A special chance to meet Eli, the third founder of Character, and learn about the inner workings of venture capital. This week on episode 6 of Jake & JZ we talked about:

• How Jake got to ride in the very first Waymo (when it was just a prototype on the Google campus)
• Jake’s rollercoaster of emotion meeting Eli
• Eli’s winding path to VC (it led through Botswana!), his famously good intuition, and “Eli-isms”
• Phaidra: Why we invested, how we work with the team, and the real value of a startup board member
• Why we use blinded scorecards to make investment decisions
• Jake’s annotated copy of the viral MrBeast production memo (download it here!)
• The importance of starting at the end
• And much more

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Chapters

0:00 Jake got to ride in the very first Waymo

3:35 Jake & JZ’s impressions of Waymo in San Francisco

7:55 Welcoming our cofounder Eli Blee-Goldman to the show!

8:15 Jake’s rollercoaster of emotion meeting Eli

10:35 Eli’s winding path to VC (it led through Botswana!)

13:35 How Eli developed his famously good intuition 

15:40 How Eli got his first job in VC

20:20 Showing up and putting in the work

21:50 A fine Eli-ism: The Conviction Punch!

26:05 The mismatch between founders and VCs

30:40 Why Eli got excited about Phaidra

34:00 Wait, what does Phaidra do, anyway?

36:15 Why we use blinded scorecards to make investment decisions

39:30 How Design Sprints make startups more capital efficient

42:15 The role of board members at an early-stage startup

47:40 Why Eli decided to start Character Capital

50:25 The viral MrBeast production memo

52:05 “This is like Sun Tzu, it’s like the Art of War”

52:45 Jake walks through his annotated version of the MrBeast memo

57:05 Start at the end: Choosing the title and thumbnail BEFORE making the video

59:55 Seth Godin: “Marketing is how we create the conditions for people to find what they are looking for”

1:00:50 MrBeast and Lightning Demos

1:03:00 Clickbait headlines and the feeling of success