How to Build a $1T Venture Platform with Daniel Dippold

Welcome to Ventures from the Valley, a podcast by R136 Ventures. This is the show where we highlight the biggest topics in business and investment with some of the biggest experts in the space to help you learn how to grow your portfolio in venture capital. I'm Rutan. I'm Tom.

I'm Victor Arlovski. Foreign. Ladies and Gentlemen, friends of R136 Ventures, this is Victor Arlovsky and your podcast Ventures from the Valley. I have an exciting founder and personal friend today, Daniel Depot.

He's a late 20s, already 3X founder with over 3 $300 million in collective company value. He's Cambridge ML Master's graduate and angel in over 60 startups since 2020. So quite like new to the angels venture business. And he has already raised seven unicorns, which is astonishing.

Over 10% hit rate. I think it's like the best in the industry I have seen so far. He has also had his first TED talk at the age 20 and he describes himself as a math nerd. And he's a founder of E War, which we will speak about today.

Daniel, welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. Two quick corrections. I just turned 31 this year, so I'm sadly no longer in my late 20s.

And what was the other. Yeah, I did an MST in Cambridge and I believe there are people with. With definitely better track record. Right.

And keep in mind, I think unicorn hit rate is the, the, the best metric in the end is your return. Right. Relatively speaking, you. It's.

It's easy to invest in, in. In companies at a 500 million valuation and then they go to unicorn. But I'm quite happy that as a preeed investor like I. I'm mostly coming.

The return is also not. I know about you, but you totally. Yes, I do. So.

Yeah. So let's start. Let's kick in with questions. So you do not identify yourself as an investor, although Ivar is the investment firm.

It's like an incubator kind of incubator we will speak about. So if you are not an investor, then who you are, how would you describe yourself apart from that? Yeah, they all intertwine. Right.

So we definitely do some things incubators do, but I think we also do a lot of things incubators do not. Right. Which is for example, investing in teams that already have a million ARR. Like that an incubator would not do this anymore.

And then we do some of the things an accelerator would do, which is helping people raise a $20 million round or helping people hire their first 10 founding team members. But then we also do some of the things that VC does and some of the things an angel investor does. And it's just we, we just try to build EVOR from first principles and therefore we don't like to be put in any of these boxes. And actually our philosophy at EVOR is a little bit different to, to the philosophy most investors have.

And this is why I personally don't see myself as an investor, but as a builder. I see my job as someone who needs to build a magnet, something so extraordinarily useful that the best people come to me. In a world of the 1970s when, you know, Sequoia started and like Kleiner started and whatnot, where these opportunities were a little bit more scattered and hard to find, it was incredibly important to just be a master at selection. I believe that today, if you look at some of the founders we've backed at evor, one of the examples is Martin Wasavski, whom you know really well as well.

Right. The challenge is not to understand whether Martin is a great founder. It's actually quite easy to see this founder. I mean it is easy to understand that he is a great founder.

I would have a question to you later. How would you understand that this 22 years old drop out from the college is a great founder? With Martin Varshavsky? I don't think there will be any question.

Right, exactly. And I want to answer the Eric Steinberger question in a second but before that, to quickly finish my point. What we built at EBOL is something so valuable that Martin says, guys, I want to do this with you in this round. We.

Yeah, I think it was a really good stake and I sent Martin a lot of talent. Right. And I can do this because we've built infrastructure that allows us to do in my opinion a 20 times better job than any ordinary recruiter. Right.

And that is relevant. I also believe by now I'm not sure about this and please don't quote me on this. Right. This will be online but from my subjective belief based on the research I've done, think we're the out of all of the super early stage initiatives that exist, the one that raises you most money.

Like last time last year it was $4 million on average for fellow. This year I'm pretty sure it's going to be between 7 and $12 million. Like looking at first on average. Yeah, like median probably average might be a little bit more.

Right. Schooled even. We have just one founder, he joined us last year in June and now he raised on a 273 million post money valuation not even year after. Right.

So, and, and he's obviously raised a couple dozen million. So it's like he's still filling the rest of the round, but the lead investor term sheet is already signed. So we, we're looking for people, you know, who do these breakout things very early. And we also try to give them an unfair advantage they can't get anywhere else.

Right. That's why we only work with 35 founders and by the time speaking I'm onboarding two more people so that actually we're 10 people who've built 100 million plus company. So we, you know, like you're working with 10 people at Ibor plus 15 others that I can explain in a sec what they do, but that, that have built a company valued between $100 million and $10 billion. Right.

And the. So it's three founders per 100 million plus founders at Evor. Right. So we have a lot of time to give people a massive unfair advantage.

And that's why I don't describe myself as an investor. I want to build something where the best people come to us simply because it's objectively the most valuable and not subjectively just a cool thing. And we seem to have a good brand. The value needs to be there.

And we're measuring this value and we translate them into okrs and we drive our companies by means of pushing those okrs on a weekly basis and run it like a venture. And legally the money comes from the balance sheet. So we are legally a venture, not a fund, which is very interesting. So this disregarding your first question regarding your second on, you know, Eric, I knew Eric, I think two or three years prior to him starting this company.

Right. And I've built a nonprofit that supported a lot of young founders and I spent a lot of time with. And there's just a couple of people, you know, they're absolutely extraordinary. And this is another thing I believe in investing.

Most interviews are to me the worst data retrieval technique out of pretty much any data retrieval technique that is out there in order to evaluate whether someone is a good founder. Right. So in an interview, you're biased. I'm biased.

The founder tells me exactly what I want to hear. I tell the, you know, like the founder something they already think in terms of second and third order consequence. And it's just a massively biased, you know, like exercise. And I just don't believe it's a great thing to evaluate whether someone is good on the other Hand ref calling or empirical data.

Following a person for a couple of years is a completely different thing. Right. And like Eric didn't, didn't ask me to invest. He asked me to be his co founder and I said this is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen.

And I evaluated this opportunity by means of investing my own time, not by means, because money is abundant. Right. It's so easy to think about it. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry. Just I want to like a little bit like discipline myself. And it's like amazing to speak to you on so many various subjects. But let's start with something what I didn't expect.

So our mutual friend Barsawski has decided to start his new venture and I hope you can say what the venture is with Ivor. So he's a famously known like repeated founder who built multibillion dollars companies already. So he does not need any incubation. Right.

I mean he has a playbook already. Right. He does not need to be trained. So what did attract him in particular with the war?

How did he make a decision? And I'm sure that you didn't like stress test Martin, right. You didn't think like too much interviewing him or whether you need to get Martin on board or not like with his new venture. So what was his view, why he decided that the war is the right change to his playbook?

Because to the best of my knowledge, he has never been to any kind of, well, incubation program before. Right. So what was his mind, why he has chosen Ivor? Yeah, because we are not an incubation program.

Right. Like as I said earlier, we neither incubation nor a program. Like we're Ivor, we run a fellowship and it's obviously a massive honor to have Martin as a fellow. He is the most successful fellow we ever accepted.

No doubt. And probably it was more an exercise of him accepting us rather than us accepting him. Right. So what, what do we do at evo, there's three things that every founder needs.

Money. Talent, distribution. Right. And what we do is we build infrastructure like a talent community, a customer community, an investor community that allows people to realize amounts of serendipity with those communities that, you know, are typically impossible for others to do.

So when Martin WhatsApp me that he's building a new thing, I got really excited and I just wanted to help out. Right. So I, I used the tech we've built to identify right. People and I just kept sending him talent his way.

Right. And he, he got intrigued. And at One point, obviously he, he always told me and he, I think he thinks of us more as like an, a super angel than anything else. Right?

Like that's literally what he told me. He said, Daniel, like an NGO needs to do two things. Like they need to be clever and they need to be helpful. Right?

And those are the two things we want to be at ibor. We want to be clever and we want to be helpful. And we have zero ego. We have not a fixed program, we don't run a program.

We basically just built this infrastructure that allows people like Martin to build these incredible companies. Martin is not the first unicorn founder who started with ibor like Ricky Knox before, who's built Tannenbank, which is worth over a billion and had a couple other like, you know, nine figure exits. He's also with Ybor. Right.

And the, the reason he's working with us is for this, for the very same things. Right. So what we think about it was just every year we reinvent what the fellowship is. Every year we say, okay, build, measure, learn.

Build, measure, learn. Last year Martin would have never gone with us. And we ask ourselves why. We've lost some great people that we made offers to and then we say, okay, why did they not do it?

Okay, understood. Let's try to build the reason of why they would do it. And to me, it was one of the biggest highlights this year when Martin said yes, because I was like, yes, we're building the right stuff, it's useful. And that just made me really happy.

Amazing, amazing. So you are like challenging yourself always to get like the best of the best out of this builder's world. So let's go to this other end of the spectrum. So you have a, whatever, 22 years old dropout and I know a few people who are applying now to your work who might refer to you.

And I know the process a bit because I'm like helping them with like advising them. And these are nice folks. So some of them already had like five interviews and waiting for the sixth one I think. So let's start personally with you.

So while evaluating a founder, so how to like reconcile like quantitative signals with your like gut feeling instinct. So. And you are always speaking about non normal founder, right? I mean, what is non normality for yourself especially?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very hard to define. Right. And I think non normal means something else depending on what you try to build.

Right. If you, to me, founder selection is more like multidimensional cluster analysis. So when someone builds a social media network or a SaaS platform or a logistics platform or an AI lab. Those are four completely different things.

And the kind of not normal you want for those four different, different things varies, right? It's like there is no single perfect founder Persona. I'm pretty sure that Mark Zuckerberg is not made for certain business models. He's pretty much an absolute killer in the business model he's chosen and maybe some other adjacent one as well, right.

But I would argue that there's some other kind of businesses, like building an E commerce business for example. I think he wouldn't have enjoyed that and I think like that that would have not turned into the same outcome, right? So this is, this is how I look at non normality. I first try to define of like oh, what, what are they trying to do?

And then I try to work backwards from there, right. And say okay, like what are the key of unique advantages? You really need to be outstanding there, right? Because you need to be somewhat unreasonable.

I don't know if you know that Bernard Shaw quote that says, you know, like it's only the unreasonable man that can lead to progress. Right. And the reason for that is if you just do what is reasonable, nothing will ever change, right? Like the only way to do it is to you do what others would never expected to do.

And all of these big companies like Facebook, they were so obvious in hindsight, but not at all obvious in the beginning, right. Like you needed to look really, really deep and just believe in people doing crazy things. So the way we work at YVOR is the, we have a clear thesis of where the world goes and that thesis entails on the future of sars, the future of AI labs. And we write this down and we deeply think about it logically and then when we work with someone, they either need to convince us that our thesis is wrong and if they can convince us, which the, you know, the Google founders I'm sure would have done that or Mark Zuckerberg, then, then we like yeah, we've learned something new.

Nice. Let's like, let's update the thesis and back those people. But they need to convince us. And the second part is we convince them that what they're trying to do is not that clever based on the thesis.

And then they work on something that's going to work out and then it's going to work out too. But either it's us convincing them or them convincing us, right. And that is how we find those non normal kind of things. It's a, it's, it's the best way we came up with, right?

Like, I'm not saying it's perfect and it's like the best thing out there, but it's the best thing we could come up with at evil. So just a challenging question to you. So imagine that is like an amazing person, I don't know, like extraordinary in math, extraordinary in science, an extraordinary character. And you like, your gut feeling is saying, oh my gosh, I never seen such a man or such a woman.

Right. I mean it's just amazing what this person is all about. And then he starts pitching you. He or she starts pitching you.

And then you recognize that the thesis are wrong, right? That I mean this is like wow, person doing something. Not something what you would not put into your thesis. Would you put money into this person?

We would, we would, but it depends on whether they're open to ideating with us. Because we recognize that thesis and idea is incredibly important. However, it is not at the stage we're investing in. It's all about the founder, right?

Like many of the big companies, slack and so on have pivoted and we are investing at a time where you can still do that if you're a series A investor. That strategy doesn't work and you shouldn't back founders just for the sake of them being great founders. But if you're doing what we do, we sometimes come in, people don't even have the idea yet, nor do they have a team. And we're like, here's half a million dollars, let's do something, right?

And even six. Yeah, that's totally fine, right? And we have other people that do a million AR, we didn't do 100 million, but we would do a million. And we're like, hey, this is cool too.

We believe this will work, let's do it. We just acknowledge that the further you are ahead, the harder it is to. And secondly, we see it as our job to make sure that the eventual outcome is great. And since we're not an ordinary investor, we have the time to work with people for so long until there is something great in order to succeed.

I believe there's a shortage of good ideas and not a shortage of good founders. I don't know when it changed, but I think somewhere between the like in the last five to ten years or so probably we have too many great people going into venture right now because of the abundance of capital and there's too little trillion dollar ideas that really are in these massive markets and are absolutely game changing. So we see it as our job to not only find Those capable people of which there is an abundance, but also give them the trillion dollar opportunities by means of us understanding what they are.

Right? And at this point talking, I would say, I would say we have a better understanding than many, but we definitely don't have the best understanding. And if we would talk again in a year, my goal is that we are in the top three globally in terms of like this understanding of what can make it right. Because that is an incredibly tough exercise.

But it works. Like I always see that it works when you look at Sequoia, right? Like their seed fund is 200 million, like their share of seeds, I don't know what it is. I would guess below 1%.

And in terms of capital invested, but then their share of like their share of wallet for, for billion dollar companies is 10% and then for NASDAQ 50 billion, it's 30%. This is extraordinary. So they're definitely managing to either create these self fulfilling prophecies or to select for them. And my gut feeling is they're doing somewhat of both.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I mean, speaking about Sequoia, I believe, I mean for me, like I'm also in venture, I mean also like trying to compete and building up my own stuff in R1, 3, 6. So obviously winning is a big thing, right? And sourcing.

Sourcing and winning one of five pillars, right? So important to be like the first one, right? The first one whom the founder is coming to, right. I mean if you're the first one in the funnel, right?

Then you select and then if you, I mean obviously you may select like you may have like false negative, false positive as well, right? So you may not select something what is outstanding, but if you're smart enough, you always like bet on something good, right? So from that perspective, so how you built your own kind of sourcing, convening strategy, I mean you are relatively small, right? Sick void is 35.

What? Sorry, 50 years. 50 years business, right? Every founder knows what CECVOI is, right?

And obviously it's a natural choice. If you are an ambitious founder, you will first knock Sick Boy door. And then if Sick Boy says no, you go then and choose someone else. So how do you solve this issue?

I mean, how do you hunt for those who have no clue of what the war is? And frankly like I learned about your world like a year ago. And by the way, I was like amazed when I was to your virtual event. I just saw like 400 names, like Venture capital firms who were listening to the pitches.

It was more than I Believe more than Y Combinator. And you gathered this crowd. So that's another question, how you gather this crowd. But let's switch to how you win.

How you make sure that founder in Philippines who like is a magic. 001% of population talent knows about the war. What you do for that. Yeah, I have a very boring answer.

I'm afraid the answer is we hustle a lot. You know, like my magic power is not that I've been a mathematician, my, my superpowers. I've been a housekeeper for half a year and I've made beds and cleaned mirrors and clean toilets 10 hours a day, six days a week. And I'm not afraid from just hustling every single day and doing repetitive boring stuff.

Right? And our answer to sourcing is let's do everything. Let's look at every single channel available. SEO, content marketing, social media, LinkedIn X community driven marketing, referral, word of mouth, meta platforming and do it all.

Every single channel. That is let's do it all and let's do our best, right? And, and that requires a lot of resources and I think we are incredibly effective as a small team. We are 25 people, so we are quite a lot, right?

Of those 25 people with the two hires I'm making right now, 10 of them have built 100 million plus company, right? Like these people are full time. Like a founder who has built a company as valuable and is full time can probably do the work of five people. So I would literally say like the way people work.

And that's why in three years we've gotten to 40,000 applicants and we're expecting 100,000 this year. Because we do everything we can and we just put in the legwork, right? And if that means doing two LinkedIn posts a week and then on top of this reminding people for nominations like once a day and what not, we need to do that is just legwork. We do it, we hustle.

Like the founders we invest in hustle. And I believe a lot of them appreciate it. Like we always there. Like whether it's 4am in the morning or like whichever time it is always reachable, always ready to support.

Because we are founders ourselves and we are building EVO as a company alongside the founders that are building their companies. We track OKRs, we use AI, we automate and we can share experiences with them. We co build and we don't do governance, we don't take boards. Like we.

If you've seen the names at the grand pitch, you've seen that there's Acquire and Reason Founders Fund. They're all there. If these guys take a board, what do we have to add? They know their shit, right?

Like, we are more like the co founder in the beginning. And that is my part on we're not Sequoia and we will never be. And we'd be stupid if we were to compete with Sequoia because we're the co founder in the beginning, right? And like, all we want to do is to be like as useful of a co founder as we could be.

And we don't do that by being full time with those ventures. We do that by building out this founder infrastructure, money, talent, distribution. Because that's what a co founder would do. They would hire, they would bring in the next customers and they would fundraise.

And if we can shorten these timelines and amplify the results, just as meaningful as a co founder can, then we have a seat on the table. And even a Martin says, I want to have you as part of this. Right? No matter how competitive the round is.

And that is really our job at iwo. And that is how we do it. So that answers the first part of your question. You have to remind me about the second part.

I kind of forgot monetizing. Well, no worries, no worries. So the second part was the other end of the story. So how do you.

Same answer. Okay, same answer. Do everything Okay. I.

I sat down prior to the grand pitch. Three days fully blocked. And you plus everyone else. I sent a personalized message.

Yes. No A.I. no like ChatGPT or Claude 4.

6 Opus, no mass mailing. I just sit down and I write something so that you see, hey, I care because I do care. Like, Evor is probably gonna be the most extraordinary thing I'll ever build. I care so much about Ivor.

And other people need to feel this and they won't feel it if I, if they actions I take symbolize that I don't care. So I just sit down and do the hard work. And most successful founders, they don't do it anymore. They have an assistant doing it.

I do it personally because that's, that's my job. I need to make these founders I invest in successful. And therefore you need to be there. You need to.

You need to be there. And without you, it's not the same thing. Right? And if I don't message you personally, you won't because you, you're like, okay, like, Daniel doesn't care.

So I don't care. Right? So this is same answer in the end. So I Believe that we come to the very important topic on how you build and sustain this amazing team.

So you mentioned that almost 40% of your full time people have personally built companies worth of 100 million or more, like from 100 million to 10 billion. So obviously, I mean this community is growing. I mean it has to grow, right? Because you have more and more startups and you have to be very personal like one to one with those startups.

So first question and let me start and then pause on that is how to you, how do you convince people to come and serve full time? And these people have plenty of interests and may do a lot on their own. So why they join a war instead of maybe building their own stuff? So what's the reason for that and what's kind of, what's the pitch?

Give me a pitch. Yeah, so yeah, why? And then maybe the pitch after. So there's this guy and I learned I wasn't the first one, I think the first one who actually came around with this story.

I wasn't aware of him. I just got recently introduced to him as Stan from Plura platform and he has this article saying that he hires the unhirable, right? And that's what we do to. I thought it was my idea.

Turns out it was then idea before I had it. We both seem to have had that idea independently though. But I later in time. And that idea is first of all there's nothing more fulfilling.

Like once you've built an incredible company to work with people who change the world and come up with underwater flywheels and nuclear test reactors and like the most transformative tech on the planet and, and give something back to them, right? And say hey, like I can shorten your timeline to unicorn by 2, 3, 4 years. This is, this is deeply fulfilling, right? And that's the other part, that we have insane trust among each other and we, we have really a low ego.

Typically with those organizations you have a bunch of alphas running around. They all want to have a say of how things work. And we at Iwo, we have an incredible harmony. So we just deeply, deeply respect each other and we spend a lot of time with each other before we actually on board people.

Like today, it never happened that I met a person and within the next three months they joined Ivoire. It's typically a year, two, three, four years or so of us working together after which we then decide okay, let's, let's do something here, right? And then secondly, what's the pitch? The pitch is a, the pitch is the return Right.

Like what, what we do in the Evo core right now is the last time I've seen it. It might have changed now because like, and we do count clas and saves, right? So if you do count clas and saves in valuation boost, right now we have 195% IRR. So the return is incredibly good.

And this of course also includes when we, right now we are incubating a, a large mathematical model and that is a proper incubation. Right. Like we had the idea, we look for the team and then we also take extra shares. Right.

And that gets put into the return. And that in the end all together really makes a, makes a massive difference. But what we want to do with Evoir is we want to create a trillion dollar company. That sounds incredibly weird, right?

I know how ridiculous this sounds, but I know we have a shock. You mean Ivor has to become a $1 trillion company, right? Not that what you just find and raise like a company which is 1 trillion but yourself. No, no, no.

Like we ourselves and, and Berkshire Hathaway made it to a trillion. And we believe that there will be a new kind of Berkshire Hathaway in the future. And we believe we can, you know, like we can build something like this. And this is not a story that appeals to any of the founders we back, but it really appeals to someone joining us full time and I honestly believe we have a shot at that.

It. As wild as it sounds, we have a plan and we are calculating with average, you know, like Unicorn, Decacorn, Centricorn, trillion dollar rates in the market, empirical data. It's a, it's a 30, 40 year vision. It will, it will not happen tomorrow, it will not happen in 10 years, but it is possible.

And by then there will be plenty of trillion dollar companies by, by then there will probably be 70, 80 or so of this. Right. So we will not. We will.

Yeah. Like I think it's a, it's a good extrapolation mathematically speaking. So by that time. But we want to be one of the hundred most valuable companies globally.

That's a. I think, and I think that is attainable with the strategy we've got. And I think that intrigues people who've built a $10 billion company. Right.

And the more you've worked with us, I think the, the stronger the belief gets. And I can't sadly go into all of the details of how we do it and what our plan is here, but we've got a good plan, a plan at least Intrigu for top People to say, yes, I commit to doing this for the rest of my life full time. You, you answered the second question. I had pitch.

You already pitched me. Victor, let's go and build a $1 trillion company. That's a pitch. Okay, let's try.

Right? Like I, I wouldn't ever tell anyone. Oh, it's guaranteed. We're for sure gonna end like this is.

Nothing is guaranteed. Exactly, exactly. But I believe you have a shot. And if you want to do that with me, join evil.

Thank you, sir. Thank you. So I, I'm not sure if I deserve that yet, but I will definitely one day we'll, we'll hope to like be like think of myself. Yeah.

I'm. I'm there to, to apply for your fellowship. Thank you. So, yeah, it is difficult.

So my challenge here is that, I mean people say that you can build like $1 billion company now being like one person. And a friend of mine built Base44, a former founder of company we backed and I mean it was like three months show and he sold this company for like whatever, like $80 million. So I mean now it's possible. Right, but not in your business.

So Ivor is a people, a business of people. Right, so. And it's extremely difficult to scale. Yeah.

So are you afraid of like losing the quality at scale? Because that's what is usually happening with businesses that scale on people. Because I mean, at the end of the day you could not hire anymore. Like you have now a few hundred amazing people.

But 201st will not be as amazing as the first hundred. Right. Just because you run out of amazing people. I mean, that is easily imaginable.

So what do you think of that? I mean. Yeah, yeah. So we believe we can be around 25 people going to a billion.

And we believe we can be less than 30 going to 10 billion. And from there on it gets a little bit vague and hard to plan. Right. And I don't like to plan too much into the future.

I'm a mathematician with appreciation for case theory and high sensitivity to initial conditions. Right. So. But we have reason to believe that we can do it with very few people.

And the way of scale we have chosen is not to go like and fund a thousand founders a year. It's not possible with this strategy. But the funny thing about venture is it is extraordinarily heavy tailed. Extraordinarily.

If you look at the distribution of wealth globally in terms of people, it's already heavy tailed. If you look at the distribution of company value, it's massively more heavy tailed, right? Like the height of the tails is, is just incredible. Right.

So if you sum up, there are seven companies in Fortune 500, which is like half of Fortune 500, right? S&P 500. Exactly. I mean that's how it works.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the, the big question here is what is your level of prediction, right? Like how, how well can you actually find those? Right.

And to me, looking at Sequoia having 33% of Nasdaq, it gives me a lot of hope and it makes me believe that by building the biggest magnet on the planet of saying objectively speaking, we built the best value prop, a value prop so incredibly high that no matter if you're gonna build a one person unicorn, you're gonna do it with us. Not because of the money. No one needs money anymore, right? Like because of the talent money distribution equation and the personal development and whatnot in the network and like all the other things and, and God knows what else we can do, right?

Like in, in a year or two. As I said earlier, every year we reinvent the fellowship. So if we build something so extraordinarily valuable that everyone just comes to us, no matter whether they actually want a raise or not, like not for the money, but just because they, they want us on board like an institutional co founder, then it would work. Whether we're able in achieving that, I can't tell you.

I'm trying every day. But that's our thesis, right? So we don't want to scale to a thousand founders. We're probably always going to stick to 30 to 50 a year.

Okay. Okay. So you can still make it with relatively small team. That's good.

That's my goal. That's my goal. It's never certain as you know, but given all of the automation, an AI, right. Like I, I really do believe so I've just sent out a kind of case study to my founders associate and, and the last couple of times when I hired new founders associates, they, they always like asked about the process even though I had it somewhere in the email.

Right. And this time I thought let me create a quick graph and, and put it online. Right. And it took me three minutes to prompt a good graph with cloud code in HTML.

Right. And, and it's a beautiful graph, even animated and like it like has grayed out the other areas and says you are here in the process and these are the next ones and it's hyper visual and it looks very beautiful and easy and simple to understand. And then Putting it on Cloudflare on Laya files.evo.

com was another 10 seconds, one more prompt and bam, it's up there and I have it ready. Right. So doing this these days, and that's just uploading a graph and communicating. Right.

Like it's just so incredibly easy. And I just believe that a lot of the stuff we do for founders, for example a rebranding, previously you had to work with an agency and you had to put in legwork and so on. Now our cmo, incredible person, he built my Muesli, which was like the number one food brand in Germany for like five consecutive years. They outranked Milka and he scaled it to close to a thousand people, right.

And then he sold the brand to Katias and then he built a deep tech company and he's just probably. I don't know if there's a better person in branding in Europe than him. Like to me personally, subjectively, he's the best. And he can just do a full rebranding with a fellow in 30 minutes and that, you know, like that, that's.

He can do that with all of our fellows that we accept in the year, just him. He couldn't do that last year, but now he can and he can design all of the graphs with Nano Banana. And I think in next year he can probably do it in 10 minutes. Right.

So I really don't believe you need to scale in people. We need to scale in quality. And I really hope that maybe in a year or two we will even have on board like a Centicon founder or someone like who's like literally built something extraordinary and just works with those founders powered by AI, helping them to build trillion dollar companies at one point that would be my dream. Yeah.

Yeah. I just drafted a post yesterday. Not yet there, but it will come soon. Imagining like, I mean this world with robotics and like all full of AI agents and people say that there is nothing to do and they will lose jobs.

And I just counted like on like so many fantastic topics which has barely been explored, like physics and math, like energy, human brain, longevity. I mean everything what you think of like as the right thing to work upon is unsolved yet. Right. And we are barely scratching the surface of these unknowns and people say that they will lose a job and they will have nothing to do.

I mean that looks weird when you have so many things which yet not being managed properly and. Yeah, and well, if you think like what you do now, like posting like accounting records is the only thing you can do, just change your mind and start Exploring the world of physics or the world of neuroscience and you will discover something really amazing there and probably will change your life and life of others. But yeah, that's exactly to your point. Look, I wanted also to bounce on you from like technical insights.

You are absolutely great mind and you are deep in research and email and AI. So what would you think of like current AI stage? Like what is a real disruption versus what is not? So and like not from investment perspectives but from real world applications.

What do you think will come true and what is fake or we should not expect it in the near term. Yeah, great question. I mean if you look at the value chain of AI, we could start as early with like ultraviolet lithography, what like ASML does, right? And then move ourselves to TSMC and then Nvidia and then foundation models and the hyperscalers and then the kind of application layers like cursor and so on.

Right. And then we can classify them into kind of vertical wrappers and horizontal wrappers and so on. Right. Like if you look at that value chain, I believe every single part will eventually be disrupted.

Someone is going to come up with a better thing than like ultraviolet lithography. I just don't know when and I don't find it incredibly plausible that it will happen next year. And secondly, it's going to be one company, right? Like, and there's going to be a new standout company then doing this and that's that.

Right? But then if you look at the same thing probably for TSMC and Nvidia, there might be one more, maybe two more that make it to like, something similar. And I personally just don't believe in my ability to like figure out how exactly that works. And like the, the deep, you know, like quantum physics probably behind this.

But then when it comes to something more predictable that I can actually say something useful about is the foundation model part and the application layer part. Right. First of all, LLMs are wildly inefficient. If you want to calculate what 2 plus 2 is like using 175 trillion parameters is like a little bit wild and you know, like.

And at the same time, the way they work, the way AI works in general. I do AI now since 12 years, right. And training an AI like a neural net on a million pictures of a cat in order to understand what a cat is is not how the human brain works, right? Like the like answering 2 +2 equals 4 takes an LLM around 0.

4 watt and watts, right? And then the human brain runs on 20 watts in total. Right. So this is like, this is just ridiculously far apart.

So I think we will see more and more efficient foundation models and we will see disruption there. Something I'm incubating myself right now is to just look at the. On how pure math functions. It has a different structure than linguistically a sentence.

And the way you define what a token is, the way you define how to structure the tensor, the way you build the prediction algorithm, which function you use, right. Which distribution assumptions you make. All of these things, like every single assumptions of how an LLM is built today can be rethought and done more efficiently in math. Right.

And there's some cool ones out there like Axiomath or Harmonic or Morph Labs, right. Like that's doing incredible stuff. But there's so much more to be done in pure math. LLMs, right?

There is, there are LLMs for robotic movements. Rota AI is an incredible example of this. So I think there will be more of these foundation models built for specific cases like robotic movement specifically. I also believe there will be disruption in the existing ones.

There will be a much more efficient OpenAI at one point. And I don't think it's OpenAI building it themselves the way they currently run. And one of the things I'm looking at right now is a completely new signal processing approach that is actually so much more efficient in doing like what OpenAI does right now. And I find it plausible that that thing disrupts entire AI.

I don't know if it's actually going to do that and the likelihood is by far lower than 50%, but it might. Right. And there will be these kind of disruption stories all on the foundation side that I find incredible. And then on the application layer side, it's actually really straightforward if you ask me.

There are a couple of companies, let's look at Salando selling clothes or like sappos in the us, right, that actually benefit a lot from AI. They can do more efficient matchmaking. The way their backend is structured actually benefits quite a lot from AI. But then there's certain SaaS companies and ERPs and whatnot that the way their system is built almost.

I can almost certainly tell you for some of those business models that they will be disrupted by an AI native company. So literally they will buy massively. Right. That's another way of approaching it.

They will try to. But I'm much more, I'm more pessimistic about like the whole acquisition story because in an AI first world where capital is completely abundant, you'd be stupid to sell that early. Right. Like if you're really, really aggressive, highly ambitious founder, right.

So I think these guys will struggle and they will do all of the things in the playbook to prevent you from succeeding. Right. By owning the distribution and whatnot. But I think most of them will be disrupted by AI native players.

One of my friend, one of my friends who is also a former long ago employee, one of the early employees of at Oracle like beginning of 90s and he's an old man now. Wow. He's. And he's a repeated founder, he jokes saying that the universe will cool down faster than Oracle will lose its market share.

So I think there's definitely. They do and I think there's definitely some business models that I would not bet against. Right. I'm just saying there's a subset of certain SaaS kind of companies that are valued between a billion and 100 billion.

And for those I'm highly certain they will be disrupted. I'm not saying it's all of them. And like Microsoft for example also is not on the, on this list. Right.

Like there's a couple of like global platform players with very unique positions and like value chains and distribution power as you say, that will very likely not be entirely disrupted. Right. So Oracle also wouldn't be on my list and neither would be Google. But there are certain ones and for example Salesforce, I'm not so sure to be honest.

And I think Salesforce is going to have a harder time. This is my, this, this is my personal opinion here. Like, like a frontier now for AI Anyway, I mean this sales and marketing stuff. Look, I have last question to you and thank you for this amazing conversation and a lot of deep insights.

I personally always value this discussion because I learn a lot. So if you ask me why I'm doing it, to grab an hour of your time and talk because otherwise it's too crowded, you're too busy. I'm doing something as well. So it's like always deep dive.

Isn't that sad? Right? Like if you think about it, it's true, right. And I think a lot in terms of usefulness.

But sometimes I ask myself, Victor, how great would it be to sit at your place in Barcelona and just drink a beer together and how much fun would we have, right? And how much deeper might have the conversation been if I don't think about like, oh, what does the audience want to hear? Right? Like so, so sometimes I'm, I'm a little bit regretful about, about this development, but you're absolutely right.

It's a great way to connect. Right. But I just, just wanted to point this out and I would say productivity has a some sort of end to end. Right.

And I would love to see you in San Francisco or Barcelona or wherever for like a real personal conversation without anyone listening. We will soon see each other in Maui and we will definitely speak hopefully a lot. Yes. So one advice, a short advice to a young ambitious founder.

What would it be? Don't go to uni. Don't work for like big tech or big consultancy. It's the best time in the world to build if you are looking for a positive outcome.

First of all in terms of fulfillment. I think the freedom of entrepreneurship, if you handle it well and study stoic literature can be one of the most beautiful things on earth. And secondly, financially, I have a calculation online actually I call it the mathematics of venture of the probability of you trying over a 30, 40 year career. So if you're young and you have 40 years ahead of yourself and you are ready to keep trying, the chances of you having a breakout financial success that is bigger than any other career you could possibly have are close to 99%.

You just need the stameter and the adaptability to do this. So if anyone, I assume people who listen to this are interested in building Inventor, right? Like if, if, if you struggle to, to say when should I start? The time is now.

The earlier the better and it's mathematically provable that this is the optimal choice. Absolutely true. Can't agree more. So this was Daniel Dupold, co founder at Ivor, one of amazing founders who is now 31 and he has gone already through three successful startups and building a $1 trillion company which I'm sure is gonna come true.

Thank you Daniel. And it was Victor Adlowsky Ventures from the Valley. Listen and subscribe to our episodes and we will continue doing amazing stuff with people like Daniel. Thank you.

Thank you Victor. It was a pleasure. Really enjoyed the convo. Ventures from the Valley is brought to you by R136 Ventures.

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