The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Howard Lindzon, Social Leverage, is below.
You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.
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BARRY RITHOLTZ, HOST, MASTERS IN BUSINESS: This week on the podcast, I have an extra, extra special guest. My friend Howard Lindzon is a guest. This is a little off of our regular format, only because Howard and I know each other for forever.
And less than a guest doing a Q&A is just kind of me goofing around with Howard and having a conversation. Howard has had like really this shockingly blessed career. He launches Wallstrip in the early 2000s and before you know it, he’s in the middle of a bidding war with a bunch of different people, theStreet.com and CBS wanting to buy it. He rolls that cash into his next venture, which becomes a wildly successful angel fund, which now is in its fourth edition.
He was a pre-IPO investor in companies like Facebook and Twitter. Literally the first check-in to Robinhood, which went public in 2021 at about a $34 billion valuation. So you can imagine that first check multiplied a little bit from 2014 or so. I know him from Lindzonpalooza from his early media work. So strap yourself in for a fun conversation about what it’s like to be at — “in the room where it’s happening” to quote Hamilton, but to be at the intersection of media and finance and technology as the world is blowing up.
I thought this conversation was fun and fascinating. And I think you will also. So with no further ado, my discussion with Social Leverage’s Howard Lindzon.
HOWARD LINDZON, MANAGING PARTNER, SOCIAL LEVERAGE: Hello, Barry.
So what do you think of these digs? Pretty nice.
LINDZON: They’re better than mine. You know, Knut is a like a MacGyver of sound. He’s my producer, went to school together at ASU. And we have this room like this, no light. Everything’s padded, it’s all about sound.
RITHOLTZ: This is professional. First of all, everything at Bloomberg, the equipment is just like the best of the best. The people are great. They don’t fool around. The only thing I’m waiting for in the studio is a robotic camera so we could do little video clips.
LINDZON: Yes, I think video …
RITHOLTZ: But that’s coming also.
LINDZON: All right, awesome.
RITHOLTZ: If it’s interesting and cool and cutting edge, these guys are right on it.
So let’s talk a little bit about your background. I’ve known you for forever and over the course of most of that time, your work has really operated at the intersection of finance and media. How did those two interests combine? How did that come about?
LINDZON: Well, they came about because the internet did its thing, you know.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: I think they call it web two. That’s when I’m very much not a technical person. The, I grew up —
RITHOLTZ: Wait, I thought it was web three.
LINDZON: No, they call it, now they call it web three.
RITHOLTZ: But back in the 2000s…
LINDZON: Back in the 2000s, we were coming through that nasty, I wasn’t involved in tech back then, but by ’05, people thought we were in a, everything was real estate, but in late ’05 early ’06, YouTube came on the forefront. And I saw YouTube and I’m like, this is for whatever reason that was, there was many competitors or 100 YouTube’s, but you know, the YouTube and its ilk, soon as I saw YouTube, everything changed for me.
RITHOLTZ: Really?
LINDZON: Yes.
And you know, before that, obviously the Apple Store, my first walking into an Apple Store and seeing the iPod and being able to play with it inside the store. So that was like ’01 ’02…
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: But that was more hardware and music and not internet related to me, you know, because I came from the financial background, so everything was DOS and Windows.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: So first year at ’01, ‘02, you have Apple and they blew out the store model, the retail model, which no one thought. And then you…
RITHOLTZ: By the way, the headlines from that era about why the Apple store was destined to be such a failure are just hilarious.
LINDZON: Well, because Gateway had failed, like everybody was doing it.
RITHOLTZ: Right. There was no differentiator between Dell, Gateway, HP. Apple was its own animal and they controlled their ecosystem. Very different creature than the other.
LINDZON: Different creature. I didn’t know what Apple was even though, you know, because you in the financial world, you were on DOS or Windows.
RITHOLTZ: I was one of the few on a Mac and it was hard slogging. It was tough, not everything was available.
LINDZON: Right.
RITHOLTZ: In fact, there was a period of time where it looked like Microsoft Office wasn’t going to be made available. That would have been the death blow to Apple. The antitrust case against Microsoft is the only thing that kept Apple alive. They needed a quote unquote “competitor.” And now the two of them are the two Mac daddies in the space.
LINDZON: Yes, living in Phoenix, then an Apple store opened up at Biltmore, then I stumbled across the street, never really an Apple user. And it just blew my mind, the store.
RITHOLTZ: So that raises an interesting question. How does a kid from Arizona, from Phoenix, get interested in venture investing, not exactly known as a hotbed of early-stage tech companies.
LINDZON: Well, I’d have to go further back, if it’s okay. I grew up in Toronto and I grew up, I was born in ’65. And so in my formative years, there was TV, there weren’t really great video games, Mattel and television, Coleco. But when I’m 15 years old, Second City Television, comedy was in the water.
RITHOLTZ: Huge.
LINDZON: Much like Chicago.
RITHOLTZ: And Canada was a giant feeder into the US, Martin Short, go down the list of all the great comedians who came up.
LINDZON: So I grew up watching them live do stand up at Yuk Yuk’s.
RITHOLTZ: In Toronto.
LINDZON: So there was Jim Carrey, there was a chain. So much like, you went to Stanford and got into –you went to work in tech in this generation. In 2000, I mean, sorry, in 1980, I was 15 years old, I’m sneaking into comedy clubs watching, you know, Jim Carrey and Dave Thomas and, you know, like everybody could show up on a night. Here in New York, I went to the 1130 show, a comedy show.
RITHOLTZ: Who did you see?
LINDZON: Nobody, famous, famous.
RITHOLTZ: Who was funny, I don’t care who was famous. Who’s funny?
LINDZON: You know what? I don’t even remember their name. There was only one out of six that I thought were funny.
RITHOLTZ: Really?
LINDZON: But you go at 1130 here.
RITHOLTZ: That’s a bad hit rate.
LINDZON: To hopefully see a…
RITHOLTZ: Although, that’s a Tuesday night. That’s a different story.
LINDZON: But you hopefully go that late show to see maybe a Chris Rock or somebody shows up to practice.
RITHOLTZ: Yes, sometimes.
LINDZON: So in 1980 —
RITHOLTZ: He just put out a new show, so he’s off the market for a while.
LINDZON: Good point. So in 1980, I would go to these clubs, and that was who my idols were, and I was just, you were, Second City was on television. So I had the comedy bug, and you had Johnny Carson, those were like the shows that a weird kid would watch.
RITHOLTZ: How did that lead to Wallstrip?
LINDZON: And then you take a break, I moved to Arizona, go to ASU.
RITHOLTZ: From Toronto.
LINDZON: Yes, from Toronto. So I run away from home.
RITHOLTZ: I’ve had it with this cold and the snow. I’m going where the sun shines and don’t care about anything.
LINDZON: Made that move, loved Arizona, golf, cycling. Obviously the weather. I go to ASU, do my MBA and I graduate in the middle of a pretty bad recession, the SNL crisis. So I got my MBA.
RITHOLTZ: It’s like the early 80s, right? Mid-80s?
LINDZON: No, it’s the SNL crisis, Charlie Keating.
RITHOLTZ: So late…
LINDZON: So the SNL boom, yes, 90. And Gulf War breaks out.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And pretty bad recession.
RITHOLTZ: 91, yes.
LINDZON: Yes, yes. So that’s when I started in business and became a stockbroker. And on…
RITHOLTZ: I did not know that about you. You became — who were you a broker for?
LINDZON: It was the print… It was called The Principal Eppler, Guerin and Turner.
RITHOLTZ: Okay.
LINDZON: So it was a little regional, you know, and they all got rolled up. I think eventually it’s Dain Rauscher, which is now Royal Bank. Like it’s, you know, everything got rolled up. I got — I learned how to sell, Pat Ryall with my first mentor. You know, back then you wore a suit. You went into work, you go to Nordstrom’s, you get a suit.
RITHOLTZ: Smile and dial.
LINDZON: Smile and dial, you know.
RITHOLTZ: I worked with those guys.
LINDZON: Yes, and you just had, there was no software, there was no, you know, you just.
RITHOLTZ: Ask for a Quotron, they’re like, “What do you need a Quotron for? Get on the phone.”
LINDZON: So that was my first real job, but I needed to do a job to stay in the United States.
RITHOLTZ: Really
LINDZON: and so even with my master’s degrees, you know, back then, I needed to figure out how to stay in the US. So I became a stock broker.
Anyways, one of my cold calls became a home run. So you smiled and dialed.
RITHOLTZ: What do you mean one of your cold calls became a home run?
LINDZON: So you know, I…
RITHOLTZ: This by the way, I thought I knew your origin story.
LINDZON: No, this is the real one.
RITHOLTZ: This is this is the Mandalorian. We’re going pre-Boba Fett. I’m going way back.
LINDZON: If it’s okay, because you have to know because it was really make your own luck and everything’s a cold call. So you know, I’m smiling dialing, there’s no internet to search wealth. And so you open the local business paper and there’s this kid smiling holding a squeeze like a product called the Grip. And I figure he’s got money. So I dial the guy goes, Yes, come on down. And I go on down, he pitches me. So I’m, you know, I got my MBA…
RITHOLTZ: Right. (Inaudible) money I want to do the next …
LINDZON: Because I need 25 grand to make payroll. Anyways, he had the stress balls and you know, I loved the product.
RITHOLTZ: Not the ones where the eyes pop out.
LINDZON: No, no, no, it’s just I’ll get into like the details. But anyway, it was a beautifully constructed stress ball called the Grip. It was four tension. It was four balloons tension wrapped around this Siberian millet. That’s the technical side.
RITHOLTZ: Serious piece of hardware.
LINDZON: Yes. Serious piece of squeeze ball. Anyways, I give him 25 grand that I don’t have.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And I did being a stock broker.
RITHOLTZ: Did you give it money or did you just commit to the money? And then you had to go scramble.
LINDZON: I had a scramble.
RITHOLTZ: Okay.
LINDZON: But you know…
RITHOLTZ: I’m just trying to get into the details. Now where am I going to find 25 grand from?
LINDZON: One of the last conversations I have with my dad, we never got along. But one of the last conversations I have my dad, I have an MBA. I cut this deal with Mark Scatterday, who’s a great founder. And he’s a very young guy, he’s a fireman who created this product. And I’m like, dad, I found I need 25 grand to get going and my dad said send me a business plan.
I’m like, dude I’m your son. I went to business school
RITHOLTZ: He just wanted you to go through the exercise.
LINDZON: And I didn’t want it so I scrambled my own money together.
RITHOLTZ: Yes.
LINDZON: And …
RITHOLTZ: I like your dad’s idea You should have created a business plan, just so you have it under your belt So now, I can’t imagine..
LINDZON: Do you want me (inaudible) either.
RITHOLTZ: … how successful you would have been.
LINDZON: No, so obviously, I did the business plan, I’m kidding.
But he didn’t give me the money.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Said, you just go figure it out and figured it out. Gave Mark the money He went and paid off some bill, his AmEx bill, and now I’m an owner of a business that has no money again.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Long story short the product was a hit, the products called The Grip. I came in We built out what was called this ad specialty business, corporate logos putting it on business and long story short the product got onto QVC, and we are in the QVC Hall of Fame There is a QVC Hall of Fame.
RITHOLTZ: How many units did this thing sell?
LINDZON: Tens of millions.
RITHOLTZ: No, so just put some jingle in your pocket
LINDZON: Yes, this was our first real hit pre-internet.
RITHOLTZ: Did you ever sell that business?
LINDZON: No, so the business still exists, Mark Scara (ph) is a great entrepreneur …
RITHOLTZ: Are you still …
LINDZON: He’s doing — no, so I was never really an owner, as an S-corp And this is when you really this goes back to the Ronnie Dangerfield back to school movie, It’s like get — “who’s going to pay the teamsters” So we, so I learned everything about business from this. We had incredible margins and software didn’t basically exist back then. And so you had a —
RITHOLTZ: Is it China or made locally?
LINDZON: Made locally in Arizona.
RITHOLTZ: Wow.
LINDZON: And we would sell tens of millions here. We were like the Duraflame. And everybody started copying us, but we had these incredible margins. And that’s how I got involved in stocks, meaning we were making so much money.
RITHOLTZ: You had to find a home for it.
LINDZON: I had to find a home for it. And luckily there was a bull market.
RITHOLTZ: This was in the …
LINDZON: Early 90s.
RITHOLTZ: So you still had almost a decade left before everything.
LINDZON: Correct. So indirectly, I became a hedge fund manager to manage our cash at the Squeeze Ball Company.
RITHOLTZ: At the Squeeze Ball Company, you’re managing tens of millions of dollars because it’s flowing in that quick.
LINDZON: Correct. So the internet in ’95 or ’96 becomes, I guess, a thing.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And I walk into Mark’s office. I go, Mark.
RITHOLTZ: Even before then, but hold —
LINDZON: But I go, Mark, we got to own our domain. And so The Gripp was G-R-I-P-P. So I remember the first experience of the internet was that when I tried to buy the domain, it was owned by a penis extension company called The Gripp. They were squatting on The Gripp’s website. So here’s what’s fine. I didn’t want to buy the domain. I’m not paying this guy for the domain.
RITHOLTZ: What was he asking for it? Do you remember?
LINDZON: Honestly, I don’t remember. But I was like, we’ll just, we’ll just, we’ll put three P’s. I don’t know what my idea was. But Anyways, so our products on QVC. So we now don’t have a domain name in QVC. We’re like a home run product on QVC. Who’s our customer? 70-year-old women buying stress balls for, you know, therapy, you know, squeezing, you know, whatever they were selling it as, women were buying it.
RITHOLTZ: Good for …
LINDZON: And so QVC would call us and say, we have hundreds of complaints from old women that are going to a website to buy your product again. (LAUGHTER)
And that’s how I learned the internet. Now that’s a good origin story. So that is how I got into tech and knew what the internet was. And then I didn’t do the internet again until 2006.
RITHOLTZ: So wait, wait, wait, wait, roll back. We’re going to not skip that decade. So you learned the lesson about a domain squatter.
LINDZON: Own your own domain, master of your domain.
RITHOLTZ: But you did. Were you master of your own domain?
LINDZON: Oh, you learn that early. You got to master your domain.
RITHOLTZ: Did you not stop and think, hey, there’s some money to be made in grabbing some domains? This guy did it to us. Let’s now own taxi.com or Indomit.com.
LINDZON: There was no Netscape browser. That’s how early it was. Remember, the Netscape browser wasn’t until ’99 or …
RITHOLTZ: No, the IPO was ’96.
LINDZON: Okay. So then it was right on the cusp.
RITHOLTZ: I remember being on a trading desk and not being allowed to trade it. “Ritholtz, you’re a newbie. Don’t touch that IPO.”
LINDZON: Correct.
RITHOLTZ: So…
LINDZON: So am I genius because again, I’m not an internet kid. I’m a comedy kid and I’m like haphazard VC, not haphazard hedge fund, like my haphazard VC. I mean, I didn’t set out in life to be a hedge fund guy. Our business turned me into a hedge fund. I didn’t set out to be a venture capitalist. I was an entrepreneur, but it gave me access.
RITHOLTZ: So, so that’s…
LINDZON: So sorry to go back to those 10 years. I am now my big idea of the internet. And a lot of people know the story in general because it happened to a lot of hedge funds or people. It’s like internet’s stupid. No one really is using it other than to swear at people. It’s kind of like pre-Twitter. I don’t know if anybody uses it except to talk sex and check the weather.
So, if anybody’s going to use the internet, FedEx is going to benefit. So through that whole late boom, I was the guy like not owning internet companies.
RITHOLTZ: But looking at logistics and stuff like that.
LINDZON: Yes, like thinking like, and FedEx would go down every day for some reason. So I really got that first trade horrifically wrong.
RITHOLTZ: If you took that to its natural conclusion, then you’re owning things in the 90s like Cisco and Juniper Systems and AMD and Global Crossing, which is, you know, the blocking and tackling of the internet, but you had to have at least a little tech.
LINDZON: My problem was I grew up in Toronto, I’m conservative. I’m like very like fundamental and I didn’t understand the internet. Not conservative politically.
RITHOLTZ: No, no, no, I mean, don’t strike me as somebody risk averse.
LINDZON: Very.
RITHOLTZ: Really?
LINDZON: Yes. We’ll talk more about that in a little bit.
RITHOLTZ: So the rest of the 90s, you just sat on your hands?
LINDZON: Yes, sat on my hands, missed the internet, boom. And also didn’t get killed.
RITHOLTZ: Right. So you come out of the crash.
LINDZON: Just hating the market. I didn’t understand the market.
RITHOLTZ: What’s down 81% between friends on the Nasdaq, right? That’s not a big deal.
LINDZON: Didn’t even know the Nasdaq basically, right?
RITHOLTZ: So when did the idea for Wallstrip pop into your head?
LINDZON: So now the one lucky investment that I made, and it was a dumb investment, much like the dumb investments people made in ’21. So in 1999, I invested in this. Some guy pitches me on a series Q, or whatever they were doing back then, of Cars Direct, which was like …
RITHOLTZ: I recall that.
LINDZON: Cars Direct was like a hot late stage, end of the bubble era, where you could sell cars at a loss, but we’ll do it in volume. And …
RITHOLTZ: Hike it up a little bit.
LINDZON: Yes, yes, yes. And so someone pitched me like the series Q, and I was like in cash, right? Like I was missing the whole internet bubble. So I remember, “Yes, I’ll put some money in this.” And that was the top, the minute my wire hit CarsDirect.
RITHOLTZ: Done.
LINDZON: Now, as an added bonus to invest in CarsDirect, to induce me into CarsDirect, they were going to throw in this other internet company. You know, sometimes you go to the horse races and they give you a handicapped horse, there’s an extra for betting on one horse.
RITHOLTZ: Unfamiliar with that experience, but…
LINDZON: Polly probably won’t finish the race.
RITHOLTZ: Right, but what did they throw in?
LINDZON: They threw in this company, Viva.com.
RITHOLTZ: Viva.
LINDZON: I didn’t even look it up. They said, listen, it is the two for one. Anyways, the bubble ends…
RITHOLTZ: Cars Direct goes tank.
LINDZON: I think 10 years later, we sold for a few cents on the dollar. Someone bought it.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: But this Viva.com was run by Scott Ingram, who’s a friend of mine in an LP now. And I’m a hunter.
RITHOLTZ: Did I meet him at your event?
LINDZON: Probably one of our events.
Anyway, Scott Viva.com becomes rent, which was means rent. Like it was just they couldn’t buy rent.com during that boom.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: During the crash he goes and buys the domain rent.com and builds the largest kind of rent marketplace.
RITHOLTZ: Apartment finder.
LINDZON: And eBay buys it for $450 million.
RITHOLTZ: And you are…
LINDZON: That was my first seed win.
RITHOLTZ: Wow.
LINDZON: By mistake.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And so I go…
RITHOLTZ: Of which there have been many seed wins by …
LINDZON: So that was that gave me my first internet win.
RITHOLTZ: Were you like a cap table owner or just a rounding error?
LINDZON: A rounding error, but for me, it was still real money. So I go, and I became friends. I used to call Scott Ingram and go, how are you still alive? Like I was just like my one internet investment. Right. And he just thought I was humorous, like as a 50k, 100k investor checking in on my investment, and we would talk about the internet.
RITHOLTZ: Right, a billion-dollar company. Yes. How’s my 10 grand doing?
LINDZON: Yes. So I was fascinated that a businessman could build businesses on the internet.
And So now flash forward to, you know, I’m a hedge fund guy.
RITHOLTZ: 2004, 2005.
LINDZON: I hate CNBC. I don’t have money for a Bloomberg. You know, I’m just a retail Yahoo finance kind of guy.
RITHOLTZ: Right. Hey, it’s free.
LINDZON: And E-Trade. And in ’06, YouTube comes out, and I have this idea that I’m going to build, going back to my comedy, and going back to how I grew up. I’m going to build CNBC on YouTube.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: That was it. That was my idea.
RITHOLTZ: Meaning a satirical take on financial television.
LINDZON: No.
RITHOLTZ: Playing it straight, But I always thought there was a lot of tongue-in-cheek in everything you guys did.
LINDZON: Correct.
RITHOLTZ: Right? It wasn’t straight up, it wasn’t Second City, it wasn’t supposed to be funny vignettes. You played it straight, but there was a subtext of, hey, this stuff’s ridiculous.
LINDZON: Correct. The first show, meaning I …
RITHOLTZ: That’s what hooked everybody.
LINDZON: That’s what hooked, but then we never got beyond that before CBS bought it, but going back, I had this idea.
RITHOLTZ: One show solved.
LINDZON: Yes, I call Fred Wilson, who I didn’t know at the time, Union Square Benchers.
RITHOLTZ: Down here in New York.
LINDZON: Yes. So I used to leave these whack job comments on his blog. He had this blog and back in the day, blogs had blog roles. You know that. You’re an early blogger. You’re a godfather.
RITHOLTZ: Big Picture had comments up until like ’09. Finally, I just gave up.
LINDZON: So Fred was like Twitter. Everybody was there talking to Fred and I would leave these whack job comments.
RITHOLTZ: Like what? Like just funny or…
LINDZON: I can’t believe you’re giving – yes, I kind of became the bouncer at Fred’s site.
RITHOLTZ: You were the Motley Fool there.
LINDZON: Because I was the guy who didn’t care about venture, I was just there can’t believe he’s sharing all this wisdom about venture.
RITHOLTZ: For free.
LINDZON: For free.
Anyways I finally pitch him I say Fred, you’re going to be in Phoenix, he’s never met me, I said I’m going to take you to a Sun’s game and this is like internet 2005, Fred was already I don’t know he was famous …
RITHOLTZ: 05, he was — they had already …
LINDZON: He wasn’t famous. He wasn’t famous like he is today.
RITHOLTZ: Well, because post.com implosion, nobody cared about who was a VC, but they had been making money for a while.
LINDZON: Correct. But he had done so many big deals in the first run.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And the biggest one being, I’m having a senior moment. But anyways, it’ll come to me.
I go “Fred, come to the Sun’s game. I’m trying to just become his friend.”
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And he agrees brings a son and we go to the Sun’s and Joanne his wife was like “Fred you can’t just go out with people on the internet” (LAUGHTER) this is not that long ago, but Fred just we became friends, I pitch him on this idea …
RITHOLTZ: Nobody stalks someone for three years to murder them they normally …
LINDZON: But think about like Fred and social media and where we’re at today …
RITHOLTZ: Yes …
LINDZON: And …
RITHOLTZ: Think about how many people you know today from social media, you never would have known. It’s been flipped on its head.
LINDZON: Unbelievable. So he kind of becomes my mentor in that, and I find out that he was street.com’s first. I didn’t even know this until after he invested. So luck would have it. Not only did he get my idea to create CNBC on YouTube, he was there when Cramer was building the street.com.
RITHOLTZ: Right, and that was late 90s when Cramer put that out.
LINDZON: So Fred.
RITHOLTZ: By the way, I have said that the very first financial blog was Todd Harrison’s “Trading Diary”
LINDZON: Amazing.
RITHOLTZ: That was a real time series of update embedded in street.com that, you know, here’s a guy who was Cramer, Berkowitz’s head trader. I mean, a lot of the best trades that Cramer did as a hedge fund manager, you know, tapping out before everything went to hell in 2000. I think that’s Todd saying, listen, every risk measure we look at is terrible. I remember reading this. You got to get out. And he avoided the disaster. Full credit to Harrison on that.
But real time, Hey, we’ll put legging into this position. He used to use the bull and bear metaphor. I got one leg in my bear suit.
LINDZON: He created Twitter. They got their own little Twitter.
RITHOLTZ: Right. Exactly. And all the comments, it was all live.
LINDZON: It was street.com to give credit was the place. Your blogs. Listen, I didn’t have Bloomberg.
RITHOLTZ: My partner, Josh Brown calls the street.com, the Motown of finance, Barry Gordy and everybody who came out of Motown. I could give you a list of a hundred people, you know, in finance today that trace their roots back to street.com present company included.
LINDZON: Yes. And I was a customer and I was a Cramer fan at the time because I came from the street myself.
RITHOLTZ: Right. And he was running a fund. He was, he was very active.
LINDZON: It was like, it was real. And so I find out Fred was his investor. It was like, wow. So I got the right investors. I raised 600 grand for Wallstrip, which is a lot of money.
RITHOLTZ: Right. Not really.
LINDZON: And, and well at then web two hasn’t, wasn’t really a thing.
RITHOLTZ: 2005.
LINDZON: Yes.
RITHOLTZ: I mean, back then it was, you know, today everything is Amazon cloud. It doesn’t take a lot back then. You had to have servers. You had to have tech people. You have like just building off the backend was a massive…
LINDZON: And no revenue. Right. There was no infrastructure for revenue. Right. There was no ad networks and there was no, so you had to figure it out as you go.
RITHOLTZ: Building everything from scratch.
LINDZON: So when we did an ad, we had to like, make the ad, insert the ad ourselves, like …
RITHOLTZ: You should be able to track it, be able to bill it.
LINDZON: So luck as luck would have it, the show was a hit. And by hit, I mean, not like millions of views because, but in relative terms at that time, if you went to YouTube, it was cat videos. And it was people filming their television and getting take down notices of like Dukes Of Hazzard or whatever. So it was just a giant lawsuit.
RITHOLTZ: The woman you had as an anchor was fantastic.
LINDZON: Lindsay Campbell.
RITHOLTZ: Lindsay was awesome. And she went on to go into television.
LINDZON: When we sold, Lindsay got a part in the show that was the era show, the mob show on HBO, the Sopranos. She was a teacher in a couple of episodes …
RITHOLTZ: For early seventies. Your memory is really terrible. You should be a little…
LINDZON: I can’t log on the internet to just search IMDB. Basically all I do is search IMDB.
RITHOLTZ: Are you on a screen or …
LINDZON: It’s okay. It’s a thing that honestly happens that you just tip of your tongue all day long.
RITHOLTZ: So I have this to look forward to in 10 years.
LINDZON: You do. And by the way, I’m going to have to stand up for the last half of this because I feel like I have to pee.
(LAUGHTER)
So, so Lindsay Campbell, we found, but what a, what a time this was.
RITHOLTZ: She was great. Talk about …
LINDZON: So talented.
RITHOLTZ: Everything lined up perfectly at once.
LINDZON: Yes. And so we had this idea. This is a funny story. So there, Fred was a master and Fred introduced me. This is how the internet worked before the internet.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: There was no iPhone yet. Blackberry was really coming into its own.
RITHOLTZ: Right, you’re still a few years away. By the way, I have a vivid recollection of Lindsay and a camera man with her holding a wired mic back to running around lower Manhattan, midtown ass thrown the mic…
LINDZON: Man on the street stuff.
RITHOLTZ: Yes. What do you think of this? And you know, she’s a pretty girl. People like more than happy to talk to her, guys in suits. Today we would call them finance bros, but you’d be on Wall Street. So what’s going on with the markets? And that was the show.
LINDZON: And the way we edited it was hysterical.
RITHOLTZ: That was the show.
LINDZON: So, so the idea was we’re going to create CNBC on YouTube. Fred invested, handed me a list of 11 people. He said, Howard, he didn’t invest all these people.
RITHOLTZ: Call these people.
LINDZON: Yes. He said, why don’t you call him? Beep, beep, beep, beep, Roger Ehrenberg. “Hey Roger.” “Hey, Howard, I read your blog, blah, blah, blah.” “Fred, Fred’s investing.” If you drop Fred’s name, everybody wrote a check. So I go…
RITHOLTZ: Of course.
LINDZON: I didn’t know this at the time. So I go, “Fred said to give you a call.” He goes, “Yes, I’m in for 25” hangs up. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Brad Felt, “Hey, Brad, Fred Wilson said I should call you.” “Sure. 25 K” beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Anyways, I call Fred back like a day later. I
RITHOLTZ: Everybody’s in.
LINDZON: I go 10 for 11. Okay. Who’s the 11th. That’s a funny story. So this guy, Mark Pincus, who’s gone on to start Zynga and he was an investor in Facebook and LinkedIn. So he partners with Reid Hoffman. Fred is an investor in all his stuff that he was a name on the list. So I call, I call Mark Pincus. I’m on a roll. I’m like – I got attitude. So I call Mark Pincus picks up. He goes, Hey, uh, “Hey, it’s Howard. Uh, Fred said to give me your number.” I do the pitch. He goes, “this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.” (LAUGHTER)
And he goes, and then he goes like this and tell Fred not to give up my (EXPLETIVE) phone number anymore. And hangs up off it. (LAUGHTER)
So when I call Fred back, So I call Fred back.
RITHOLTZ: So not just a no, that’s a hard no.
LINDZON: And anyways, if you know, Mark and I do, he’s an LP friend, as much as you can be a friend with Mark, he’s super smart investor and started Zynga. I call Fred back. I go, you’re, you’re a genius. I go 10 out of 11 people just wrote a check over a StarTAC phone call pitch for an internet YouTube company. I go, I don’t know what’s going on here. And I said, but there’s this one guy who not only thinks it’s the dumbest idea, but told me not to give, he said to you not to give out his phone number anymore for a laugh.
RITHOLTZ: He knew who it was.
LINDZON: Yes. He goes, “Oh, that’s Mark. Don’t worry.” Anyways.
RITHOLTZ: Call him back.
LINDZON: He didn’t say call him back, but this is a funny Mark story that I haven’t told too often is about three months later. We, I never, I didn’t know what — listen. This was like a loosely the internet deals were not the same as they are today.
RITHOLTZ: It was a handshake deal.
LINDZON: It’s a handshake deal, like I’m a try, like Fred, like this was like a two person operation.
RITHOLTZ: Read Sebastian Mallaby’s book on, on “The Power Law: Venture Capital” million dollar deals were literally done on a handshake. Hey, I’ll come by Monday for a check. We’ll have the lawyers get the documents. It wasn’t like a team of …
LINDZON: There weren’t even standard docs.
RITHOLTZ: Everybody was kind of winging it. Yes.
LINDZON: Fred was the ringleader. Fred was the — he’s the maestro. So I’ll trust, you know, I’m going to get to the docs. Anyways, stuff was moving very fast. YouTube’s getting sued. We’re just distributing our video across a hundred of these YouTube channels. Anyways, three months goes in and I get a break. I get like “New York Times.” The gray lady is going to do a piece on Wall Street. We’re maybe getting six to 10,000 views an episode.
RITHOLTZ: Which is not nothing.
LINDZON: But it’s nothing in today’s world.
RITHOLTZ: In today’s world. But then.
LINDZON: Oh yes.
RITHOLTZ: Then who was getting 10,000 views in a day?
LINDZON: And not just 10,000, it was who was watching.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: That’s what I learned about the difference between audience and the right audience.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And so Fred was probably, we were all promoted. It was a very cute show as you know. And I was writing in and starring in and producing it. And I didn’t know what I was doing, but it was the internet anyways, but three months go by and, um, you know, we’re doing the books. There’s no revenue. The books are pretty easy to do Quicken. Oh, we burned 30 grand.
RITHOLTZ: That’s called single entry accounting.
LINDZON: Single entry cash cow.
RITHOLTZ: Show me what you’re spending, no money is coming in.
LINDZON: Correct. I was wearing that hat at night. There was not much accounting to do except how many months we have left before we have to call Fred for more money.
So anyways, 10, you know, I’m doing the books and there’s an extra, so we get in the New York Times, whatever, and I’m like famous and, uh, there’s an extra 10 grand in our account. And I’m like yelling at my team and yelling, Lindsay, did we do revenue that I don’t know about?
RITHOLTZ: Mark just dropped off a check and nobody never bothered to tell anybody.
LINDZON: Never told anybody after he knew we were successful, sent him the 10k
(LAUGHTER)
So I call Fred, I go, you know, I call Fred, you know…
RITHOLTZ: Can you believe this guy?
LINDZON: Who is this guy? He’s like my Newman.
RITHOLTZ: He was the first…
LINDZON: He’s like my Newman.
RITHOLTZ: He was the first (inaudible) in round B at the higher valuation.
LINDZON: No, I ended up, we ended up selling to CBS long story short a few months later, and he — I returned multiples on that late money and we’ve been friends ever since.
RITHOLTZ: Right, that’s hilarious.
LINDZON: So he was like my Newman at the time, you know, like in Seinfeld, I’d see that check and I go, Newman, Pinkus. (LAUGHTER)
So, anyways, it was just, that’s what the internet was. It was very cottagey. It was web 2. It was just coming out of such a bear market.
RITHOLTZ: See I think of like the seventies and eighties that way. You’re telling me even in the two thousands, it was still shockingly rudimentary.
LINDZON: Rudimentary. There was no Y Combinator. There was no Techstarts. There was no way to do business.
RITHOLTZ: Wait, when did Y Combinator come out?
LINDZON: Probably 07, 08.
RITHOLTZ: That late. All right.
LINDZON: I think because I used to go to those events. It’d only be 20, 30 people there.
RITHOLTZ: I remember the nineties. If you were interested in venture capital and you were on the East Coast, the only way you could learn anything was like fast money or I’m sorry, a fast company or wired magazine. But there was really not a lot of media coverage of what was going on in the West.
LINDZON: No, it’s Cramer to his credits. He used to write at Smart Money Magazine.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: I was a disciple and then he started an internet company.
RITHOLTZ: People don’t realize …
LINDZON: He had an internet company.
RITHOLTZ: If you’re not a fan of Cramer today, I…
LINDZON: Which I’m not. But I loved him in the day.
RITHOLTZ: I’m not going to argue with you, but you have to realize how influential and important a player he was in the nineties, in the 2000s, he was really, you know, between, between running the hedge fund Cramer Berkowitz between launching the street.com when nobody really thought, I know let’s do a real time finance site that’s actually operated by people running real money, not just a bunch of ministers without portfolios and all the time dropping in on TV, doing his hits. Like when he had his finger on the pulse, when he was running “Money” he was the man for a long time. And now it’s a different world. It’s a different environment and he’s in a different role. But regardless of what you think of him today, you got to give him props for what he did in the 1990s and…
LINDZON: He lit the way. And Fred has great Cramer stories. Anyways, what needs starts with Wallstrip. Great is, you know, we were doing five, 6,000 views and I had this idea to get Cramer’s attention. We would spoof Cramer.
RITHOLTZ: Right. I remember that.
LINDZON: Okay, this is a great story. So I, so I go, I said, “We can’t spoof Cramer. You can’t, you can’t upset the guy.” What we’ll do is have our Cramer give cancer and medical advice. So he’s going to have a show.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: He’s going to be Cramer, but people will call with medical question.
RITHOLTZ: Oh God.
LINDZON: And so we got this method act. Lindsey found one of her friends who’s a method actor who looked a lot like Cramer. And we said, listen, go into that room, listen to a hundred hours of Cramer, be Jim Cramer. And then we’re going to create like a set and you’re going to like give advice with people calling in for medical problems.
RITHOLTZ: Hilarious.
LINDZON: Anyways, he was so mad at Cramer.
RITHOLTZ: Oh, he didn’t find him amusing.
LINDZON: No, he doesn’t have a sense of humor like the guy did.
RITHOLTZ: Yes, that’s fair.
LINDZON: So anyways, this leads to our acquisition. So Cramer wants to buy us to get us off the internet.
RITHOLTZ: Really?
LINDZON: Yes, yes, yes. So street.com calls me after the show and goes, we’ll buy you. I’m like, buy me? I don’t know I was for sale. I didn’t know what I was doing. We had no revenue. I had 10 grand showing up in the ether. Right. We had nothing but expenses, Barry. It wasn’t like the nineties where you had to build a business like my squeeze ball business.
RITHOLTZ: This was a little bit of green mail. This was like, hey, buy us or we will do another parody.
LINDZON: This is how I got into VC. So street.com says, we’ll give you this amount of money. And I say, deal. Like I’m like, I’m like Kramer in Seinfeld. I’m like, “You spilled hot coffee on me.” “Don’t accept the first offer.”
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER)
LINDZON: I’m like, “Deal, Cramer. You got me.”
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER)
LINDZON: So I call Fred Wilson. I go, Fred, I go, yes, Fred’s my board. I go, Fred, what do I do? He goes, I didn’t know you want to sell. You call them back. And like, you know, Fred’s like…
RITHOLTZ: He walked you through what you had to do. I guess there’s a competitive bidding going on.
LINDZON: Correct. Fred. So Fred makes a beep, beep, beep, makes a few calls. Like the next day I’m at CBS.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And I have no way, you got to understand, you know, me, right. I’m literally a nobody.
RITHOLTZ: Clueless.
LINDZON: Clueless. You know, obviously good instincts. I’m not going to completely terrorize myself, but good instincts, great people around me.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Lesson number two. You got to know your cap table. You got to build trust. You got to have great people around you. So I made the one call. Fred goes, Howard, you want to sell. Got to have, if you didn’t know you wanted to sell, let’s get blah, blah, blah. Next you know, I’m in CBS’s office at BlackRock. This table is big as Bloomberg headquarters. And you’ve got Quincy Smith. Who’s a great guy.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: He’s running CBS interactive. And Mike Marquez is a dear friend of mine today.
RITHOLTZ: Right. Was it Mark — they had already acquired Market Watch by then, right?
LINDZON: Yes. A long time earlier. Yes. Yes. Yes. Bill Bishop and those guys, great guy, newbie. And, they go, “Hey, I hear you want to sell?” And I go, I don’t even know how to prepare for this man. I go, maybe. And they go, what’s street.com’s number.
And like, I literally was like…
RITHOLTZ: Like an idiot, you tell them.
LINDZON: I’m an idiot, no, I made up a number a little higher …
RITHOLTZ: Higher than what they had offered.
LINDZON: Yes.
And they go, we’ll double it. And I go “Deal”
(LAUGHTER)
RITHOLTZ: Again.
LINDZON: Again, I’ve hit the table. I’m like…
RITHOLTZ: Kramer, what are you doing?
LINDZON: I have nobody in the room with me to like stop me. And then I go, but you know what? The one thing I said, I go, you know what? Let me call my board. And I remember Quincy, they go, we’ll wait. I’m like, I thought I’d have 24 hours. We’ll wait here. And I’m like, so I, I trample out of the board room. I call Fred on my StarTAC. I go, “Fred, CBS offer me double what street.com.” He goes, “Well, do you want to do the deal?” And I said, “dude, I mean…”
RITHOLTZ: It’s a lot of money.
LINDZON: It’s been six months.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: I said, I think I do. We have no revenue. I mean …
RITHOLTZ: I don’t see how we’re going to make this work.
LINDZON: Yes, I’m like…
RITHOLTZ: It’s a rescue plan before we run out of money.
LINDZON: Correct. This was in …
RITHOLTZ: And they have the infrastructure to monetize it if they want to do that.
LINDZON: And I, for a minute think I’m going to be famous, right? My, in my old, think about me coming out of the room. I’m going to be on Letterman. I’m going to have a show…
RITHOLTZ: Right. You sell the crappy little website for barely seven figures, right.
LINDZON: I was now an executive at CBS.
RITHOLTZ: Right. Hilarious.
LINDZON: There was like, if there was a balloon coming out of my head, I’m like…
RITHOLTZ: This is it.
LINDZON: Bring me green M&Ms stat.
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER) you want the green M&M’s…
LINDZON: Yes.
And so I call, so Fred goes, walk back in there and you tell them that you won’t shop the deal if they add another two.
RITHOLTZ: Two, right.
LINDZON: And I say, “Can I do that? Fred?” He goes, “You hang up and you walk back.” (LAUGHTER)
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER)
LINDZON: And I go, okay. And I’m wearing like my Crocs, I think and some sunglasses. I’m not prepared for this meeting. And I walked back in and I said, listen, I talked to my board and you know, for an extra two, I won’t shop. And then they go deal.
And I go, “hang on” They go “Get the (EXPLETIVE) out of our office.”
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER)
LINDZON: So that was how my deal with CBS was done. Oh my God.
RITHOLTZ: Oh my god, that’s hilarious.
LINDZON: And literally half my investors had not finished signing their paperwork when we returned the money. So it was just, it was a different era.
RITHOLTZ: So they all got 3x, 5x, 10x.
LINDZON: I had an MBA. I was supposed to know what I was doing. I’d like to tell people, you know, people look up to me, you know, but I like to give the honest story is what made that successful. Right idea, right time. I had no ego about the exit that I was building something greater than anybody else.
I had incredible people around me, Lindsay running the show.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Over exceeded anything that you could expect. I found these people on Craigslist, right? They were just, and it was a miracle. It was a miracle …
RITHOLTZ: Craigslist which was on the internet.
LINDZON: It was a miracle, on the internet. So I don’t know. It was just one of the greatest, stressful, fun, interesting times in my life.
And I met great people and that’s kind of what got me started. Boy, we’re out of time. At least, you know, now how …
RITHOLTZ: I asked one question. Thanks for coming. That’s all the time we have.
The sale of Wallstrip. The next step from there was that Social Leverage.
LINDZON: Yes.
RITHOLTZ: Tell us a little bit about that.
LINDZON: So I sell Wallstrip. I’m working at CBS and, I pitch them this idea, like my best idea I’ve ever had. So, you know, there was this moment where I said I was going to be famous and CBS goes, okay, Quincy goes, “Go meet the TV people. They’re going to love you.” They did not want to meet me. So I have this idea for a show for them. Because they asked me to pitch them a show. I thought they bought my show. I thought they owned me. So I stay up for three days. I’m writing furiously a show idea. And my show idea is very simple. It’s like after, after dark, wherever a guest comes on Letterman or their after show that that guests, when I come over to this studio, the creepy studio and there’d be a comedian and they would just talk about what’s in their wallet. You know, the celebrity would talk about money.
RITHOLTZ: Everyday carry. Right?
LINDZON: Oh, okay. There would just be a show about money. Hey, show me your wallet. What credit card do you use? Have you ever been screwed by your financial manager? You know what I mean? If you’ve got to go to Vegas and need 10 grand, how do you do it? Right. It’d be an interesting look to how famous people spend money.
RITHOLTZ: Now, if you get them to eat hot wings at the same time, that’s a show.
LINDZON: That’s a show. So they threw me out of the building and that was my end. I was so by that day…
RITHOLTZ: That was hard.
LINDZON: I was Clarence Beaks from that point.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Who’s Clarence Beaks.
RITHOLTZ: Trading Places.
LINDZON: I was collecting a paycheck and no job and Twitter, you know, in the background, Twitter now starts and I saw Twitter and I said, this is Bloomberg. My first call was to Fred Wilson with Twitter. We were all making fun of Twitter back in the day before iPhone. You were, everybody was. I was using it and I was telling people where I went to the bathroom. Hey, I took a pee at this restaurant. And the VCs thought I was funny because it was really VCs on Twitter at the time.
RITHOLTZ: Right, it was journalists and venture capitalists. That was pretty much…
LINDZON: So I went to Fred and I said, “Fred, this is Bloomberg.” If I, if the president ever, this is like a blog post I wrote when the President tweets about the economy, the market will move. And Fred goes, that’s very clever. You should start a company.
I go, Fred, I’m working for CBS. And that’s where StockTwits came out. I went to Jack and Evan at the time. And I said…
RITHOLTZ: So now at this time, Twitter’s pretty small and you’re talking about Jack Dorsey.
LINDZON: Twitter is very small.
RITHOLTZ: What is there? 50 million people on Twitter?
LINDZON: No, not that many.
RITHOLTZ: 10, 20 million people.
LINDZON: Fred had invested. I passed on that investment. Yes. It was…
RITHOLTZ: You know, you could have sold it to some idiot for $44 billion.
LINDZON: This show is not “Howard’s a Genius.” It’s called “Masters in Business.”
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER).
LINDZON: You have to have losses to become a master.
RITHOLTZ: That’s true.
LINDZON: So, I,..
RITHOLTZ: That is very true, young grass hopper.
LINDZON: So I go to Jack and Evan, I said, Twitter dot — This is my pitch to them. I go twitter.finance.com. I said, people will talk about stocks on here. And they were like, Kumbaya, what about Greenpeace and save the world.
RITHOLTZ: All that stuff, that’s just, that’s Greenpeace Twitter, this is finance Twitter.
LINDZON: Yes, finance Twitter, the original fin twit idea. And they were like, you should just, you know, we have an open API, which is a trap …
RITHOLTZ: Just plug in.
LINDZON: Yes. Plug in.
RITHOLTZ: So build your entire company on our continuing goodwill and whim.
LINDZON: Correct. So this was a not smart by me, but smart, you know, it depends how you look at it. I, you know, some days I love the idea. Some days I’m like, wow. But, I went back and I said, listen, I got two choices. I can either just give it away for free, which, you know, I started the cash tag dollar sign…
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: A A P L dollar sign R I M M because my idea was how do you separate people talking about green apples from people saying they love the Apple store.
RITHOLTZ: The stock symbol, like a hashtag only a dollar sign.
LINDZON: Because people already in finance spoke the language of tickers. It was a clever hack. And I created it with the team and we just started tweeting with dollar signs and it caught on.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: So now I had a decision to make because people, because I had sold my last company, all the VCs were like, “Howard, what are you doing now? What are you working on?”
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And I’m the idiot that just said, well, this and people, and I said, but I don’t know, like, how am I going to make money? You know, I don’t really control.
RITHOLTZ: Will figure it out later.
LINDZON: Yes. So I felt trapped to the very things we make fun of other people for is like, and this goes to today’s lessons, you know, just because you have an idea doesn’t mean it should be venture backed.
So kids today, that’s a lesson for you. Not everything needs venture capital, but at that time it was nirvana, right? Because it was just organic growth. Another very important lesson. Organic growth is growth. Other kind of growth. Not so growthy.
RITHOLTZ: Growth you buy.
LINDZON: When it’s organic.
RITHOLTZ: Right?
LINDZON: As opposed to AI today. Chat GPT.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: That’s organic growth. The world loves organic growth because it’s a mystery.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: It’s a miracle. Well, 2006 was a miracle. You have Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, AWS, the coming of the iPhone, the App Store. You know what I mean? Right. This was all to come. There was still Blackberry.
RITHOLTZ: The Dot Com crash is far enough in our recent history, five, six years earlier that, uh, some of the wounds are starting to heal. People are starting, the market is up off the lows pretty substantially before the 08, 09 crisis.
LINDZON: The tech …
RITHOLTZ: So people are starting to look around and saying, “Hey, what’s going on out here?”
LINDZON: But it was organic growth. You didn’t have to force somebody like a crypto wallet to force feed it down their throat. This is the future. It was just happening.
RITHOLTZ: Plus you had all of the late nineties infrastructure build out, the miles of fiber optic cable and all of the various hardware upgrades was just waiting for something to be built on top of it.
Web 2.0 as you called it. And these were all those companies that were taking advantage of cheap post-crash prices.
LINDZON: Yes. So the smartest thing I ever did in this where Social Leverage started is I took everything I made and just redistributed it to everybody I saw doing a startup around …
RITHOLTZ: Just every company. A shotgun.
LINDZON: Anything that I saw, I wrote a 25. I ran out of money quickly, but I layered the world with my 25k.
RITHOLTZ: Give us some names that we might be familiar with from back then.
LINDZON: Most famous is GolfNow, LifeLock, Buddy Media, TubeMogul, TicketFly, TweetDeck, Bitly, Summize, BetaWork.
RITHOLTZ: Oh, so a lot of these have already had eggs.
LINDZON: Uber.
RITHOLTZ: Yes.
LINDZON: So, yes. So Angel List, I was an investor in.
RITHOLTZ: Okay,. Another.
LINDZON: So all these things came from me just being in the mix and knowing Fred and reading blogs and just being part of the community. And I was at the right place and time. This doesn’t happen very often. I think the AI, some AI machine experts now are going to be in this place, right?
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: We, that was organic growth. That was the first real internet. The, the, the internet of ‘99 was infrastructure and promise. The internet of 05, and 06 was the users — mass user onboarding. So you have, you know, as well as I’ve done, I was supposed to do well. If you were alive and writing checks in 2006 to 2011.
RITHOLTZ: Hard not to make money.
LINDZON: Correct.
So, so remember that as a “Masters In Business” lesson, being in the right place at the right time with the checkbook matters. So that happens to be there.
RITHOLTZ: So that planetary alignment doesn’t come along very often.
LINDZON: No.
RITHOLTZ: How do you recognize like at the time you just spread in the manure, hoping all the plants grow? Are you thinking, wow, this is a target rich environment. And I got to have a little bit in everything.
LINDZON: It’s a good question. Because I didn’t have that much money. The ideal and you run out of money fast, even when you’re running 25…
RITHOLTZ: 25k, sure.
LINDZON: They add fast.
RITHOLTZ: 50 checks. And you’re, you know, that’s a million dollars.
LINDZON: I was at 50 checks in quickly, you know, I was flying to Israel. I did eToro and I’m, and I’m also running StockTwit, which is also an extra benefit because everybody’s pitching me ideas.
RITHOLTZ: Right. You’re right in the middle of the flow.
LINDZON: Which leads to the Robinhood story later, but so everybody’s pitching me ideas. I’m running a company. I’m writing 25k check. I’m talking to everybody that matters and there’s organic growth, meaning no one was faking it. It was just ballooning. Whatever you did had traffic, not fake. It may not be lever lasting, but it was real.
RITHOLTZ: So the name Social Leverage obviously comes from the people that you met on the first round that you began to socialize with. Suddenly everybody’s in everybody else’s deals. Everybody else is seeing what’s going on. So, how…
LINDZON: And also most importantly, the end of financial leverage. So it was a play on words going back to my comedy is like, we are coming out of this era where we realize that financial leverage is not a strategy. It’s a tool. Okay? So my play on words here was that Social Leverage is infinite. You and me doing this podcast, me starting my own podcast. This all is leverage from the network.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Financial leverage almost brought down the system.
RITHOLTZ: So your Social Leverage is deal flow connections, access to start founders, access to capital…
LINDZON: Low capital requirements. It was just a moment of the opposite of what brought down the system, but no one really dove in. Most people think, Hey, you’re giving back to social good. I go, no, I’m pro-oil.
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER)
LINDZON: But, so there is people go, “Oh, I don’t want to invest with a guy who’s investing in the social good.” And I’m like, well…
RITHOLTZ: Do you drive a car? Then shut up.
LINDZON: Yes.
RITHOLTZ: But I, by the way, I — digression. I don’t understand the whole low carbon investments. We’re going to not give any money to the carbon producers. Instead we give money to the carbon consumers. How are you moving the needle there? If you’re against oil and want to see alternatives come up, isn’t there a better way to do it than saying, we’re just going to give money to people who use carbon.
LINDZON: Yes. Well, climate now is a big category for VCs and I’m not in it, but it’s, there’s big developments happening. Finally.
RITHOLTZ: If you want to invest in alternative energy, well, put your money in there. Because there’s a ton of promise in that space.
LINDZON: That’s finally going to be a thing.
RITHOLTZ: But to say, uh, no Mobil, we’re just going to invest in UPS and FedEx, Amazon, you know, this way we’ll not spoil the environment is just kind of misguided.
LINDZON: Yes. So Social Leverage is just a play on words.
RITHOLTZ: Right. So, so from, from Social Leverage, where do you go from there? How do you, as a venture investor, how do you think about what you’re putting money into? Are you, what is it about the management team? Is it about the product idea? Is it about the valuation? What, what’s the decision-making process?
LINDZON: It’s a great question. Everybody’s different. You know, luckily my mentors, Brad Feld, Fred, what these are like some of the great stars.
RITHOLTZ: Rockstars. Yes.
LINDZON: Yes, Rockstars.
RITHOLTZ: By the way, I’ve been begging Fred to come in the show. No BS. Seven years. He’s like, I don’t really do podcasts.
LINDZON: He may show up tonight at our event.
RITHOLTZ: All right. Well, I’ll corner him. I met him somewhere else.
LINDZON: But Howard Morgan shows up, Roger Ehrenberg, So I got very lucky because at that time, remember you’re coming out of a nasty bear market. These guys were not looked upon as like…
RITHOLTZ: So this is like 09 and beyond.
LINDZON: Yes, these people were coming out of getting their ass kicked for five years in lawsuits and IPOs that went down 95%. So these were not famous people. These were people that were deemed idiots again, truly not idiots, but you know what I mean? They were out of favor.
RITHOLTZ: You’re only, you’re only as good as your last trade.
LINDZON: Correct. So these people were beat up, but they were all smart. And the MIT guys…
RITHOLTZ: And they had capital.
LINDZON: They had capital, they survived. They kept the reputation intact by communicating with their investors.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: There’s a cycle and they caught the next cycle. Now this cycle, they be what, what happens to great investors after they go through a cycle, if they’re great, they become great investors because they have memory and they have a new muscle that they learned that markets go down.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Right? Like, guess what Fred hates the stock market because he met, you know, he became a VC. He’s like, my job is to invest early. And if I have a chance to sell…
RITHOLTZ: I’m out.
LINDZON: I’m not going to be greedy. So luckily I had this great group of mentors and like you, they were blogging. Not only were they blogging, they were blogging about stuff that I couldn’t get in a textbook.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: They were also…
RITHOLTZ: Fred Wilson’s blog, AVC,
LINDZON: AVC, and Brad Feldfeld.com and Roger Ehrenberg at the time. And there was like…
RITHOLTZ: What was Ehrenberg’s blog?
LINDZON: Information Arbitrage. And he was a Wall Street guy.
RITHOLTZ: Paul Kedrosky is another one.
LINDZON: Paul Kedrosky, he was a great writer. You, um, and obviously I have stocked with, now I have hundreds of writers and then, you know, they just gave this stuff away.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And they own their domain. So there wasn’t any problems. Like you wrote on Fred’s blog, you had to go to Fred’s blog. He linked to other people. They picked up the phone. Everybody was moving fast. It was just organic, get the speed going. And so it was just a miracle. And what we focused on was good people and big idea because you could glob onto Facebook and Twitter. So that attracted…
RITHOLTZ: So how did you become a pre IPO investor in stocks like Facebook and Twitter?
LINDZON: So at Twitter, Fred, because of Wallstrip, he wrote the first, they led the first $3 million round on Twitter at a $17 million valuation. Now think about that. Right. Like today, that seems normal. Back then I was Wallstrip was like a 400K valuation. I was doing deals one on two, 600 grand on 1 million, like founders were giving up 40% of their business. We were coming out of like a hard time, like “these kids today.” But back then it was like, you’re giving up meaty chunks of the business. So things had to move very fast, but really you were betting on people.
It wasn’t so much price because everything was cheap because you were coming out of that.
RITHOLTZ: Valuation didn’t make much of a difference.
LINDZON: It didn’t happen yet.
RITHOLTZ: Marc Andreessen said, all right, so imagine we overpaid double for Facebook. Who cares? It’s a 6,000% return instead of a 12,000%. What does it make a difference?
LINDZON: It does now.
RITHOLTZ: At these levels.
LINDZON: At these. So what happened is that story got, you know, when you say it a thousand times and the 12th kid graduating 20 years later, says the same thing, it doesn’t work.
RITHOLTZ: That’s a different story.
LINDZON: And that’s why I flash forward today. But back then, yes, so Twitter to me, so Twitter, I had Pat, I said, Fred, how am I going to make 20 times my money? I had my VC hat on for an hour and I go, Fred, Twitter would have to be worth half a billion dollars for me to make worth my while. So of course I passed. Now, Fred taught me a lesson there and he said, “Howard, if you love everything about the product and the team, hold your nose about the price.”
RITHOLTZ: Right. I told you.
LINDZON: But I’m Canadian. This goes back to when I said I’m conservative. You didn’t believe me. I just mentally couldn’t do a model like these guys because Social Leverage hadn’t been around that long. The network effects were new.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: So it was mind boggling to think that the president would tweet like Trump or that Elon Musk would be the richest guy in the world at the time.
RITHOLTZ: By the way, mentioning the president tweeting, you have to look at the four years of the Trump administration …
LINDZON: Exactly what I thought would happen.
RITHOLTZ: …as the golden opportunity for Twitter to turn into something.
How did they blow that opportunity? I guess that post-mortem is not your expertise, you’re pre-mortem, your much earlier stage.
LINDZON: Well, my pre-mortem was going to Jack and Evan, visualizing that for them and saying, wrap a terminal around Twitter, delay the feed 30 seconds for everybody. So imagine, you know, I go to Ted Murch, who’s a friend of mine. He was Bloomberg here for 20 years. I used to come to this building.
RITHOLTZ: I met him at Lindzonpalooza, he’s the guy who put…
LINDZON: He’s an unsung hero.
RITHOLTZ: He put Twitter on the terminal. So because for a lot of people, Twitter became the new tape and they were Bloomberg was smart enough to say, we have to have this in our feed. People can find out about it after the fact. And they came up with a very clever way to curate.
LINDZON: Bloomberg didn’t come up with the key. Howard and Ted came up. I used to call on Ted. I used to come in here, go to the sixth floor, wear a suit, complain that there was no candy…
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And go, what kind of mental cases don’t have candy in their hallway.
RITHOLTZ: And I was at the…
LINDZON: And I would call on Ted. I would call on Ted and say, Ted, I don’t understand. I go, you guys are, this is a dangerous problem for you to have outside the walls. Like Jurassic Park. I go, trades are happening, not on the terminal.
RITHOLTZ: Right. You can’t have trades away.
LINDZON: And so I said, one day your hedge funds are going to start screaming at you. That news is breaking outside the terminal. So Ted understood all that.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: He went and cut the deal of the century, I imagine, with Twitter, some poor sales kid, a GNIP inside Twitter comes to Bloomberg, like a, like a cub into a wolf den.
RITHOLTZ: Right, to the lion’s den, right.
LINDZON: And tries to meet Twitter’s quarter …
RITHOLTZ: We will give you $100 a week.
LINDZON: Tries to meet Twitter’s quarter in 2011 comes home with like a 30 mil. I don’t know what the number is like a 10-year Bloomberg deal…
RITHOLTZ: Right, whatever the deal was. I’m sure it was good.
LINDZON: So this is me yelling at StockTwits going “idiots” Like I go, Jack, this is why I was always mad at management. It’s where I go, don’t sell to the one customer…
RITHOLTZ: Who could buy you.
LINDZON: Who absolutely needs the data. So this is where Twitter is mistaken. And Fred agrees with it. I would go to Fred. I go, Fred, get over to that board meeting. And you tell Jack and Ev to delay the feed 30 seconds.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Somebody will call you and pay you a billion dollars to get it in real time and charge that company.
And that’s going to be Bloomberg, Reuters, Warren Buffett, Goldman Sachs. They can afford to pay you.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And if Justin Timberlake farts at a concert, if someone reads it a minute later, it doesn’t matter. But if a player injures itself in sports or if the president tweets or Bin Laden gets shot, the futures will move.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And that was their business idea. They kind of had 10 employees.
RITHOLTZ: And they blew it.
LINDZON: Yes. And so I always still give out that idea for free.
RITHOLTZ: I still don’t understand why Twitter didn’t or doesn’t acquire StockTwit. It’s such a natural thing.
LINDZON: It’s not even about StockTwit. They should have bought DraftKings. They should have bought Robinhood. They should have been a broker dealer. They should have been a gambling — they should have made money off the transaction.
RITHOLTZ: They think they have this crazy idea that they’re selling ads. They’re the town square.
LINDZON: Well, they are the town square. You know what’s in the town square is a lot of poop and a lot of crazy people. You know why you can’t drink out of the Nile? Because people pee in it for a thousand years. So the town square is a dirty, dirty place.
RITHOLTZ: So you end up with a sort of area that is central to so many people.
LINDZON: Correct. I got lucky.
RITHOLTZ: It’s the nexus of so many industries…
LINDZON: Correct.
RITHOLTZ: And so many journalists and celebrities and finance people. And there’s medical Twitter and there’s black Twitter and there’s finance Twitter. And there’s, you know, I get dragged into, , I mentioned, I set up a list of all the watch companies, right? Watch Twitter. Like you have all these communities and it’s astonishing that nobody’s figured out a way to monetize.
LINDZON: Because it was an open protocol. Like when Fred invested, he envisioned it as an open protocol. What did they do? They closed it. It’s okay to close it to the people that can afford to pay to open it. N
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Not to the regular people charging me $8 for something I’d pay five grand is not good business.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Charging me $8 for something I’m not willing to pay $8 for is not good business.
RITHOLTZ: Definitely, right.
LINDZON: So that was the mistake. You have the Nile River, it’s just filled with data and you decide to let everybody piss in it.
RITHOLTZ: Right. And that’s the crazy thing is Twitter as a data source is really astonishing.
LINDZON: especially in an era of machine learning.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: So this is where Elon could come out okay. Having a unique data set, we’re jumping around here, but having a unique data set in 2023, like StockTwit does quadruples our value because people are doing things you can’t use to get to apply our mod — your LLM or your model to real time financial people that talk about stocks all day long. You have to have our data.
RITHOLTZ: Yes. So let’s circle back to Social Leverage. We talked about what you’ve done on the media side. We’ve talked about finance side. What else does Social Leverage focus on? Is it just, you know, finance and media, or do you look at tech and other things?
LINDZON: So, yes, we’re investing out of our fourth fund. It’s $100 million fund. We went from $6 million…
RITHOLTZ: And you’re closed. You’re done.
LINDZON: We’re closed. Yes. So we, we, we raised 6 million for our first fund. That fund had Robinhood in it.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: The second…
RITHOLTZ: We’ll talk about Robinhood next segment.
LINDZON: The next second fund had some more Robinhood and a company called Customer and a few other great companies.
RITHOLTZ: How big was the second fund?
LINDZON: 20, just two of us. And then we brought on our third partner, Gary Bennett, who had sold his company to SalesForce and we were doing a lot of enterprise and healthcare. And that’s our third fund, which was 40.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And we, we liked the capital constraint model. And then our fourth fund will be like where we settle in on the future is the $100 million fund.
RITHOLTZ: Right. And you’re still doing very early seed stuff.
LINDZON: We write $1 million to $2 million check. We lead rounds. We don’t have sharp elbows. I mean, we don’t have, if someone wants to put their name first, they can put their name first. It’s about the 10-year stuff. So we like to win.
RITHOLTZ: Yes.
LINDZON: Now what’s changed is Social Leverage has evolved because the markets move. So I was very heavy in financial services stock, which was a great lead gen engine. We invested in Rally Road, Koyfin, eToro, Robinhood, Alpaca, YCharts…
RITHOLTZ: Very finance-oriented companies.
LINDZON: You know, so …
RITHOLTZ: I didn’t realize you were in YCharts.
LINDZON: Yes. First check.
RITHOLTZ: No kidding?
LINDZON: And so, so yes, $60,000 check to Sean Carpenter when he was running YCharts and it’s a great business.
They sold, Chart IQ, which just sold to S&P. So we really, I covered, if you were going to build a Bloomberg terminal, and again, this is Twitter screwing this up. Twitter should have bought all these companies and just giving it away for 50, a hundred bucks a month, create a $200 a month Bloomberg terminal that’s open.
RITHOLTZ: They’ve never, no one has ever been able to do that.
LINDZON: Including me because I don’t have the capital structure.
RITHOLTZ: And by the way, the terminal.
LINDZON: It’ll still happen. There’ll be a roll up post this crash. No, there’ll be a roll up.
RITHOLTZ: All right, do you think so?
LINDZON: Well, there will be an effort. I’m not saying it’ll be correct. Why wouldn’t you, you can buy a fintech assets for 90, 90 cents off the dollar.
RITHOLTZ: You could go back over the past 20 years and every three or four years, there’s a story about this is finally the end of the Bloomberg terminal. And six months later, they’re at all-time highs in terms of users. Nobody has ever been able to do that.
LINDZON: Let me be clear, Barry. You cannot disrupt the, didn’t mean it that way…
RITHOLTZ: But I mean, that’s been the intent.
LINDZON: Stupid intent. There’s really things you can’t beat.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Okay. You can’t beat open.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: So I’m not going to go take on OpenAI.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: I mean, I don’t want to know — it worked.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Okay. You can’t take on the Bloomberg. That doesn’t mean rich people won’t try, but network effects are very powerful. Okay. Centralized network effects are very powerful. The second thing that Bloomberg has is the right customer.
RITHOLTZ: Of course.
LINDZON: And the third thing that Bloomberg has is a will to not lose.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: What Bloomberg got right was aesthetic talent. Not, not giving an inch ….
RITHOLTZ: Stability.
LINDZON: The stability.
RITHOLTZ: When was the last time you heard about …
LINDZON: Customer support?
RITHOLTZ: Right. When was the last time you heard about the terminal going down? Twitter, you know, every other week you, you were hearing about that for how long?
LINDZON: Yes. Early on Twitter could have set up a customer support desk for 500 a month and said, call us, we’ll build you lists instead of the one, you know, they sell, they do the hard work.
RITHOLTZ: I have a behavioral finance list. I have a, I have everybody in my firm on a list. I see everything that everybody tweets. Um, case anybody that says anything, non-compliant, compliance tracks that also the watch list is just sort of fun. I have a car list. That’s fun. Like that sort of curated lists. I still, to this day, don’t understand why Twitter doesn’t promote these sorts of things. They’re amazing. Science and technology. I have a list like that that has like 70,000 followers. I don’t know how that grew.
LINDZON: I’ll give you my thesis. My thesis is organic growth while great is also a drug and it got, it infected people’s brains, meaning, “Hey, we already won America. Let’s go to China.” You know how long it took like Bloomberg to open its second office? I imagine 10 years, you know, how fast Twitter and Facebook and even Robinhood were opening offices in China year two, like no one. So I’m saying organic growth was a drug that forced people to think that they were smarter than they were, grow faster than they were. And by the way, there was 0% interest rate and venture capitalists were lining up to give you money.
RITHOLTZ: Howard, in addition to running a venture fund, Social Leverage also, hosts a podcast called “Panic With Friends.” So I got so many questions to ask you about first. What, what is this podcast thing you talk about?
LINDZON: Well, you start, there’s, there is podcasts is a thing now a little bit.
RITHOLTZ: Should I look into this?
LINDZON: You should. So I think the podcast is popular in general because you get to have these conversations with people, Conan being a perfect example. I only listen to comedy podcasts. So I listened to Conan …
RITHOLTZ: Really?
LINDZON: And Conan is just so talented.
RITHOLTZ: So he happens to be just quick digression, which you and I both can’t help but do. When I was pitching Masters In Business to Bloomberg, I pitched it as, Mark Maron meets Charlie Rose and Mark Maron is one of the original pot. And by the way, that’s back when Charlie Rose had pants on who nobody knows what’s going on. But Mark Maron, he was the first guy doing long form interviews with people in his industry. And he’s a standup and a television show producer, but it’s, let me bring in my friends from the world of standup comedy and let’s dissect what makes something funny.
LINDZON: Correct. So inspired like, like Jerry’s show, inspired by what you do, inspired by Conan. I started my own podcast in March 10th of 2020. So the market, the VIX was like on its way to 90.
RITHOLTZ: Oh, so we’re not quite shut down yet. I think the NBA had just been canceled.
LINDZON: Four days to shut down. And the, you know, and I’m like, people were freaking out. And it was kind of a service to myself and my network that I have …
RITHOLTZ: Keep yourself crazy.
LINDZON: And a service to the, my network to be able to talk to like Fred Wilson and Jim O’Shaughnessy and you, I said, why don’t I just for 30 days, document the panic and start the show called “Panic with Friends” where we are a calm voice. So my first inclination with COVID was this will pass, obviously, because buy the dip.
RITHOLTZ: Everybody I think had the same…
LINDZON: It maybe my best call, but it wasn’t like I had some great insight. It was just, Oh my God, people like at least we can do is…
RITHOLTZ: Take a deep breath.
LINDZON: Take a deep breath. So I had this idea. We’re going to, we’re going to do the opposite of panic, even though the show’s called “Panic With Friends” and I would get my calmest friends that have been through many cycles and just chat with them about the panic. And at the time the VIX, now the market closes, I’m doing a show a day, a great guest. Jim O’Shaughnessy is my first guest. And it’s just really good advice. It’s like that. And then I start bringing in traders when the VIX hit the 80 and I’m like, what are we buying? Oil was negative. I bring on my favorite oil trader. And we were just like, we, if you listen to my podcast, you made fortune because we were there. And it was so proud of just being kind of not making…
RITHOLTZ: A voice of reason amidst the…
LINDZON: A voice of reason saying, guys, you don’t have to buy, but if you’re not thinking about buying during these weeks, you will, you may not want to ever be an investor.
RITHOLTZ: Let me ask…
LINDZON: That was the idea of the show.
RITHOLTZ: Let me ask you a question because I had a similar experience. I’m curious as to what yours was, what sort of pushback did you get to that rational, hey, down 30% in a few weeks buying opportunity. What did people say?
LINDZON: Well, the show wasn’t like crazy. It was more a show of like, you know, I have a big audience, not for the podcast at the time, but I would just, I figured if people ever go back and look for about 30 days of podcasting day after day, I was going to put a piece of work out there that would be timeless.
Now I didn’t expect to be doing the show for three more years and it should be called Frolic with Friends at this point, but I was really proud of it, but we just kept going. Knuda (ph) is one of my best pals.
RITHOLTZ: It’s also, you don’t realize how much fun it is to sit down with somebody. You and I know each other for a long time. How often do we get to sit down and BS about what we do for two hours?
LINDZON: It’s also…
RITHOLTZ: It’s a blast.
LINDZON: It’s not just a blast. It keeps me ahead of the curve.
RITHOLTZ: You got to think about who you’re talking to. There’s some prep work that you wouldn’t do otherwise. “Hey, let me look into seed investing before I sit down with Howard. Oh, look what I’ve learned” I mean, you, you must have those sort of experiences, although you have a staff that does all the research. Or maybe not.
LINDZON: I don’t have staff to do everything other than Knut (ph) myself. And you know, I just love the idea that my daughter, my wife listened to it and they like it, as long as they like it. I’ll keep doing it. So every time I say I quit, my wife goes, “I listen while I’m hiking.” I go, “all right, I’ll keep doing it.”
RITHOLTZ: So what do you, what have you learned from hosting a podcast?
LINDZON: Well, I’ve learned that people are great, right? I’ve learned obviously, because I don’t watch.
RITHOLTZ: So the opposite of what you learned from Twitter.
LINDZON: Yes. I learned that just there’s so many smart people. And I also learn a lot about myself in that I don’t know anything. And I do love to make my guests laugh. Like part of the thing is if you can make the Freds and the Jim O’Shaughnessys and the Barrys laugh, that is the only gift that I was born with is to probe and make them giggle or just look at themselves a little less seriously.
Right? So when I see a flaw in a person, whether it’s Cramer or whether it’s, you know, Trump, I look at like, man, these are bad life decisions. Like Jim could have been me. He could have, he had the center of the universe. I’d look at Jim and he went media. He could have gone venture.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Maybe he did do venture and he doesn’t talk about it.
RITHOLTZ: He did okay for himself though, to be fair.
LINDZON: I’m not saying he didn’t make money. I’m saying he’s slapping on makeup, but he could have been Andreessen. He could have been writing checks.
RITHOLTZ: He’s got a daily grind that looks from the outside. Like it’s, I hope he loves it. If you had to pick one of two lifestyles, I think Andreessen’s lifestyle is a little more less, less stressful than the lifestyle that Jim’s on.
LINDZON: So I feel like I chose the other side of the road. I could have gone down the media side, but I still look at the media more like the enemy, but I also don’t look at it like Trump and Elon Musk look like it like they’re out to get me. And I know they are out to get them and whatever, but I don’t have the same…
RITHOLTZ: They’re out to get clicks and they’re out to get pages.
LINDZON: Correct.
RITHOLTZ: So, you know, whenever I’m going to interrupt again, because I feel like…
LINDZON: No, we’re friends.
RITHOLTZ: I feel like we, this is a conversation, not, not a Q and a, uh, and I apologize to those people who are expecting a Q and A, whenever I hear people talk about media bias and a lot of it is just lazy journalism and, and what is extreme, what is outrageous, what is sensationalistic, how do we get the views? How do we get the clicks? It’s not the sort of, I think the, the right misunderstands the left and the left misunderstands the whole thing. It’s a business and it’s about generating and capturing attention, not we’re pushing the left versus the right side of view.
Fox news is its own animal. It has its own origin story that, that comes from a very different place. But when you just look at media in general, yellow journalism has been around for centuries, literally centuries.
LINDZON: Yes. I just love the idea. I was born with the gift to laugh at myself and that’s just a gift that others don’t have.
RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk about laughing at yourself. And I’m going to insert myself even deeper into the conversation. I wrote a, a column in 2021 for Bloomberg, “What My Worst Trades Taught Me About Investing.: And I mentioned, you said it’s 2014. I remember it’s 2015, but I wouldn’t swear to it. The line I said is “Howard, that’s the dumbest investment idea I ever heard.” I’m omitting the F bomb that was in the middle. You and I were talking, we were in San Francisco. I have a vivid recollection of the ferry building being behind us. We were out on the deck, behind where a couple of those restaurants were. And you were pitching me on this ridiculous idea for an app that’s going to give away free trades to millennials on their phone.
That’s like, you know, the world’s moving to passive who wants free trading? Where’s this going? So first kudos to you to investing in Robinhood when I was too stupid to see it. But second, how did you come across the Robinhood opportunity and what made you so enthusiastic?
LINDZON: The, first of all, it was, it was just E-Trade 2.0. So my big idea, like even with Wallstrip was CNBC on YouTube. Robinhood was just an extension of what E-Trade.
RITHOLTZ: E-Trade on the phone.
LINDZON: So E-Trade to me…
RITHOLTZ: If you would have pitched it to me like that, cause my first gig in the business was at E-Trade, I would have been all over it.
LINDZON: So it’s my fault. I get it.
RITHOLTZ: It’s totally your fault.
LINDZON: So again, I’m in a, it was in a power position on some level because people needed StockTwits to spam to get users. We were a gateway to traffic much like Twitter. Okay. So, but the people that came to me were people with financial apps. And because I was too wimpy to build my own brokerage. So in 2013, just like you said, VCs are not perfect. They are like MOS. And at the time the world of VC was enamored with disrupting Vanguard.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: So the VC models were all…
RITHOLTZ: How’s that going, by the way?
LINDZON: So the VC models.
RITHOLTZ: What are they up to Eight trillion. Good, good, good job.
LINDZON: So this is (inaudible) my hat. So the VCs were seeing the world one way. I saw the world another way.
So the VCs were like, we got to go after the assets under management. I was like, who cares? Those are worth a dollar. You need to get the customer and you need the, you know, so it wasn’t like any genius insight. It was just all the money was trying to disrupt Vanguard, and Vanguard wasn’t disruptable. You couldn’t build a product that was 20 times better than Vanguard. Whereas eTrade they were spending billions on advertising.
RITHOLTZ: So great advertising, but expensive advertising.
LINDZON: So at the time in 2013, you could look through the financial statements of Schwab and TD public statements, and they were spending $150 for a customer acquisition. So this is the math that I applied.
RITHOLTZ: We could acquire them for next to nothing.
LINDZON: How about zero and less than zero, right? Meaning I show my friend, my free trade on my phone. He didn’t see a TV commercial.
RITHOLTZ: So what does that cost you? 20 bucks?
LINDZON: Less than one, because one lead one customer led to 10. So it was like Uber growth.
RITHOLTZ: But you’re giving them a free trade. You’re giving them a free share of stock.
LINDZON: Understand that when I invested…
RITHOLTZ: What is that 20 bucks, 30 bucks, not even …
LINDZON: You can’t think like that as a seed investor, you can now that interest rates are 5%, but at the time…
RITHOLTZ: But if they are paying — if Schwab is spending $150 per client and you’re spending one share of a $5 stock, your cost of acquisition is $5. It’s meaningless. Who cares?
LINDZON: Right. So at worst it was $5, but at best it was still negative because that person told five other people.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: You got to understand how that type of networking works, which is organic growth.
RITHOLTZ: Viral…
LINDZON: So it was Snapchat, but with trading. So think about this, do the math. If I acquire a million users and I’m at Schwab and I did that for $10, you’d be CEO of the company.
“Bring me the kid that got me a million users without a TV ad” right?
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER)
LINDZON: Now, all your, all your workers were trying to kill you because it’d be “Slow down, dude. You’re, you’re not supposed to work that hard” but this was my idea was like, if you can acquire a million users at zero, you’re worth $150 million.
RITHOLTZ: Yes.
LINDZON: So if I invest at an $8 million valuation, let me put up the calculator. I’m up 19 times my money in an arb trade. So it was just an arb idea that I had.
RITHOLTZ: And again, you should have explained that to me.
LINDZON: Well, at the time I probably had gas from something I had eaten in San Francisco and I had other things on my mind.
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER).
LINDZON: No, but the idea then was it was very hard for other people to see that because they were looking for a business model.
RITHOLTZ: Well, now that you’ve explained it, it’s easy to see.
LINDZON: And so what I didn’t get right, luckily for me, again, a lot of this is luck. I didn’t expect it to be 30 billion, you know, so we did sell some along the way. And that was the beauty of what, of this market markets have become, they’re illiquid a little bit right now, but there became liquidity in the private market…
RITHOLTZ: Sure. Tons.
LINDZON: Which is why I also helped build by investing in AngelList and other things.
So I was just part of that whole generation, which was fun, which created liquidity in the system.
RITHOLTZ: So how early were you in Robinhood?
LINDZON: We were the first check.
RITHOLTZ: You were literally the first check. They go public for $35 billion. That that’s got to put a few jingles. Yes.
LINDZON: We’re in a, we’re on a few lists for our fund returns.
RITHOLTZ: So you’ve, you’re selling a little bit along the way, but it’s got to be 100 X plus, right? I know you can’t disclose that, but it’s huge. So now you’re in a very different situation instead of thinking about. Yes.
LINDZON: Yes, now you pay me to come on the podcast.
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER) Right, that’s right. But, but for other people, we have, we have clients who’ve sold businesses. We have other people who’ve had these giant windfalls. Suddenly it’s a very different calculus. You’re saying, all right, I’m no longer worrying about multiplying this. How do I go about protecting this giant pool of capital and how do I not get killed tax wise?
So do you collar this? Do you sell it? What, what do you do when suddenly the bank calls and says, “Hey, there’s a couple extra zeros in your bank account. Put it at the end of your, your balance.” What sort of financial response do you take to that?
LINDZON: Well, the first thing you do is I tell everybody is you hide it from your, your wife and kids.
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER) Right. So they don’t know.
LINDZON: Yes. My kids never heard of Robinhood.
RITHOLTZ: Sorry. That Robinhood thing didn’t work out.
LINDZON: My kids think I’m trying to still disrupt Vanguard. No.
So the first thing you do is try and just appreciate like, you know, the good fortune. So yes, you set up the trust…
RITHOLTZ: Gratitude, all that stuff is fantastic.
LINDZON: Then set up the trust and you realize that you have to start lying to your children.
RITHOLTZ: Right? You start moving money into various trusts. You’re worth more dead than alive. You don’t want them to know that.
LINDZON: Yes, yes, yes. You move into a smaller house.
RITHOLTZ: Disincentivize them to detach the brake lines. We don’t want that to happen.
LINDZON: No, I mean, there’s nothing special. We, as a conservative person…
RITHOLTZ: Do you, do you collar the, cause that’s a big chunk of money.
LINDZON: We, we distributed the stock to our LPs. So a lot of…
RITHOLTZ: So it’s up to them to do what they want to do.
LINDZON: This goes to the greed at the end of the cycle.
RITHOLTZ: Yes.
LINDZON: You know, again, I was mentored by Fred Wilson. We’ve been joking a little bit.
RITHOLTZ: Fred says hit the bid.
LINDZON: Fred has always, because he went through 1999.
RITHOLTZ: Right, right, he’s not…
LINDZON: He went through.
RITHOLTZ: He’s not looking to optimize.
LINDZON: He’s not looking to optimize.
RITHOLTZ: That is the regret minimization strategy. That’s what Fred deploys.
LINDZON: I’ve made a few mistakes in my life in investing that Fred laughs at or not laughs at, but appreciates it, he says, Howard, what do you think?
RITHOLTZ: Been there, done that?
LINDZON: Where I’ve optimized over-optimized for entry.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Okay.
Fred has always said, if everything lines up, optimize, don’t worry about it.
RITHOLTZ: Optimized for exit.
LINDZON: So I have always optimized for exit, meaning I’m never going to sell the top.
RITHOLTZ: Right. Nor do you want to…
LINDZON: And generally you’re going to sell on the way out.
RITHOLTZ: You don’t even get a ribbon when you top to I’ve top ticked two stocks in my life. When I was on a trading desk, you don’t ring the bell at the exchange. No one, no one gives you a plaque. It’s like, Oh, that was a lot of effort for nothing.
LINDZON: So our job is to return capital as fast as we can.
RITHOLTZ: And you did that.
LINDZON: There’s a, there is a thing in the venture industry that’s kind of a joke, which is, you know, IRR. Well, IRR might mean something if you’re returning cash.
RITHOLTZ: Right, internal rate of return, but you’re returning actual shares.
LINDZON: So in our thing, it’s dollars return. So it’s DPI. And so the higher your DPI, not your IRR is what matters when you have a five to 10 DPI and you’ve returned that much cash on cash, people return your calls.
So I was mentored by the people that said, focus on DPI. So if you have a chance to return your cash.
RITHOLTZ: You do it.
LINDZON: If you return your cash in 2016, we returned some cash in Robinhood in 2016, very early, but say those LPs bought Bitcoin.
RITHOLTZ: Right? They did okay.
LINDZON: Meaning my job isn’t to manage their money. My job is when, when I entered a company, I said, if this gets to a billion, I got to sell some and it got to a billion. You can’t change. Yes, of course you can change, but I’m a early-stage investor.
RITHOLTZ: You didn’t sell everything. You sold a little bit to take some house money off the table. You still had a big slug waiting to see if it did any better.
LINDZON: Yes.
RITHOLTZ: So and it did…
LINDZON: So when it went public…
RITHOLTZ: So even from there, it was 35x.
LINDZON: It’s unbelievable. Now, we made the decision and our LPs agreed that we are as soon as we can sell, we will return the shares to the LPs. Let them decide.
RITHOLTZ: Six months post IPO.
LINDZON: They have their own tax problems. They have their other issues. Let us return the stock market. They want to hold it. They can hold it. For me….
RITHOLTZ: What are the rules for early pre-IPO investors?
LINDZON: Six months.
RITHOLTZ: So, so you basically give them pre-IPO shares.
LINDZON: No, we give them, we have to wait legally for the shares to be cleaned up.
RITHOLTZ: Six months? Okay.
LINDZON: We clean them up day one, give them their shares. They’re free trading. They can either hold them and give them to their kids. That’s not our job. We distributed market.
RITHOLTZ: And the IPO was when? 2021?
LINDZON: Yes. Late 2021.
Now a lot of people around this time started heading up their funds like Andreessen and Sequoia to be permanent capital. These are the signs of the top…
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Where they’re like, Hey, we now have an evergreen fund that will hold these stocks. So, you know, so there were all these signs in 2021.
RITHOLTZ: Late 2021. That’s not a great call.
LINDZON: Yes. So, so again, you know, we consistently try and return capital. That is our job.
RITHOLTZ: So all told your experience with Robinhood ended up being pretty, pretty, pretty good.
LINDZON: Yes. Pretty good. We’ve had a few other ones, but Robinhood, what was fun about Robinhood is that we saw other people didn’t like it. And that still goes to our strategy today is when you’re betting on people, you have to have domain experience, which we had in Robinhood. We have to get the timing right. That’s a little bit of luck. The world was ready for an app like this.
RITHOLTZ: And then the pandemic certainly didn’t hurt.
LINDZON: It didn’t hurt, but the execution that they had early was fantastic.
RITHOLTZ: Really quite fascinating.
So I have a very vivid recollection of you being on my partner’s podcast, Compound and Friends, Josh Brown and Michael Batnick. And I want to say it was like October 21. Is that about right? And you’re like the market’s screaming higher. We’re up from the lows at the end of March 2020. The market’s up 68 percent for the calendar year in 2021. The S&P 500 is up 28 percent. And you couldn’t have been more uncomfortable. You just said wherever you look, signs of problems coming.
What were you seeing in October 21 that made you and not just public markets, you were talking about private market valuations, demands from founders of startups, like everything you said was bubblicious.
LINDZON: So earlier in the year in April, I rarely do serious interviews. And I came on Joe’s podcast with Tracy and they were great. And they were like, ask me questions. And it went, I was like, I was like, you know, this is stupid. And we had raised $100 million in late 2021. Again, we went from six, as I said, to 20 to 40, a hundred, a hundred was easy.
RITHOLTZ: Really. And that gets you 90 cents…
LINDZON: So, so it was like, I was like the Costanza of venture capital at that point. I’m like, this has been so hard for us. We’re good.
RITHOLTZ: But we’re not that good.
LINDZON: Why are people giving us a hundred? What have we done to deserve this?
So it was kind of like Costanzing ourselves. And so we stopped writing checks, which is one of our best decisions.
RITHOLTZ: So wait, hold on a second before we get to that. So you raise $100 million. Now you have a track record. That’s, you know, Robinhood had already gone public.
LINDZON: People just wired us money.
RITHOLTZ: So, so was this, there’s too much money around. People have become reckless with their capital or is this a little imposter syndrome? Hey, we’re good, but we’re not that good. This is a problem. Or a little bit of everything.
LINDZON: a little bit of everything. Plus a lot of it’s now my own money.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And I’m conservative and I’m like, nothing makes sense to me. And I’m getting three minutes to decide on a deal. We’re still doing business on the Zoom. I’m not a Zoom guy.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: I dislike this.
RITHOLTZ: You need to see people’s body language.
LINDZON: Why can’t it take three months to do a deal?
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Meaning, okay, I lose a deal in three months, but like, shouldn’t I have dinner with you? Shouldn’t I see if you’re like, treat the staff well. Shouldn’t I see what your co-founder looks like? I don’t even know how tall you are. So again, God bless the people that wrote checks. And my partner Gary wrote a few good checks during COVID. I didn’t.
RITHOLTZ: So, so starting in early 2021, the Social Leverage spigot is shut off.
LINDZON: Almost in 2020 …
RITHOLTZ: Really>
LINDZON: because March, 2020, I start the podcast and there was so much opportunity in the public market…
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: That it was saying, how are you not buying these stocks? What are you worried about private markets when you can make 10 X on a public stock with liquidity?
So I lost, I got lost in the public markets. And of course, you know, some cool companies got funded, but really those first three months of COVID were like, you would like a motorcycle accident. You get up and you go, “we’re not dead.”
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER)
LINDZON: And so it wasn’t like I was in the mood of check writing, but by like June of 2020, market was open baby. And people were writing checks.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And for a couple of months, I was excited.
RITHOLTZ: You’re writing checks.
LINDZON: We have money. People love us. We know what we’re doing. And so we wrote a few checks, but then I like by the end of the year, I’m like…
RITHOLTZ: This has gotten crazy.
LINDZON: The prices were tripling and people would be that Andreessen line. “Hey, if you’re going to make a thousand on your money, what’s the difference if you pay triple on the opening price?”
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: But that math, if you really put it in a calculator …
RITHOLTZ: Becomes a problem.
LINDZON: Becomes a problem. And just if you’re wrong, because now the IRR, which does an important to me is important. If you’ve invested someone’s money and it takes three extra years, you’re not going to beat anybody.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And so my job is not just about DPI. It also is about IRR because I’m going to put your money to work. The clock starts ticking and you know, delaying an exit three years is real thing. So the risk, I just felt the asymmetric risk.
RITHOLTZ: So wait, let, let, let’s just talk about IRR briefly, typical venture funds. If I commit $100 to a venture fund.
LINDZON: A great fund.
RITHOLTZ: I’ll get a capital call right away for 25%.
LINDZON: 20%, 25%.
RITHOLTZ: Right. And then the next January, I’ll get another call for 25 bucks. And then the, so maybe over the course of three, four, five years.
LINDZON: Three to four years.
RITHOLTZ: So this way they can, they’re not sitting with your cash worrying. This is just showing zero return or back when, you know, the ten-year was 2% showing almost no return. You have to worry about your cash until they call it.
LINDZON: Yes. And so we, it wasn’t like a lack of seeing things, you know, cause e-commerce was booming after COVID and, you know, everybody was believing that, you know, the future was e-commerce and it still is, but people were locked down and behaviors were changing. People just thought that would be forever. You know, we’re never going to go to the mall again.
RITHOLTZ: It went from this is temporary to everything’s different.
LINDZON: Now we see the future. Right. And I didn’t see the future the same way because I live in Arizona. I was hiking. Phoenix wasn’t closed. There was no COVID in Phoenix.
RITHOLTZ: Outdoor, sure.
LINDZON: So, and what happened is this phenomenon of what took four years, the VCs were putting 100% of the money to work in 12 months out raising their next fund.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: So there was a lot of FOMO and I have to admit that the FOMO for sure caught up with me personally. So as schmuck insurance against me not writing checks, I did write. And I remember Packy being on Josh’s show and I was making fun of the whole thing.
RITHOLTZ: Sure. Packy is great.
LINDZON: I have 25K in one of his funds and I was yelling at him. I’m like, you know, I gave you money. It didn’t mean to just blow it in a casino.
RITHOLTZ: For people who don’t know who Packy is. Just give 10 seconds.
LINDZON: He’s just a really smart young guy. Very young. He wants his first fund right into the teeth of the mess. Yes. And so he was, he was really a fun thinker. And again, we were all locked in our house reading smart people.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And he had good opinions and he was into crypto and I’m not into crypto. So I said, I started placing personal bets with money that I had made just in case I was wrong.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: But not my LPs money. I wasn’t willing to make crazy bets with LPs money. And that just goes to social…
RITHOLTZ: This is what we call the fun account.
REYES: Yes.
RITHOLTZ: Pull off 5% trade away. If you blow it up, who cares? It’s a small part.
LINDZON: So one of the insights I got from my schmuck insurance money is that no, I was a schmuck for writing the checks and the people that I gave the money to God bless them as smart as they were. I think were schmucks too. Not like bad people just caught up in the moment of valuations don’t matter.
RITHOLTZ: But that’s why we have schmuck insurance and don’t use our LPs money for these dumb ideas at times when you think this, this isn’t going to work out, but I can’t, I feel like I have to still be in the game.
LINDZON: Yes. I feel our best work as a firm was not writing, even though we had great returns for our first funds, I feel our best work was not writing checks in 21 and 22.
RITHOLTZ: That’s what Buffett says is, you know, unlike the public markets where you have to be invested, you could stand at the plate with the bat at your shoulder and not take a swing.
LINDZON: Now in Andreesen’s defense, he would argue you’re timing the market. And so again, I don’t know if it’s right or wrong. And in a way I did time the market. And so maybe I just got lucky, but my beef for the last six months, and it’s quite public. My beef is with my own industry is that they were talking out of both sides, meaning they were writing those checks and then also saying the Fed’s stupid and things are overvalued. And I’m like, you can’t have it both ways. You should have been more conservative with your LP money.
RITHOLTZ: So let’s delve more into that. What did you see in 2021 that you thought was egregious and ridiculous? What were the signposts that led you to say, this is just out of hand?
LINDZON: Well, not meaning founders and just assuming that you could write a check.
RITHOLTZ: Even in 21 at that point.
LINDZON: It was worse.
RITHOLTZ: Because we were wide, you know, we were pretty open by 21.
LINDZON: We were open, but the, but the money was raised and being deployed and no one was taking their time. Everybody felt like, get this money.
RITHOLTZ: Mad rush.
LINDZON: And the LPs had it. The GPs had it. The media had it. And don’t get me wrong. I had it, but I didn’t have it with other people’s money. I had it with my own money. So we probed, right? Like I gave money to a lot of young managers just to see, because I was a young manager myself with no experience.
RITHOLTZ: But that was like 67 years ago, right? You haven’t been a young manager since World War II.
LINDZON: No, but you know, in 05, 06, when I started Wallstrip and got the bug, I was in my, you know, I hadn’t seen that much.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: So maybe I didn’t know what was going on. Maybe I’m the old guy.
And so, as I said, to keep that Social Leverage going, I feel the most important part of being an angel investor. And I don’t consider myself a venture capitalist. I consider myself a seed kind of more…
RITHOLTZ: An angel investor, right.
LINDZON: … is you have to invest.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: You can’t just commentate.
And so by investing, that helped me see how dumb I was. And it’s not that other people are dumb. The markets are markets and they’re open, but you could see the mistakes piling up. And now here’s where we’re at.
RITHOLTZ: So you put a couple of percent of your …
LINDZON: We’ve deployed 30% of a three-year-old fund.
RITHOLTZ: But last year with your own pocket, you put a couple of percent of your net worth.
LINDZON: Yes.
RITHOLTZ: What you call schmuck insurance is just, Hey, I’m just keeping a toe in the water. You didn’t make any big, crazy bets.
LINDZON: No. And I got very lucky because Robin had benefited from COVID, eToro. I also was an early investor in a couple of crypto funds that had Solana. So, I mean, I was a lucky participator in this boom, which made me think maybe I have to speculate to just keep the oil going. And so I made a lot of personal, luckily not like anything significant, but it taught me a lot about what the end of the cycle looks like. And we just saw it.
RITHOLTZ: So here we are in the second quarter of 2023. When you look around, our valuations remotely is crazy. It was a rough 2022 for both stocks, bonds, and private. What do you see today and what are you looking out at?
LINDZON: It feels like I’ve been talking about for a year. I’m like bond boy. I never thought I’d be, I never had owned a bond or a treasury.
RITHOLTZ: Hey, you could get tax-free munis now. I don’t know if Arizona does a lot of muni writing, but you know, if after tax, you’re getting four, four and a half percent. That’s fantastic. You haven’t seen that in decades.
LINDZON: Yes. Four years ago, I invested in max my interest, my friend Gary, because he was, he was aggregate. He was sending out your cash to many different accounts and getting you 1%.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And I was like 1% better than zero. So I invested in that company and no, everybody made fun of that company.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And that was a company that’s now important because you can get 5% on your cash on the internet distributed through FDIC, through many banks.
RITHOLTZ: So it’s quarter million per bank. So you’re way, way below the …
LINDZON: They figured out the software years ago.
So, so again, like it, it just, by participating in the markets, you see things, but we are in a much different environment than I’ve ever seen now because we have so much cash raised, not deployed.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: The, the money is out there. The young generation, you know, is very mobile. They’re very smart. And you know, it’s just a confusing time because interest rates have shot up and we’re seeing the first signs of breakage. Right. We’re seeing things break.
RITHOLTZ: Well, Silicon Valley broke that, that was kind of a crazy run on the bank that you could blame a handful of venture capitalists for starting. I think they were trying to do the right thing by their — by their portfolio companies, but, you know, we could have just easily wrote that out and …
LINDZON: Well, I don’t give them that credit. Silicon Valley Bank left a black hole for nine months and the balance sheet and the internet found it. And when the internet finds it and something tips, everybody wants to take credit or not take credit for it. The internet found a hole.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: And it just imploded much like GameStop. Silicon Valley Bank was the opposite of GameStop. GameStop had a different type of hole. There were some people short.
RITHOLTZ: Buying short interests.
LINDZON: And they had models. The hedge funds had models that turned out to be outdated.
RITHOLTZ: Right?
LINDZON: Meaning they never.
RITHOLTZ: You can call them wrong. They were wrong.
LINDZON: The models were not accounting for 8 million Robinhood people clicking a green button at the same time. And that’s what created GameStop. And the same thing happened to Silicon Valley Bank.
RITHOLTZ: Keep in mind, Silicon Valley Bank.
LINDZON: Everybody hit withdraw at the same time.
RITHOLTZ: Silicon Valley bank had hedges on their long treasury positions as a long duration, which the long duration trade is the long trade while rates are going up. So the hedges offset that and they took the hedges off. They rang the bell and gave themselves in Wall Street.
LINDZON: Gordon Gekko said it in Wallstreet, they were wreckable. They left themselves wreckable…
RITHOLTZ: And they were wrecked.
LINDZON: And the internet wrecked them. The GameStop hedge funds were wreckable because they didn’t understand internet scale. They hadn’t seen a model that had Robinhood people pushing this button over at the same time with leverage on short term option.
So their three standard deviation was an old model.
RITHOLTZ: That was it.
All right. I only have you for a handful of minutes before you have to go to your next meeting. So let’s jump to our favorite questions that we ask all our guests, starting with, you know, you talked about being locked down and podcasting and streaming. What were you consuming? What’s been keeping you entertained over the past couple of years?
LINDZON: Well, I’m a media guy passing up by like eight 24, all these like, like a great studio producing stuff. So I’m a media hound. I watch everything on Hulu. I ask you, but you just gave me “Daisy Jones and the Six,” which is fantastic.
RITHOLTZ: So good….
LINDZON: And I know the guy at Amazon that did it.
RITHOLTZ: I actually met him…
LINDZON: You met him at my event.
RITHOLTZ: He’s a buddy of Mike Batnick’s. I bumped into him.
LINDZON: Right, right. He reads our blogs.
RITHOLTZ: Lindzonpalooza.
LINDZON: Here’s what’s so fun about our business.
RITHOLTZ: So crazy.
LINDZON: Celebrities read me.
RITHOLTZ: Yes.
LINDZON: And they liked me. And I’m like…
RITHOLTZ: When people reach out to you. So, so Ben Clymer of Hodinkee told me a story when I had him on the podcast that he’s running this blog on watches. It’s kind of, but not quite a business yet. And he gets an email from some guy named John Mayer, who says, “Listen, I want to talk to you about watches. I got a bunch of watches. I’d love to have stopped by.” So he calls the guy back and lo and behold, it’s not some guy named John Mayer. It’s the rock star, John Mayer, who shows up at their studio, brings them — back then, he rolled heavy, brought a big bag of watches. Now security is a little different and …
LINDZON: They did a video together.
RITHOLTZ: That was the first “Talking Watches.” And that blew up and became a regular feature. So when you put yourself out there in the public, you have no idea what’s going to, what’s going to come out of it.
LINDZON: It’s magic. It’s magic. So you ask why.
RITHOLTZ: By the way, which I was writing in public at your Coronado Island event is where I met the guy I would eventually hire and become my partner. And he’s become a star. Josh Brown is the partner at Ritholtz Wealth Management, but for you, I never would have met Josh. And by the way, but for me writing a blog, Josh never would have cared who I was.
LINDZON: The best part of my job and people won’t believe it because they think it’s money is that you met Josh is that we launched thousands of people on stock puts into investing, tens of thousands of people that my kids friends call me for how to do their, who to get recruited at a health tech company, placing young people in careers is the greatest feeling in your life.
The COVID nightmare of kids working from home and zoom, it depresses. No, we’re not — it is the biggest problem right now, but we’re already off topic, in terms of media. I love it all. I don’t take a (inaudible) content.
RITHOLTZ: So “Daisy Jones” give me, give me another one.
LINDZON: “Beef” my friends at eight 24.
So when I …
RITHOLTZ: I just added that is that it’s …
LINDZON: Very dark and interesting. Yes. And it’s eight 24 …
RITHOLTZ: Sally Wong is very good.
LINDZON: Yes, she’s very good.
RITHOLTZ: And the other guy who’s on it is also very good.
LINDZON: Very good.
RITHOLTZ: I haven’t watched it yet. It’s in my queue.
LINDZON: So someone who reads my blog, Robbie Nandan is a partner at eight 24, which was like the A16Z of media, a big studio. And he just emailed me on my blog one day. He goes, man, I’m fascinated. You’ve got, you know, and I’m always fascinated that smart people are reading me and, you know, long time reader, first time comment, or you get that all the time too.
And it just amazes me who reads what I write. And I’m not so fascinated in trying to meet the biggest celebrities.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: The fact that Robbie is a creator and did the Rami Show. And I’m fascinated by like media because I did it like myself. And I don’t know. It’s like, it’s like, you know, with the Wizard of Oz, when you meet the wizard, like getting to see behind the curtain and realizing nothing’s going on behind the curtain…
RITHOLTZ: It’s not special.
LINDZON: You have to see it to believe it.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: My CBS meeting as stupid as it was, was to have that meeting and be in that room. You can’t make it up.
RITHOLTZ: I picture the episode of Seinfeld where they’re pitching the Seinfeld Chronicles to NBC.
LINDZON: That’s me.
RITHOLTZ: That’s the show. What do you mean? Nothing happens. That’s the show. Why are you watching it? It’s on television. Not yet.
LINDZON: So to know that I lived it, people can’t take that away from me and to know when to meet people that create great content. And we have a documentary that you’re coming to see.
So to think that…
RITHOLTZ: This is not financial advice, you can say it on the air.
LINDZON: This is not financial advice. It’s going to be fantastic.
RITHOLTZ: By the way, we had the doge guy at future proof and it’s, it’s like curb your enthusiasm for money. It’s so cringy watching this guy go from nothing to millions of dollars.
LINDZON: It’s the greatest story.
RITHOLTZ: And then you’re watching him blow it up and you, as it starts, you know, what’s going to happen. You see it coming and he is just so oblivious to what’s the freight train barreling down at him. It’s very hard to take your eyes off.
LINDZON: The odds of me making money or getting my money back are 5%.
RITHOLTZ: Oh it’s zero, right, 5%.
LINDZON: So it’s a labor of love. Chris Temple created this incredible documentary.
RITHOLTZ: He did a great, great job.
LINDZON: The reviews are insane. By the time this comes out, you will know that it is picked up by Tribeca film, right?
RITHOLTZ: Right, it’s a Tribeca.
LINDZON: It’s been at a one for one of my movies. I have a red cashmere suit to wear to the opening. I’m going to wear, I’m going to wear a gold chain with my T score, my testosterone score. It’s a new thing that I’m launching where people wear their T score around their neck.
RITHOLTZ: What is the, what is the launch date of “This Is Financial Advice” the opening date?
LINDZON: The Tribeca debut is in June.
RITHOLTZ: So you still got months.
LINDZON: Yes.
So I love media.
RITHOLTZ: Clearly. Let’s talk about mentors. You mentioned Fred Wilson, who else helped shape your career besides Fred or is Fred really the most significant mentor?
LINDZON: No, obviously. Well, I mean, again, I don’t speak to him all the time, but he, he allows me to check in and ask him a question. A lot of my LPs are my mentors, even though they give me money, I’m there. Like I’ve surrounded myself like Paul Grinberg, who’s chairman of Axos Bank.
RITHOLTZ: And I met some really interesting LPs at your last event.
LINDZON: Yes. So my LPs are my mentors, Roger Ehrenberg, Brad Feld, people that trusted me and, you know, they don’t, they, they, they know that I’m weird. They, they believe in me, but they know also that I like don’t know what I’m doing. Right. And so they pick up the phone because I call them.
RITHOLTZ: Still, even to this day, do you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing?
LINDZON: Yes.
RITHOLTZ: Are you really that deep into the imposter syndrome thing?
LINDZON: No, I’m not deep into it.
RITHOLTZ: Like Dave Noddin (ph) and I joke about it. I’m like, I don’t think it really exists. He’s like, no, no, you got to talk to people who aren’t sociopaths like you. It actually exists.
LINDZON: Yes. I think I’m — I think I don’t have it. I just have been humbled ridiculously a few times.
RITHOLTZ: That’s fair.
LINDZON: That I have to be really careful. And again, writing …
RITHOLTZ: Both private and public markets are a very humbling place.
LINDZON: Yes. So if I’m Elon Musk.
RITHOLTZ: And you have a lot to be humble about is the old joke.
LINDZON: So if Elon Musk, what bugs me about it is, is there nobody whispering in his ear that he looks like an ass? I would hope that my wife and my daughter would come to me and stop me before I embarrass myself day after day. Now, is he embarrassed? No. So again, I’m not judging.
RITHOLTZ: But that’s his mistake.
LINDZON: I’m just hoping that he should be. I’m hoping that my wife and my daughter who read my blog would say, you’re full of yourself. You need to tone it down. And guess what? They’re pretty good at telling me that.
RITHOLTZ: That’s the importance of having some no men around you. I tweet something that’s a 10th as idiotic as Elon Musk. And the tweet is barely live. When Batnick comes storming into my office, “Idiot, delete that” “You know that you’re like a junior partner here and I’m the chairman.” “I don’t care. That’s the dumbest thing you ever tweeted. Take that down.” “Okay. I don’t even think about it anymore.” Maybe that was my response five years ago. Now, Batnick says, “That’s a bad tweet.” I’m like, “okay” I don’t even think about it. It’s automatic.
What Elon Musk needs is a Batnick. If he had a Batnick, he wouldn’t have pissed $44 billion away.
LINDZON: Well, he has people cheering him on.
RITHOLTZ: Yes. He has the opposite. He has anti-Batnicks. He has people indulging his worst instincts rather than saying, that’s a lot of money for a really crappy property that nobody’s ever been able to monetize and its business model is awful. And you’re running two or more other companies. Maybe you should just keep tweeting for free. Nobody said that to him.
LINDZON: Yes. I wrote about this recently. We wanted to disrupt television and we got television times a hundred. So we wanted, we wanted to get rid of Jim Cramer. We got 20 Jim Cramers with more power than we thought that they would have. Jim Cramer is lightweight compared to the Chamath, David Sachs, the Elon Musk, the Peter Tills. You just don’t know if they’re happy about the system blowing up. You can’t tell if they like it. And I guess we shouldn’t like it.
I love the system. I don’t think it’s perfect. I love that things work. They’re not working great, but relative to everywhere else, it’s a miracle.
RITHOLTZ: Chamath turned his business into a family office. I think he’s happy with it. I can’t — I can’t tell you about everybody else. Some of these guys, I think if their daddies hugged them when they were younger, we could avoid it a lot.
LINDZON: I don’t know.
RITHOLTZ: I don’t want to play pop psychologist to any.
LINDZON: No one hugged me and I’m okay.
RITHOLTZ: And you worked out all right. That’s right.
LINDZON: I did have Jack one time saying on Twitter to one of my tweets that I needed a hug. And I think one of the proudest father moments I had was that my daughter came right into the thread and said, “he got plenty of hugs.”
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER) That’s awesome.
LINDZON: So when your daughter is defending you to Jack Dorsey on Twitter and he disappears from the conversation.
RITHOLTZ: He just never responded.
LINDZON: Can’t respond. My daughter destroyed him. He didn’t know what he was walking into. This was my problem with Twitter.
RITHOLTZ: That’s hilarious.
LINDZON: I go, “Jack, you don’t know how to use your own product.” My 24-year-old daughter just shamed you off your own product. She’s a great girl. Like she’s great. She lives upper East. So I’m really proud.
RITHOLTZ: Oh she’s here in the city, are you going to see her tonight>
LINDZON: One of the proudest things I have. Yes. So one of the proudest things I have is my daughter lives in New York. She’s living the entrepreneur, as a father who’s an entrepreneur and an American, born Canada, but American to see, have your daughter live in New York, the entrepreneurial city in America. This is that’s good daddying. And she likes New York, which you want your kid to like New York.
RITHOLTZ: It’s not for everybody. I happen to love the city, but right. Yes. Or any large city like Chicago or Miami.
LINDZON: Chicago is not the same city. New York is closest to being the same city. Chicago ain’t the same city.
RITHOLTZ: That’s really interesting. Let’s talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now?
LINDZON: I have not read a lot of books in the last 20 years.
RITHOLTZ: No kidding.
LINDZON: Three books that define that. I still remember vividly and it’s the Agassi book.
RITHOLTZ: “Open.”
LINDZON: Yes. The “Shoe Dog” book, which is going to spawn a hundred movies, obviously just his first movie.
RITHOLTZ: Yes. That was, that was good. I, it was good. I don’t, I don’t know if I’d call it great, but it was only a fun read.
LINDZON: To me it was a business book.
RITHOLTZ: Yes,
LINDZON: Meaning If you’re an internet entrepreneur and haven’t read “Shoe Dog” you’re not going to be a good entrepreneur to see that he went 10 years before he got to 10 million in sales. These kids today with their global growth in the first week. So no “Shoe Dog” was great. “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator” was great.
RITHOLTZ: Edwin Lefevre.
LINDZON: There’s just not that many books that I get to.
RITHOLTZ: Hey man, that’s, that’s three solid books right there. You’re okay with it.
Our last two questions. What sort of advice would you give a recent college grad interested in a career in either seed investing or venture capital?
LINDZON: Well, first be nice to your parents because you’re going to need capital, right?
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER) right.
LINDZON: And, and the first thing is write. Stop thinking about who’s reading it. You know, we’re an investor in Beehive, which is like a newsletter writing product, or whether you’re going to do it on Mirror or wherever you’re going to, or Twitter, wherever it’s easiest, start writing and stop worrying about who’s reading it, write what you want to write about. And that’s how you build domain experience. You have to have, be passionate about something because that will help you see around corners. Whether it’s my son, is golf for my daughter, she’s not quite sure yet. It’s New York and it’s like operations. If you don’t do it and do it, you can’t possibly know that you’re going to be good at it.
So the faster you figure out something that you want to do, and I think the easiest thing to do is write. That’s something that people should do.
The second most important thing is forget about the job title. Go work at a company whose product is flying off the shelf. So when we were kids, you and I, and I was a stockbroker and whatever your first job was, you were a lawyer. Our job was to just follow directions, right?
RITHOLTZ: Right.
LINDZON: Like our job was simply you get out there and you follow this rule book and you make 200 calls a day and so and so and so.
RITHOLTZ: 200.
LINDZON: You know what I mean? Like pick up that phone. We’ve seen the movies. Wait a minute. What’s the question.
RITHOLTZ: You used to get a grid? How many do an X every call?
LINDZON: I forget the question. What’s the question?
RITHOLTZ: So what advice would you give these kids who want to start out in seed or VC investment?
LINDZON: So the thing is you’ve got to go and not worry about the title so that if you’re not worried about the title, go work at a company whose product is flying off the shelf. Don’t go push a rock up a hill. So forget about the title and what your pay is. You are going to see things that you won’t see anywhere else if you work at a company whose product is flying off the shelf. There’ll be so much work to do. You won’t have to hide out. You could shine because there are holes to fill.
So the biggest mistake young people make is they want to just get a job for a certain salary and work at a bank. Whether it’s Manscaped, one of our companies, or whether it was the messaging app, whatever is flying off the shelf, get yourself in that room. Take a maintenance job, take an office manager job, but just get in the door.
RITHOLTZ: And our final question, what do you know about the world of seed investing that you wish you knew 75 years ago when you were first getting started?
LINDZON: Luckily, I think it’s such a new thing that I don’t know if there was anything. I think that the thing that I got lucky more than know is it was just the right time. There was people like Fred and Roger writing and Brad Feld writing. So what do I wish I knew?
RITHOLTZ: And I don’t mean buy Apple at $2. I mean, what would have been useful earlier in your career that you now fell is a bit of hard-won wisdom?
LINDZON: I think I got lucky because going to the market first in hindsight and seeing how markets crash and really seeing like how a cycle works before I got into angel investing was actually lucky.
So I would say to those people who think they want to be seed investors is open a Robinhood account. Even if it’s one, like learn what it feels like to lose money.
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER).
LINDZON: Learn what it feels like to both make money and feel euphoric and feel like you’re an idiot. And that will get you a feel. And now obviously you can go to Vegas or go on DraftKings and get the same thing, but those are very much not positive expectancy type things like the stock market.
RITHOLTZ: Right. Whereas the market is.
Howard, thanks so much for being so generous with your time. Really, this has been a delight.
We have been speaking with Howard Lindzon. He is the co-founder of StockTwits, the founder of Wallstrip, a managing partner and founder of Social Leverage, a pre-IPO investor in Facebook, in Twitter, and really the first check into Robinhood.
Is that right?
LINDZON: Yes.
RITHOLTZ: That’s amazing. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of our previous 496 discussions we’ve had over the past eight and a half years. You can find those at YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
Sign up for my daily reading list at Ritholtz.com. Follow me on Twitter @ritholtz. Follow all of the fine family of Bloomberg podcasts at Podcasts.
I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack staff that helps me put these conversations together each week. Samantha Danziger is my audio engineer. Paris Wald is my producer. Atika Valbrun is my project manager. Sean Russo is my researcher.
I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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