On marketplaces, community-owned networks, and the future of work.
Adam Jackson is the Co-Founder of the Braintrust network, a decentralized global talent network that connects freelance knowledge workers with clients.
Adam has founded 4 VC-backed companies and an asset management company over the last 16 years and is an angel investor in over 100 companies.
Adam Jackson
[TRANSCRIPT IS MACHINE GENERATED]
[00:00:00] Alex: Adam Jackson is the co-founder of the Braintrust network, a decentralized global talent network that connects freelance knowledge workers with clients. Adam has founded four VC backed companies and an asset management company over the last 16 years and is an angel investor in over a hundred companies. Today, we talked about marketplaces, community-owned networks and the future of work.
Hope you enjoy.
[00:00:28] Alex: Sweet. So Adam, to start us off I think it'd be cool to get some background from you. If I, I did any like decent amateur slew thing, you for background as a software engineer, you did computer science at Vanderbilt, moved out to San Francisco after school. Now you're in a position building up the brain trust network.
Now what's, what's the in between payments. The picture here.
[00:00:49] Adam: Yeah, I, you know, I did computer science at Vanderbilt and you know, barely got out of there. I was on all kinds of academic probation. And you know, I mean, you're, you're, I don't know how much different colleges now. You're, you're a current college student, but in my, when I was there, this was the late nineties, early two thousands.
It was purely a social experience. I mean, you don't learn a damn fucking thing in college or at least I didn't and uh, Yeah, it was a good engineering school, supposedly. Wasn't very good for me. So I, you know, I became an Oracle certified database administrator. I learned programming languages, blah, blah, blah.
And you know, I started off my career as a freelance developer in college and. That's sort of how I paid down the , student loans that were levied on me, by the way, Vanderbilt is a bank and a hedge fund that happens to own land and not pay any taxes and runs a school on their property. They are in that order that those are their businesses and not just them, I would say that's probably true for all of the.
The big bullshit schools out there. But anyway, so I got out of that place and moved to California and you know, it was broke and quarter million in debt from this worthless fucking degree. And so I, you know, was just a hustler. I, I, I would write code for a living and build a crew up and got clients.
I was writing shopping cart software for e-commerce sites back before there was, you know, Shopify and Amazon. And and it sort of paid the bills that way. And then at night, we'd sort of try to figure out new businesses to start new, new web-based businesses. This is in like 2003, 2004. So it was like, kind of before web two really got kicked off.
And I ended up sort of getting traction with this thing. I started called market square, which was online. It was a it's online mall for, for locally available goods. So you shop online, buy local. We were that it turns out we were the first ones to do that. Like if you would type in back in like 2004, 2005, if you typed in like bike helmet and Berkeley, we'd be the only organic result, no paid and just one result.
And that was us. And so we sort of invented what became known as local SEO and grew that into a, you know, a decent sized marketplace. And eventually it was acquired by Intuit where I went to work for a. For the the guy who's now the CEO. And it was, I was in the QuickBooks division. I don't know if Brad's CEO is still anymore, but anyway, Scott, Brad Smith really awesome guy.
And I learned kind of, you know, classical product development at Intuit. And so it's a great place to learn how things, how to build software products. I mean, they into, it operates two very successful monopolies with TurboTax and QuickBooks and. You know, they, they do so they're great innovators right there.
Those are, those are great pieces of software. And so I spent some time there kind of learning how to build product and then left started my second company called drivers side, which is a web based marketplace that connected car owners with mechanics that had capacity for them. So I sort of learned, you know, the web enabled You know, it was my second web enabled marketplace business. And we grew that into a national marketplace and work wired by advance auto parts, which is an auto parts franchise. Spent some time through an earn-out at advanced auto parts. And then. In 2012 started my third company called doctor on demand, which I actually partnered up with Dr. Phil. Who's a famous kind of daytime TV guy. I don't know if he's famous with your generation, but
[00:03:56] Alex: He's still there.
[00:03:59] Adam: Is he still there? Anyway, he's a great guy, his son, Jay McGraw's a really talented entrepreneur television. And so we, we built doctor on demand and you know, we're the first kind of direct to consumer video telemedicine system and eventually merged that with with another enterprise healthcare company.
And. Grew into a giant healthcare business and you know, not, not something I was suitable around anymore. So we put a real, a real manager in place and that combined company will probably go public here then. Quarter or two. But when I, when I, you know, unwell and day to day there, I, I kind of went back.
I wanted to go back to my, my true passion, which is deep tech, and that's how I got into blockchain. I I'm, I don't own Bitcoin for awhile but you know, got to participate in the Ethereum crowd sale and really became obsessed with smart contracts and tokens and things like that. And, you know, really thought, you know, You know, traditional marketplaces.
They're, they're very capital intensive to start. You gotta to raise hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to subsidize one or both sides of the marketplace. You come out the other end with this investor on network. That just needs to tax the users, tax the users, keep extracting more value and all that value extraction, you know, really just creates misaligned incentives between the users on the network and the folks, the investors who own it.
And so I thought, you know, there's gotta be a better way. You gotta w what if you could like make the users also owners and you know, make it almost like a co-op instead of having this like extracting extraction corporate engine in the middle, you know, get rid of that corporate thing in the middle and replace it with software.
And instead of having shares of stock, you have tokens that control the network and you could have like a whole new firm, right. We can reinvent the way marketplaces work. And so that's where, you know, I actually wrote a paper in 2018 called the user owned economy, and that's where the concept for brain trust came from.
And we incubated out of a hedge fund to help start called Cambrian and. You know, I was thought I was done working. I thought I was done operating businesses at that time. But but this one was just too good. So I got off the bench and back on the field and you know, here we are three years later, four
[00:05:58] Alex: years, and here we are, that's quite the journey.
I don't want to get us too off track, but you are in San Francisco now. That's right before we get into brain trust. I want to hear what's your take on the whole San Francisco thing? Are you pro San Francisco long San Francisco? You know, from, from my perspective, maybe this has to do with the type of school I go to.
There's not that many people going straight into tech. But I probably know like two people moving to San Francisco and at least a hundred moving to like New York. So what's, what's your take where's where's your. What
[00:06:27] Adam: about Florida and Texas, our kids
[00:06:29] Alex: move in there more and more. Tampa, Miami lot to Austin.
Yeah, Austin's
[00:06:35] Adam: the place to be. So look, I've been in San Francisco since 2003. That's when I got out of school. I have a wife, three kids. I have a winery, you know, like I have a lot of shit here, so it's, it's hard for me to leave. It would be hard for me to leave. Not that I don't think about it all the time.
The other thing is like for as poorly run as the state is our governor is a fucking moron. The mayors here, absolute fucking idiots all the mayors, right. They're just awful. We are a corrupt society top to bottom. The state of California. It's. I think Paul most poorly run governments in all of the world, certainly of all the 50 states.
Our, we have the highest taxes and we're dead last in every measurable way. Homelessness crime. Public schools, you name it, right? It's just, it's a, it's a corruption and theft machine. But like, it's really nice here. It's still the best weather. It's still the most beautiful, your geography. There, it's still like some of the smartest people on the planet are here and and aren't going anywhere either.
And I love that. I love, I love that San Francisco bay area has not lost that. And LA is still the most amazing place in the world. The Napa valley makes the best wine in the world. You know, it's like, I'm not going anywhere. I'll just pay the taxes and complain about it, like everybody else. So but look, if I were your age, if I were coming out of school, I wouldn't dream of coming here.
Right? It's it's this, the odds are stacked against you here. If you want, I think the places like Florida and Texas are new, the new hotbeds of innovation. You know, or, or travel. Right. I mean, I wish I'd done more of that, so yeah, that's kinda, it's kind of where I'm at. Gotcha.
[00:08:12] Alex: All right. Let's let's dive into the fun stuff.
You know, before we get into the nitty-gritty details for anybody who has no idea what you're talking about. What's like the, the sort of go-to response when you're like someone that comes up to you, cocktail party, they're like, what the hell is brain trust? What is this?
[00:08:28] Adam: Well, as I mentioned, I have three kids.
I don't go to cocktail parties anymore. Parent teacher conferences. I get, you know, so, I mean, look, so brain trust is a talent network that connects tech people, knowledge workers. With clients that need them, that in and of itself is not new. The new part is the ownership and control structure of the network.
The old way was, you know, the web two way was a for-profit usually publicly traded company owns and controls that network. It sets the rates, defines the rules, decides who can use the network and who can't decide what categories we're in decides what, how much fees to. There's like five people at the company that decided that not a great, if you're not one of those five people, right.
Or shareholder, the new way web what's known now as web three is the corporate entity in the middle is gone. And the users who make their living and rely on the network to make their living control the network via their token. Right. They can, they can vote with their tokens and the way you get tokens is.
Do things to help the network invite talent vet that talent and invite clients onboard. Those clients are the network of our, of the size of brain trust would typically have, you know, thousands of employees by now. We have maybe 20 full-time people. Yeah. And one of the, one of the nodes that I run and there's other nodes that have other employees, but, you know, the, the, the ball could, the progress at Bryant brain trust makes us because of its community 45,000 now and growing quickly.
And so that's, you know, kind of web to web three, those, those are the different. Gotcha.
[00:10:07] Alex: So if somebody visits your site they'll scroll down and they'll see some pretty crazy names, right? Like you've got Nike, Nestle, Porsche NASA. Why, why are these big names coming to you guys rather than working with, you know, Italian agency just like hiring people.
Like what's, what's the draw for them here.
[00:10:26] Adam: Yeah. Great. A great question. So put simply we live in a talent constrained world, right? And so wherever the talent goes, The companies that need them, the demand will follow and the talent, in our case, it go is government coming to a network where they pay zero fees.
There's no fee on them. So if you want to make a hundred bucks an hour, you make a hundred bucks an hour. We're not taking anything away from you. Whereas Fiverr Upwork, Accenture, they're going to take a big piece of your income brain trust takes no, none of your income. And you get to control the network, you get tokens and you get to vote on the rules.
You get to vote on how the thing has governed and what categories should we be in next and who should be allowed on who shouldn't be, right. It's a democracy. And so when you have a better value proposition to the talent, it's much easier to acquire the talent, the talent come to you and the clients follow.
Right? So, I mean, I'll give you an example. This is, this will sound anecdotal, but it's not, this is a pattern. You have a firm like Goldman Sachs. They'll come on and they'll bring, they'll open up. Maybe they'll post jobs, you know, maybe two or three roles on the marketplace and they'll get filled and they have a great experience and like, wow, that was this brain trust thing is cool.
Let me put 12 more on, and then they have a better experience. And then they come in, they come in and they say, Hey, we have 3,500 aging full-time rules. On our job board that we can't fill, could we just put them all on brain trust? Right. And so, and that's, that's been the growth story for, for brain trust.
So
[00:11:55] Alex: on the other side of that, let's say I am somebody who wants to work through the network. What's that experience look like for me. So I go on your site.
[00:12:05] Adam: Yeah, you come on a brain trust and you create a profile and you fill out your skills and you'll get put into a queue because it's, so it's, it's sort of an enterprise grade talent network, which means, you know, enterprises need skilled talent, right?
They need people who've been vetted, you know, who, you know, it doesn't matter where you went to school or whatever matters, like what your skills are and have you shipped code before and have you, do we have some kind of certificate saying, you know, whatever. And and so you'll go into a queue and then someone from the community.
We'll eventually get to you based on demand. Right? So if you, if you have skills that aren't in demand and in particular, on the, on our particular marketplace, you, you may be on the waiting list longer. If you have skills that are in demand, like product management or UX design or Python or database management or whatever those are all highly demanded skills right now.
Someone from the community will you know, interview you live, you know, help, help kind of, you know, vet and build out your profile and, and then you're approved. And then once you're approved, you can bid on jobs. You can submit proposals and, you know, work as much or as little as you want, and it's all remote.
You know, you can do it from anywhere you want with people, all of the world. You're paid in dollars. You invoice through the platform you're paid through the platform, all dollars. And then if you want to interact with the token, you can, you don't have to though, right. You can just come and make more money here and not ever deal with the token, but if you end up referring some of your friends or become one of those community screeners, or invite a client or invite other talent you'll earn tokens for all those things.
And then in those times, Represent control of the network. So you can propose changes to the network or you can vote on other people's ideas to change the network. It's kind of a cool system.
[00:13:41] Alex: So I do want to, you know, delve in a little bit on, you know, the token Nomics of the whole thing and some of the technicals, but.
Before we get to that. I mean, you know, what was once sort of a crazy idea is, is, I mean, it's working and it's got a lot of interest, right? You guys did a hundred million dollar, I'm going to say raise in quotes from, from Cotu and tiger. Cause it's not, it's not really a typical rates. They're just buying tokens.
Right. It's that sort of,
[00:14:06] Adam: they're joining the community essentially. So
[00:14:08] Alex: what does that look like? Because typically, if you're a startup and you're raising money, your relationship with a VC is complicated to say the least, but this, this, this might sort of present a difference, a different relationship.
What is your relationship been like with any of these firms that are buying in tokens?
[00:14:26] Adam: Yeah. I mean, we, we were pretty specific about who we wanted to buy a token from the, from the investor community who we wanted to be part of the community. We had, I mean, the seed round was hard to do because we were people thought we were idiots for trying to do this.
And the, the subsequent rounds were much easier. And so the, the lens, the lens we looked at investors through was what can you do to help us build the community? And so the one thing. All of these, almost all these investors have in common is they brought clients to the community. Some of them are bringing, are even bringing talent.
In coach's case, they're helping us build out a recruiter platform because they have, they've acquired a lot of talent firms at Cotu. And so but you know, like blockchains and Pantera and multipoint, they, you know, almost all the clients on the platform came from, you know, some of those investors.
And so that was. Credible value add, right? They, they are really helpful members of the community. And so that was, you know, it's different from like a regular company where like there's a CEO, there's a board, the board can fire the CEO. It's, it's, top-down controlled. That is not how decentralized networks work, right?
Like I'm not the CEO of this thing. And I have, I run one of the nodes. I'm a member of the committee. But your interest doesn't have a CEO, it's a decentralized network, right. So people can do what they want the community. I mean, the community argues over things all the time. You know, you vote with your tokens, right?
The more tokens you have, the more influence you have. And so you know, there's pros and cons to that, right. But it's, it's an interesting new model.
[00:15:55] Alex: So when we're talking about a decentralized network, we're. We're talking about this being open source, right? Like there's, there's there's no, there's no paywall line of data.
People can build on the network as far as I know. What does that, what does that look like? What does that extrapolate to in your opinion?
[00:16:12] Adam: Yeah. There's you know, parts of it that are open and parts of it that are the community has decided to limit it. Right. So like to become a PR approved talent, right.
The community actually has to be. The community, right? So that's a, that's a self kind of referential thing. And that's what preserves the brand and the value of the brain trust network. Because if you just open it up like Upwork and like let anybody in, they didn't have to prove who they were. It would be a spammy environment like you see on Upwork and it would be an unpleasant experience for clients and the network would have no value.
So but, but the, most of it is permissionless. Anyone can sign up and get a unique code and start referring and refer to make, to earn tokens. Right? That's kind of like miners on our network is, you know, you know, a recruiter can come in and create her own account and get her code and then refer talent.
She's worked with in the past. And as those talent come on and transact, she gets a residual in tokens. And then governance has completely permissionless as well. Anyone with tokens can propose any change. And if the community decides to employ. It's, you know, that part is, you know, like fully decentralized and there's some interesting things that come out of that.
[00:17:15] Alex: I'd love to hear your take on just sort of the pros and cons of. Decentralized governance. Right? As far as you know, running a firm as like a director of democracy, you sort of I mean, typically speaking, like as an organizational structure, things can be a little bit more slow moving than if you were the guy up top and you just said, we're doing this, this and this.
Have, is there anything that you've seen come out of that? Any pros, any cons, anything in particular, just in your experience,
[00:17:41] Adam: both. I mean, so the cons are what you just said. Right. It's, it's just difficult to coordinate a lot of different parties and get them all pointed in the same direction, especially if you're not paying all of them.
And so that was one of the reasons we spent, you know, basically three years as a private network, right. We, we, we got the flywheel spinning and we got the marketplace built. We've only been decentralized for four months. Right. So we're, we, we had very strong network effects before we fully decentralized and network.
And I think, I think that was a good plan. Rather than just centralizing on day one and trying to herd the cats. So that would be the biggest con the rest are pros, right? Th th th the sort of bio-diversity of ideas and debates around how to grow the network is awesome. Like you compare brain trust, decentralized brain trust to a centralized brain trust where like the ideas come from the top and there's VP of this and whatever.
Th th that is, you're going to end up with a monoculture, a corporate monoculture, which is all Silicon valley really is, is a bunch of corporate monocultures at the end of the day. And they all think the same way and they all do it the same way. They all probably look the same, probably look like me. And, but in a decentralized network, You get this amazing, as I say, biodiversity of viewpoints, ideas, perspectives there's so many things in our discord that I think are just dead wrong and like, I would never have done them and they're going to get done.
And some of them will probably work and they'll work despite, you know, because I wasn't in charge. Right. Like it's, I love that. Right. I, I am at least mature enough to know that, like there's no way I could think. Every good idea for this network. So many other people have such strong opinions about what the future of this network should be, and that's gonna, that's what will make it grow faster and be more valuable than a centralized brand trust.
[00:19:34] Alex: So I want to talk a little bit about your guys' choice to build on the Ethereum network. You know, there's a lot of options for layer ones now. But you know, rather than Solano Bitcoin, I actually, I understood. There's sort of a turn complete sort of issue when it comes to when it comes to Bitcoin. But why, why Ethereum?
Like, why was that the choice that you guys made? Well, in
[00:19:54] Adam: 2019, there were no choices. It was a theory. I Bitcoin obviously existed. I'm I'm still, I'm still, I've still never seen a smart contract on Bitcoin. I, I, I hear that's the thing. I it's, I don't think it's a thing. I love Bitcoin, by the way, there's, you know, it's comparing Bitcoin and Ethereum is like bars of gold to Linux.
Right. They have nothing to do with each other, and there's no reason to not to own both, but th th you know, so, so today, if you were starting today, you'd have real choices, right? I think even though Solano can go down for 48 hours cause you know, Mom, I'm plugged their computer in the basement. You know, it's that they have a great platform.
And I think the terror, the Terra Luna ecosystem is probably where I'd build today. If I had to start over that they have an incredible ecosystem, a credible platform. But the thing that you get with Ethereum and ERC 20. Which is true then even more true now is you get whatever 30, 40,000 developers in the ecosystem.
Everybody knows solidity, you know, try finding a Russ developer right now. It's really tough. So everyone knows solidity. Institutional custody is, is trivial now for ERC twenties, right? If you know, I helped start a hedge fund in 20 17, 20 18, I had to build the custody solution, the cold storage solution for the assets we held because Coinbase didn't have a qualified custodian yet.
And there, there just wasn't. There was no Anchorage yet. And so. Now, and, you know, so ERC 20 is just such a gold standard and I don't think it goes anywhere. And there's enough kind of layer two scaling things now like, like scale labs has the scale chain, side chains and polygon MADEC and, you know, there's, there's enough ways to sort of get up to speed now in the Ethereum ecosystem.
So I think I still think it's a strong choice.
[00:21:30] Alex: Gotcha. So I'd like to get a little bit more. Broad and macro for a second, because you've got this really unique perspective into this sort of wider trend. If you want to call it the atomization of the firm, or if you want to call it you know, polyamorous, careers, freelance, whatever, where are most of these people that are using brain trust coming from in the first place?
Like, are these people out of college that are sort of more crypto native or are they coming from like your legacy firm? What does it look like?
[00:22:00] Adam: Yeah, it's both actually it's it's folks that want nothing to do with the corporate world, right? Like are like, Hey, I'm out of school. Like I'm not moving to Menlo park and, you know, strapping myself to a cubicle.
Fuck that. And so, and then there's a bunch of people who are leaving that environment, right. Who have. New York and San Francisco and say like, I'm not commuting anymore. I'm not dealing with this bullshit. I don't have to go in and co COVID really created all of this, right. If there's a silver lining to COVID, it's the fact that we're all remote now.
And if it can be done remotely, it is being done remotely. And so it's, it's like this great resignation trend you read about like a network like brain trust is the direct beneficiary of.
[00:22:45] Alex: How far do you think that goes? Right? Cause like I mean, when, when you're thinking about this more broadly, we have.
This, this concept of, of software, the internet sort of decreasing transaction costs and our ability to sort of transact with each other and remote work, obviously expedited by COVID. In some ways, creating this environment where the, the optimal size of your firm is kind of shrinking there's. This notion of the, the largest company is getting larger, but as it turns out the average size of the firms that.
Been getting smaller over the last decade. I'm curious. How far do you see this all going? Like, are we all just going to wake up in 20 years and be freelancing with each other or does it stop at a certain point?
[00:23:24] Adam: I don't think it'll take that long. I think it's, I think it's an inside of five, 10 year trend where we call it the great unbundling of the firm.
Right? The unbundling of corporate America. Here's the, here's the thing about corporate or. No one likes it, right. Unless you're the CEO of Microsoft or Google or whatever, nobody fucking likes that world. Right. And, and we're, we're we hear this every day. Like the only thing keeping most people there is health insurance.
Right. Cause that's how fucked up American society is that we can't, there's no like actual market for health insurance, so the corporations have to provide it. And so that's unbundling to actually, we're going to announce next week, some, some health insurance partners. So if you go on brain trust and freelance, you can also get reasonable healthcare and health insurance, not, not from us, from, from a partner.
And so I dunno like the old ways, like, you know, work for a company. It's re you know, you don't get to choose what you do. You start, you have to go where you're told work on what you would want to two weeks vacation a year, if you're lucky and in exchange for that, you get health care and a steady paycheck.
Well, you can now on brain trust, get more than a steady paycheck, right? Like you can work as much or as little as you want. It's very flexible. And you'll soon be able to get healthcare. So. Why, why would anyone go back to corporate America? Right. So I think, I think that unbundled it look it's better for companies to a company would much rather have 10,000 full-time employees than a hundred thousand.
Right. Every company would admit that too. So it actually is a win-win the reason why this is possible. Now it wasn't possible five years ago is because. Th the middleman, right? The Accenture puts developers into a bank, charges them 400 bucks an hour and the developer gets $75 an hour. Right? Like that's, that's not a good deal.
That doesn't scale. Right. You can't, you can't scale that up if you're a client. And so what web three does, is it cuts out the middleman, right. It takes all the value that the middleman used to extract and just gives it back to both sides. Right. So that. That Accenture Deloitte or whoever had with the bank and the developer eventually comes to brain trust.
Developer gets a raise and the bank pays less. Everybody wins except the old middleman. Right. So I really think it's and it's lifestyle, right? Like, do you want to move somewhere and like sit in a cubicle and sit and sit in traffic. Fuck. No, you want to sit in your apartment or go to an Airbnb. You know, and I mean, every there's all digital nomad thing.
Right. It's, it's enabled by this. So I, I can't see it ever going.
[00:25:50] Alex: So to talk about those old middlemen in this larger trend of, you know, supposedly like replacing middlemen with algorithms, so to speak what's like if you had a spectrum of how long any of these like, legacy marketplaces like Uber or door dash or Airbnb.
Although I understand you actually like Airbnb quite a bit. How long they'll last? Like what sort of rank would you give these? Who's going to go.
[00:26:15] Adam: Yeah, it's it's, it's a great question. I like to kind of describe this as like a spectrum of web to marketplaces on one end of the spectrum you're providing as much or more value than you extract on the other end of the spectrum.
You're extracting way more value than you provide. And so Airbnb, I think is a clear. They provide a lot of value. I think their fees 25% or something, but you're getting background checks and insurance and safety and trust. And you know, you don't see a lot of people trying to disintermediate Airbnb, and, and because of they're so good, they were able to kind of consolidate the space.
On the other side is the gig economy, right? Every company, the gig economy is taking far more than they give. And I put fiber network in that category as well. So I, so I look, I think the more, your extra, the more value you extract, then you provide the more vulnerable you are to a user on. Eating your lunch.
And it is my greatest hope. Now brain trust plays in the sort of knowledge worker, gig economy much higher ticket size. But as my greatest hope that someone copies the brain trust model and applies it to people, food package delivery.
[00:27:21] Alex: Interesting. Now, you know, zooming out again a little bit more.
You again. Been working on this through COVID, which a lot of people have sort of you know, come to realize, as I think accelerated this movement towards freelance and movement towards remote work and a lot of this, a lot of great stuff that brain trust is riding off of. In what ways did you see that happen?
How did that affect you guys going through COVID did that sort of play out in a quicker, slower way than you might've expected?
[00:27:53] Adam: Yeah. I mean, COVID accelerated brain trust track by five to 10 years. You know, it's, I, I think co COVID this true for many things. Like, I mean, my last company doctor on a man, I think we did Dr.
And amended five years of business in Q2 of 2020, you know, it's, it made tell them COVID made things like telemedicine or remote work. They made it, brought them from the fringe to the new normal overnight in, in the month of March and April in 2020. And that's good. Right? Those are net great things for, for most people, right.
It's just easier, faster, cheaper. And so, you know, we, we were, this, this way of work was a direct beneficiary of
[00:28:31] Alex: COVID. Now I want to touch a little bit more before we wrap up the sort of more macro talk here. When you're thinking about, and you were sort of mentioning this earlier, when you were talking about Florida and Texas as being these new hotbeds for, for innovation.
I know I've seen that firsthand. A lot of people moving there where do you see this moving regulatorily? Right? Because it seems like states and countries are now in sort of this position where they're in competition with each other in a way that they weren't before they. I mean regulatory arbitrage is becoming like a very real thing.
They're undercutting each other. Is that a trend you see continuing?
[00:29:09] Adam: Oh man. It's, it's the best thing that could have happened, right? I mean, states competing with each other for business. It's, it's such a net positive for the populations. And I know it's controversial, like, oh, where's the new Amazon HQ going to be.
And, you know, I don't know. I think if you asked New York, would they have rather had it than not, you know, instead they screwed it up. I think, I think that was a loss for them. Right. And I think, I think that'll make this sit in California. It just shifts the bed constantly in these issues. Like, you know, it.
Tesla, right? The most important car company in the world leaves California because the local government here is so stupid, Texas wins and, and who else wins people who want to buy Teslas and, you know, the shareholders of Tesla and, you know, so it's the, the geographic arbitrage is a great thing for, for consumers and society.
And I think it's the only thing that holds. Politicians accountable. Right? Because eventually what happens here in California is the taxpayer completely erodes. Right. And so all the waste, all the grift, all the things. That is afforded by our taxes here. If eventually, you know, I mean, I say I'm not leaving, right?
So it's maybe a lot of people don't leave, but eventually that tax base erodes and the politicians will have to clean it up and stop the waste and stop. You know, all the things that hold California back from, from being a like a great place where the public services work and the schools work and that kind of
[00:30:29] Alex: gotcha.
So to, to start to wrap us up here, I want to look at web three more broadly. And firstly, looking at you know, these traditional sort of VC hedge fund institutions, you know, you, you, you helped, co-found a hedge fund, I think in 2017. Thank you. Still sort of. Semi-active angel invest. What's your take here?
What is, what does this turn into
[00:30:51] Adam: yeah. Great, great question. This is a really interesting topic. And I'm by no means an expert here. I've never, I've never thought Sandhill never made any sense.
Now it makes sense to me from a capital allocation standpoint like that it's risk on capital and these managers do it better. I test in family offices do on their own that that part remains true. I never liked the idea of them being gatekeepers of capital and I, and I think. You know, that gatekeeping status that venture firms have held has, is basically gone, right.
It it's, it's, it's eroded away. And that I'm so happy about that. That is like, if you talk to any VC, like that job has gotten 10 times harder in the last and just in the last cycle. Because they're competing now. With everybody, right. Everyone's an angel investor, you know, and now you've got doubts. And to me, Dow is like, it's a great experiment.
Like you're going to see a lot of things that don't work. But, but, but it's instant capital formation globally without reg regulation. And that's, that's a fucking amazing thing. And and so is there a risk there? Yeah, I mean, There's risk and investing in startups. I don't think, you know, the sec is being genuine in their desire to protect investor, but you can, you can walk into a casino and play blackjack all night, but you can invest in a seed round unless you're accredited.
Like, it just makes no sense. Right. It's, it's a CRA it's just yet another example of the corrupt system in the United States. And so I think it's great for founders. Great. For. Creative thinkers. You see, like artists can now monetize with NFTs. That's amazing. Like create creative people can now make a living more easily.
Not just like the founder from Stanford who walks down Sandhill road and collects his checks. And so, and it's harder to be an institutional investor and that that's a good thing. Hopefully there'll be less of them in the future.
[00:32:40] Alex: So last big one here for you, sort of in two parts, one, any projects you're excited by that you think more people should be paying attention to outside of brain trust, obviously.
And. To any broader predictions that maybe other people might not agree with you on? Hmm,
[00:32:58] Adam: well the person who connected us Ron Neil from audience, I think they're doing amazing things. I think that is such, such an excellent, excellent application of, of the user on economy. I mean, I'm, I'm an investor in a lot of things, so I can't, I don't want to list all of them, but You know, I think I mentioned them earlier that the tear Luna ecosystem, I think it's the most brilliant vertically integrated crypto ecosystem we've seen since the Ethereum.
It is, it is pulled off, you know, it's, it's the dominant, it's now the most dominant stable coin. It's the most dominant defy area. It's their fixed APY products. The, the staking system in the softwares is flawless. Right. They have just executed so well And we'll see if their, if their version of ERC 20 takes off.
But and then like, you know, like there's layer twos on, in the EVM world, like scale, I mentioned scale labs, you know, we're, we're building on them skills, a great project. And then something I, well, this, this might be contrarion. I, I think it would be popular, but contrarian, I think the U S gets there on regulation. I think some people are just so skeptical and you know, Gensler's been really hawkish on the space, but I actually think they get there. I think. Like the U S always does the right thing after it's tried the wrong, all the wrong things first, and that's true.
Right. Whereas like China, right. China closes down and there's no way close beats open. Right. There's no way China wins this game. They might be more organized than us and blah, blah, blah. But they're not going to win close, never beats open and we're open. Right. And so I think. The sec, the CFTC, all the other bodies will, will.
I think they're trying to figure it out, you know, and I think they'll, maybe there'll be another couple of things where maybe they get it wrong, but I think they eventually get it right. I think. Both sides, right? Blue and red. They don't want us to lose. They don't want America to lose this innovation race.
And I can guarantee you, China is not going to win the crypto race, not even close, right. Not even close. So it's sort of ours to lose. And I, but I don't think we'll lose it. I think, I think we'll get there. I think the regulators will get there. I think there are a lot of re reasonable people there who, who all want us to win.
And so As long as you're not Facebook, you're fine,
[00:35:03] Alex: Adam. I'm optimistic before we let you go. Where can people find you? Where can people get involved in checkup, brain trust? Yeah,
[00:35:10] Adam: sure. Brain trust.com. And then I'm at Adam Jackson SF.
[00:35:15] Alex: Awesome Adam.
Thanks so much for doing this. I appreciate the time.
[00:35:19] Adam: Yeah, anytime take care.
[00:35:20] Alex: You too. Bye.