Capital & Taste audio essay. Capital is banking built for founders. If that sounds like you, sign up for a Capital account today, whether you’re just raising your first million or doing millions in ARR. Capital expands Party Round’s offering from fundraising to a full suite of financial services focused on startups. Today, that’s banking – so you can hold, spend, and send the money you’ve raised with their flagship fundraising tool (fka Party Round). In the future, it might be...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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:...

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...

The Enchanted Notebook: on the real and growing power of writing down the future you want to see exist. In the context of a recent Lex Fridman and Ray Kurzweil podcast conversation, Packy explores where we are with AI today and what the future may hold. This essay and audio essay were sponsored by Secureframe. If you're starting a software company or getting up-to-speed on enterprise, schedule a demo with Secureframe. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/notboring/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,...

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...

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://anchor.fm/notboring/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://anchor.fm/notboring/message

Amplified Tribalism: Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a vibe shift online: the conversation seems to be getting more negative, aggressive, and polarized. Today’s piece is an attempt to unpack why so many people are talking past each other, why it’s so unproductive, and what to do about it. It’s not as upbeat as a lot of Not Boring pieces, but I think addressing this issue is crucial to unlocking progress. Sponsored by Athletic Greens. Athletic Green's AG1 is foundational nutrition...

Sponsored Deep Dive on Circle & USDC. In one of our longest essays yet, we tackle the following topics: What are stablecoins? How do stablecoin issuers generate revenue? Why are stablecoins a valuable primitive? How are USDC and Circle a platform? What is Circle’s competitive advantage? What would a new financial system built on Circle’s rails look like? This essay is sponsored by Circle. To learn more about how we decide to do deep-dives, checkout our policy here. ---...

Monday Essay -- "Intertwining Threads": Imagining the wild things that might happen when we mix and remix new technologies. Sponsored by Athletic Greens. Athletic Green's AG1 is foundational nutrition you can count on. Learn more at athleticgreens.com/notboring and when you use our link get a free 1 year supply of Vitamin D + 5 free AG1 travel packs.  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/notboring/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...

Alok Tayi is the founder and CEO of Vibe Bio. Vibe Bio is a community of patients, scientists, and partners committed to identifying, funding and developing promising treatments to rare diseases and empowering patient communities with unprecedented ownership over the process. Packy and Alok discuss how rare diseases can find cures, the biotech industry today, and why Vibe is built on web3 rails. Sponsor Season 2 of Not Boring Founders is sponsored by FTX US. You may know FTX because of...

Samiur Rahman is the co-founder and CEO of Heyday. Heyday is a browser extension that automatically saves web pages you visit and pulls in content from your apps. It uses AI to resurface that content alongside Google search results, overlay it on articles, and curate it into a knowledge base that fills itself. Samiur joins the show to discuss some big news, building great products, and Heyday's plans for the next few months. Sponsor Season 2 of Not Boring Founders is sponsored by FTX US....

Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus. Pocus is a Product-Led Sales platform that helps go-to-market teams use data to improve customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion - without relying on engineers. This is Alexa's second time on Not Boring Founders and she joins us to discuss some big news, what Pocus has been up to for the last 8 months, and how she's approaching operating Pocus in an uncertain macro environment. Sponsor Season 2 of Not Boring Founders is sponsored by...

Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus. Pocus is a Product-Led Sales platform that helps go-to-market teams use data to improve customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion - without relying on engineers. This is Alexa's second time on Not Boring Founders and she joins us to discuss some big news, what Pocus has been up to for the last 8 months, and how she's approaching operating Pocus in an uncertain macro environment. Sponsor Season 2 of Not Boring Founders is sponsored by...

Henry Ward is the co-founder and CEO of Carta. Carta helps companies and investors manage their cap tables, valuations, investments, and equity plans. Packy previously described Henry as a "Worldbuilder" - an entrepreneur who can see something non-obvious about the future, timestamp their prediction, and then execute against that prediction (sometimes for over a decade) until they end of building something really, really important. They address the accuracy of that title, the current state of...

Justin & J.P. Alanís are the co-founders of StoryDAO. Story DAO is a new kind of production studio where individuals have the opportunity to collaborate with established Hollywood writers and artists to create and co-own the next generation of culturally relevant story franchises. It's a radical experiment in community world-building and is changing the way franchise intellectual property is created and owned, bridging the gap between Hollywood and the metaverse. Sponsor Season 2 of Not...

Will Manidis is the co-founder and CEO of ScienceIO. ScienceIO's mission is to make all healthcare data computable. It's products enable real-time transformation of unstructured healthcare data into structured data that can be used for search & analysis. If Will and team are successful, he envisions a world in which healthcare is more connected, transparent and equitable.   Packy and Will go deep on healthcare, company building, and a variety of tangentially related topics, including NLPs...

Humberto Ayres Pereira is the co-founder and CEO of Rows. Rows is the spreadsheet with superpowers. With Rows, you can esily create and share powerful, interactive models with a passionate community of other spreadsheet users. It's taking on the likes of Microsoft & Google head on, and doing so by focusing on its interactivity and sharing functionality. In this conversation, Packy and Humberto discuss tactics for taking on incumbents, the power of spreadsheets, and startup culture in...

Paul Kromidas and Woods Buckley are the founders of Summer. Summer is re-imaging second home ownership -- with a unique rent-to-own model, members get the benefit of homeownership without the headache of the purchasing process, furnishing, and rental management. In this conversation, they discuss Summer's ten year vision, why people do & don't buy homes, wealth creation, and creating a great customer experience. Excitingly, Summer officially launched today June 7th, 2022 -- and you can go...