Today’s guest is one of my favorite follows, and the reason I started following him is because in the old days everybody linked to everybody. That’s how the internet just worked. To get smart we linked, we shared, we discovered. Luckily I discovered Horace. He understood Apple. He studied and wrote about the company and helped me stay with Apple, not from talking specifically about the stock, but writing about what made Apple great. Horace now runs one of the best twitter streams, with a podcast arm, centered around micro mobility. If you like smart people and you like stuff that will actually help you make money, even though he’s not talking specifically about stocks, Horace will be your man. I hope you enjoy this episode, and you can be sure Horace will be a recurring guest here on Panic with Friends.

Today’s guest is an incredible leader building an incredible company. Patrick Spence is the CEO of Sonos ($SONO), a $3.5 billion dollar hardware audio company. I get excited because this is one of those companies I like to call fashology – where fashion meets technology. Patrick made his bones at Blackberry, fighting in a land of giants; taking on Apple and Google and Microsoft and Qualcomm. And at Sonos he continues to wage war in a world of giants, competing against the likes of Apple and Google. It’s a great growth story and I hope you enjoy it.

I went a little selfish with this episode and geeked out with a super smart person on the Fed, the markets, tech, fintech, lending and the economy. I’m talking with one of my favorite financial bloggers, Marc Rubinstein. Marc is retired from Lansdowne Partners, one of Europe’s largest hedge funds. While there, he advised on a US $4 billion global long/short financials equity fund. Now Marc is an active value investor and early-stage fintech investor, as well as the author of the popular weekly financial newsletter, Net Interest. He’s also a contributor to Bloomberg Opinion. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

I haven’t met today’s guest in person, yet I consider him a brother. He’s a master of business development. He’s a master at brand. Sina has seen inside the belly of the beast as Robinhood’s first head of crypto during a period of hyper growth where millions are signing up and you have to hold on just to stay alive. Prior to that, he co-founded one of the earliest crypto fund of funds. But he started his career on the dark side with Morgan Stanley, and later Credit Suisse. Now Sina is performing magic in the fast-paced world of crypto on behalf of FTX. He got his BA from UC Berkeley and an MBA from USC. Needless to say, Sina will be a regular on Panic with Friends.

My good friend Josh is the co-founder and CEO of Small Door, a startup that is completely overhauling the pet care industry with a tech-infused membership model. It’s a magical bricks-and-mortar meets software experience. And we go deep on what it takes to build a retail-physical-software company smack in the middle of a global pandemic. Prior to co-founding Small Door, Josh was a successful investor at Softbank, and before that he was part of the management team at public company Outbrain ($OB). I’m a personal investor in the company, so let’s just say Josh is probably going to need a bigger door when I bring my horse in to his West Village location.

I’m excited about our guest today. Jack’s been doing startups from a young age. In his early twenties he started a company called Milo, which ended up being acquired by eBay for around $80-90m. Since then he’s been using a studio model at Atomic; the “two pizza team” principle. His dynamic teams have been busy churning out innovative ideas that scale into billion dollar companies. Jack moved the firm to Miami over the pandemic and hasn’t looked back. I would encourage anyone young listening to this to definitely go out and build. There’s a lot to build, lots of problems to solve and things to fix. Just do it.

You know what we do here on Panic. We talk about entrepreneurs and founders and investors looking for inspiration and trends. Today’s guest is the epitome of a grinder. Dorrian Porter is the founder and CEO of Vestaboard. Maybe I’m biased because I’m a small personal investor, but it took him a long time to create the hardware. It’s really where art meets science meets technology. And I love it. It’s rare you meet a founder who is truly pushing a rock up a mountain. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed my conversation with Dorrian.

I’ve got Kyle Samani back for his third appearance on Panic with Friends. As unusual, Kyle does a fantastic job of breaking down crypto with compelling use cases that will leave you with a better understanding of where we’ve been and where the promise of Web3 will take us. I’ve been a personal LP in his fund since it started in 2017, with positive results even through the brutal Crypto Winter of 2018/19. This episode piggybacks last weeks episode with Tushar Jain, Kyle’s co-founder at Multicoin Capital. Listen to them both. You’ll walk away realizing the inevitability of Web3 and where the major trends in technology are developing.

I’m really excited to have special guest Tushar Jain on the pod. He’s the co-founder and managing partner of Multicoin. We talk about the current crypto market, what it was like in the 2018/19 bear market, and what we can expect with crypto/web3 on a 2 to 5 year time horizon. We discuss The Graph, Helium, and Render. We’re still at the beginning with crypto, which means volatility is here now, but the future is out there; we’ve been in a blackberry moment, web3’s iPhone moment is coming. This tech bear market we’re in right now may be the catalyst that gets people focused on the next big thing.

The markets are in turmoil, and while this is an evergreen podcast, I thought it was important to put this episode out now and address what’s currently going on in the markets because we’re having our first real Panic since March of 2020. We kept our cool back then, but this panic we’re in now is very focused on a specific group of companies. It’s mainly focused on technology companies that are doing well, but are just overvalued.

I'm excited to bring one of my favorite guests back for his second round of Panic: Yoshi Yokokowa, founder of Alpaca, a Social Leverage Fund III portfolio company. Coming to you all the way from Japan, Yoshi is here to talk fintech, the stress of a recap, and the stress of losing momentum at an early stage. And to all those founders out there listening, we don't talk about recaps or losing momentum much because it's not fun. But people pricing their companies to perfection in the first year, should be careful what they wish for; things can and do go sideways. 

It’s 2022 and the memes will go on, but hopefully investors will get wiser and smarter. But a world in which energy is the best performing asset bores the hell out of me, so I decided to bring Justin Reis of Watchbox back for a second round of Panic. He’s quickly becoming one of my favorite guests. I’ve long been fascinated by all things watches, and Justin is my go-to expert on buying, selling, and trading pre-owned luxury watches. I hope you enjoy our chat on creating value through the power of community and passion.

I last sat down with Rob back in April of 2019 and we discussed the best tools for researching stocks. A lot has changed since then. 2022 is going to come down to fundamentals. Up until now it’s been a party, but the Fed is deciding to rein in the 50 year party of loose money. Stocks trading at 100 times revenue are now at 40 times, or even 20 times revenue. We’re at a point where it’s time to look at the numbers. Rob and I discuss fundamentals, what’s happening in the market, and how he thinks about building a product for a world that hasn’t cared about fundamentals for a long time.  

You yutes have it so good. Mark and I used to walk up hill in the snow both ways to school, we had Hebrew class 8 days a week, and we had to read actual books at an actual library. I first met Mark about 15 years ago in the early days of Stocktwits; at the Macanudo Cigar bar. We talk charitable work, market cycles, investing, inflation, and valuation. It was good to catch up. I hope you enjoy our conversation and appreciate how good you have it.

It's Arizona Cardinal Kelvin Beachum Jr's second appearance on Panic with Friends, but he also holds the distinction of being the first in-person guest in our brand new studio! Kelvin is now in his 10th season in the NFL, and he's an investor at heart. He caught the bug early in his NFL career from teammates; there were many locker room conversations on traditional investing, real estate, and of late, even NFTs. He's into startups too, always looking for what's new and innovative. Basically what's next, whether that's crypto, web3, or the metaverse. Kelvin continues to build an incredible network in the venture capital world. I hope you enjoy our conversation. 

We're off to a bit of a rocky start to the new year. And that's why I called in my friend Jeff Richards to help make sense of it all. This episode marks Jeff's fourth stop on Panic with Friends since we started almost 2 years ago. People talk about bubbles all day, and I've been talking about these tiny bubbles we're witnessing right now --the ones that just pricked. So Jeff's here to talk about fundamentals versus valuations and the big picture as we come 70, 80, 90 percent, whatever it is, out of COVID for better or worse.

We welcome Sam Jones, Co-founder and CEO of OOOOO, back to the show to discuss his evolving plans for building a technology platform that helps brands and entrepreneurs share their products and services through live, interactive, shoppable videos.  I’m a small investor in the company, and hope you’ll be OOOOO so excited about the future of the live-stream.

It's our last Panic of 2021. Knut and I take a look at what’s coming in 2022. But you can’t look ahead without taking a look back, so we discuss what we’ve learned from traders and investors and operators over the past year; and some themes like Miami, NFTs, TANG, Crypto, tiny bubbles, and speculation is entertainment. Looking ahead at the new version of the web, web3 or whatever you want to call it, it’s more than just ‘decentralization’ and the blockchain. We’ll need great companies that will be defined by skilled operators.

My guest today is a fintech operator turned investor. Frank is the real deal. He spent almost 13 years at CapitalOne, is the co-founder of QED Investors, and made the Midas List of Top 100 Investors four times. Everybody is a fanboy of somebody, and I’m a fanboy of Frank for sure – because he’s just raised a billion dollars, and he has the amazing ability to spot leaders in the fintech space. So sit back and listen and learn. 

As long term listeners know, I struggle with sleep. I'm in perfect health with an incredible body and an incredible mind, yet perfect sleep continues to elude me. Luckily, the O'Shaughnessy's chimed in on one of my twitter rants and pointed the way to today's guest, Matteo Franceschetti. Matteo is the co-founder and CEO of Eight Sleep. Part of our discussion is a fascinating look into sleep, an area that consumes about a third of our lives; and has a massive impact on our health and longevity. In addition, we cover Matteo's previous startups, his experience with Y Combinator, and what it takes to grow a 'hardware' company in an environment where software is eating the world. 

On this episode we’ve got not one, but two legends; Eren Bali and Russ Fradin. Now they're both working together on a company called Carbon Health. Eren founded it and Russ invested in it. Eren’s last company, Udemy, recently filed to go public. Russ was an investor in Udemy. We can’t talk much about Udemy since that’s a quiet period, but we dive into Carbon Health and learn a bit about healthcare from somebody who actually understands it and is trying to fix the system. 

In a Panic with Friends first, I give myself the applause dub for some advice I’d passed to Justin back in 2014. I told him there are so many interesting things happening in fintech broadly, in the big picture, that if he wanted to go work on something for ten years that was really interesting and unknown, but with high asymmetric upside; then making that bet is probably a good move. And that’s just what he did. Justin spent about five years at Stripe, the biggest company you’ve never heard of, unless of course you’re in fintech. He’s now at Lightspeed, and we’re in our first deal together, Payitoff. We discuss all of this, how Justin sees a post-Stripe world, and his inevitable transition to venture capital. Enjoy!

What’s better than one Roy? Two! We’ve got Roy Erez and Roy Rubin from R-Squared Ventures on the show today. The two have teamed up to invest in Fintech, Enterprise/SMB SaaS, Marketplaces, and Digital Commerce. They’ve both founded, run, scaled, and sold businesses where they stayed on as corporate executives post acquisition. As angels, they’ve invested in over a few dozen startups, and they’re both passionate about supporting the companies and founders they back. I think you’re really going to enjoy this episode.

On this episode, my good friend and fellow Canadian, Michelle Zatlyn, stops by to talk about building a better internet. This feels like the right time in the right moment to talk about the internet, and Michelle is just the right person to talk with. She’s the Co-Founder, President and COO of Cloudflare, the company that helps the internet work. We discuss security, how things really work on the internet, where Cloudflare is headed, and how you grow even faster during COVID.

Dave is the founder and CEO of Upstart, the first consumer lending platform to use Machine Learning (ML) to price credit and automate the borrowing process. Prior to founding Upstart, Dave was President of Google Enterprise and built Google's billion-dollar cloud apps business worldwide, including product development, sales, marketing, and customer support. He started in Silicon Valley as a Product Manager at Apple and was an associate in Booz Allen's Information Technology practice. We cover the joy and glory of building a $25 billion plus company in just about nine years, and as we rarely get a public CEO on, I’ve got a lot of questions. We talk about business and the markets and lending and interest rates – pretty much how all these things work. Plus we get into remote work, raising venture capital, and the long slug of it all. Enjoy!