WBD307 Audio Transcription

Why Silicon Valley Doesn’t Get Bitcoin with Dan Held

Interview date: Friday 5th February

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Dan Held. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Dan Held, the Director of Business Development at Kraken. We discuss Dan's experience in Silicon Valley, what drives VCs to invest, and the changing Bitcoin narratives within Silicon Valley.

“Right now the risk reward has never been better - maybe some VCs look at everything with the lens of early stage investing where they expect a 100x pay off, what’s crazy is with Bitcoin you might actually get that.”

— Dan Held

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Good to see you again, Dan.  How are you doing, man?

Dan Held: Thanks for having me back on; doing well.

Peter McCormack: Were you up listening to Elon Musk this morning?

Dan Held: Who wasn't listening to Elon Musk last night?  I guess last night for me was -- he recorded really late Pacific Time and I'm in California, but really the whole world was talking about it.  It's huge.

Peter McCormack: Well, it was morning for me, so I had to set my alarm for 5.45 am, because it was a 6.00 am start.  But in some ways, I felt like that was an interesting thing to listen to, knowing what we're going to talk about today, really; because, people are hypothesising what he meant.  But, I just thought it was quite interesting. 

But, we should let people know, for this show, we're going to be talking about what Silicon Valley doesn't understand about Bitcoin, which is a really important subject for a couple of reasons.  One of the main reasons is why there's so much shitcoining that comes out of Silicon Valley, which we should talk about; but also, why there's this kind of aversion to Bitcoin.  And, this is a subject that's been really important to you, right?

Dan Held: Yeah, it's been huge for me, because I've been out in Silicon Valley for eight years and I've seen these different waves of hype cycles.  We had not just Bitcoin, but there was Blockchain, Not Bitcoin; there was Ethereum and ICOs; and now it's DeFi; and that's just within the Bitcoin crypto sector.  If we zoom out from there, VR, AR, drones, you know; Silicon Valley, it never stopped being a Gold Rush City; it still is -- sorry, San Francisco never stopped being a Gold Rush City; Silicon Valley is part of that, of course, and I think that bleeds over into new, emerging tech.

What happens with that is it unfortunately leads to some circumstances where there's tons of hype and not a lot of substance; and, that's where I think we're going to dig in a little bit more today around the issues I had with that and how Bitcoin has been perceived over the eight years I've been here.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  Let's do a bit of background first, let people know, because you say you've been there for eight years.  Let's check bio; let's talk about the CV, the stuff you've done there, because I think it's relevant.

Dan Held: Yeah, so I've spent eight years in Silicon Valley.  I've worked at five different crypto companies.  I was the first employee of Blockchain.com.  They bought my app called ZeroBlock, which is the most popular mobile price tracking app, back in 2013, and it's been kind of a wild run.  I mean, at Blockchain.com, I worked with CZ, Andreas Antonopoulos; it was a really wild time. 

Then from there, I went to work on ChangeTip, where we did micropayments over social media.  I also then worked at Uber on rider growth, which is a very pedigreed growth product team in Silicon Valley and growth marketing team.  And then finally, I made my way back to crypto and Bitcoin with Interchange, which was an accounting software.

So, I have built and worked on pretty much every type of crypto product you can imagine; the same with Kraken.  So currently, I'm at Kraken, because Kraken acquired Interchange.  So, I've worked in crypto eight years, five companies and two exits.  And from that experience, and living in Silicon Valley, living in this Gold Rush City, this Gold Rush area of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I've seen so many of these narratives ebb and flow; I think it's been a little bit frustrating for me when you understand why Bitcoin is valuable, to see the quintessential Silicon Valley hype cycles miss the mark on an industry I know so well.

Peter McCormack: Let's dig into the Uber role you did a little bit, because I'm aware of these companies you've created, but I think a little bit of insight into what the experience is like at Uber will probably be a nice setup for the topic we're going to discuss today.  Tell me what that environment was like.  Also, what kind of stage in Uber's life cycle were you there?

Dan Held: I joined Uber early in 2016 and that was, I would say, later stages, but still very high growth.  We were moving from 10 million to 100 million users and Uber, at that time, was the hottest tech company you could work at.  I mean, they were cool and sleek and they didn't give a fuck!  I mean, they were actively illegal in every single city they launched in.  I mean, what better vibe to fit a bitcoiner's vibe than to work at Uber?

Uber was like, "Well, yeah, the government rules aren't really rules; they're just more guidelines and we're going to break them".  I mean, that's pretty cool.  Also, Uber was built and Uber's growth team was built from the remnants of the early Facebook growth teams.  So, Uber's growth team is one of the most pedigreed growth teams. 

By growth, what I mean is that they're looking at the journey of someone from the awareness stage, around being aware of Uber's brand, to getting them to install and sign up and take their first trip; after the first trip, getting them to share with their friends.  So, they look at that customer journey and they try to optimise that journey for the most minimal amount of friction, which enables the company to grow really, really rapidly.

Facebook and other companies were the first companies to have proper growth teams.  Uber's team was comprised of ex-Facebook growth folks -- ex-Amazon and Facebook growth groups.  So, Amazon had a really big growth culture as well, so Uber's growth culture was incredible.  Our job was to grow Uber globally as fast as possible.

I think that experience was really interesting, both from the growth aspect of understanding how do you grow a product, going from 10 million to 100 million, make it relevant and understandable and all these different geos; and then as well internally, with how we communicated internally.  So, Uber required that you wrote a TLDR, a Too Long Didn't Read, on top of every email thread that had a lot of folks cc'd on it; or at the top of like a one-pager that you wrote on a certain initiative you wanted to do.

I think that was really formulative to how I approach writing, how I approached storytelling, which was that people don't have time for this.  They want the story right away, they want it punchy, and this was both applicable internally at Uber, but also on Twitter and in my articles.  I try to write simply, clearly and get to the point, because I think a lot of people out there are great writers, but sometimes they wax poetically using very, very complicated verbiage, that maybe some folks in Ivy League schools would know, but maybe many others wouldn't.  And, I think they're phenomenal writers; I'm just sad that their message isn't able to reach more people, because they've written it in such an, I would say, esoteric way.

Peter McCormack: And, within Uber, did you have to kind of learn the culture, or did they teach you the culture, in terms of the expectation that this has got to be aggressive; the results are aggressive; you're expected to work hard; you're expected to really commit to this?  And, I'm assuming everyone had some kind of options, like share options and stuff?  Is it exactly what you imagine?

Dan Held: Yes, I mean Uber was positioning itself to take over the world.  I mean, that's exactly what people felt like internally, which is a pretty cool vibe.  I mean, the product was loved; people loved the product.  That's all that really matters, right.  As long as people love the product, then you're heading in the right direction.  We were trying new things, like flying car programmes; we had, like, there's Go-Jek out in Asia where you could actually just hop on a motorcycle with someone and you hold on to them, and it costs like $1!  So, all sorts of kind of cool, wild ideas; nothing was off the table. 

The cultural values here, I mean here's a couple.  These were identified internally as the company cultural values that Travis Kalanick went on stage and would present.  One was "big bold bets", so they'd constantly be taking bigger and bolder bets.  Then, another one was "toe-stepping".  That was actually encouraged that you should toe-step if you feel that your manager or stakeholders above you are incorrectly passing and making decisions, like passing data and making decisions, which was really fun.  I actually did that once at a really big level, which had to do with the internal employee credits programme. 

So, we would get a certain number of free rides and I felt like it had been configured very poorly.  And, Travis was the one who came up with it; Travis Kalanick.  We were forced to call him Travis, by the way; we weren't close or anything, but internally you were supposed to call him Travis.  Travis had championed this new internal employee credits programme that was very misaligned to folks who had joined post-2016.  So I was like, "This isn't correct, this isn't how we should treat our employees", so I started to champion the issue internally; you can imagine like internal forums, would be the best way to put it.  And Thuan, the CTO of Uber, found me championing the issue and he decided to pull his political weight behind it, which was incredible.

So, that was super empowering to know that, even though I was an entry-level non-important person, that if I cared enough about something, you could challenge even the CEO.  And, I think Uber very much pushed people to do that, and I think that's a wonderful culture.  It wasn't like an impolite culture of, "I'm going to just be rude"'; it was, "I'm principled, we need to get shit done and if this isn't making the company money, then we need to talk about it and I don't care how big you are" or, "If this leads to higher employee churn", or something else, which is what I championed with that issue.  So, I felt like that was really cool.

Same within my role and in my function, so I ran apps to optimisation on growth, and I was in the war room for the new launch of the rider app.  The rider app was with the app you all call Uber.  And we were making critical, challenging assumptions, like I would push back on the brand design team on icon designs.  So, it was a really empowering culture to know that if you're principled and you really know what the hell you're talking about, then you should fight for something.

Anyway, Uber as a whole had this vibe of high intensity, but highly principled intensity.  Principled confrontation was another cultural value; that you should approach things, you know, if you approach things in a conversation, then it should be principled.  So, all of these things, I think, inform how I approach defending Bitcoin and how I write about Bitcoin.  Also, I think Uber was very different than many Silicon Valley companies, and I think that's what I really liked about it.  It wasn't Silicon Valley; it was a kind of very edgy Silicon Valley startup.

Peter McCormack: So, you've done eight years in San Francisco as a bitcoiner, eight and a half years maybe, so you go back to, what, is that 2012 or 2013?

Dan Held: January 2013 is when I came out here. 

Peter McCormack: January 2013.  But, you were already aware of Bitcoin at that point, right?

Dan Held: Yeah, I got into Bitcoin, from what I remember, was 2012.  It's funny, I found a Mt Gox account creation email of 2011, so technically I'd been around since 2011, but it was late 2011 and I didn't really do anything; so, 2012 was when I got in.

Peter McCormack: But as I remember, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure we've talked about this; didn't you get some of those, what are they called, Sacascius [sic] coins; I can't remember what they were called?

Dan Held: Yeah, Casascius coins, those gold coins that you --

Peter McCormack: You're that old!  Casascius, that's it.

Dan Held: Yeah, my buddy paid me back for a beer in Dallas, Texas with it!

Peter McCormack: Oh, that's funny!

Dan Held: And of course, as soon as you hear about Bitcoin, the first thing I didn't do was hodl it; I immediately tried to figure out where I could sell it, because I didn't understand this thing!  I didn't get it right away, I don't think anyone gets it right away, especially back then when there wasn't any great content around.  And he was like, "Yeah, just download Bitcoin-QT and there you go", and I'm like, "Okay!"  Bitcoin-QT is the Bitcoin Core client, and it was pretty rough.  I didn't know what the hell I was doing!

But, yeah, 2012 was when I really dived in, really got to understand it, set up a Mt Gox account, bought some coins.  I think a lot of people also think like, "Oh, Dan's been around for a long time, he must have a giant stack".  Dude, I was like 26, just out of college and didn't have much money in Texas.  It wasn't like I mined Bitcoin on my laptop, or something.  You know, what's funny is that I felt like I was late in 2013 when I was out in Silicon Valley, out at these meet-ups and I met guys who were miners from 2011; people who'd bought like 10,000 coins way back in the day.  So, I felt like I was late, which is kind of funny.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's a whole other topic where people don't hold on to their Bitcoin and always end up with less.  I think everyone's got an, "I should have had this much Bitcoin" story; we can do that one another time.  Okay, so you're heading into Silicon Valley, into San Francisco; you're a bitcoiner; so, I mean, the first couple of years of Bitcoin don't -- yes, they're important, of course, but excuse what I'm saying here; they don't really count for the sake of this story.  You've been in Silicon Valley for most of the time that you've been able to trade Bitcoin, let's say?

Dan Held: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Most of time, yeah; most of the time, it's been tradable.  So, has the experience been consistent.  Like, have you found across the whole eight years, people have tended to react the same, or is there at least some maturing?

Dan Held: Yeah, so there have been a couple of distinct waves in Bitcoin over the last eight years I've been out here in Silicon Valley.  2013 was very distinctly Bitcoin only, but it was a Bitcoin for payments narrative.  And the reason why it was is that, when you go and pitch VCs, you have to use language that they understand.  It's just like dating.  You can't go into a date and use very esoteric language, or terms that they don't use.  You want to pitch to your target audience about why you're a good fit.

So, on the date, you're like, "I like dogs, I like long walks in the park"; and with VCs, you need to use VC terminology that will resonate with them.  And, there's very specific terminology that you have to use.  There's a language and a dance that you need to do to a T, otherwise you will not get money, no matter how good the idea is, no matter how much you're making.  So, with Silicon Valley VCs, what they felt with Bitcoin, the narrative that they -- and by the way, the VCs create the narrative.  Whatever narrative they want to hear is what you tell them.  It doesn't matter if it's ridiculous, like the VR/AR stuff, which made no sense. 

For example, with VR -- I'm a gamer, by the way.  With VR, you break the illusion when you stand up and try to move; and the VR headsets are expensive, the resolution is poor and the game played is exponential level.  But, certainly when I can plug my head into VR; yeah, that would be incredible.  Then also, I also give the credence of, okay, let's say the VR headsets come down to zero dollars in price and have super high resolution like it would be in real life, it still doesn't lead to that much more of an immersive experience.

Anyway, I'm just highlighting that as, it didn't matter though.  Silicon Valley threw billions behind VR startups, because the narrative had been set by the top VCs that this is the narrative; this is what's hot.  And the little VCs can't do anything about that.  The little VCs have to hang on to whatever the big VCs do, because the big VCs dictate the tone; and what happens is, the little VCs, their LPs, the investors in the VC go, "Hey, why didn't you do what Sequoia or a16z did?"

So, the little VCs just have to pile in on the same trade the big VCs choose, and the big VCs are just like, all the GPs combined, so the GPs being the General Partners, basically the guys who run the fund, the guys and girls.  And they're only talking about like 50 people, and so they basically create the narrative.

Anyway, the narrative in 2013 for Bitcoin was, Bitcoin is meant for payments; Bitcoin was here to solve PayPal, fix PayPal.  That's a narrative that Silicon Valley VCs can grok.  Most Silicon Valley VCs are not Austrian School of Economics sort of folks.  They're not going to be like, "Oh, yeah, digital gold; totally.  How can we go disrupt this giant fiat banking system?"  That's pretty too out there for them.  I mean, disrupting the government isn't exactly a VC-fundable idea.

So, payments related things were super hot.   This was when fintechs, in 2013 and 2014, fintechs became really hot; so, very high narrative market fit with the payments narrative.  So, all the companies in Silicon Valley that were focussed on Bitcoin and crypto, we all oriented our efforts around that in order to attract VC capital and attract talent as well.  So, in that time, that narrative was pretty popular with Bitcoin, so it was mainly just a Bitcoin-only narrative then.  Then, you had the 2013 run-up twice, so it went from $10 to $260 down to $100.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, can I just ask you something before we go onto the next bit?  So, is it a case of -- because there are two things here, right?  There's firstly explaining Bitcoin and having people understand what Bitcoin is; and then, trying to explain the products or companies you want to build.  Did you have difficulties with both, or just with one side?

Dan Held: Oh, totally, yeah.  It's a dance you really have to learn very well.  With my last startup, we pitched to over 50 VCs.  It was a tough process to go through.  You have to pitch them and, just like dating, you've got to be okay with rejection, you've got to put yourself out there, you've got to figure out what flaws or what things that they like about you and try to highlight, or minimise those. 

So, I've gone through that myself from the fundraising process, but also in the product role of, how do we find product market fit; how do we build this product?  And then also on the marketing side, like how do we go bring this product out to market; and, how do we communicate to customers that this solves a problem for them?

So, on all three of those levels, I've seen products, VCs and builders all work together around these different narratives.  And so, with 2013 through 2015, that was largely the payments narrative.  And then in 2015, when Bitcoin was coming off the $1,200 high and 2013 and 2014, the momentum was really lost.  VCs will immediately shift their momentum to something else.  What they do is they look at what's hot.

Now, with the winners, they stick around.  If you invested in Coinbase, you stick around, because that's like your winner.  But if a narrative dies, they don't do retrospectives; they want to forget about it.  They don't bring it up, they just let it fade away; you just want it to fade.  Like, how many VCs are doing retrospectives on VR?  They usually just double down, either double down on it and just be like, "Yeah, we're committed for the long term", or they let it fade away.

What's crazy about VCs is that when they make bets, it takes five to ten years for it to play out, so it's hard to know if you're right or wrong, so you really have to be convicted in it.  So I don't think they're necessarily bad people or dumb people; it's just a game of incentives and it's a game of how to identify what's next and what's hot.  I'm not sure if there's much of a science to it, right?  There are different ways we can minimise our exposure and minimise the bad decision-making, but I don't want to wax too philosophically around what VCs represent.

But, with Bitcoin and crypto, 2015 is when the Blockchain, Not Bitcoin narrative came out.  So, this is a fresh new narrative VCs can get behind.  Now, this one's a little bit more boring than the Bitcoin one; it's, let's go replace back an architecture for the existing financial system, right, with this new thing called blockchain. 

We all know Blockchain, Not Bitcoin is fucking bullshit; it's the stupidest narrative I've ever seen in this space!  You and I have ranted about this on Twitter but today, it was announced, and this is a very, very sweet moment for myself to enjoy and revel in this; IBM are scaling back their blockchain efforts down to just a few people.  And I think at the peak, they had a few hundred engineers working on their different blockchain initiatives, and this just highlights how silly that narrative was.  It's the idea you could just splice out --

Peter McCormack: Well, the narrative got flipped?

Dan Held: Yeah.  We're finally seeing the narrative totally fade away.

Peter McCormack: No, but I mean, Dan, you would flip it.  So, when they're saying Blockchain, Not Bitcoin, everyone just flipped it back and went, "No; Bitcoin, Not Blockchain"; it was completely flipped against them!

Dan Held: Totally, exactly.  Now, it's all Bitcoin driven, and I'll get there in a minute on what the current narrative is.  But, yeah, Silicon Valley largely created this cohesion, and then there's the whole narrative of, "Blockchain, Not Bitcoin; that's not going to occur in Silicon Valley; that's going to be New York driven, because they understand finance". 

It turned out no one knew any of their shit, because Blockchain, Not Bitcoin makes no sense.  You can't just splice blockchain technology and take it out of Bitcoin with no native token.  I mean, the reason why native tokens exist is that it rewards the miners.  There are a couple of reasons, but one of them is to reward miners to order transactions and behave properly.  I don't know how you have a blockchain with the right alignment of transactions, or having the transactions in the right order, if there isn't this game theoretic block reward that incentivises them.

So anyway, anyone who knew how blockchain tech worked was like, "This is silly".  And that narrative, in 2017, really started to fade as it was outshined by the ICO and Ethereum narrative.  So, ICOs were the new hot thing.  And, with ICOs, it was all about disrupting fundraising.  You know, we've got these different forms of fundraising, like Patreon; we've got GoFundMe; Kickstarter.  These are all pretty hot ideas.  People forget about these.  Even the centralised services here outside, if we zoom outside of the Bitcoin sector, it's crazy to see how fast these narratives ebb and flow.

So, Kickstarter was huge; I don't know if you guys remember that.  I only bought one thing on Kickstarter, by the way; it was Super Troopers 2!  I was like, "I don't even care if it's terrible; I just love you guys, so I'm going to buy it".  And, that's where this narrative of ICOs came around, where it's like crowdfunding, it's about the idea of tokenising everything; and, this was very attractive to VCs, because it was that intertwined with a digital world computer, decentralised world computer, that would finally -- it's the ultimate VC pitch. 

I mean, Vitalik's pitching of this to venture capital in Silicon Valley was genius; it's an irresistible pitch for people in Silicon Valley, particularly engineers.  The idea you can build, at that time too, apps and dapps.  Every hot company at that time, Airbnb, Uber, was an app and this is called a dapp; woah!  So, this was perfect narrative market fit, and then you loop in the fundraising aspects.  There were a couple of different layers of disrupting fundraising; it was disrupting these big tech giants which everyone was worried were getting too much power.  So, it was a perfect narrative market fit and that's where we saw ICOs explode. 

I mean, I was out here during that time and everywhere you went, people were talking about ICOs.  Everybody invested in an ICO; everybody was doing an ICO; that's literally what everyone was doing.  It's going to totally change startup fundraising; now there was equity before, and debt, and now there are tokens; it's totally going to change everything.

But, very few of these people in Silicon Valley understood what the heck money was, or why Bitcoin was valuable in the first place.  They never spent the time to understand it, because as soon as Bitcoin didn't fit that narrative of a cheap PayPal, they just disregarded it like trash and they were like, "It's done; it's dead; it's old".  And then, Ethereum comes out and were like, "No, we're new, fresh, hot, and we're a decentralised app platform".  They're like, "Cool; I don't even need to think about Bitcoin anymore.  This is what's hot".  And I'm not faulting them for it.  I don't think these are dumb people; it's just how Silicon Valley works.  You've got to chase what's hot to be on top of things, right; and if you chase what's hot at the right time, you might go make $10 million or $100 million, even as a non-founder; so, it's a big deal. 

So, I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley and I'm just like, this is super annoying.  None of these people have any idea of how Bitcoin works.  Most of these people are scammy; I would say a large percentage of them were just scammers trying to -- they might have scammed something in the healthcare space before this, and now they're trying to scam in crypto.  Then I heard somebody's raised $30 million for an ICO and I'm like, "Dude, none of you guys have ever even built a product before".  So, it was just pure insanity at that time.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well look, firstly, a lot of people did make money during that ICO phase; they did, on things that have failed.  I think it was Jill Carlson who said to me that some of these people are doing their IPO and their seed round at the same time.

Dan Held: Yeah, exactly.

Peter McCormack: And they did make a lot of money and they got swept up in it.  I guess, Dan, one of the things is, let me ask you, do you think one of things is that Bitcoin is something they can't control, so that bothers them; and then perhaps also, do you think there's ever this fear, like back then there was a fear of the regulatory side, like they could build a product but Bitcoin might get closed down, therefore they couldn't invest in it; or, do you think that's got nothing to do with it?

Dan Held: I do think part of it is control.  I think part of it is control; that's great that you brought that up.  I think that's something that I should have highlighted earlier, so yeah.  It's control; it's building.  They like things that are constantly being built.  So, any tech company has had to constantly iterate to be relevant.  There's no tech company out there that just builds the first version of it.  Actually, there's one! 

Peter McCormack: Bitcoin?

Dan Held: Craigslist.  Craigslist never innovated, but it does very much highlight how much network effects matter.  There's a schelling point around posting an ad and buying something, or posting a listing and buying something or trading something on Craigslist; it doesn't matter how shitty the interface is.  Which I guess is pretty good credence to Bitcoin; Bitcoin's all about network effect and network effect of storing value in this one network.

So I think for Silicon Valley, they're like, "Okay, Bitcoin isn't innovating".  They want to see a lot of code change happening fresh and they look for developers as a signal of what's going to be hot.  All the developers are like, "We're building stuff on Ethereum".  So it's, one, they can't control it, they can't push.  I mean, yeah, they do really like to push their own narratives.  I mean, they want to pump their own companies, not in an illegal way, but they just want to build it up and they'll use everything within their power to do that.  They can't do that with Bitcoin.

Also, their LPs would be like, "Cool, why am I paying you to invest in Bitcoin; I can go invest in Bitcoin?"  So they have to define, "Oh, we've got an edge", which are these other protocols.  And then as well, these other protocols fit an investment thesis that a lot of them had around disrupting different types of sectors.  There's a decentralised Uber if you want to go for that; there's a decentralised Airbnb; there's a decentralised Amazon, aka Filecoin.  Decentralise whatever you want; we've got any flavour of decentralisation you'd like. 

It's like a Black-Scholes model of all possible narrative paths for a coin, is literally what happened in 2017.  I mean, there were over 10,000 ICOs launched and it was just a Black-Scholes model to build as much supply as demand required.  So, demand kept asking for new narratives, and supply of these coins met those narratives.  And I think that's what best succinctly defines what happened in 2017.

Peter McCormack: So, is 2021 DeFi; is that the latest narrative?

Dan Held: Yeah.  So then all the ICOs fade away, Ethereum narrative fades away; Bitcoin, Not Blockchain starts to come in and then 2020 hits and COVID hits and Bitcoin really starts to shine.  This is Bitcoin's moment, right.  Bitcoin demonstrated resiliency and then Gold 2.0 narrative started to catch on.  So, that's where Bitcoin was really, really shining.

But yes, to your points earlier, they can't go, "Yeah, we're just going to buy Bitcoin as our VC thesis", because it's a publicly tradable asset; that's not the point of being a VC; that's called a Hedge Fund.  So, they still have to go create a new schelling point around another narrative that validates their value prop as a fund allocator, "Do we take LPs money and we go allocate it into private rounds [or] we have information you guys don't have and that's where we have alpha?"

So, DeFi is that new latest trend, so decentralised finance.  This is somewhat of a word salad that was left over from a few other narratives of like -- there are a couple of other ones post-2017 that the Ethereum community used.  But essentially, this is like their narrative compression of multiple narratives that ebbed and flowed over the last four years.  And, DeFi is the most succinct, I think, narrative.  Radical Finance was one; a couple of other ones as well.

So, as these narratives ebbed and flowed, they have to create new schelling points for it to capture investment and interest.  DeFi is a really powerful one, because DeFi is one that they try to root in, this is solving a problem.  This is solving the problem of trading.

Peter McCormack: Decentralised Finance?

Dan Held: Yeah, and that's where anywhere that understands how blockchain technology works, you're digging a little bit deeper and you're like, "Wait a second; there's a kill switch by the core dev team?" or there's been bailouts, or there's been tons of hacks.  They're like, "Yeah, cool, it's just like we have automated market makers, man.  It's totally going to work forever". 

I'm like, "Wait, so you're telling me you guys have saved holy grail problems in finance and that your DEX is going to weather intense volatility; and, once the big hedge funds come in, you're telling me that these guys won't blow your shit up to where they go find that little fatal flaw and they're willing to put $1 billion to get a $3 billion exploit?  Those are the big boy games.  Those are the ones where things really start to become real.  These are mainly like testnet sort of things. 

So, I think they act like they've solved all these problems perfectly and I'm like, "I don't think you guys understand how finance works".  Stuff is very, very -- I mean, you have Soros breaking the pound; that's a famous one.  They're like, "Yeah, cool, well it will work 99% of the time" and I'm like, "The point is, the existing financial system works 99% of the time".

What they parade as decentralised finance is semi-centralised, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad or good thing; it's just more about they try to hide it, and I think that's a little bit more annoying.  I think they should just be more explicit about it.  For example, some DeFi protocols, you can have locked USDC or USDT.  Those are completely centralised stablecoins that can literally be frozen.  And if that is collateral that's been posted for a smart contract and then there's another smart contract that relies on that one, then it leads to this daisy-chain reaction.

There's this like, "Oh well, that doesn't happen very frequently".  I'm like, we're not really building decentralised finance here if we've got two 100% centralised stablecoins that are underpinning this DeFi financial infrastructure.  This isn't just an exchange thing where traders are moving USDT between exchanges to arbitrage certain things; this is like, a core underpinning of a lot of these smart contracts are now becoming these centralised stablecoins.

So, I think with DeFi, it's a new hot narrative for Silicon Valley, especially with Robinhood stuff going on.  I think that definitely makes them a little bit more energetic about it.  I don't think it has the narrative clout that Bitcoin does, and there are a couple of reasons why.  One, it's really hard to understand.  You're not going to get retail into that.  If it's super hard to understand, like Bitcoin, all these institutional folks around the world are like, "Oh yeah, Bitcoin; it's like a store of value Gold 2.0".  That's really easy for everyone to grok; everyone knows what gold is.

But, DeFi; how do you explain that simply?  It's not like the ICO narrative where they're like, "Oh, dude, this is the new equity, bro".  ICO; IPO; woah, really similar, you know.  Again, these terms dapp and app; ICO and IPO; they're very much like a false equivalency that people naturally make the leap, but they're totally different.  And that's where I just think the narrative of DeFi now is a good one for that community and certainly interesting what they're trying to do

But ultimately, I think their promises fall a little bit flat and also, I don't think people care about that too much at the moment, other than the Robinhood stuff that happened last week.  People don't care as much, whereas Bitcoin's Gold 2.0 narrative has perfect market narrative fit.  It is resonating at the highest levels of both governments and hedge fund institutions. 

So, this is Bitcoin's moment to shine and I think Silicon Valley, through all of its flaws in terms of its incentive models and how they think through problem-solving, it's a great mental model to use for almost everything else; it's just not good for Bitcoin, and that's why Bitcoin is so different in what it is and what it represents as a digital gold that I think, even for the folks that look at the most innovative, forward-thinking technologies, even for them it was a little bit too hard to grok, unless they had the right fundamentals.

Peter McCormack: But, there is some movement with Bitcoin now, right?  We've seen Square put some money in, we've seen what Jack Dorsey's doing; Coinbase is going to IPO; we've got some other big players now; BlockFi are doing very well.  There are, I would say, the shoots of something here, even though something like Coinbase is huge.  Their IPO's going to be massive.  But, I know now there are companies within Silicon Valley, or even New York, who are having success.  Have you noticed a recognition of that; like, is there anything recently?  Is the Bitcoin narrative starting to work?

Dan Held: Definitely, yeah.  There are a lot of people who bought into ICOs and Ethereum are largely disillusioned in Silicon Valley.  Unless they're folks building on it, they're going to just be super convicted until it goes to zero.  I think they're just so convicted in it that they don't want to admit anything.  So, for the folks who are more in the middle, who hadn't made up their mind yet and hadn't really been a bitcoiner or an Ethereum person, I would say almost all of them have gone Bitcoin, and I'm talking really high-up tech execs at companies that I worked that I know, that are really well-known out here, which I've talked to many of them personally.

The Bitcoin narrative is very understandable now for these -- I see the moderates all switching over.  Even some of the core, hard-core Ethereum folks are like, "Hey, Dan --"; I've had a few people reach out and they're like, "Hey, Dan, you're right.  You're right and I've switched over; I just want to let you know".  It's kind of a weird feeling where they're like, "I want to let you know I just hold Bitcoin now".  Not that I pressured them to do that; they just know that I speak about it all the time and whenever we talk in person, four years ago that's all I wanted to talk about was Bitcoin, and I think they're starting to come around to that.

So, yeah, I would say the tide has shifted quite a bit.  I wouldn't be surprised though if it shifted back to DeFi if a lot of these start to pump really, really hard.  And, that's where it's really hard about crypto and understanding what actually has tractions or not is valuations.  The valuations are a signal to traditional VCs that this idea has traction in the market, because they're raising money and they're making money and that means that it's successful.  Now, I know there's a lot more nuance behind that; I'm just overly generalising here.

With protocols, the problem is that the valuation is completely disconnected from any fundamental value.  And so, the VCs who see these protocols with these valuations, they're like, "Oh, that's value" and I'm like, "Yeah, sure, it's a market cap and a valuation, but it is very disconnected from anything resembling protocol".  Market fit, or product market fit is the old terminology for it, that the protocol is solving a protocol for someone. 

It's not doing that; people are speculating that it will solve a problem for someone someday, and those are two very different things, because one is rooted in a real world customer problem that is being solved and ultimately value is driven there; the other one is hypothesising that it will create value, and that violates some core fundamental thinking in Silicon Valley which is, you're always obsessed with solving customer problems. 

When you do that and you build products to do that, every great product is built that way.  Ultimately, that's what a business does; you build a product that solves a problem; that's it.  And VCs, again, these guys aren't digging in.  Yes, they call in experts, but they're looking at so many different deals, they can't dig in really in depth on certain topics.  So, they see these valuations and like, "Cool, it has traction and I don't need to think about it anymore"; versus really digging in and going, "Wait a second".  Okay, yeah, exactly.

Peter McCormack: So they recognise that magic internet money exists, but they haven't really spent the time looking at the economics, thinking about monetary policy, looking at Austrian Economics, as you talked about; they just see there's a digital internet money that people are buying and getting rich off and I guess we've maybe got to that point where, almost a little bit embarrassing not to be in Bitcoin.  You can miss it in 2013; perhaps in 2017, because nobody cares; but now, with the Saylors of the world, Jack Dorset putting money in, I'm pretty sure it's a big swing with what Elon Musk is saying.  You don't want to be the guy who now says, "Oh, no, I don't believe in Bitcoin"?

Dan Held: Jack Dorsey was huge for Bitcoin.  It was not appropriate to say you liked Bitcoin in Silicon Valley in 2017.  That was considered a death sentence for your career, and I certainly took a career hit by saying I like Bitcoin, which is ridiculous, right; it's absurd.  So, what happened was, in Silicon Valley, you cannot go against the grain of the narrative, because then you're saying to all the big VCs, "You're wrong"; you're saying to all the smartest product people and tech leaders, "You're wrong"; and you don't ever want to be on that side.

Silicon Valley is not about thinking independently.  It is very much a crowd-chasing thing where everyone piles into the same trade.  Silicon Valley does not reward independent thinking.  They reward independent thinking as long as it's within the genre of how they like to think about it. 

So, Jack going out and saying, "I like Bitcoin" was very, very brave and different and bold.  Everyone else was like, "You're wrong.  It's definitely Ethereum and ICOs and it's this whole dapp system", and Jack's like, "I like Bitcoin, man, and that's it", which we've got to give a hat tip to Miles Suter for that, because I believe Miles was pretty critically important. 

Peter McCormack: Unsung hero.

Dan Held: Thank you for popping orange pills, yeah.  Miles is an awesome guy, by the way.  I've met him a bunch of times in person.  He's done some great work for Bitcoin.  But, yeah, that's where now we're starting to see the tight shift where Elon Musk is, "I like Bitcoin".  And, if we start to see some other big tech leaders switch over, that will be huge, because all of them are very big Ethereum people.  I mean, they were full on board, and you would not get promoted within their companies if you felt that way. 

I mean, I've heard this at certain, I'm not going to name the ones, certain giant crypto companies in Silicon Valley; not Kraken.  If you liked Bitcoin, you were very much, and I've heard this from folks internally, you were very much not put in an advantageous position.  You either were fully onboard with Ethereum and DeFi, or you were free to have your opinion and you wouldn't be relevant.

So, yeah, Silicon Valley was very much anti-Bitcoin; not even just pro-Ethereum, it was anti-Bitcoin.  So, that's where I stood up and said I'm going to be a loud voice for Bitcoin, I don't care what it means for my career; and, it's also right.  And, that's where I felt like I had to write -- I wrote, Silicon Valley Doesn't Understand Bitcoin, recently as a newsletter on my danheld.substack newsletter, and I wrote that and that's what we're talking about today, because I felt so frustrated and I felt that no one had really told the story of why does this happen.

When I published this, by the way, I had an overwhelming amount of folks comment on Twitter, and you can go check out the tweetstorm.  So, if you check out that tweetstorm, go look at the quotes with replies, and you'll see some of the top people in crypto, big product leaders, be like "This is exactly my experience in Silicon Valley with VCs with how things are built".  So, I felt like someone should tell the story, because I think a lot of people were like, "Well, what the hell was Silicon Valley thinking in 2017, in 2015 and now".  And again, they're not bad people, they're not dumb people; it's just, they have different incentives and they have a different mindset.

That mindset works for so many other things, so I can see why they're like, "Well look, it worked for all these other ideas I evaluated; let me copy and paste it for Bitcoin".  And so, it's been a little frustrating because you want to feel part of a community, right, like anyone, even bitcoiners.  Within Bitcoin, you and I are in our own mainstream part of Bitcoin and some folks are a little bit more niche, and that's where everyone wants to feel like they're part of a group.  And, it was very isolating being in Silicon Valley knowing that you're going against the grain so hard that you're in a little bit of a no man's land.

But ultimately now, I feel very much vindicated, I feel excited.  I mean, I just wish they wouldn't have made it such a detrimental thing to a career path to go against the grain, but I also get it as well.  If you're the big guys, if you're the big, big VCs and you're all the other money and you're all the other startup founders, you can't allow these other narratives to exist.  Otherwise, people question why you're right and they can't be like, "Oh, yeah, Dan's got some good points.  What we're building is probably shit!"  You can't do that; you just have to be, "No, we're totally right and the big VCs that backed us are totally right, so we're just going to go try it and be heads down and go do it".

So, I get it.  You can't allow for that other narrative to exist, and that's why they had to really punish bitcoiners so hard in 2017.

Peter McCormack: So, do you think now, there will be a shift.  Do you think there will be some interest within Silicon Valley about investing into Bitcoin companies; or, do you think they're just going to be buying Bitcoin and most of the actual companies that are going to be built, it won't be from serious interest from the VCs in Silicon Valley?

Dan Held: I think VCs will back a lot of different Bitcoin-only companies, they'll back bigger tech companies.  I think we're going to see a ton of investment made.  There are a lot of very lucrative crypto businesses, including Kraken.  Kraken's doing phenomenally well.  You look at Coinbase and Kraken's trading volume and you compare that to a year ago and you're like, "Woah, this is huge". 

So, there's going to be a lot more VC investment, in particular around trading.  I think trading is always the permanent narrative in this space, whatever narratives ebb and flow; you've got to trade in and out of those narratives.  So, anything trading related, I think, is the only thing I've seen survive from 2013 in terms of companies.  But, I do think tech leaders will slowly start to signal more Bitcoin. 

I mean, if Elon's on the train; Jack Dorsey, by the way, is like a Silicon Valley icon.  Those two are huge.  That starts to create some momentum and I think that momentum will -- they still may go invest in DeFi and other projects, but I think you'll see more companies start to disclose that they own a Bitcoin position.  I think all of us are crossing our fingers for Tesla, right; we're all hoping that Tesla has bought some Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: What do you think though?  What's your read?  I'll tell you mine afterwards; what's your read on the Elon situation?

Dan Held: Just with him and Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dan Held: Yeah, I think some big tech leader has orange-pilled Elon, or someone close to him, because he didn't really seem that interested for such a long time and now he's bringing it up, not only in his Twitter bio, but he's also bringing it up on Clubhouse last night.  I think part of that is because he saw what happened with Robinhood and in these moments, there's a lens that the world now, with this new lens that you see the world through, like COVID had the same sort of thing; the whole world comes into clarity and so does Bitcoin and how Bitcoin interacts with the world.

You're like, "Okay, so Bitcoin makes sense now; I get it".  I think that's probably what happened for him is that, both that catalyst moment, plus the right folks orange-pilling him.  But with him, I mean he's a pretty libertarian sort of guy.  He's very anti-government.  He's moving to Texas, to Austin, so I think Elon, I could see him taking some of Tesla's treasury and buying Bitcoin. 

I can also see him personally disclosing a position.  I think him and others kind of see it as a rallying cry.  You've got these WallStreetBets ebb and flow with their narrative, fighting back against Robinhood, but Bitcoin's narrative has been there all along.  It's much easier to create a schelling point around Bitcoin's anti-banking, anti-government narrative, than to go pop up a new one and have a whole community network effect all built around that.

So, Bitcoin's schilling point around it being a financial revolution, I think is probably the strongest schilling point out of anything with DeFi, WallStreetBets, Bitcoin.  I think Bitcoin's is so strong that the whole rebellion goes around that.  You know, with these rebellions, it's kind of like Black Lives Matter.  Black Lives Matter wasn't just about Black Lives Matter, it was about a whole host of issues.  But, people can't go and do their protests for 100 different types of issues; you want to gather around the largest schelling point issue at the moment, and that was Black Lives Matter.

By the way, their issues are very critically important; I'm not trying to diminish from that.  I'm just saying that when these movements happen, people are just ready for a change, and then they all go around one movement.  You can't have 100 different movements.  So, r/wallstreetbets, DeFi and Bitcoin are kind of intersected together, and then there's ultimately going to be one big movement that everyone rallies behind, and I think that's going to be Bitcoin.  It's singular; it's persistent; it's easy to understand; it's embraced by everyone, both the large institutional types and retail; so, it's hard for me to see any other narrative that this rebellious feeling really collects around.

Peter McCormack: I wonder if the cycle is the issue as well, because you're either in bull market feeling like you've missed it, or in bear market feeling like it's dead.  I wonder if that affects the psychology of the people investing, because when the bull market hits, you don't have much time and it feels so quick, you feel like you've left it late.  Like right now, even for me, and I've stacked a lot of Bitcoin this last couple of years, I look at $35,000 and I'm like, "Hmm, do I want to buy anymore?" and I won't, and then it will go up to $90,000; or, I'll buy a little bit and it will go up to $90,000 and I'm like, "Shit, I should have bought some more".

Then, wherever we end up, we'll go into a bear market and I'll be like, "Well, I don't want to buy now, because it might go lower", and I wonder if that same psychology affects investing in companies, because they're like, "Well, I don't want to invest in a company now, because by the time their product's ready, we'll have missed this", and they don't want to invest in a bear market, because they think Bitcoin's dead.  Do you think there's any substance to that?

Dan Held: I think, you know, it's funny because when I came into Silicon Valley, I thought VCs were contrarian, and they're very much not contrarian.  They very much buy into whatever narrative is hot; and the reason why is, it's a financial incentive.  Again, their LPs, if you're a smaller fund you look at the big funds and are like, "Why aren't you investing in cool VR stuff, like a16z or Sequoia is?"  I'm not saying that that's bad or good, but just that your investors also are humans; they want to know what's cool and hot and they expect you to go chase that.

That's where I think, when it comes to the space, for Bitcoin I think there's just such a schelling point around it, I just don't really see anything else really gathering much steam.  And I think that, are they going to put in their own money; are they going to invest in it?  I can definitely see it being more of their own money play.  Again, the VCs can't put their funds into it.  They can, but it's weird because it's like, "Cool, you just invested in something publicly traded; I can do that too".

But, I think it's more going to be like a personal allocation notification, or like Marc Andreessen might come out and be like, "I own $100 million worth of Bitcoin".  Trembath is a great example of that.  Trembath has just been tearing it up on social media.  He's one of the wealthiest people in the world; big tech icon; and he's been really touting Bitcoin.  And I think that's where Bitcoin will become the rallying cry.  But not only can it become the rallying cry, but you can rally your portfolio around it, which is really awesome.

When Bitcoin moves in these different stages -- Bitcoin has largely been de-risked.  When I got into it when it was $10, there's a lot of risk.  We didn't know what the hell we were doing.  The infrastructure was so shaky; Mt Gox was 90% of trading volume and when that collapsed we were all like, "Is that going to come back?"  Same with Silk Road; when Silk Road collapsed, we weren't sure how much demand was driven by Silk Road.  And then civil war in 2017.

So, Bitcoin went through all these scary stages.  Right now, the risk reward has never been better.  Maybe some VCs look at everything with the lens of early stage investing, where they expect 100X payoff.  What's crazy is, with Bitcoin, you might actually get that.  You could actually get 100X pay off and still have very minimal risk.  I mean, Bitcoin does not have the same operational risk that an individual company has.  It's a protocol; it's a network.  It's very different than, "Oh, will my ride-sharing app survive or not?"

So, I would say Bitcoin has the best risk-reward skew out there.  If you're going to go deploy money in your high risk and you think Bitcoin's a high risk investment, there's no better return for that risk.  You can do early-stage startups, but 1 out of 100 of those will survive.  And that's where I think maybe VCs will start to view it through the lens of this risk-reward profile, and start to realise how big of a deal this is; even though they might perceive it as late stage, but I think we're still very early.

Bitcoin at a $30k market cap is tiny.  Bitcoin, I don't think, has really even touched upon the Gold 2.0 thesis, until it's between $2 trillion and $10 trillion, and then it starts to really -- that's not like early adulthood, but that's like the teenage years.  Adulthood is far greater than that value, and so we're talking at least in the hundreds of thousands for that price, for that sort of product market fit. 

So, we're very, very far away from that -- not far away from that, we are very far away from Bitcoin realising its ultimate valuation of, I think between $10 trillion and $100 trillion seems probable in the long term, and that's where I think VCs, once they understand that, I think that might be attractive to them.  But, I think right now, they think it's too late.  They think that they thought in 2016, 2017, it was too late, and now they're thinking it's too late.  So, I think that mindset's for everyone of, "I'm too late", but for VCs, they're always trying to find what's early, and so they definitely might skew more on, "We're too late" right now.

Peter McCormack: Well, you could also hypothesise that in the hyperbitcoinisation world, that the power shift of investing will go towards the bitcoiners; they'll be the ones with the capital?

Dan Held: Totally.  There's some really cool game theory they can play out, where those who invested in Bitcoin early and hodled a really long time will have such large amounts of wealth that they'll change how capital allocation across the world looks, in terms of when these bitcoiners sell their Bitcoin, what do they go put it in, or what do they go invest it in.

So, we might see a really interesting world where bitcoiners start to pop out VC funds and start to think about, not only how to allocate money into Bitcoin startups, which I think is a little bit boring; it's like, "Cool, okay you've just got a circular loop there"; it's like, how do bitcoiners apply their lens of how we see the world with every other asset? 

I think that's where things get really, really cool, where bitcoiners start to, due to this really long time horizon, due to our ability to reduce our time preference and have this very long-term time preference, we can now reallocate all the wealth in the world to things that are much more anti-fiat sort of ways that they perceive the world, and how they allocate money towards very, very kind of more pure capitalist plays.

Of course, bitcoiners are free to invest their money in whatever they like, but I do think bitcoiners have a very critical thinking mindset of, "We were early with this", and they will be very cautious with how they allocate wealth in the future.

Peter McCormack: Decentralised Valley, man; it's the future.  All right, this is really useful, Dan; good to hear you talk about this.  Is there anything I've not asked you about this subject you wish I had?

Dan Held: It's a good question.  I think we covered it.  Maybe just a little bit more on -- I could maybe give two notes on the builder side?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, please do.

Dan Held: Okay, so we've covered a lot of the VC stuff, but I think we haven't touched on as much the builder side, so when you go and build software products.  So, the way this works internally is, we are constantly thinking about our product roadmap.  Our product roadmap is, what direction are we going to steer our product, being the ship?  Should we go left; should we go right; should we go forward?

When you do this, it takes a lot of planning.  You've got to go and you've got to talk to these other teams, where there's interdependency of our code with their code; with our engineers and their designers.  There are a lot of interdependencies here; there are a lot of politics too, because if you're taking away engineers from one project, your project really has to shine why you need those resources.

So, when it comes to building products in Silicon Valley, you're constantly iterating and shifting.  Your competitors are operating very, very quickly and shipping code.  Instagram, for example, stole Snapchat's thunder with Instagram Stories, because Instagram didn't have Instagram Stories before Instagram Stories were a way for them to tap into the sentiment of people switching over to Snapchat to get these ephemeral stories.  So, you always have to innovate and if you innovate fast enough, you can thrive, survive and maybe kill your competitor. 

So, that's where this constant state of iteration is what Silicon Valley constantly thinks of in terms of building things.  So when you go, "Hey, I've got this software; it's called Bitcoin and we're never going to change it", they're like, "Okay, well that's going to fail.  I just know it's going to fail, because everything else that I've seen that never innovated failed".  And it's like, yes, for software like a weather app in a social media app that works; but for money, you don't want to be changing money all the time. 

Money is the core foundational layer of the financial system.  You can't be tinkering with it and yoloing into it; it can't break.  That's what they don't understand.  It can't break.  Most engineers have never built a product that can't break; they just go patch it or fix it.  That's why, if you look at server uptime for big companies like Google and Amazon, they give you their uptime based on months or years, not based on duration the company's been around. 

So, it's just a completely different mindset to build a product for Bitcoin, which is a foundational layer for money.  They just don't really grok how delicate this is.  I mean, it's like a fucking rocket launch.  If there's a paperclip that's been dropped in the fuel tank, it's going to explode.  If your altitude trajectory is off by 1%, it'll tumble.  It is so precise and requires so much finesse to have it go right, I don't think they really appreciate that.  And it's not because, again, these are smart people; it's just because they haven't thought about building something like this before. 

So, they've used the lens that they've used before to build products.  Those products have been great.  They've been great weather apps, social media products, whatever products they may have been; but for the product of being money, the foundational layer of the entire financial system, I don't think they understand how important it is not to change.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, that's a killer episode, Dan.  I really appreciate you going through this with me and obviously, your experience is really useful and I do think we're just starting to see that shift now more recently, but it's only pioneered.  It is Jack Dorsey, and it is potentially Elon and, you know, I've got to throw Saylor in there anyway, because I think he's inspired a lot of people there.  But, it will be fascinating to see if there is a shift over this latest bull market.

All right, mate, well listen, look, again as ever, tell people where they can sign up for your newsletter or follow you on all the cool stuff you're doing, my man?

Dan Held: Yeah, so if you google danheld.substack, that's my email newsletter; it comes out on Thursdays.  If you like a really frank, really forward version of me, that's what you're going to get; I just let it loose.  I don't go through editing, I just let it go.  I don't know if you knew this, Pete, but I just let it go, I don't do any editing.  That comes out every week on Thursdays.

Peter McCormack: I didn't know that.

Dan Held: And then, if you want to follow me for my up-to-the-minute sort of thoughts, follow me on Twitter @danheld at Twitter.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I will just say these emails are fucking great.  There are a few emails I really like.  I really like Marty Bent's, but I really like yours.  Yours is different.  Marty's is a lot more technical, so it helps me understand some of the more technical stuff, but yours are more kind of narratives about specific topics you're going to teach people about.

Sign up, people, it's brilliant.  Links are in the show notes.  Dan, love you, man, thanks for coming on; appreciate your time, dude.

Dan Held: Thanks for having me, bro, always a pleasure.  Cheers.