Super Pumped (with Brian Koppelman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt)

1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

   I think you both know enough about Acquired that I don't need to go into the general shtick and spiel.

2. BKBrian Koppelman0:06

   Right on.

3. DRDavid Rosenthal0:07

   I love it. I'm so honored that you guys have listened. It makes my day. Thank you. [chuckles]

4. BGBen Gilbert0:11

   [chuckles]

5. BKBrian Koppelman0:11

   That's why we said yes. [laughing]

6. DRDavid Rosenthal0:15

   [laughing]

7. SPSpeaker0:15

   [upbeat music] Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Hmm. Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down. Say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth?

8. BGBen Gilbert0:32

   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.

9. DRDavid Rosenthal0:46

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

10. BGBen Gilbert0:52

    And we are your hosts. David, I feel like today is the natural culmination of a journey we started in May of 2019, when we did our Uber episode on the day of their IPO.

11. DRDavid Rosenthal1:03

    God, it feels like another lifetime ago, but it was only two and a half years ago.

12. BGBen Gilbert1:06

    Well, for listeners who don't know, the events of, you know, Uber leading all the way up through their IPO, and the implosion around that, and the just insane story that all of that was, is coming out as a Showtime series on February 27th called Super Pumped. I have to say, it's a little bit surreal, the world that we live in, of venture and startups, as we will talk about on this episode, becoming part of entertainment and pop culture like that.

13. DRDavid Rosenthal1:36

    And even more surreal that this is made by Brian Koppelman [chuckles] and Joe Gordon-Levitt.

14. BGBen Gilbert1:42

    [laughing]

15. DRDavid Rosenthal1:42

    There is no world that I would've imagined we would find ourselves here.

16. BGBen Gilbert1:46

    No, and on top of that, there is no world that I would've thought we would've found ourselves in where they're our guests on Acquired to talk about it, and so we're ludicrously fortunate today for that to be the case. And for those who don't know, Brian is one of the three executive producers, writers, and showrunners for Super Pumped. You probably also know his work from Billions and from Rounders, which is my all-time favorite poker movie that I watched about 100 times in high school and college when I was playing a lot of Texas Hold'em. Brian's work over the decades is just awesome. We're just lucky to have him making stuff out in the world. Joe, as many of you already know, stars in Super Pumped, playing Travis Kalanick, or TK. Of course, you know his previous work, too: Inception, Looper, recently Mr. Corman, many other great movies. Uh, Joe is actually a founder himself of the company HitRecord, that we discussed a few months back on the LP Show, and just a delightful human being.

17. DRDavid Rosenthal2:42

    Totally.

18. BGBen Gilbert2:43

    And, uh, one note for listeners: we wanna wave our, our arms around and say we're normally a pretty family-friendly podcast, but this episode does have some strong language, as does the show itself, obviously. And before we dive in on our interview, for those of you who listened to our episode with Brendan Eich, you know that we are very excited that these special episodes are brought to you by the Solana Foundation. Many of you know this, many of you have talked with us on LP calls about this. Frequently, we're talking in the Slack about it, but what is Solana? Solana is a global state machine and the world's most performant blockchain. Now, what does that mean? It means that developers can build applications with super low transaction fees and low latency without compromising composability, since it's all on a single chain with a global state. They're capable of processing tens of thousands of smart contracts at once, but instead of actually talking to the folks at Solana Labs or the Solana Foundation, we wanna use this time to talk to some of the folks building the protocols and decentralized applications on top. Today, we want to feature a big pillar of the Solana ecosystem, the Phantom Wallet. Here's Brandon Millman, the CEO of Phantom, to tell us all about it himself. So Brandon, what is Phantom?

19. SPSpeaker3:59

    Phantom is the fastest-growing crypto wallet that helps users do more with the world of DeFi and NFT apps. Not only does Phantom help users securely store their crypto, it also helps them do stuff with their crypto, like trading tokens and collecting NFTs. From our launch in April 2021, we've quickly grown from zero to 2.4 million users. If you wanna start using crypto or Web3 applications, Phantom is the easiest, more s- consumer-friendly option out there.

20. BGBen Gilbert4:25

    Well, growing to 2.4 million people, I know we're in early 2022, so it has to be in a year or less. Definitely, the proof is in the pudding there on people being attracted to its ease of use. I know it's built on Solana. How did you make the call to build in that ecosystem?

21. SPSpeaker4:41

    Actually, from 2017 to 2021, before we started Phantom, the co-founders and myself all worked at this previous crypto startup called 0x, which was focusing on building DeFi technology on Ethereum, and so we actually have a very deep Ethereum background and worked in that space for a while. And while we were working there, we, we noticed that wallets were, in general, pretty hard to use and are mostly geared towards developers. We realized that in order to really bring crypto to the mainstream, we needed to develop an experience that was much more user-friendly. At the same time, the underlying Ethereum platform was becoming more and more expensive and less usable and approachable to the average consumer, so we decided we needed a faster and cheaper platform, and that platform ended up being Solana.

22. BGBen Gilbert5:26

    That's great. And are you desktop only, or... I saw something about launching mobile recently.

23. SPSpeaker5:30

    We started off as a Chrome extension, but more recently released our iOS app at the end of January.

24. BGBen Gilbert5:37

    Our thanks to Solana and Phantom. If you are considering developing on Solana, head on over to solana.com/developers, or click the link in the show notes. All right, listeners, join us in the Slack, talk about this episode, acquired.fm/slack. Hear Joe's interview on the LP Show, just search Acquired LP Show in any podcast player, or click the link in the show notes. And without further ado, on to the interview.... Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brian Koppelman, welcome to Acquired.

25. JGJoseph Gordon-Levitt6:05

    Thank you.

26. BKBrian Koppelman6:06

    Thrilled to be here, guys.

27. BGBen Gilbert6:07

    Ah, we are super pumped for this. [laughing]

28. JGJoseph Gordon-Levitt6:11

    [laughing]

29. BKBrian Koppelman6:12

    And now we have to leave. Joe, this isn't fun. [laughing]

30. BGBen Gilbert6:16

    [laughing]

Episode duration: 1:04:53