure you will find one it's kind of how i'm starting to think about it and
again i'm quite impressed by the traction of show show but the very moment that i find something
more exciting i know that i'll be able to go get it is a is a wild landscape for a founder to be in
it's not the landscape i was in with j ride where i was you know beholden to investors and i'd raise
money that i had to keep going it's a very different landscape and i just think that's
the time scape that exists for founders now.
It strikes me then that essentially
the quest for product market fit
can now be funded by your time
and elongates the process
such that the chance of success is better.
And you can also hustle different ideas
at the same time
because the engine room of developing those ideas
is a piece of software that you've got and a process.
I mean, it's absolutely insane for any entrepreneur, basically.
Like, what a time to be building stuff.
Like, holy shit.
Yeah, what a time.
What a time to be on the outside and only on the outside.
I mean, BigCo can't do what I'm describing, right?
Have you ever seen a BigCo trying to spin up an innovation lab and succeed?
No, never.
It's the rarest thing in the world.
So put your hat on for a minute and go back to BigCo and think about how they're responding to this.
Your board of directors just asked you whether or not you're leveraging AI to reduce cost base and improve efficiency.
And so you go to your head of customer service and you say, hey, you repeat the question, are you doing X, Y, Z?
Give me a plan on my desk tomorrow that tells me the opportunity that you haven't captured yet and how you're going to go and get it.
what's your head of customer service going to do is they look around and they see their budget and
they think oh that's going to get cut and then they see their headcount and they say oh I love
these people and I spent so long recruiting them and then they say oh you know but I've got an
existing customer base and what if I upset them with bad AI replies and we've got this existing
brand reputation and what happens if we damage it and we can't stand those risks that would be
horrible we're not going to we're not going to be able to say with a straight face that AI is any
good and besides that if I did say with a straight face that AI was good I'm going to lose budget
next quarter. I'll just say that, you know, we explored it and it's not good. So then you go
back to your board of directors and you say, oh, you know, it's the opinion of our senior leadership
team that there's nothing to do here and we should just keep on with our business. Compare and
contrast to you, Jake, the outsider who looks at an incumbent company and says, I wonder if I can
copy that with no one at all. I wonder if I can go after that and instead of having 600 headcount,
have two. You might be wrong. It might not be possible, but if you fail, you've lost nothing.
And if you succeed, you win the whole game because they can't come after you.
And you can only do that if you're on the outside.
So I just want a time to be a founder.
I really think so.
Rod, do you think then, I've heard some others talk about this,
but conceptually, do you think a single man billion dollar business is possible?
I mean, sure.
Yeah.
I mean, I wonder if eventually you'll get companies that are running so much on autopilot that maybe the founder passes away and no one notices.
And the AIs just keep collecting Bitcoin every day.
And eventually it's, you know, one of the largest holders and there's no one running it at all.
But also no one knows how to turn it off or even where the software runs.
All sorts of things are going to happen.
Wow.
It's extraordinary, isn't it?
Oh, my gosh.
um rod what i want to do is i want to circle back to something you touched on very near the start of
the conversation um and that was around policy and this experience you had building a business
in travel and first of all like what it was like to be close to the money printer in a sense and
also then the idea that like oh look here's this pandemic that's come along and your market's now
just closed um at least those are the two things that i think that you were referencing when you
talked about policy so what does that mean to you and and what were some of your lessons from that
yeah so just to unpack a little bit about what happened there so
running a travel technology business into the onset of the pandemic
and most investors start calling around january of 2020 saying what's going on something is
something happening do you see anything in your numbers and at that time we didn't right we had
one investor call and say, prepare.
Okay, well, we'll take that in mind and we're watching it carefully.
Then March 20, 2020, US closes its borders
and the whole world rapidly follows suits.
And immediately, you know, your travel technology company
that hasn't had a single down quarter in, what was it at that point?
10 years or nine years suddenly loses 95% of its revenue immediately and has to refund
in million dollars worth of travel repairs that aren't going to go ahead and also still
work out how to pay transport companies for all the jobs that they did do.
What a crazy trip.
Oh, and also explain that to the team and explain that to the capital markets while,
you know, planning the, I guess, you know, unwinding of 75% of your headcount.
you know what a thing and you know you can look at that and you can say it was a virus but I'm not
responding when I'm responding to that I'm not responding to a virus I'm responding to a policy
decision I'm responding to the US and then subsequently Australia's decision to close
borders and say that travel is no longer a vertical we want to support yeah and so you know what do
you do well I mean you get through it right so you you manage the team through it you tell them all
to work from home, you have emergency board meetings, you reduce costs, you get through
on the smell of an oily rag.
And if you do it well, you take care of your people.
And then at that future point in late 2021, when we were able to be an exciting barbell
story and raise a bunch of money, you're able to bring those people who are still on the
outside back from whatever job they managed to land that they didn't prefer because you
took care of them.
Now you're hiring again.
They'll come back to you.
And we did all of that.
We did it very well.
And still it makes you look at the situation and say you say and again as a founder you into only one business right
Bold a lightning out of a blue sky.
Suddenly everything shuts down for that one business.
What if I had two businesses and one of them was Zoom, right?
And, oh, look, travel's done, but, wow, look at teleconferencing.
and you just not just pull your own focus,
but pull your capital and pull your team
and go and scale your other business up.
So, you know, this is a thing that investors were doing
when they were diversifying against multiple verticals
that founders couldn't and now maybe can.
And so, you know, again, sitting through that experience
with Jayride and, you know, seeing the impact
of these massive external macro forces
and how they will absolutely crush you without any thought.
And kind of maybe, you know, I guess if you're a Bitcoiner
and you have a view to monetary policy being insane
and you maybe perceive that, you know,
the state response to that fallacy of monetary policy
will be continued insanity, possibly with greater severity,
possibly with greater frequency in future years from whatever form it might take you say well
diversification let's let's run multiple parallel entrepreneurial tracks if we can or at least
build a core competency of skills and discipline around starting things so that if let's call it
maybe not inevitable but if catastrophic macro forces affect you again you can say i'm going
from here to here or you can say okay take this competency of starting something and start something
that's appropriate for the time and space.
Put the other thing just on ice for a minute
and come back to it when it's ready.
You know, that's the sort of thing you didn't have
the flexibility to do as a list co.
You know, it was my job to help investors through it,
to make sure the company remained funded,
to take care of all suppliers and team members
and so on and so forth.
And so, you know, you step into the role and you do your job.
But given the choice, better to be on the outside.
Yeah, it's very interesting, isn't it?
And so the bolt from the blue, what do you think,
and you touched on this just now,
it's essentially you want diversification as a founder,
which is now in theory possible to do,
given the engine room of the business can be automated, essentially.
What were some of the decisions you've made over the last six to 12 months
of building that have been heavily influenced by that experience? I lost your question, Jack. Sorry,
can you feed it to me again? Over the last six to 12 months of building, which decisions have you
made that have been a result of the insight around the fact that you can have diversification as a
founder? I mean, getting into NOSTA. Yeah. 100%. I mean, I think you asked about, you know,
at the very start and you wanted to focus, I think,
a little bit on why the choice.
Yeah, let's get there.
60 minutes, that's it.
Great.
It's okay.
It's okay because I already gave you the layup that at least part
of this is about feeding the AI and just the sheer mass of beautiful
open source code that's been funded and made available for people
to build on the network and just how fast that makes you speed
to market with AI because you can feed it existing great architecture
and, say, emulate, and it will.
But also diversification, right?
So I have a particular lens to this, which I like to roll out.
Do you remember a thing called Google Wave?
No.
A little while ago.
And you know Google Maps.
Yeah.
So Lars, who founded Google Maps, it wasn't called Google Maps.
It got acquired by Google, Lars with it.
Lars was given a remit at Google to make something revolutionary, right?
It was going to be a brand new communication platform that replaced email forums.
It had, you know, multi-party editing in real time, which, you know, later then moved into Google Docs.
It had all of these fundamental innovations.
He ran that for three years.
He made a big deal out of this in the developer and founder community because the vision was, let's create a platform where everybody can get onto it.
Everyone can build their own applications.
This is going to provide like a fundamental layer that is otherwise missing.
And it's going to be, it's going to be Google,
but it's going to be open so that other people can build on it.
Let's get out there.
Let's get the developers in there and building on this thing.
And he had three years and then, you know,
the CEO of Google just said, no, too complicated.
Pull the plug.
I happened to meet him in a bar at the,
because he was Sydney based,
happened to meet him in a bar shortly after that happened.
And I was such a dickhead.
I asked the question, what happened?
And he had certain commitments that he was going to be able to take a long path to make a proper infrastructure play for the development community that he believes weren't fulfilled.
And he went off to Facebook and I presume he was very happy there.
But the lesson is, you know, he is one of the biggest and most exciting technology firms in the world, making a promise to the development community.
here's a platform that you can use to build your business on and then three years later they pull
the plug and pull the rug out from every one of those developers and everyone who built on google
wave then is left going well look at all the time in the capital we wasted right what a what a complete
waste of time i wish i had done anything else right i just had the rug pulled entirely it's
the de-platforming thing that you talked about but writ large across you know what was supposed to be
this innovative new thing.
Lesson learned, you know,
don't invest on building on somebody else's land.
You know, do build only on something that you can own.
And so along comes Noster with a statement that, you know,
you can own this.
There's no central anything.
There's no one who controls it enough to pull the rug.
You can continue to write JSON in this format forever
and absolutely nobody could stop you even if they wanted to.
That's a better foundation to be building on, right?
It's platform, de-platform-less risk, none of that risk.
Bad English, but you take my point.
Think about like how the internet started, right?
So, you know, here's an open protocol.
It's protocols that make the internet great.
Here's an open protocol for communication of information, HTTP.
It's brand new.
we're going to have publishers who own websites who publish data and then we're going to have users
who visit websites to consume data but that's not actually you go forward these days that's not
actually how we use the internet right every single user of the internet is both a creator
and a consumer how many of us own websites and servers few if any right but that's not even the
main way that we want to do it we want to be as an individual networking with our social network
consuming their content, creating content and reply to them, right?
Like it's an entirely different use from the original kind of web one.
Now the market, as it does, sorted that out by saying, well, you know,
I'm Mark Zuckerberg and I say that wouldn't it be great if users could exist
within a social graph and create and consume content from each other.
And venture investors said, you're right, that is missing from the protocol.
Let's create a company out of that and we'll put a lovely moat around it
and we'll try to protect it and we'll build shareholder value.
hang on that's not why the internet was created right the the building of moats around data
interoperability to build shareholder value was not why the internet was created right the internet
was created for interoperability right for permissionlessness but it was missing that
social layer you know facebook created it and put a wall around it google tried and they cried many
times and one of them was called wave and they rugged everyone you know what i see with nostr
is i see well here's the missing piece of the protocol right here's a here's a thin very simple
identity layer interoperability protocol very basic content distribution that anyone can copy
anyone can emulate anyone can build on that can't be taken away you don't need to ask anyone's
permission to use it that's the internet and so again thinking about like as a as a founder am i
going to go and apply for permission from large silicon valley juggernaut or am i just going to
build on something that's open rails 100 open rails and this this then again come come to being
a founder you know can i still remove more risk what risks am i removing by by going here one i'm
removing deplatforming risk. You mentioned that. And not just because I've said something mean and
now the company doesn't want my custom anymore, but also as in the Google Wave example,
companies shut platforms down all the time. So I'm removing those risks. I'm also increasing
all sorts of opportunity because anyone can be building on the same rails and I can interoperate
with those contents. Think about the speed to market. Think about all the things you just don't
have to build right so we've launched show show it provides live streaming i didn't have to build
a sign up page i just said plug in your nostril id i didn't have to build an edit profile page
i didn't have to decide on any architecture because i just copied a standard i didn't even
have a server i just yeah do you want to invite your friends no yeah exactly and then the big one
here's a here's a you know peer-to-peer sort of experience where i don't have to solve a chicken
in their problem. I don't have to worry where my first users and content are going to come from
because I just bring it in from the network. It's already there. And so you get this massive
advantage with less risk and faster time to market. I mean, everyone should build a monster.
I don't see there's any better way. Yeah, I like to think of it as a superior form of capital
allocation. And it's largely because it's the property rights. It's built different. And protocol
is superior to platform and saying you know like a rumble we won't switch you off okay until you do
or elon like i've just bought the whole of twitter because i can and now i'm going to run it as a
business and it has to make money and if it doesn't then i'm fucked oh well guess what i'm
going to call it the free speech platform but actually there's a whole lot of stuff we're doing
on the back end that means that it's it's not and it that's a choice and that's absolutely their
choice because they're private businesses you can do whatever you like but until you understand that
and i think it's that whole thing like basically the internet's become i'm going to hop on instagram
for a bit and now i'm going to go to youtube or maybe i'm going to hang out on tiktok for a little
bit or tiktok shop and now i'm at amazon and now i'm done it's like that's like a bunch of private
companies with digital monopolies that either monetize your attention or are a classic kind
of e-commerce play and a winning because of the the tendencies of a monopoly and
it's funny really like the the deeper you get into this concept of the free market it's like
that's that's okay it's the do whatever you like but as individual entrepreneurs or creators
this is the playing field and if you just so happen to see that the playing field is over
here as well aka Noster and you can have a key pair that you know I even got excited recently
thinking about inheritance and and I'd read a great book that was called Call Me Ted which is
about a guy called Ted Turner who started CNN and he inherited a business from him for his father in
the US that was a an advertising company with billboards and it was like the 50s and people
were driving cars and suddenly the billboard business was growing and that turned into what
became CNN and it's an amazing story just because you're like the playing field was different
billboards and cars were a big deal but now it's like we're in cyberspace and currently your
your billboard is on Facebook's digital real estate or on Google's digital real estate and so if they
want to just burn your your billboard down they could but NOSTA changes that you're like wow what
would it be like to inherit a Nostra key pair in 30 years time that's been building or accruing
capital all that period? I don't know what that looks like, but it's like, wow, the playing field
has just changed. Yeah, look, I agree. It's a different playing field. It's a great time to be
a founder. Your ability to get out the door and build a thing with AI, your ability to build on
an open platform where no one can ever
rug you.
Your ability to diversify,
avoid risks, and
I guess even more than anything else,
go and target overblown
fat, two
high market cap Silicon Valley companies that
no longer have technology moats and possibly
no longer even have network effect moats
should NOSTA succeed,
and just go and take their business.
And
ultimately then over the course of five to ten
years, there are enough entrepreneurs doing that
create a world of empowered users,
Bitcoiners would say sovereign individuals.
What a time.
It's a great place.
Yeah, and I think it's this idea, isn't it,
that you control your own data
and without necessarily realizing it,
when you log into Twitter with your email
and your password or whatever might be the case,
you're stepping onto someone else's piece of private property
and that's okay because they built it and someone owns it um but what that means is
if you're you know quote unquote free like you're the product and somehow that's just people don't
even realize right oh they've got an instagram account like do you understand what you've given
away in order to actually have that like what's the cost and in some ways it takes an innovation
like Nostra to turn up for you to really be able to answer that question more effectively because
it's shifted.
And so, okay, Rod, we've been going for an hour or so.
I'll look to wrap this up in the next five minutes.
I'm intrigued just to get a bit of a futuristic play.
We've talked a lot about what you're doing right now.
But over the next 12 to 18 months,
what's got you most excited
and where are you going to spend your time?
I'm excited about NOSTA generally.
And then specifically, I think live streaming
is a very exciting vertical plan.
I'm going to build that live streaming e-commerce play
in Shoshow that I've mentioned,
but just live streaming in general.
I think we've seen over the last little bit
social media protocols,
and it doesn't matter,
sorry, protocols or businesses,
it doesn't matter which they are.
The moment they add live streaming,
it's a very important and interesting thing
for them to add that's additive.
We've seen, for example,
Rumble added and suddenly get a lot of traction.
We've also seen some of the incumbents
like Twitch, lose a bunch of market share to kick, streaming is becoming decentralized.
Streaming always had this really interesting opportunity, right?
It's all open source code.
It's all open source Legos, just like Nostra, where anybody can plug and play little bits
together and go live.
But it had a key problem, which was discoverability, right?
It's not, it doesn't age well, this content, unless you're there live at the moment, unless
you can be found at the moment, then your live stream expires and it's gone.
And, you know, so you need to find a way to get discovered.
Traditionally, a few large platforms, be it Twitch or YouTube or, you know, TikTok became these centralized discoverability portals.
But, you know, NOSDA solves discoverability, right?
If not in full now, as it's new in time, it has its own network effect.
And then you as a streamer can publish to any server, have that syndicated through any relay to any consumer on any website.
Must be ultimately better discoverability than I can only stream to one server and it can only be on my website surely
And so I see in general streaming is a very interesting
Market that's already breaking apart and decentralizing and I see Nostra as really interesting rails for that to ride on
I must give props to Kieran right for showing the way with zapstream
But then as kind of more people enter this you're going to see different servers. You're going to see different, you know
broadcasters you're going to see all sorts of different things come through different business
models like i'm talking about with show show and and others like maybe tk building with his uh you
know apple tv for nostra streaming app is any number of things that can happen here so i'm
really watching that closely i'm pretty excited to see where it goes awesome and i'm very excited
to see what you create rod it's um it's a conversation like this is such a great kind
snapshot for a moment in time and in a year or two years you can go back and you listen oh that's
what we're talking about then and this this has then happened or whatever and what's so cool is
is someone with your your skill set essentially refocusing their attention in this direction
going okay well look i built a company before i know what i'm doing in this sense you've just
talked through the the rocket internet playbook but we can do that as individuals you don't need
to be rocket internet to do that any longer um oh very very exciting well rod thank you so much
and the final comment would be it would be interesting to live stream some of these
conversations and so i haven't done this before with nostr uh because i just i haven't figured it
out yet but you could live stream conversations that then obviously become recorded podcasts and
it's very popular thing to do um maybe that's i'll have a play around looking at some of the
different tools to do that and see where that takes for the next couple weeks but rod thank
you so much for your time today um last question if people want to reach out what's the best way to
do that uh find me on nostra um jake can you share my handle absolutely i'll put it in the show notes
well rod thanks so much for your time today thanks jake it's been a pleasure thank you