Shervin Pishevar
speaker
179 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Shervin Pishevar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah. I helped start the network state movement with biology and Joe Lonsdale. I had lunch with Joe like 2012 and I said, Hey, what if we started, you know, new cities that had sovereignty, new city States and tokenize it and have ownership become citizenship become ownership. We started hosting new city salons and Balaji came to it and then Balaji wrote Network States, the book.
And then we had the first two Network States summits. That movement led to another mantra of mine, which is great founders should try to start new industries, not just companies.
should start a completely new industry like Hyperloop was a new industry and in this case network states and new cities is a new industry and there's now hundreds of startups starting new nations Praxis is another one of them that I'm involved in that's one of the largest network states and they're looking at a million acres of land
in different places in the world and that have been helping them with but we're going to basically see new nation states new countries be started in our lifetimes and you're going to see a lot of people opt into those new nations so i think that's that's one of my probably more controversial uh the world map 200 years ago looks very different than it does today and it's going to look very different in 200 years nations are not supposed to be permanent they're supposed to evolve
I had the opportunity to invest in Snapchat in the seed round and I had the opportunity to invest in Pinterest in the seed round.
So I brought Snapchat to Menlo Evan and I hit it off. I really believe that. I was on it in the first 30 days because my kids were on it. And so they showed it to me and I was chasing it and Evan and I hit it off. Unfortunately, Menlo passed on that round and then the next round as well. And then Pinterest, I looked at when I was angel investing. So that was my own, fully my fault.
And one lesson I learned there is I did the meeting with Ben Because I met him through Jack Abraham, and I had funded Jack when he was 22 in his company Milo. And then he introduced me because he invested in the seed round of Pinterest. I was like, you should take a look at this. And at the time, I was talking about social commerce being the next big wave.
So it fit perfectly, but I did it as a call instead of an in-person meeting. So the one time I didn't get on the plane, the presentation...
over the phone wasn't the same than it would have been if we had met in person so i passed on it the presentation just didn't hit it for me but if i had met ben i i would have gotten a sense of his brilliance but over the phone he just didn't present well at the time this was like two dozen i don't know 10 or 11. you can only invest in one fund which fund do you invest in
Honestly, the one I'm really excited about is 1789 that my friend Omid Malik started. Donald Trump Jr. just joined as a partner there. They're going to kill it. I think they're going to do some amazing things. Their thesis early on was to invest in companies that are all pro-America, anti-woke. And that thesis has worked really well.
And I think they're in a really amazing position to invest in really incredible companies. So I really believe in them. 1789. What fun do you think is most overhyped? Benchmark. Do you ever speak to girly? No, no. And these were, these were friends of mine. Like Matt Kohler was a dear friend and, you know, and was at his 30th birthday party, his 40th birthday party right before all this happened.
And so you know we've lost dear friendships that were meaningful friendships in our lives because of that battle the uber wars is something that should be studied in order to learn lessons about what to do right and what to you know what to avoid the types of mistakes if you had the uber wars again is there anything you'd do differently
The strategy of publicly and legally battling was the only strategy that I saw as an effective counter to what was happening at the time. What I wish I had done or had the wisdom to know to do was what Sam and his allies did in getting the employees at OpenAI to back Sam and say, if he doesn't come back, we're going to leave. That was very powerful. It was very powerful.
And if we had done that at Uber, because Travis was beloved, so was Emil. They were beloved by the team. And so, you know, they were smart enough that they turned a few key people like Ryan Graves against Travis and they began collaborating. Do you blame him?
again he was another dear friend so it's it's tragic almost shakespearean like the friendships that were broken up over over this and so there was a lot of love there but i don't speak to him anymore i don't think you know others do either but um you know he i mean travis hired him from a tweet when he was like 28 years old at ibm made him a billionaire. And Travis was super loyal to him.
Unfortunately, Ryan, for whatever reason, went to the other side. That was heartbreaking.
I'm extremely loyal. That loyalty has served me well, but it's also caused me a lot of pain in my life. And in some ways, my successes have also come from being loyal. People knowing that I wouldn't do anything like what happened to Travis to a founder.
So the same thing that has caused a lot of pain because I've fought for people and I've taken the bullets and the missiles is also the reason I'm here. And I do have the reputation that I have with great founders.
Thank you. And I hope you get on the plane and come to Miami and visit us, me and Emil, sometime.
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