"Age of Miracles"

Rushir Parikh is the co-founder and CEO of Popchew. Popchew is a platform that allows creators to build their own restaurant brands at a national scale. When Packy first met Rushir, he passed on investing -- in this conversation, Packy explains how he (thankfully) was able to invest later on and Rushir lays out the massive vision that Packy missed the first time around. Popchew has three main stakeholders: creators, consumers, and operators. Rushir explains how Popchew gives creators a new way to connect with their audiences, consumers a more fun way of eating, and operators additional volume. 60% of Americans report getting food delivered at least once a week. Rushir believes Popchew can make that experience more fun and profitable. SPONSOR: Season 2 of Not Boring Founders is sponsored by FTX US. You may know FTX because of its innovations in crypto derivatives or its ultra-rich & altruistic founder, SBF -- but what you may not know is that the FTX App is available in the US for all crypto traders...and that it's the cheapest exchange out there, with no minimum, ACH, or withdrawal fees. The company is moving fast and now offers crypto trading (Bitcoin, Eth, Sol, Doge, ect) and supports NFTs -- and is releasing new products seemingly every month. Download the FTX App today, invest $10 and get a free coin from FTX in exchange. Use this download link and enter code "notboring" when you sign up to redeem the offer. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Vance Roush is the founder of Overflow. Overflow builds infrastructure that makes generosity frictionless across every major asset class. The inspiration for Overflow came from Vance's other calling -- he's the founder of Vive Church, an Bay Area based church that now has over 4,000 members across 10 locations. As Treasure of Vive, Vance realized that the church's tech-focused congregation had no easy way to donate non-cash assets--like stock--to the church. He also knew that non-cash donations were the most advantageous from a tax perspective. So he built Overflow. Overflow makes it easy to donate non-cash assets to nonprofits and churches -- unlocking generosity from contributors and opening up new sources of funding for organizations that need it most. In this wide ranging conversation, Packy and Vance cover everything from the nature of eternity to the nitty gritty of 501(c)((3) tax codes. They also discuss Overflow's opportunity to unlock billions of dollars of generosity, the company's GTM strategy, and why giving can and should be as cool as angel investing. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing, rating, and sharing with your most Not Boring friends! SPONSOR: Season 2 of Not Boring Founders is sponsored by FTX. You may know FTX because of its innovations in crypto derivatives or its ultra-rich & altruistic founder, SBF -- but what you may not know is that the FTX App is available in the US for all crypto traders...and that it's the cheapest exchange out there, with no minimum, ACH, or withdrawal fees. The company is moving fast and now offers crypto trading (Bitcoin, ETH, SOL, DOGE, etc) and supports NFTs -- and is releasing new products seemingly every month. Download the FTX App today, invest $10 and get a free coin from FTX in exchange. Use this download link and enter code "notboring" when you sign up to redeem the offer. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Last week, Not Boring crossed 100,000 subscribers. In this episode, we take a quick look back, brush off the trolls, and re-commit to taking risks, getting things wrong, and being unabashedly optimistic. You can read the full post at Not Boring. Thanks to the Presenting Sponsor of Not Boring's Audio Editions: Masterworks. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

The dialogue around web3 has turned into a full-fledged debate and the focus has shifted to winning instead of the truth.  I actually debated in high school and college, and started a Debate Club in NYC. I think the web3 debate is silly, and that the right answer is always in the middle, but after Prof G dropped his rebuttal against web3 for the Opposition, I had no choice but to jump in for the Proposition. You can read the full post at Not Boring. Thanks to our Presenting Sponsor, Masterworks.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Oscar IPO’d on March 3rd at $39 per share and started trading at $36 per share, good for a market cap just north of $7 billion. Since then, it’s down nearly 77%, its market cap hovering around $1.5 billion. As The Abstract Investor summarized, the challenge, and opportunity, is that: Many tech analysts aren't paying attention to insurance, while insurance analysts won't quite know how to look at a highly tech-stacked insurance company. That presents a potential opportunity for those that can figure out the murky puzzle. In this episode, we try to put together that murky puzzle by understanding the two businesses that Oscar is building -- a tech-enabled insurance business and an insurance-enabled tech business -- and how they might combine to create the kind of scale needed to compete in health insurance. You can read the full post at Not Boring. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Not Boring Capital is launching a $30M Fund II.  In this episode, we go behind the scenes of raising and running a small venture fund, share the most recent LP update, and talk about the value of pushing out the weirdness and risk curve.  This podcast is brought to you by our Q1 Presenting Sponsor... Masterworks. If you want to join me on the platform and get priority access – click this Not Boring link. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

2022 is the year that web3 starts making a meaningful impact on atoms-based challenges like healthcare and climate. Web3 is a global, real-money economic and social simulation, a digital laboratory for complex problems. We dive into Allen Iverson, complexity economics, and non-fungible olive gardens to understand why, and what that means.  This episode is presented by Masterworks. If you want to join me in investing in art and get priority access – click this Not Boring link * *See important disclosures and offering circular --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Formic delivers Robots by the Hour to manufacturers. It’s making small and medium American businesses stronger, fighting inflation, and creating abundance Link to full essay here. -------------------------- The goal is abundance. We want more and better things, more cheaply. We want those things to be made closer to home. We want less fragile supply chains, so that those things are always available when we need them. We want more good jobs, and more time unlocked to maximize our human potential. Over the long-term, there are a lot of things we can do to create abundance. Generate clean, cheap, renewable electricity. Improve the education system. Build more houses. Change laws. In the immediate term, the answer is robots. Formic is creating the largest workforce of robots in the country -- and delivering Robots by the Hour to its customers, so that they can increase productivity and generate abundance. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

John Andrew Entwistle is the founder and CEO of Wander. Wander is a fully-integrated platform for experiencing magnificent short-term rental homes. Wander owns the customer experience end-to-end: the homes, the booking platform, and the value-added services. Over 100,000 people have joined the Wander waitlist. In this episode, John Andrew announces, for the first time, Wander's newest product: Wander Atlas - the world's first and only vacation rental REIT. Through Atlas, you can earn passive income, diversify your portfolio, and own a piece of Wander's magical network of homes.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Social vs. Science Experiments: We talk a lot about progress here in Not Boring. Progress can be difficult and messy and winding, and importantly, progress moves at different speeds and follows different paths for different kinds of products. Today’s essay is my thinking on two types: science experiments and social experiments. Successful science experiment products clearly move the world forward; social experiment products are less obviously beneficial and messier in the short-run, but I think they’re every bit as important in the long run, especially in combination with science experiment products. Sponsored by Secureframe: Secureframe is the leading, all-in-one platform for security and privacy compliance. Secureframe makes it fast and easy to get and stay compliant so you can focus on what matters: Scaling your business, customers, and revenue. With Secureframe, hypergrowth organizations can: Get SOC 2 audit ready in weeks, not months Stay compliant with the latest regulations Scale compliance with your business to meet ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, and other requirements Plus, Secureframe helps sales teams respond to RFPs and security questionnaires quickly and easily with AI so they can close more deals, faster. Click here to set up a demo. Mention “Not Boring” during your demo to get 20% off your first year of Secureframe. Promotion available through October 31, 2022. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

In "How Do I Teach These Kids?!" Packy confronts the challenge of how to properly educate his two young children in a rapidly evolving world. "Dev and Maya get a blank educational slate to start with. Puja and I are responsible for figuring out how to give them the best education possible, one that helps them love learning, have fun, and get prepared for life beyond school. I don’t think the answer is as simple as “Get them into the best schools possible.” I think it’s a lot more complicated than that, and will only get more complicated as things move faster. This isn’t meant to be a complete survey and analysis of the modern educational system, it’s more of an exploration of how I’m thinking about it personally in the very specific context of Dev and Maya’s education. What’s the best way to prepare my two kids?" --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Tegus is building the modern investment research platform for fundamental private and public market investors, starting with a novel twist on the classic expert call model, and expanding into adjacent opportunities by listening intently to customers. This audio essay covers: The Course to Tegus Modernizing Investment Research The Tegus Business Model The Outsiders: Fundraising, Buybacks, and Acquisitions Read the full newsletter here --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Peter Johnston is the founder of Polywork. Polywork is a place to discover opportunities to collaborate with other professionals. Existing networks like LinkedIn focus on connecting us to 9-5 opportunities — but where do you go to find opportunities to speak on podcasts? Or discover partners for your side project? Check out who at Google or Netflix is open to angel investing or starting a company? If LinkedIn is built for the 9-5 generation, Polywork is built for the collaboration generation. It’s been in private beta for just over a year, but this week it publicly launched for everyone, was #1 on Product Hunt, and announced its Series B funding. So what’s its magic? Polywork understands that as professionals, our list of job titles don’t do a good job of telling our full stories. Furthermore, it’s purpose built for professionals who want to connect with one another beyond their 9-5. There’s a growing network of amazing professionals from places like Figma, Snapchat, and Github all sharing what they want to do — making it incredibly easy to collaborate with anyone, on anything. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Monday Audio Essay: "Indistinguishable from Magic" Packy explores "magic" in tech and how it impacts the startup lifecycle: "It’s the Magical Startup Circle of Life. A startup, if it’s lucky, creates magic, turns that magic into dollars, and transitions to life as a successful Big Muggle Company, capable of enormous profits and power but no longer able to conjure magic. Then a new Magician comes along, using sufficiently advanced technology to build something indistinguishable from magic, and uses that magic as a wedge to challenge the Big Muggle Company." To read the full essay with graphics, head over to notboring.co.  Thanks to Polywork for sponsoring this Monday's essay!  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Mike Saunders is the co-founder and CEO of Captain. Captain powers restaurants and their communities through a mix of web2 and web3 technologies. Mike is an experienced food delivery entrepreneur, having previously started campusfood.com, which subsequently sold to Grub Hub where Mike served as an exec for a number of years. Captain, in many ways, is a response to many of the problems that Mike contributed to creating while building web2 food delivery platforms. One of Captain's first products is Supper Club: the digital wallet for the future of dining. Customers can find restaurants and earn rewards through fun games. In the process, restaurants gain access to a community of loyal customers. Food delivery is a massive industry and increasingly dominated by a handful of middlemen that extract a high-take rate, disconnect restaurants from customers, and abstract away customer relationships. Captain is an attempt to empower restaurants to creatively engage with their community of customers. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Eli Wachs & Alex Grinman are the co-founders of Footprint. Footprint's mission is to bring back trust on the internet. The company wants to put people in control of their identity while solving KYC, IDV, and PII storage problems for enterprises. Footprint just announced a $6M Seed Round led by Index Ventures. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Brandon Arvanaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Meow. Meow is a startup that opens corporate treasurers up to crypto markets. This is Brandon's second time on the podcast -- and he's on to discuss raising Meow's Series A & navigating challenging times in the crypto markets. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Thomas McLeod is the Founder and Executive Director of Arkive. Arkive is redefining culture by building the first-ever decentralized physical museum. Its mission is to curate, own, and create culture. Its community helps shape the future, by curating the past -- members vote on what items to acquire, how to display them, and much more. The first item Arkive acquired was the patent to ENIAC -- the first computer. Tom is a 5x founder, having also previously created over a dozen mobile apps and starting storage company Omni.  SPONSOR -- Tegus This episode is sponsored by Tegus, the leading modern research platform for institutional investors. Tegus is the most comprehensive database of expert call interviews with former executives, customers, competitors, and industry experts. It's a a tech-first platform that makes it easy to surface and search SEC filings and earning transcripts. Plus you can get expert calls at a fraction of the typical cost. It has unmatched info on public and private company. Check it out today: https://www.tegus.com/trial/notboring --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Packy and writing collaborator, Tina He, break down token design and why now is the perfect time for tinkerers to build new economies. The piece also explores how protocols are similar to corporations and nations, and where those analogies fall apart -- while suggesting a new framework for evaluating good token design. This audio essay is sponsored by Masterworks. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Isaac Newton's lifelong pursuit of alchemy may surprise you. Newton is the father of science and one of the most rational thinkers in history, but he also dedicated enormous amounts of time and energy to the now discredited field of alchemy. Yet, without alchemy we do not have chemistry. Many of the key problems and methods posed by alchemy would lead to the development of chemistry. We see this repeatedly throughout history. Seemingly frivolous or unproductive experimentation ultimately leading to major breakthroughs. Packy explores this historical trend in the context of our current markets and offers an optimistic view of where the last decade of seemingly frivolous experimentation and resourcing may take us in the future. This audio essay is sponsored by Masterworks.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message