Most people talk about startups from one angle. Founder. Investor. Operator.
David S. Rose has done all three—at scale, across decades, and across multiple technology waves.
If you’re building, investing, or thinking about where startups are heading, his perspective cuts through the noise.
From Firewood to Venture Capital
David didn’t “discover” entrepreneurship. He grew up in it.
By the time he was in college, he was already starting businesses—selling firewood to dorm residents, running production services, even negotiating with NASA.
After a stint working for a U.S. Senator, he joined his family’s real estate firm. That’s where something important happened: he started applying early computing to a traditional industry.
He didn’t call it proptech at the time. That label came later.
But he was building it in the early 1980s.
That pattern repeats throughout his career:
He shows up early, before categories exist.
Building Before the Market Exists
One of his first major tech ventures came from a simple observation:
computers could connect to other devices.
That led to the WristMac—a wearable device that synced with your computer. This was decades before the Apple Watch.
From there, he moved into mobile messaging, wireless communication, and early internet infrastructure.
At one point, he built a wireless internet broadcasting system—before Wi-Fi, before smartphones, before the market was ready.
It failed.
Not because the idea was wrong.
Because the timing was.
That’s a key lesson:
Being early often looks identical to being wrong.
Falling Into Venture Capital
David didn’t set out to raise venture capital.
He accidentally discovered it.
While demoing a product, top-tier investors approached him asking how much he was raising. He didn’t even realize that was an option at the time.
Soon after, Warburg Pincus led his Series A.
That experience shaped how he thinks about investing today:
Founders often don’t understand the game they’re entering
Investors are constantly looking for reasons to say yes
The best deals don’t feel like “pitches”—they feel inevitable
Surviving the Dot-Com Crash
David scaled his company during the dot-com boom.
Then watched it collapse.
He went from 125 employees to 17.
Raised capital. Expanded globally. Then lost it all when markets turned.
That experience forced a shift.
He moved from building companies to backing them.
The Birth of Modern Angel Investing Infrastructure
David founded New York Angels, one of the most active angel groups in the world.
Then he noticed something broken:
Startup investing was inefficient.
Founders applied separately to each investor
Investors operated in silos
Processes were manual and fragmented
So he built Gust.
Today:
Over 2 million founders use it
Most major angel networks run on it
It powers the infrastructure behind early-stage investing globally
Instead of being just an investor, he became the system.
What Actually Matters in Early-Stage Investing
After reviewing thousands of startups, David simplifies it down to three core factors:
1. Integrity
If a founder makes decisions that benefit themselves over the company, everything breaks.
2. Passion
Startups require sustained intensity. Without it, founders quit when things get hard.
3. Traction
Not vanity metrics. Not hype.
Real traction means:
External validation
Someone getting value
That value growing over time
Most founders get this wrong.
The AI Shift: Faster Than Any Previous Wave
David has lived through multiple tech cycles:
Personal computers
The internet
Mobile
Cloud
He believes AI is different.
Not just bigger. Faster.
The timeline is compressing.
He expects:
Full AGI-level capability within a few years
Dramatic reduction in startup costs
Smaller teams building larger companies
Capital becoming less of a bottleneck
The implication is clear:
Startups won’t just change.
The entire structure around them will.
A Controversial Take: 75% of Jobs Disappear
David makes a bold claim:
Up to 75% of jobs could become economically obsolete within a decade.
His reasoning is simple:
If AI can do a job:
Better
Faster
Cheaper
That job disappears in economic terms.
This doesn’t mean people stop working.
It means the definition of “work” changes.
What Happens Next?
He breaks the future into three groups:
Entrepreneurs (~1%)
People who create new systems, regardless of constraints.
Builders / Technical Creators (~8%)
Engineers, designers, operators building within those systems.
Independent Producers (~15%)
People using platforms to create income (freelancers, creators, etc.)
That leaves a large portion of society needing a new structure.
Which leads to:
Universal Basic Income (or something similar)
New economic models
A shift from survival work to optional work
Why He’s Still Building
Despite decades of experience, David hasn’t slowed down.
Today he’s:
Executive Chairman of Gust
CEO of USREM (real estate marketplace)
Investor in multiple AI companies
Author and educator
His mindset hasn’t changed.
He still sees every shift as an opportunity to build.
The Real Takeaway
Tools change. Markets change. Technology changes.
But the core pattern stays the same:
Spot what’s coming early
Build before it’s obvious
Adapt when the market shifts
Stay in the game long enough to matter
David’s career is proof that the edge isn’t in predicting the future.
It’s in continuously rebuilding yourself as the future arrives.
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Chapters:
00:01 – Intro & David S. Rose background
00:24 – Early entrepreneurial beginnings
02:30 – College ventures & first hustles
03:30 – First job with Senator Moynihan
04:40 – Real estate career & early tech adoption
05:20 – Inventing proptech
06:50 – First startup experiences
08:00 – WristMac and early wearable tech
10:30 – Mobile messaging startup
13:30 – Accidental Series A raise
16:00 – Wireless software & early telecom
17:30 – Internet disruption
18:00 – AirMedia & wireless internet vision
22:00 – Dot-com boom & expansion
23:40 – Dot-com crash & shutdown
24:40 – Transition to angel investing
25:30 – Founding New York Angels
26:30 – Building Gust platform
29:00 – Gust Launch & company formation
30:00 – Writing books & Quora
33:00 – AI impact on startups
35:00 – USREM & real estate marketplace
37:00 – Current ventures & roles
39:00 – Singularity University origins
42:00 – Exponential technology & Ray Kurzweil
49:00 – AI, AGI, and future predictions
52:00 – Impact of AI on venture capital
54:00 – Future of work & unemployment thesis
58:00 – UBI and economic restructuring
01:00:00 – Abundance & societal shifts
01:01:30 – Entrepreneurship in AI era
01:03:30 – Healthcare, robotics, and tech progress
01:05:00 – Founder mindset & entrepreneurship
01:07:30 – Startup success traits
01:09:30 – Investment decision framework
01:11:30 – Closing thoughts & where to find David
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:01:14): Hey everyone welcome back to the Ignite Podcast today we’re thrilled to have David S. Rose on the mic he is a serial entrepreneur one of the world’s most prolific angel investors founder of new york angels and the founder of gust to the platform powering early stage investing infrastructure globally thanks for coming It’s my pleasure. I’d love to start with your origin story. What’s your background?
David S. Rose (00:01:34): So my background is that I am a fifth generation serial entrepreneur turned third generation angel investor, first generation VC, and it’s all additive. So I continue to do all of the above.
Brian Bell (00:01:45): That’s amazing. How did you get started in your career? It sounds like you kind of grew up with an entrepreneurial environment.
David S. Rose (00:01:53): I did. I was a finalist for the ENY Entrepreneur of the Year Award back during the dot-com boom in the 90s. My father won it in 2002. and put things in perspective. My father is currently 96 going on 97 and is more active than I am. He’s finishing his third book. He’s developing a museum in Accra, Ghana around pontificating and all kinds of So he was a wonderful role model. He was an entrepreneur and is an entrepreneur in real estate. And so I grew up from an early age figuring that, of course, this was the kind of thing that you did, although there is a large hereditary component in it. So I have siblings and they’re not particularly entrepreneurial so I got the entrepreneurial gene as it were and so I’ve been starting companies since I was a kid when I was probably 10 or 11 I started Rose Productions a multimedia organization and did graphic design work and provided AV services for children’s birthday parties and so on in high school I was doing a graphic design everything from business cards and student IDs and so on all the way up to when I got to college in high school I created an after school film program and when I got to college I took over the school printing press and turned that into a venture and start a bunch of other things on the side. At one point during my college career, I was negotiating with NASA to see if we could subcontract some space in the space shuttle to send stuff up. My first day at college, I walked in, realized that our dorm rooms had fireplaces, but no firewood. So I loaded up a quart of firewood and started selling firewood on the street. as people moved into their dorm rooms. And so I was then in college with this entrepreneurial bent doing things to the point where this is now in the 70s, mid-1970s, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The Yale Daily News did an article headlined, What Academic? are not enough about this really strange person who was like involved in business things as a student because that was back in the day which would seem almost inconceivable to most of the people listening to this podcast. There was no such thing as an entrepreneurial class venture centers new startup things nothing the term entrepreneur didn’t appear in any university class club activity or whatever so it was a really weird thing but in any event all my classmates were Pre-med, pre-law, pre-McKinsey, whatever. And being an opportunistic entrepreneur, I had no clue as to what I was going to do. So as I graduated, I was debating between going to work for Disney as an Imagineer to design rides for Disney World or get an MFA in typography. and book design in Florence. When out of the blue, I got offered a role, since my college major was in urban planning, urban affairs, I got offered a role as special assistant for urban affairs to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who I had known and done some volunteer work for. my first job out of college was working for senator Moynihan as his urban affairs person and eventually ended up running his regional office in new york which was an enormously wonderful and heady experience for a young kid out of college here i was sitting on boards with the mayor conducting congressional investigations drafting op-eds for the Times and so on and so forth and that was great and I was having so much fun that I figured that I would be sort of stuck there for life but at heart I really was a private sector entrepreneurial type so I left Moynihan after a couple of years went back to Columbia got an MBA in real estate finance and join the family firm which was in real estate development that’s a firm still going on it’s now this is a centenary so for a hundred years it’s been operating so there was a long history there and I started there in the early east and being a young whippersnapper you know interested in new technology well I figured there were these things called you know personal computers that had just come out I had my Apple II and so on and eventually got a map and stuff. And so, well, of course you’d use these tools in your business the way you’d sort of use AI today, you assume. So I brought my computer in to work to do things with it and realized that there was nobody else in real estate industry. who was using computers for anything. So I have the sort of dubious distinction of having invented the field of PropTech as early as 1981. Wow. 82 or three InfoWorld did a full-page story on me because we were using Apple IIs as I created the first computerized real estate sales office. We had a whole lot of firsts in PropTech because there was literally nobody else in the industry. I developed the first construction punch list software, the first multiple listing servers for New York, the first location-based social network, the first Buildings that had computers in every apartment, you know, a whole series of stuff. We were among the first people to use pro formas, computers for doing kind of Excel spreadsheets for real estate pro formas, which sounds inconceivable now. How would you do it without that? But back then people were doing it by hand.
Brian Bell (00:06:39): that you know if you look at Mad Men in the 60s you know the ad of the the ad show or they’re making ads and it’s like it’s a it’s a sea of desks and all they you can think of the sea of desks as different cells on a on a spreadsheet they’re literally just passing calculations to each other
David S. Rose (00:06:55): It was fascinating. When we were doing, you know, before I brought in Visicalc, remember that the spreadsheet was invented by friends of mine, Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, who created Visicalc. Before that, there were a spreadsheet, was a spreadsheet of paper. and you would type in numbers and you would calculate it all by hand on like an editing machine or a calculator. And then if you’ve changed one number, oh, what if the interest rate changes by, you know, two points? Well, bingo, you have to recalculate by hand every sheet in the cell in the sheet and then type it all out again. So it was a major, major change, shall we say.
Brian Bell (00:07:32): So in any event- What was it like to start a business back then? I mean, you couldn’t go out and just find investors. You just had to sort of bootstrap or what did you do back then?
David S. Rose (00:07:40): I mean I was in real estate I didn’t know what starting a business was all about I mean I was doing real estate development in the family business and I did that for 10 years bringing technology into the industry but on the side I was doing little Funky stuff as entrepreneurs are wont to do and in a remainder catalog used to be these things called remainder catalogs where overstock goods were sort of sold I found a digital watch that Seiko had developed with a little chip in it and a little display and it plugged into a computer and could download information from a computer so I said oh this is pretty cool but that was for PC only I was a Mac guy so I got the last 10 units in the catalog and I you know figured out how to you know connect it to a computer I brought on a sort of hit team of friends of mine who were involved in this space because I’ve been very involved in the online what passed for the online computer world before the internet came along there were CompuServe and online systems like that so I was a sysop I remember I remember
Brian Bell (00:08:42): those I’m old enough to remember that
David S. Rose (00:08:44): So I was a stop for the Mac forums on CompuServe And I got, therefore, basically anybody who was doing stuff was on these onlines I mean, you know, now when the entire 8 billion people in the world, half of them are in tech and using stuff In the early days, there was nobody I mean, if there were, you know, 500 people who were in the entire industry That would have been a lot, right? And so they were all online and I was a sysop for, you know, for CompuServe. And so when I figured I got this watch and I figured, hey, how can I connect this to my Mac? So I found a guy named Richard Reich who had created the HP 12C desk accessory calculator for the Mac and he did the software. A guy named Dennis Brothers who had written the, I think, the VINHEX protocol for downloading binary files on a Mac, created the, designed the cable for the watch. The manual was written by Neil Shapiro, the editor of Mac User Magazine. So a little pickup group and it created this, took this watch and branded it and repositioned it as the wrist Mac. Digital watch, 28 years before the Apple Watch, there was this digital watch that could upload and download data from your Mac into your watch. and so I took this to the I think the second or third Macworld trade show that used to be an all Macintosh trade show called Macworld and I got this this booth and I was you know I’m real estate so this would be done on the side of my little I was showing off this watch that could connect to your Mac and it got a fair amount of press interest because it was a pretty cool thing guy comes over and says oh that’s really interesting I want to buy one so my first sale was to a guy named Fred Smith turns out to be the guy who founded FedEx and also went to Bill Atkinson who created Macintosh creators originally and so I had all of a sudden I had people you know getting this product which looked really really cool but it was a side gig because I was in real estate and so time goes on I then realized that hey enough people want to buy this so maybe it makes sense I called up Seiko and I said, hey, you got any more of these out there? And they said, well, it so happens that the product really wasn’t a success. And we had a whole bunch of watches we were sending back to Japan to put under bulldozers to avoid dumping problems. I said, no, I’ll buy them from you at pennies and a dollar. So they turned the ship around and I got back the, I got these, you know, thousands of watches and went into business on the side selling wrist max. which was which was very cool and they got a bunch of press because it was a very remember this is many many years ago when mobility was not a big thing and so I said that’s great and so the next thing I know I said well what’s our follow-on project product for this because of course you have to have a product path. And so I said that was when Motorola came out with a wristwatch pager. I don’t know if anybody remember pagers, but they were like a beeper. You could dial a phone number and go to your watch. And so they came out with this pager on a wristwatch.
Brian Bell (00:11:27): They were like jaws on the floor, you know, how a pager works. You dial a number and then you, you know, dial another number into that number and then that number would now be sent to a device.
David S. Rose (00:11:41): It was a beeper and like, you know, Motorola had one that was on for your wristwatch. So I said, oh, cool. I’ll do a wristwatch, a mobile version, wireless version of the wrist Mac. And so I realized, hmm, no, wait a minute. It’s only a beeper. It just shows a number. That’s not too helpful. Besides, you know, their wristwatch pager was about the size of a cup of coffee. It was a big thing. So, but then they came out with a new pager, a text pager. It was a very high tech thing. It’s called the Advisor and this had a two-line display so you could actually send a text message. I thought that was really cool. And it turned out the way you would get a message to somebody with a pager was you’d call up a phone member and you’d tell the operator and the operator would type it into their system and it would go to the pager So we figured out what the protocol was to get into the dispatch systems and design software to do that from your computer. And so I created a product called Notify, which was the first text paging software. And the next thing I know, I got a call from the Personal Communications Industry Association or whatever, PCIA. Back then it was called Telecater. and they said oh you’re a techie so we’re putting you on our tech committee I said what okay so that’s how I found myself on there on the paging industries tech committee and got involved with the folks who were doing early wireless communications from Motorola and other kinds of companies like that and One thing led to another and all of a sudden I had this mobile communications wireless communications project and we were invited to show it at a show called Demo which back in the day was one of the major sort of trade not trade show but industry conference where people would show off their new products they pick the best products of the year and you could demonstrate it so I’m still in real estate so I go I got called to go to California go out there and show there do a demo of our product and they give you a little desk and a pot of plant and a chair and you can people can come over and you can demo your thing And so as I’m sitting here at demoing our mobile teaching solution, people come over like John Doerr and Ray Rothrock and Esther Dyson and they said, oh, interesting thing you have here. So, you know, how much are you looking for? How much, what am I looking for? So I come back to New York and And the next thing I know, I talked to a guy, I had a family friend of ours, who my father appointed me to, who he said invested in stuff like that, a guy named Alan Patricopp, who at that point was the head of Alan Patricopp. and company later renamed Apex a mega private equity firm one of the biggest venture firms in the business and I showed Alan what I was doing and he said oh really interesting you know we do very big deals but you know I do a little something called angel investing and you know I’d be interested in putting $75,000 into this company of yours I said oh really interesting I’ll get back to you so I went back to my father and said hey I mean Alan must have put a K into this project and my father said well he’s a very smart guy that’s really you know interesting my father is not a techie at all he said but you know always get a second opinion so we have another friend who does stuff like that go talk to our friend Lionel so he I’ll talk to Lionel. It turns out to be Lionel Pincus, the head of Warburg Pincus, which at that point was the largest measurement around. Wonderful corporal guy. And so I show him what we’re doing. And he says, very interesting. What do my guys say about that? I said, I don’t know. Who are your guys and what do they say? He said, I thought you were here to pitch me. I said, OK, I’m here to pitch you. So the next thing I know, long story short, Warburg Pincus actually ended up doing my Series A. So I’m the only guy who fell backwards into raising my first Series A without realizing I was raising money.
Brian Bell (00:15:29): It wasn’t called a pre-seed or seed back then, it was just a series A.
David S. Rose (00:15:32): Pre-seed or seed, come on, those terms are like in the last three or four or five years. No, back then it was series A, right? Because it was sort of a first stock. So they did my series A, and at that point I left real estate and moved into tech. And then that began my tech career. So the wireless software did...
Brian Bell (00:15:53): Do you recall what the valuation was back then on that first round?
David S. Rose (00:15:57): Oh, God, I think they probably invested at about a six or seven million for a Series A. You wouldn’t do a Series A six or seven million today, but I think it was around there, maybe eight. And so the next thing I know, so then I left real estate, moved full-time into the venture, and that was great, and we became the leading developer of paging software, worked with most of the carriers, because smartphones had just come in, and a PCS phone, so instead of just being a wireless cell phone, you now had a phone that actually had a screen display and did text messaging. Remember, the early cell phones didn’t do text messaging, and so that text messaging for phones used the same paging protocols so we became the leading developer of that kind of stuff and that was all great until something appeared on the horizon which was the internet where people anybody could connect their computer to anything you didn’t need to run special software that would dial up your phone and dial into a paging system so we were going to be eaten by you know the shark of the internet so what do we do I said okay well how can we maybe tie this you know wireless stuff into the internet and came up with the idea of taking a pager licensing the pager technology for Motorola and TI and building a device that would connect to your computer and let you effectively send a wireless message to a computer this is before Wi-Fi before 4G before 3 before anything right yeah but the we developed that and it was called the The newscatcher was a black pyramid about this big, little paging chip inside that would plug into your Windows PC and let us send you wireless things over the air. And so because of the way paging worked, we could do broadcasts, everybody got the same thing, or narrowcast so you could subscribe to a particular channel, or individual one-to-one messaging so you could get a message just to you, and you could do it all on the same chip. And so we started showing people this under NDA and they got really excited about it. And so the next thing you know, I did another round to fund this and we came out with something. We renamed the company from originally Ex Machina, a long story. to AirMedia and we came out with the AirMedia Live wireless internet broadcast network which was very cool and we had a bunch of we had Citigroup and we had SK from Korea and we had all kinds of interesting players invested in it and it was this first internet wireless message broadcast which was amazing it shipped and got a lot of press got a full Walt Mossberg column in the Wall Street Journal and we licensed it even before we shipped we licensed it to Hewlett Packard and Compaq and Philips and NEC and Global Village and all kinds of interesting players and the product shipped it got amazing reviews and nobody bought it which was very depressing because this was And that’s when I realized that if you have to, you know, A, tell people what the internet is, E, what a wireless internet news receiver is, and three, who this company, Air Media, that they never heard of before, you’ve got three Three enormous lifts that you’re trying to do, and that just did not work. So we spent an enormous amount of time and effort at 125 people trying to get that, push that string, and it eventually was not to be. We had to do something. So I came up with another idea saying, well, okay, you know, we’re now in a world where you have all of these new smart phones and so on and they have built in wireless there so how about doing a back end platform that would allow because the carrier stepped on control of the phones where so the carrier would decide what use your AT&T or Verizon would decide what you would see when you got your phone this is before Apple changed the whole world with the iPhone and so we went to the carriers and they liked what we were doing and so I went back to my investors and said okay we have this new idea to turn this whole you know thing into a platform for smartphones and communications and stuff and most of them said okay interesting good luck with it that’s fine do what you have to do we’ll pass on reinvesting you know in the round Citibank who was my most farsighted beast said Okay, this might have promise, so we’ll re-up and put more cash in. And I had one VC, my smallest, tiniest VC, who is the kind of player who gives rise to the term Vulture Capital, and they basically said, And they thought that because of who I am and who I was that I wouldn’t dare you know play chicken with them and they said we’ll force you into bankruptcy we’ll force the company to bankruptcy if you if you don’t pay us out in full. And one thing I’ve learned from my very, very honorable family is you don’t succumb to, you know, extortion. You have to curse your convictions. And in this case, we had done nothing wrong. So I said, you’re making a mistake. And by the way, you do realize that the last cash that went into the company was a secured note Citigroup and I personally had put in a secured note to keep the company going during this time and they said yeah but you’re not going to file you know we know you I said you’re reading this wrong you know we’re not going to do this but they persisted and so they forced us into chapter 11 so we did a prepackage chapter 11 the result of which is they got wiped out and Citigroup and I ended up owning the company so We started it, we hit the dot-com boom, and all of a sudden we had people throw money at us, including an international fund that said, great, this coming three months out of coming out of a Chapter 11, that they would invest 60 million bucks at a 120 million valuation. These were very different times back then. And we had filed some cool patents. Hopefully that’s free money. Yeah. that had all issued and you know PWC had appraised our patent portfolio at 125 million so it was very interesting interesting heady time and so we then had gone from 125 people to 17 people we expanded up again hit the dot-com boom All kinds of interesting things happened went on an acquisition spree acquired a company in the UK which got us Richard Branson as an investor acquired companies in all kinds of other places expanded to Europe had operations in France, Germany, the UK and you know go-go days of the of the dot-com boom which was great until all of a sudden it wasn’t so great and it was the end of the dot-com boom and so you recall for those who were around at that point Amazon lost 95% of its value overnight and And if you weren’t Amazon, you can imagine what happened to everybody else. So I get this call before the closing on our round because this investor had been bridging us to their own round. They put in like, you know, 10 million bucks, whatever it is, over a year was they were bringing around together. And they, in two weeks before the closing, they called us and said, you know that round? Not going to happen. So, yeah. That was an interesting comeuppance So with the whole world crashing down We ended up getting Closing on our operations in the US We were still having some revenue in Europe Selling ring One of the first people to sell ringtones That you could download to your computer And stuff like that Licensed it to a bunch of big players But then eventually that was just with the dotcom crash Everything The entire industry had been evaporated We ended up going down as well So at that point I come back licking my wounds and say okay you know no more entrepreneurship stuff but I had helped found the New York New Media Association NINMA back in the mid 90s and NINMA had what was called an angel investor program so being Temporarily beached entrepreneur when it went to the dark side, joined the local angel, you know, the New York Media Association’s angel program and began to help investing in entrepreneurs. But then pretty quickly realized that the angel group had been founded by NINMA, which was his trade association for dot-coms, all of whom are now broke. NIMA had 8,000 members all of whom were unemployed looking for jobs from the other 8,000 members and that didn’t really work so the trade association went bankrupt and it was eventually acquired by the Sofa Publishers Association so they didn’t want the angel group because that doesn’t apply to a trade association so I said okay I think we can do something here so I took the people who had been in the angel groups but now created a new group called New York Angels which is today 25 years later one of the world’s leading most active angel investment groups and so I spent the next several years creating an angel group and investing in early stage companies and doing some some cool stuff I then realized that the angel world itself was very inefficient because back then you would have breakfast and people come to breakfast and then you’d meet with them in person and they’d send you a business plan by FedEx or whatever and that was not very efficient so I figured there was a way to apply technology I had done with real estate technology to this universe. And so I created a company called Gust, the UST, originally called AngelSoft, now known as Gust, as the infrastructure platform for the startup world. The idea being that we would power these angel investment and then entrepreneurs would apply for funding to these groups and if you had everybody on one platform you could do a better software than any angel group could do by itself because they weren’t companies they were loose associations people so we got most of the major angel groups in the world on the platform and that was great and then I realized that We have all these entrepreneurs who are applying to not just one, but multiple angel groups. So rather than just being a pure SaaS platform for an angel group, how about if we open up the other side to founders, re-architect the platform and effectively do it like the common app for college. So as a founder, you can create one profile and then you can share that profile with whichever group you want to And that grew pretty rapidly. And today is now 20 plus years later, we have over 2 million founders who’ve created Profiles on Gust we support most of the world’s major angel investor networks and then over time we began to add on increasing services for founders and stuff for VCs one of which was realizing how difficult it is to start a business because back then you would typically if you had money you’d go to a law firm and they’d give you their startup package of like 5,000 bucks to incorporate you and do your cap table and so on and so forth that was you know it’s a lot of money especially if you’re starting up a company and this is now you know 10 years 15 years ago so we created the first cast platform company as a service we became a Delaware registered agent built an entire instrument and system around it and so now today if you want to start a company you you come on it’s called Gust Launch you come onto our platform you press a button and wham we spin up the entire company we incorporate you to Delaware C Corp we serve as your registered agent in Delaware we set up your cap table we do all of your post incorporation legal and then handle your financing documents and your safes and your convertible notes and the whole bit And then you can graduate up the system, set up your cap table, run your equity program to your option plans, give you all kinds of, you know, events, discounts and cool stuff like that. And that became a success. And then we were getting these ridiculously high NPS scores, net promoter scores. And people love the platform. People say, hey, can I come in? I got to start a company. Can I get all this stuff you’re doing in the platform? And I said, well, you know, the only reason that works is because we have the economies of scale and everybody’s structured and standardized the right way. So, you know, if we didn’t incorporate you, we really can’t do that. But then they said, oh, we really want to come on. So we said, okay, well, you know what? Let’s divorce the actual sort of technology setup stuff from the handshake. And so on We provide advice, we have pitch practice, we have financing, forecasting, we have partners like Forecaster and so on. And so it’s become this really, really popular way for companies to get a lot of the support that everybody wishes they had when you were starting. And then along the way, since I happen to be, as you can tell, a big mouth because I haven’t let you ask a question in the last 15 minutes. I haven’t seen it.
Brian Bell (00:28:24): I’m getting like a free history lesson.
David S. Rose (00:28:27): Even the people didn’t ask. And there’s a website called Quora, Q-U-O-R-A, which some of you guys might know, which is the question and answer website. So I began, I joined Quora when it first started. And I said, hey, look, people want to hear answers. Let me answer their questions. So I’ve answered questions. So now, it’s now, what, 17 years? And I’ve answered over 12,000 questions on Quora. many of which are related to angel investing and early stage startups and stuff and Wiley the business book publisher had decided that the you know this whole tech world was progressing and angel investing which had been this back world backwoods sort of thing was now getting you know to the fore and nobody had ever written a book about angel investing so they look around see who had the biggest mouth which was me and they said hey could you write a book about you know angel investing so I said okay and so as usually I did it backwards I got a contract from Miami and then I got an agent and then I wrote the book which was I basically took all my core answers about this stuff and did a table of contents and threw the one at the other and then rewrote the whole thing and ended up with a book called Angel Investing Gus Guy to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups which to sort of everybody’s surprise became a New York Times bestseller because it was the only book about how to invest in startups and that was pretty cool and so then about a year after that while they came back to me said you know we didn’t really think this would be a bestseller but you know there aren’t enough angels to make a book a bestseller so we went to see who was buying it and it turned out a lot of the people who were buying it were founders who were looking for the other side of the table perspective could you write a book for founders about how to start a company I said okay that so I so I signed up with Wiley and wrote a second book called the startup checklist 25 steps to a scalable high growth business which became and also became your time bestseller and even more gratifying has been adopted by over 500 colleges and universities in the US as the standard textbook for their entrepreneurship courses which is very very cool and that takes you through the entire process of you know There have been a bunch of books I mean some friends of mine have written great books Guy Kawasaki and Eric Reese and Steve Plank and you know how to you know lean startup methodology and the but those were tend to be all big picture stuff right how do I think about what business to start and how do I deal with my team and so on and so forth there actually to my absolute astonishment had not been a book about what’s step one what’s step two who do I file where do I what’s the difference between a C Corp and an LLC why should I you know you know who’s my registration what does that mean how do I get a credit card what do I you know so I said okay well that’s the hole in the market the 20 you know 25 steps to a scale of a high growth business it’s all about okay do it here’s how you do a business plan here’s how you do a business model canvas here’s how you you hire people and so what I did was effectively a survey of all the best and then I point you to Steve’s book and everybody else’s book for the details of stuff, you know, Business Plan Pro and all these various tools. And it became this definitive book on how to actually realistically and pragmatically start a company from step zero all the way through to an exit. And both of those books had been surprisingly good sellers. So they are both, I did the second edition of Angel Investing, came out last spring, is doing really well. And I’m delighted to announce here for the first time that the second edition of the software of the startup checklist is coming out later this month. So you can pre-order it now on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. But that is actually a fascinating place. I was rewriting the book starting, what, about a year ago, maybe, when AI, which is clearly eating the world, said, how do you rethink about AI for a founder? What does that mean? And of course, over the last year, what AI has done for startups is just gone through the roof and accelerated to an unbelievable degree. So I told Wiley, you know what? Nobody can write a realistic book today about AI is just changing so fast. I can’t point them anywhere. I can’t tell them what to do because it’ll be out of date by the time I finish writing the chapter before it’s published. So I tell you what I want to do. And he said, what? I said, okay, instead of putting any directions or any recommendations or any links in the book, I want to put in QR codes. So they said, oh, I haven’t done that before, but I said, okay, great. So basically, the book that’s coming out later this month, the Startup Checklist, does not have a single live link in it. What it has are QR codes, which you can scan with your phone for every chapter and every resource pointing you to to the latest and greatest LLMs and tools and stuff for this. And so the way you think about starting a business in the age of AI is completely different from the way you, I mean, it is mind-bogglingly different because the tools are so powerful. you can do and the teams you can build and how you find money all that stuff are so different and so that’s now all covered so this is very much a book for the new AI world so you got that there and then anyway with all this going on I am an entrepreneur at heart so we We’re looking at you at Gust and we said, well, we have the investors and we have the founders and we have the digital company and their cap tables and everything else. Well, the logical thing is to move to a platform like a financial markets platform where people can buy and sell their shares and this kind of stuff. So we started doing that in this day and age. That’ll be a blockchain based thing. So we started working on that and then pretty soon realized that actually people don’t want to buy and sell shares of startups. Yes, if you’re just pre-IPO, you can do a Forge Global kind of thing. but the random stuff that angels invest in there’s no market there but one of the first family offices we were we approached for funding for this new thing said you know we’re not really interested in doing startups but you know we have a lot of real estate could we use your platform to sort of syndicate and raise you know get liquidity for real estate so I said I hadn’t thought about that, but now that you mention it, I do have a little bit of background on real estate. So when you think about that, I went off and realized that, hey, actually, that’s a very interesting universe because real estate has a very – it’s the world’s largest asset class, has a big liquidity issue. I mean PropTech which as I invented in the 80s has now finally become a bit of a thing but the real estate industry is still way behind the times and so here was a potential to provide liquidity so we started this so we took this thing we were doing at Gust spun it out as a standalone company called USREM the US real estate market and created a platform for limited partners like just in like in venture funds limited partners in real estate funds to buy and sell their interests in this commercial real estate. And it turned out to be a really interesting play. We now have about $3 billion of property signed to the platform, 2,500 LPs. have become a very interesting play and it turns out that when you actually have a platform you don’t need tokenization per se I mean they’ll obviously get there eventually because that’s the way the whole world is heading but the problem is everybody was trying to do tokenization first and use that to build liquidity and they got to kind of have that have the platform we’re doing the real market building liquidity and then you can tokenize it so anyway so we now have a great platform called us rem and so since all of this is additive you know i’m the you know full-time ceo of us rem i’m the executive chairman still august as an investor i was the lead investor in an ai company called thinkable ai which is doing an amazing stuff in the in the film generation space not the the technical rendering of images. But before that, how do you develop your script? How do you cast it? How do you do all that kind of stuff? So it basically has used AI for the entire film production process, putting, you know, entire studio down into a one or two person operation. So that’s a lot of fun. And then I was the lead investor and chairman of the board of a company called Book It and Go, which is using AI for the travel industry. deal inclusive with the world with the largest hotel owners association among other things and they have got a back-end API that will let your agents or whatever go out and automatically book travel and stuff all this is added up so basically today here we are you know many years since I started this entrepreneurial stuff I’m full-time running U.S. Rem the U.S. real estate market executive chairman of Gus chairman of Book and Go chairman of Think of LAI and Plot.com I’m signed with Wiley for my third book called The Real Estate Investing Bible that’ll be out in 2027 and I continue to lecture and then along the way I helped to found something called Singularity University which was a guy named Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called The Singularity Is Near so I’ve been doing this future AI technology stuff since 2008 actually Ray and I just recently did an event at the 92nd Street Y Discussing AI and where all this future stuff is going. So I’m the founding track chair for finance, entrepreneurship and economics, a singularity university. And so I’ve been doing a lot of that stuff as well. So all this leads to a very crazy, overly committed that I’m having a lot of fun doing hopefully creating interesting and good things haven’t taken a vacation in a decade because I’m just having so much fun doing what I’m doing and hope to be around for I figure I got another you know 50 60 working years left in me although Ray is convinced that we’re going to hit escape velocity on human longevity by 2032 which would mean if you can make another six or seven years you can effectively live forever or at least live in a box forever or something so we’ll see where that goes But that’s the backstory.
Brian Bell (00:37:36): That’s amazing. What an amazing journey. And there’s so many things I want to dive into. I mean, just the singularity thread alone could be another three hours. I mean, I read Ray’s book 20 years ago on a plane when I was living in New York, actually. It just had a profound impact on me. You know, kind of his vision of the future and how accurate he had been.
David S. Rose (00:37:55): Ray is an absolute visionary. He came out with his first book called The Age of Thinking Machines in 1999. 9 and that was all about how you will eventually have artificial intelligence which in 1989 the idea when a computer could barely count 2 and 2 the idea that it could think was insane in 99 he comes out with a second book called The Age of Spiritual Machines saying okay yeah not only are we going to have computers machines that think, but they’re going to think so much that they’ll think anything like a human can think, including being effectively spiritual or conscious. Both of these books, people in A, they sort of didn’t think without a trace, but they were picked up mostly by the science press and people like us who were sort of ahead of the time.
Brian Bell (00:38:37): Some of the predictions even in the 89 book, you know, about the internet where they sounded crazy because he said, everybody’s going to be connected. And at that point, there was, you know, maybe tens of thousands of nodes on the internet. So like, this is absolutely crazy.
David S. Rose (00:38:52): One of my friends and early co-investors is a guy named Nicholas Negroponte, who founded the MIT Media Lab. Nicholas was fond of saying that when the internet started, he knew everybody on the internet. He personally was friends with every single person on the internet. because of course back then there were about eight people on the internet connecting you know MIT and Stanford and whatever so anyway so his second book about 99 was the age of spiritual machines and then his third book comes out and so the first one he He doubled down on his predictions. His third book was the one you’ve read in 05 or 06 called The Singularity Is Near saying, okay, not only are we going to have, you know, AI and not only am I keeping to my projections that you’ll have that by about 2029, not only And that is incomprehensible for most people because our human brains are wired to think linearly. You either it’s a straight flat line or it’s a line with a slope that’s going up. But in reality, technology is growing exponentially. And that means that, you know, double, double, double, double. One of Bray’s great illustrations is that if you go up one step for every step forward and you do it linearly you go out forward 30 steps you go up 30 steps and at the end of 30 steps you’re 30 steps up but if you do it exponentially you know 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 you go out 30 steps and you’re not up 30 steps you’re up 1 billion steps that’s the difference and we can’t conceive of that and so In the early days of Singularity U, it was all about, you know, the only people who were thinking in exponentials, you know, Ralph Merkle, who invented public key encryption and been served with the Internet and credible, credible faculty. We’re all talking about this exponential stuff. And so, you know, now Now people are finally realizing, hey, wait a minute, you know, the version of ChatGPT that was released this week is, you know, twice as what it was, you know, the week before. So it’s gone into hyper acceleration. So Ray, in his book, The Singularity Is Near, as you know, said, okay, well, what this means is you’re going to keep advancing at this insane pace because it’s not going to stop. And you can take this back to the beginning of recorded history. You can take this back to the formation of the Earth. And actually, I did a TED Talk, TEDx Talk, The last spring, which people can check online, was really good about tracing the evolution of technology from, you know, fire to, you know, the singularity. And so he said, if you just project forward where the inevitable where this goes, I mean, you’re going to have machines that can think soon. Super Intelligent Machines that have reached AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, by 2029, right? 2030, in the next two or three years. But what happens when you now have computers developing computers and it goes at this warp, warp, warp speed straight up? The only logical extension of that, he says, is that computers and humans will somehow merge. Either you will live forever outside of your corporeal body, or who the hell knows what, right? And the one thing we know about when that’s going to happen is we’re not going to have a clue what that means. And nobody forget science fiction. Nobody can even imagine with our imaginations today what that will be. And that’s why they call it the Venter Rosner, the technological singularity. And so when this book came out in, you know, 05 or 06, you know, there were three reactions. One group said, well, that’s ridiculous. Human exceptionalism computers are just big calculators and so you know not gonna happen forget those guys the second group said okay your historical analysis is accurate your projections are accurate as far as they go but what you’re not taking into account is that we as a society are not that good before we get to your mythical singularity you’re gonna have some guys gonna bring a suitcase nuke and blow up the world and a giant electron magnet pulse will take out all the technology you’re gonna have a plague that’s gonna take over the entire world you know we’re not gonna get there so we’re
Brian Bell (00:42:50): There’s some filter ahead of us, basically, yeah.
David S. Rose (00:42:54): But the third group, who was slightly more optimistic than the second group, said, okay, assuming that we’ll stay a half a step ahead of the bad guys and the plagues, and we’re going to control ourselves and not blow up the world, that third group said, okay, if the similarity is coming, what do we do about it? And so they got together, and this was Google, NASA, Cisco, Nokia, A bunch of individuals and VCs, you know, me, a few other folks. And with Ray and Peter Diamandis, who created the XPRIZE Foundation, created some whole Singularity University, which was the first, you know, effectively think tank about this XPRIZE. exponentially growing technology, looking at it in, you know, our first class was in 2009, since 17 years ago now, saying, hey, this stuff is coming. And the idea was to identify the leading future visionary entrepreneurs and stuff around the world, Bring them to Silicon Valley, give them an intensive 10-week postgraduate program with the leading lights of the industry, and then set them out to solve humanity’s grand challenges so that we could get to the singularity. And it turned out that it was amazing. and that grew exponentially. I think the first year they had like, you know, 500 applicants for 40 places. And the next year they had a thousand and then 2000. And then, you know, so by the time you got to the year four, they had like three or 4000 applicants for 80 places. It was a remarkable, the average, the demographics, the third year, the demographics, I recall, average age was 35, the average person who attended, we had people from 35 countries out of the 80 people who were there, the average person had started
Brian Bell (00:44:33): I did apply, actually, but I had no experience, so I didn’t get in. I was an applicant back in 2009 or 10.
David S. Rose (00:44:42): Let me quickly, do not feel bad because this was more selective by two orders of magnitude than Stanford or You know, whatever, right? I mean, it was an absolutely incredible, incredible group. And so, and I was the founding director for finance, entrepreneurship, and economics, which I taught single-handedly for three years. And then after three years, it was so successful that as OpenAI has just done, it has started as a not-for-profit, but they ended up switching it as OpenAI is doing into a for-profit and they got venture funding and moved forward with it. For-profit AI. effectively so I mean I’m still involved as an advisor and you know an equity holder there but I haven’t been day to day involved for a number of years Eric Reese took over for me for the next year the entrepreneurship program and stuff
Brian Bell (00:45:28): Oh, nice. Eric’s been on the podcast, actually. He’s publishing a new book. He’s coming back on in the next month to discuss his new book.
David S. Rose (00:45:34): Yeah, I know. I’m actually on the podcast with him as well. We’re doing one for good this week. Oh, fun. We’ll talk about it. So anyway, it’s been a fascinating life looking at AI and having the background for all of this. It’s like a lobster being boiled, starting in cold water, right? Having the background of starting. I mean, I took typing in high school where I learned to type.
Brian Bell (00:45:54): I did too I took it in middle school and high school yeah I remember that and at least it was on computers it wasn’t on typewriters but I did take typing I’m guessing they still teach that right
David S. Rose (00:46:05): You know they don’t know how to do it keyboard skills right which is which is something else so I mean I can touch I can type faster than I talk and I talk pretty fast so the you know seeing here in 2026 where things are going where AI is taking us where technology is taking us is just the most eye-opening fascinating it’s like Magellan going around the world
Brian Bell (00:46:25): How do you how do you think it impacts us as angel investors and VCs like you know the singularity because as of right now it’s it’s a positive impact right there’s more startups than ever they’re able to get traction more than ever but like kind of five or ten years out as we approach the singularity what do you what do you think happens
David S. Rose (00:46:41): Well, I think it gets to be very interesting, right? Because a good part of the whole angel VC world is all about the economic growth over time. And with the compression of time that you’re seeing, it’s going to be in the availability. You can spin up an entire team. It’s not going to require the intensive capital to do whatever. So capital will be available. Times will be sort of short. It’s going to be a very different dynamic. And I think that you’re going to see everything morph. Angels are great because they’re nimble and they’re willing to take risks and so on and so forth. And I think that they’re going to move into a different kind of support mechanism. Realistically, nobody can predict. At this point, things are moving so fast. I don’t think anybody can predict 10 years out. Remember, if the singularity is happening in 2045 and we’re now at, you know, 2026.
Brian Bell (00:47:32): At the latest, I mean, you could argue, I mean, if you listen to the Moonshots podcast guys, which you all know those guys personally, you know, they’re like, they’re saying we’re like right now, we’re in the singularity right now.
David S. Rose (00:47:44): I mean, Ray and I talked about this in June at the Y. I mean, what Ray has in mind for the singularity is not just like supercomputing. I mean, it’s really, I mean, he really sees something you can envision, which is computers and humans really merging. And that’s not where we are now. So the fact that Ray can look at this and say, okay, yeah, we’re going to have AGI in 2029.
Brian Bell (00:48:06): And you could say you have AGI now, like you could argue, I mean, we passed the Turing test and we didn’t even think about it.
David S. Rose (00:48:13): You know, the best prognostication here, I think, at least to my mind, are the guys who did the AI 2027 analysis. That was a great paper.
Brian Bell (00:48:22): Yeah, I read that one.
David S. Rose (00:48:24): Great paper. Brilliant. It’s scary as all hell because according to them, we’re are they going to be pets or food for somebody within, you know, three years or whatever. But they do a quarterly update of their forecast, which is interesting. The latest one came out last week. So their first quarterly update said, okay, we were a little bit advanced, so we’re dolling back our thing. So instead of being, you know, 2027, 20, 30, 20, 31. Latest one last week. They just went back the other direction. Okay, wait a minute. It really is picking up. So we’re pulling it back in. And it’s now like 20, 29. And so 20, 20, 29 gets you to what they, I think are calling superhuman coding, right? Where you just basically, basically, yeah. Full on AGI And from what I’ve seen, I mean, I’m doing, you know, everything is AI these days, right? And the power, people are not currently using AI If you are listening to this podcast and you are not currently using things like Claude Cowork for something really significant in what you’re doing You are missing the boat. I am telling you the time is here and now the tools are here and this stuff is beyond transformative. I mean, you’ve heard my background in this up to my ears and have been for my entire life. And I am just blown away by what this can do. And it really takes somebody who knows what technology can do to understand how big it is. PC, internet, mobile, cloud. Yeah. So I tend to agree with them, and I think the consensus is that you’ll have real, full, legitimate AGI by 2029, right? So that’s two to three years from now, which is really completely set and forget, right?
Brian Bell (00:50:03): Which means you could talk to it like a human, and it’ll just kind of do any task that you want it to do, just like a really well college-educated human could do.
David S. Rose (00:50:12): Yeah, I mean, and so what’s interesting is, you know, I had a class that I started teaching back at SU in 2006 called No More Companies, No More Jobs on the Weight of a World Without Work, which I’ve taught over the years at various places including Yale and elsewhere.
Brian Bell (00:50:27): Wow.
David S. Rose (00:50:28): And, you know, Ray and I were doing a talk at Bard University about Bard College about three or four or five years ago. And Ray does his whole, you know, future and amazing stuff. And then I did my economics thing about saying, you know, we are going to have effectively 75 percent economic unemployment. by 2030 or thereabouts, right? And people are, you know, looked at me. I almost got stoned. People were saying, you know, first question, Mr. Rose, have you no heart? Have you no soul? I’m saying, hey, I’m just a messenger. Don’t kill me. I’m just a messenger. I’m just like, yeah. But I mean, but seriously, at this point, think about what we are saying. Everybody who says, you know, well, look at all the economic projections from these guys that, you know, you’re going to have a 10% production of people’s jobs are safe because we’re going to be Hello. If what we just said is that we are going to have within two to three years technology that can do anything, literally anything better, faster and cheaper than a live person then definitionally by the laws of economics that person is economically unemployable you can say okay I’m going to pay you to do something because I want to pay you to do something or because it’s charity or because I’m electing people who will do the works progress administration right but the bottom line is the entire you know 75 percent of the population my projection somewhere between 50 and 100 percent to call 75 percent will be economically unemployable within single-digit years. And that’s something nobody is talking about because where that leads is, okay, what does that mean for society? Well, you know what? People are not being employed because technology is being employed to do the things that people were doing, which is creating value. And so you’re going to have a...
Brian Bell (00:52:17): I think what a lot of economists would say here is that there’s this lump of labor fallacy, right? I think you could, like if you say AI is going to take our jobs, right? You could like say the same thing about like, oh, immigrants are going to take our jobs, right? If we let too many immigrants in, they’ll And so like AI is actually probably an accelerant to our economy where it creates more both supply of labor, but also demand.
David S. Rose (00:52:44): But again, no, because what what everybody The fundamental difference here is that every time in the past that technology has created new jobs, the industrial revolution and the term saboteur came when the Dutch began to do automatic looms and the workers would throw their wooden shoes into the machinery to stop them to stop technology and the sabot was the You know, Luddites, Ned Ludd was destroying the mills, right? Because what happened there is the technology took care of some of the grunt work and let people go to higher level things, right? Right and but the problem is what we’re seeing with AGI is the higher level things that you could do are now being done better frankly that could only be done by people in education that’s why you needed a college education high school education then college education then graduate education right hello all of that is now being done what COVID showed us with everybody virtually everybody’s job could be done remotely sitting at home in front of your Zoom right and if your job could be done by you sitting at home it could be done by a computer who could deliver the same work in there right Right, right. And so the question is, what job will people do that computers and technology and AI and robots cannot do better, faster and cheaper? It’s not flying a plane or driving a bus or writing software or doing a marketing plan or writing a novel or making a movie. What the fudge do you think people will do? In a society in United States of America, the average IQ is 99 and the average person has no college degree. Think of it. Let that sink in. okay what is that person going to do in an era like two years from now three years from now when technology can do everything better than the you know person with a graduate degree in anything right and so well therefore but that being said this technology is being used to create value which is which is which is good but how do you pay for value different question right so what you got to do is somehow it’s like now you get back to economics definition of economics the The science of the allocation of scarce resources. Well, all of a sudden, if Peter Diamandis says you’re in a world of abundance, that constraint is off the table and you have a whole different universe. And now what you have to do, the purpose of economics, is to take the value that’s being created by the Dr. Justin Marchegiani of automation or corporate income or whatever, right? And that’s going to be applied back to something like UBI, universal basic income. So you’re going to have a society where the value that’s being created by technology enures ultimately to the benefit I’m just going to play pickleball on the court you know But some people are just going to watch movies or TV. Some people are going to want to play sports, compete in things. You know, entrepreneurs like us. I mean, I think I’m going to be creating companies or whatever the next version of a company is because that’s what I enjoy doing. Right. You know, designing AI things. And so but we will have it. I believe in this I do believe in Peter and Ray’s thesis of abundance which we will have at this glorious period with technology doing the things that we have to do allowing us ultimately to do what we want to do because I think that people are
Brian Bell (00:56:59): You’re a techno-optimist like me. I do believe in the future that we will work it out. And then, yeah, I think what you’re saying is, which I agree, is that there are things that we’ll discover as we continuously get closer and closer to our machines and our AI that we can’t even imagine right now, right? absolutely being a being a podcaster look at this like that didn’t exist 20 30
David S. Rose (00:57:21): years ago right it was like Larry King basically sorry so that’s that’s my prognostication for the future I’m looking forward to it I think I’ll be around for it and I think I will be an active participant in it well especially if your dad is
Brian Bell (00:57:33): uh you know in his 90s still writing books and starting businesses I’m sure you’ll be there too with all the medical technologies coming out in the next you know five or ten years are you following all the like the Yamanaka factors that are like in stage one and two and stuff like that for Dr. David Sinclair has some stuff for glaucoma and stuff like that you know everything
David S. Rose (00:57:54): I had my my hip replaced right so my parents both had their hips replaced when they were in their 70s or 80s and it was a big long process you were it was like a two days in the hospital surgery and then you were like you’re kind of rehabbing for
Brian Bell (00:58:07): like six months and yeah yeah
David S. Rose (00:58:09): So I have a hip replacement last June. I walked into the operating room, climbed up on the operating table at 11.30 a.m. I walked out of the hospital on my own two legs at 4.30 p.m. Wow. With a four-inch supergluid incision and zero pain. Three weeks later, I’m back. walking around I have not had one second of pain and all that surgery was performed by a robot with my great doctor guiding the robot but it was robotic surgery and it turns out that if you actually can do a 3D CAT scan and a digital twin model and a this to that and use or robotic tool to go in there, you know, so hip surgery, but it’s effectively a nothing burger. I mean, this is not, I mean, I would have my other hip replaced, you know, tomorrow. No problem. Literally, no. Admittedly, in my particular case, great surgeon, great hospital, great tools. I define the best possible outcome, but I’m here as a walking version of saying this was a three or four hour experience and a couple of weeks of using a cane steady myself and then done zero pain zero problem zero sequelae you know now I’m just waiting for them to get that for knees which is I think a few years after hips but you’re going to have technology I mean I was talking to a friend of mine who was the editor of the Journal of Oral Maxillofacial Surgery or whatever and he was saying yeah today if he was going in for oral surgery you’d use a robot right you’d do that you know and so you’re going to find whether it’s robotic surgery the already radiology right there’s no question that computers can do radiological assessments better than pathologists at this point
Brian Bell (00:59:50): But you know what’s funny about that you bring up the radiology example there’s actually more radiology and more radiologists than before AI infiltrated that profession so there’s the the what do you think of it like the Jevons paradox this
David S. Rose (01:00:03): gets back to the question of you You know, exponentials and scale and speed. And there’s a saying that, you know, everything takes, you know, far longer to happen than you thought it would. But when it happens, the impact is much, much larger than you thought it would be, right?
Brian Bell (01:00:18): Well, we totally overestimate in a year, but we underestimate in like 10 years, right?
David S. Rose (01:00:23): Yeah, you know, so what you see now, now that we are heading up this exponential curve, this stuff is moving faster and faster and faster. And you can’t look at where things are today and extrapolate from that because it’s this exponential curve. And so we, you know, are we going to you know there are some things you know food replication teleportation light travel those are things that are probably still beyond our understanding of physics and you know you’re not going to be able to get to right but you know Ralph Merkel who was my co-faculty member at Singularity U is doing stuff with desktop nano fabrication that is The progress that’s being made across the board on literally everything these days is and it’s all, you know, building and building and building on itself.
Brian Bell (01:01:11): Yeah, it’s recursive self-improvement, right? And the big AI labs are doing that as well. What do you think it is about entrepreneurship that keeps pulling you back towards that because you’ve been on the investor side of the table as well. And then you kind of, you know, throughout your story, you kind of keep going back to the entrepreneur side. What is that?
David S. Rose (01:01:30): Well Benjamin Franklin wrote his own epitaph for his tombstone and it said here lies Benjamin Franklin not statesman not political person here lies Benjamin Franklin printer he thought of himself first and foremost as an entrepreneurial businessman as a printer right And everything else was on the side, the being wise, writing a declaration and so on and so forth, right? So I think of myself here as David S. Rowe’s entrepreneur. So I am an entrepreneur first and foremost, and everything else sort of comes in and out and around and follows that. So it’s not a question of ever having left I mean it’s that’s so baked into my DNA and so then the question what is an entrepreneur which over time changes right as you’re going to have you know in my taxonomy when I when I talk about the future of work and where this goes and effectively jobs get lost in the same reverse order that they came in so the order they came in so for example the first job for resource extraction right I mean hunting and fishing and pulling things out of you know growing food and so on And so, you know, and then you had manufacturing to transmogrify it into something else and then transportation to get it somewhere and then retail. And then, you know, and so all of a sudden, you know, resource coal miners and transportation, autonomous cars and trains and planes and, you know, all the retail stores, all this stuff, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. is dropping off and so where I think the future world gets rebuilt in my taxonomy of where things go is I think entrepreneurs are like cockroaches you can’t kill us we are designed definitionally entrepreneurs are all about Taking whatever you have in front of you and making something out of it, right? So if there was the world changes, great. Whatever the world looks like today, that’s what I’m going to use and I’m going to go do it. So the percentage of natural-born entrepreneurs in society, I believe, is about 1%. You know, my numbers are anecdotal, but they are, I think, pretty accurate. So about 1% of the population is entrepreneurial. And as long as people live, there will be stuff for them to do. They can be social entrepreneurs, business entrepreneurs. Whenever we go to a post-economic abundance world, they’ll find something else to be an entrepreneur about, right? But then, at least for now, they typically require other people to help get their vision instantiated, which that number is shrinking and shrinking with technology. But let’s call those STEM people, all the people who work for SpaceX and, you know, so-and-so, right? So you have, you know, STEM, creative, you know, folks as the next level. And what percentage of them are playing at a high enough level to be in these startups? 1% entrepreneurs. So double that, double it again, four, double it again. So, you know, eight doublings, right? So maybe you have 8%, right, of the population are capable of being these STEM creative types working in these startups. What comes next? Well, what What you’re seeing is we started this starting about 20 years ago and then growing amazing platforms designed to let everybody flower to their you know to do things that you couldn’t do by yourself right you know one person is not going to set up their own taxi service but give them uber and they can now be as you saw in the startup of one from reed hoffman right you can be your own your own company but leveraging the platform like uber to do it and that works for etsy if you’re doing handcrafts or airbnb if you’re Renting out your spare bedroom or you know Upwork if you’re doing spreadsheet design or whatever right so you have a group that I call entrepreneurial personal producers they’re using these platforms and they are bringing personal skills that are viable today that still includes the plumber fixing your sink that may not be around you know in for four or five years when robots can do that for you. But for now, you know, whether you’re a hairstylist or whatever, you can add value. And those personal entrepreneurial personal producers who are using these platforms to manage their billing and pay their taxes and do their stuff, how many of them are there? I don’t know, double the STEM creative guys. So there were eight, so that’s called 16. All right, so you have 16% of entrepreneurial producers and 8% of the STEM and creative types and the 1% entrepreneurs and that equals about 25% what’s the next layer after the entrepreneur person producers and so therefore you get you know that’s it so I think you end up that’s how I get to 75% unemployment right I think you add I think you end up at something that smells like 75% economic unemployment right within single-digit years. I don’t think it’s two, but I don’t really think it’s nine. somewhere in that universe. And we therefore had better figure out the whole, you know, UBI taxation, robotic, societal, economic infrastructure.
Brian Bell (01:06:23): But again, like we’ll have super intelligent AI to help us figure it out, right? We’ll just ask our AI and say, hey, what should we do here?
David S. Rose (01:06:31): The scariest thing about the whole AI 2027 piece was that you have, you know, robots, you know, AI deciding what’s better for humanity.
Brian Bell (01:06:39): Yeah.
David S. Rose (01:06:39): You know, open the odd bay doors. I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that one.
Brian Bell (01:06:44): That’s funny. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about angel investing before we wrap up here. You’ve probably seen thousands and thousands of pitches. What are some characteristics of startups and founders that make you lean in and just want to sign this safe for the convertible note right away?
David S. Rose (01:06:58): Well, there are three core things, right? And so basically every investor has a thesis and you have to, you wouldn’t be an investor if you didn’t think you could make money doing this and you think you can make money doing this for a reason or set of reasons because you have an approach that if I do that, then I’ll make money. And that’s your thesis, right? You might know an industry, you might feel you can spot them or whatever it is, but all investors effectively share three theses in common the three basics in my experience it stacks up like this the first one is integrity which sounds like it’s preaching or it’s bullshit or it’s something you you learn in your religious service but no for speaking as an angel investor integrity is absolutely the number one thing because startups are making a startup founder is making a decision every minute on everything right and I have to believe that they are making that everyone I can’t afford to bet my cash on that so that’s a stopper integrity is number Number one. Number two, you know, have been an entrepreneur long enough to know what it takes to get in there, and that’s passion. You better have a passion for what you’re doing because otherwise you’re an operator, you’re a functionary, and you might be Tim Cook, which is great for getting Apple to a trillion dollars, but you’re not Steve Jobs. If you want to be Steve Jobs, you better have Steve Jobs’ passion. And even Bill Gates, who is not known as a passionate person, it’s an internal kind of passion, but you have to have that total drive to to do it. And so, you know, the question is, you know, where do you go beyond that? With those in place, You have the kinds of skills, the domain expertise, the leadership ability. One of the things that we, the biggest single disconnect between investors and founders is I say, I’m looking for traction. And a founder says, well, traction, sure. I’ve got, you know, I filed for these patents and I’ve got built this great team. And I look at all the people on my wait list for doing this. And you know what? As far as investors are concerned, that ain’t traction. There is this, you know, I think you know you use that word I don’t think it means what you think it means as far as investors are concerned traction is something outside the control of the founder outside the founder’s control that shows that they have created economic value for someone else and that that value is growing traction is sort of the the Big thing, right? And the business itself has to be scalable. The person and the entrepreneur, integrity and passion and skills, the ability for the business, the core fundamental, what is the business? That’s why restaurants aren’t scalable, right? You need a chef, but it’s going to do a restaurant. You want to do two restaurants, you need two chefs, right? A scalable business gets better as it gets bigger. So it’s got to be scalable. And then you have to have traction. So you have those three things, and that at least gets you in the front door. And then it’s a question of what’s my personal thesis? I don’t invest in fashion, but I do invest in prop tech. You know, I don’t invest in medical devices. I don’t know anything about it, but I do invest in SaaS platforms. So you pass those first three gating things, which everybody looks at. And then the question is, is it a match for you know for what I am looking to do with my thesis and if the answer is yes if you pass those three you know gating factors and then you’re in my wheelhouse for the things I want to invest in at that point the conversation flips and it’s now I want you to sell me I really need to do this deal because how can I be an angel investor if there’s nothing for me to angel invest in right so therefore you pass my three things you’re in my wheelhouse and great let’s make this work please pitch me sell me you know I want you to tell me right so so then I you want me to get really really excited about what you’re doing and then after I then I make the internal decision yes I’m gonna like this I love this that’s my thing I’m gonna invest in this company if ellipses dot dot dot right and then you go to the other side of the thing and now it’s sort of the downside which is the diligence I’m doing your reference checks and your customer checks and your this and that all that kind of stuff and you got to get through the gauntlet but that’s after I’ve made the decision intellectual emotional decision to invest and then you got to pass through all the diligence factors before you actually get the checker
Brian Bell (01:11:20): Right well this has been the easiest podcast I’ve ever recorded I could have talked to you all day we could have just literally it could have been my whole work day just eight hours talking to David really enjoyed it we’ll have to have you come back on when you when you publish your the new edition of your book and and the upcoming book as well I really appreciate you taking the time where can folks find
David S. Rose (01:11:36): you online and find your books com is my personal site books are available anywhere fine books are sold Amazon Barnes & Noble new ones might actually be in bookstores and in in a couple of weeks. And if you’re interested, if you’re a founder, a startup founder, you should absolutely check out gust.com, G-U-S-T.com, all kinds of great things there for founders. If you are an angel investor and you should definitely check out your local angel group because they have a lot of things that they can really support you with. And if you’re in an angel group, you know if they’re not using gust they should certainly check out gust on the angel side of it you know the my my current venture is the US real estate market USREM securities.com which is doing cool stuff if you’re interested in seeing AI applied to film
David S. Rose (01:12:21): Amazing, David. Thank you so much for coming on.
David S. Rose (01:12:23): My pleasure. Thanks a lot.
