Platforms and Power (with Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi)

1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

   Hey, Acquired listeners, we have some fun news for you. Following hot on the news that we are doing a freaking arena show-

2. DRDavid Rosenthal0:07

   Arena show!

3. BGBen Gilbert0:09

   [laughing] At Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle. We are here tonight to announce the very first guest that will be joining us for that show.

4. DRDavid Rosenthal0:18

   Ben, who is it?

5. BGBen Gilbert0:20

   It is fresh off his full-page profile in The New York Times this weekend, Jim Weber, the CEO of Brooks Running. We wanted to have a really fun, local Seattle success story, but I think most people have no idea the magnitude of the success story here, or Jim's personal story. It's just fascinating.

6. DRDavid Rosenthal0:40

   We want everything we do for this event to, like, literally check all the Acquired boxes. This checks all the Acquired boxes.

7. BGBen Gilbert0:46

   Berkshire Hathaway.

8. DRDavid Rosenthal0:48

   Berkshire Hathaway. Uh, people who don't know, Brooks Running is a very successful, now standalone, division of Berkshire Hathaway. Local Seattle story, amazing, amazing journey. What they went from... Under Jim, they went from, like, de minimis small number of millions of revenue to over a billion in revenue a year, competing with Nike and Adidas.

9. BGBen Gilbert1:09

   They were, like, accidentally bought by Berkshire as part of a Fruit of the Loom roll-up, and they were sort of this bland nothing brand, and by-

10. DRDavid Rosenthal1:16

    Yes

11. BGBen Gilbert1:17

    ... unbelievable, maniacal focus on making fantastic running products, that is how they became the billion-dollar business that they are today.

12. DRDavid Rosenthal1:24

    Not to mention, Jim battled cancer, uh, along the way. Like, so great.

13. BGBen Gilbert1:29

    And when you say billion, by the way, we should say billion in revenue. Well, like, this is a profitable, over billion-dollar [chuckles] revenue growing company.

14. DRDavid Rosenthal1:37

    This isn't a billion-dollar valuation. [laughing] That's, that's a billion in, in cash every year. [chuckles] Not cash flow, but revenue.

15. BGBen Gilbert1:43

    Yes. So we're very excited to have a conversation with Jim at the event. You should totally come join us. It's May 4th. Doors open at five, with plenty of time for drinks and mingling throughout the event. You can go to acquired.fm/arenashow, or click the link in the show notes to RSVP. We've got a few more details in the previous little mini episode that we released to announce the Arena Show. All proceeds will go to Climate Pledge Arena's philanthropy, the One Roof Foundation. It's twenty dollars to attend, and, uh, we hope to see you there. Acquired.fm/arenashow, or click the link in the show notes.

16. DRDavid Rosenthal2:19

    We're gonna have some more announcements coming over the next couple of weeks, and, uh, it's amazing. People are DM-ing us, saying they're flying in from all over.

17. BGBen Gilbert2:27

    [chuckles]

18. DRDavid Rosenthal2:27

    If you live in Seattle, definitely come. If you don't live in Seattle, Alaska Air has great flights-

19. BGBen Gilbert2:32

    Great flights

20. DRDavid Rosenthal2:32

    ... to SeaTac. This is gonna be a huge party. We're so excited.

21. BGBen Gilbert2:36

    [upbeat music] Awesome. Listeners, acquired.fm/arenashow, we'll see you there.

22. SPSpeaker2:40

    Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way. Who got the truth?

23. BGBen Gilbert2:57

    Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs, and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

24. DRDavid Rosenthal3:11

    And I'm David Rosenthal, and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco.

25. BGBen Gilbert3:17

    And we are your hosts. Well, today, back by extremely popular demand, we have Hamilton Helmer. We email Hamilton, like, once a quarter or so, David, and ask, "Uh, hey, have you found an eighth power yet?" [laughing] And he always says, "No," but he did finally say, "Hey, my colleague, Chenyi, and I have been developing a new framework for how executives can apply 7 Powers for platform businesses, which are way more complicated." So obviously, we jumped at the chance to get to dig into this with Hamilton, since we later found out that by platform, he means this very broadly, like any business that serves as an intermediary to make transactions. So it probably applies to the technology business that you're working on right now.

26. DRDavid Rosenthal4:02

    Or investing in.

27. BGBen Gilbert4:03

    I found it particularly interesting, reflecting after the interview, because it's a framework still in progress, so you can start to see some of the, like, really important principles crystallize for Hamilton and Chenyi as they sort of talk through it. We get to read about these things in business books twenty years after they're finalized and gone through tremendous rigor, and it's just really cool to see it in the infant stage.

28. DRDavid Rosenthal4:26

    So fun to have Chenyi on, too. She is an incredible rising star.

29. BGBen Gilbert4:31

    For sure. These special episodes are sponsored by the Solana Foundation. As you know, Solana is, uh, a global state machine, and the world's most performant blockchain. It means developers can build applications with super low transaction fees, low latency. They don't have to compromise composability. It's all on a single chain with one global state. Today, we've got a little fun interview with Dan Albert, who is the executive director of the Solana Foundation. So here we go. Well, Dan, you guys are up to something really interesting in the Solana ecosystem with stake pools, or liquid staking. Can you share with us what that is, and how it has some advantages over some of the issues with just regular staking, like the lack of liquidity?

30. SPSpeaker5:16

    Hey, thanks for having me. The goal of the Solana Foundation is to foster the growth of the Solana network and the Solana community as a whole. The goal really is to have one billion people with self-custody of their keys and the ability to understand what that means, and sign transactions, and do useful things. So in order to get a good chunk of the world's population doing this, we need a whole robust suite of apps and services that are useful to people as humans. To that end, it's one of the reasons why I'm really excited about stake pools, because it provides a great vehicle for ordinary people who want to participate in the crypto ecosystem, the ability to participate, while also fostering the growth of the network and supporting the growth of a larger set of validators.... And so what this is really is a way for people who are interested in crypto and interested in supporting and securing the blockchain networks that they care about through staking, but providing people a liquid means to do so. So what does that mean? So an individual user or users can deposit their SOL into one of these programs and get back a derivative token, and what happens under the hood is the stake pool automatically distributes the underlying tokens to one or many different node operators or validators on the Solana network. So traditionally, on Solana and on other proof of stake networks, when you stake an asset, it's subject to some lockup period or sometimes called the unbonding period, where basically the asset is not liquid. You can't move it or sell it or do anything with it on short notice. And Stake Pools provides really liquid exposure to the same underlying asset while giving the user the ability to earn any potential staking rewards that are earned by the validators who are members of that pool. It really takes a lot of the kind of technical and research overhead away from the user, which can be really intimidating. The Solana network currently has over fifteen hundred validators operating on mainnet beta, and I get this question very often from members of the community that say, "Hey, I'd love to stake. How do I pick a validator? I click the dropdown list, and there's a thousand names." And so by vying to be included in one or multiple stake pools, these validators can earn stake delegations based on performance and based on merit, rather than based on name recognition. So we've got some community-facing resources on the Solana Foundation website around Stake Pools, so that's solana.foundation/stake-pools. There's some information there about existing pools that have been launched and are being successfully managed by different teams in the Solana community. There's also some information if people are interested in potentially launching their own stake pool to support a group of validators or perhaps to implement their own unique staking strategy.

Episode duration: 1:26:03