Jake Paul & The Chainsmokers: Turning Fame into Funds, Jake Enters Politics? & Venture Bubble Signs

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

The episode features two deep-dive conversations regarding the transition from massive cultural fame to institutional-grade business ownersh

Key takeaways

• Jake Paul views attention as the most valuable modern currency for building business ecosystems.
• Paul identifies a massive opportunity in MMA by targeting the UFC's failure to pay fighters competitive revenue shares.

Main topics

• Attention Economy
• Professional Boxing and MMA disruption

Notable quotes

I was doing it before it was cool. I was the wave.

Conclusion

The episode provides a blueprint for how creators can successfully piv

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:01) Jake Paul has got to be the dumbest, cockiest, stupidest, most egotistical person in the social media sphere. Speaker 8 (0:08) Mr. President, what an honor. That's what makes him so damn successful. The world has shifted to attention being one of the most valuable currencies. Speaker 1 (0:19) He is the multi-talented superstar who bridged the gap between social media and professional boxing. He is a boxer. A content creator, an entrepreneur, a philanthropist. I Speaker 8 (0:32) have two main goals. Definitely becoming world champion. And I want to exit a company for $1 billion. I never was like social media is the new wave. I was the wave. Speaker 3 (0:45) Please welcome Jake Speaker 4 (0:47) Paul. Speaker 5 (0:58) Sup man. What's Speaker 8 (0:59) up? How Speaker 5 (1:00) you doing? Good. Speaker 8 (1:00) Hey, don't fall asleep when I say all you say in all All! Let's go. Come on, guys. We're at the summit. Get that energy up. Speaker 5 (1:11) Jake, let's actually start where I think Nick and Clavicular ended, which is... In this weird way, all of you guys have grown up in this social media generation. And you're maybe at the tail end of it. You're almost 30 now. Speaker 5 (1:28) Talk to us about your journey, because your journey started very similar to a lot of these guys, which is you're there, you started Vine at the time, so it wasn't even really TikTok and YouTube, and then this success begets success, and then just walk us through what that does to you as an individual trying to find your way in the world. Speaker 8 (1:49) Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I don't remember a time where like I wasn't already getting followers and people following me and coming up to me since I was super young. And I think. Speaker 8 (2:04) For me personally, I was doing it before it was cool and because it was a passion. I think a lot of people now are trying to become influencers and trying to figure it out and seeing if they can go viral and create a team and build businesses around them because it's the cool thing to do and it seems like the best thing to do. But I think the people that authentically are actually entertaining and have a take and are filling a niche in the entertainment space and specifically on social media are the ones that succeed. I was doing it because I love doing it. And I was- What did you love about it when you first started? I loved creating. I loved having a story and an idea in my mind and seeing it come to life and to be able to put it out there into the world and to make people laugh, to change their lives, to maybe make their day a little bit better. People go through hard times and all these things on a daily basis. So if I could inspire someone in my messages every single day in my vlogs, I would say, make sure you're working hard. Make sure you're smiling. Make sure you're chasing your dreams. And I think those simple reminders on a daily basis are why I was able to grow a really big audience. Does Speaker 5 (3:21) the pressure change your approach to the business as you started to become more and more successful? There's millions of people. And then in this weird way. the platform underneath you goes away. And so how did that change when you're like, oh my God, I have to restart all over again. This business that I'd invested so much time in isn't there anymore. This is Vine specifically. Yeah, Speaker 8 (3:40) I wasn't too worried about it. So it's actually a funny story and it's a good lesson for business owners, but we told the top 20 Viners told Vine. Hey, you have to start paying us. Otherwise, we're going to stop posting on here because they weren't paying us. And we knew we were getting ripped off. We were bringing in all of the content, all of the views, all of the fans. And we were like, hey, we need a million dollars. They went back to Twitter and they were like, hey, they want a million dollars. They came back and were like, yeah, we could pay you the million dollars. A million each or a million a month? Exactly. They said, we'll pay you a million. How do you guys want to divide it between you 20? And we were like, no, we need a million dollars each per year. And they said, no, we all stopped posting on the platform, transitioned to posting on Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat. And within a couple of months, the vine died out. Speaker 5 (4:31) Tell us about the evolution now of streaming and popularity and attention. How has it changed from when you started this 15 years ago? And what do you think happens to society and these generations of young men and women who now really aspire to be famous and have, you know, the things that you've built, which we'll talk about in a second. But what happens like sociologically to these people? Speaker 8 (4:54) Yeah, you know, it's a weird world to grow up in. And I don't think we have the answer to that of how, you know, the iPad kid generation. grows up and they're able to access so many more things than we ever even able, you know, were able to do. I still was in an era where I had to go knock on the door of my friend's house to go hang out with them. And so I got the technology, but also the analog real life. And so I have that balance, but I don't know what it looks like. I think there's a lot of, you know, not good streaming content out there and people doing things for clickbait for views just to generate attention and I used to do that when I when I was a kid, you know because I wanted to make it and I wanted to You know build a business and I wanted to build a following and so I call it the YouTuber disease that people can fall into a lot of times where they're just saying absurd things to generate more press and clicks on a daily basis. Speaker 5 (5:58) Should YouTube take more responsibility in filtering some of this stuff and actually having more of a, maybe a moral view on what the spectrum of things is that they should support? Speaker 8 (6:08) Well, I think they're just one platform. And I think the problem is, and it's very similar to the AI race that's happening. between the United States, Russia, China, is if YouTube stops it, then their viewership and people going to their platform go down. And then Twitch, Kik, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, whatever platform is still going up. So if they don't come together to solve the problem, then I don't think the problem will be solved. Speaker 5 (6:39) You've had to evolve from making content and you've started to be, I mean, a very successful... businessmen. Speaker 5 (6:48) The evolution of content creator tends to be you go from content creator you during sponsorships Maybe you start to roll your own products and then ideally if there's cash flow then you can start to actually own assets Give us your version of that how it happened for you. Speaker 8 (7:01) Yeah, so I'm an entrepreneur at heart And so even before I blew up on on YouTube I went to SF in the valley and fell in love with startups and seeing all of these big companies i got to go to google twitter uber i saw you know people and hacker houses building all of these insane apps and that's when i started angel investing and i started my own startup at the time which was a social media label and so i always saw vision in people and the potential in people and so i'd find talent sign them to my company team 10 and help them blow up and I created 20 or more you know people with millions and millions of followers and revolutionized like the content house and that was my first startup that I did and so I've always been in the business of startups investing and being in the valley since I was a young kid one Speaker 5 (7:58) of the things that happened at one point is you had a you started boxing And you had this incredible moment with Mike Tyson. I think it was 108 million people watched. 138. 138 million people watched on Netflix. Where did boxing come in? Why did you feel like you had to put your body at risk, I guess, maybe? And was it because you were passionate about the sport? Or was it that you felt like that was an unexploited way in which you could continue to build? Awareness and attention. Speaker 8 (8:33) Yeah, so it started off because these two brothers from the UK were talking to me and my brother and we were like, yo, let's just glove up and settle this and I actually we signed a contract to fight them in like three months it was and I was like I'm not gonna lose and I went to a professional boxing gym the next day and it was very grueling but I grew up as an athlete in Ohio and just started training and and within that three month period got to be pretty good went into Manchester to fight them enemy territory and got a knockout and that was one of the greatest feelings in my life it felt very accomplished and it was very fun and I don't know if it's like a little sadistic but it was like cool getting punched in the face and beating someone up Speaker 8 (9:25) And from that moment on, it was the biggest pay-per-view in amateur boxing ever. And I saw the numbers. I loved it. And I wanted to double down and become a professional boxer. And I took it very seriously. Moved out of Los Angeles to go and train in a secluded area in Puerto Rico where there's less distractions. And knew that I could take over the sport of boxing because... And saw the vision because most boxers build their record up they fight easy fighters Then all of a sudden the first time you hear about a boxer is when they're 20 and 0 But I had this built-in audience of a hundred million followers that followed along through every fight and that I could also grow and build fighters Underneath me similar to my original startup team 10 where it was influencers So I just replicated that model and now we have 400 fighters boxing MMA under MVP and we're going after Dana White, Sufa boxing and the UFC. Tell Speaker 5 (10:30) us about that. Where is UFC failing? Why is there an opportunity to rebuild MMA? Speaker 8 (10:37) Yeah, so first and foremost is they don't put fighters first. So they pay their fighters. roughly 15 % of their total revenue, which in other professional sports leagues, it's 50%, five zero. And so the fighters are pissed. They want to leave. They want to go box. They want to go find to make money somewhere else. Sean O'Malley got paid 600K on the White House card. And so because of that, the big fights aren't happening. They're not willing to pay for the big fights and people don't want to risk it. They're not putting on the fights that fans want to see. They're having trouble creating... So very Speaker 5 (11:13) classic, your margin, my opportunity, kind of an opportunity. Speaker 8 (11:17) Exactly. You Speaker 5 (11:17) attract the talent because you're just willing to give them a very significant part of the gate and the ref share and all of that stuff. Speaker 8 (11:23) Exactly. And letting them have sponsorships and not shelving them. There's a lot of drama between the fighters and a lot of them want to move into boxing as well. And so in every industry, there's a Coke and a Pepsi and a Nike and an Adidas. And never before has it been possible to compete with the UFC until my company came into the fold. And we just merged with PFL. And it's going to be a very exciting next couple of years. Speaker 5 (11:51) And when did you start angel investing? Because you're an investor in OpenAI, Cognition, SpaceX. I mean, it's an incredible portfolio. How did that start? Speaker 8 (11:59) So I started angel investing when I was 18 years old after I went to the Valley, made a ton of mistakes and then formalized a fund. Jeff is your partner. Yeah, Jeff Wu. Jeff Wu. And so we believe that we're in the attention economy and that capital is a commodity. And I think this is part of, you know, Elon buying Twitter is, you know, when you make a new account on Twitter, the first suggested follow is Elon. pumping all of his companies through that, very smart obviously, but bringing attention to a company and to a cap table is something that we've found to be extremely valuable and something that founders need and want. Speaker 5 (12:41) Jake, what's the downside of an attention economy? Like, what is the downside when popularity is how things first get arbitrated? Speaker 8 (12:50) Yeah, no, I think the... Speaker 8 (12:53) The problem is if people forget to build great things and our focus on just building something to gain attention and to have eyeballs and to make it seem like they're doing something big. That's where there can be downside and I think the Uh... Speaker 8 (13:18) Inauthenticity that can come with trying to gain views is a massive problem I see in journalism, in reporting, and in people making content online. A lot of times there's these crazy hot takes that people are coming up with because they know that it's going to garner a lot of views and make them money. At the end of the day, they're using that attention to try and make money. Money runs the world. So in an attention economy, the inauthenticity will come through and it's not a good Speaker 5 (13:52) thing. So your attention mechanism, meaning the followers you have, the reach that you have, is a differentiator when you're investing in these businesses at some level. Because for some of these businesses, you can help them cut through the noise and generate a level of awareness that they wouldn't otherwise get. Speaker 8 (14:10) Correct, but also... my years of experience in marketing and branding behind the scenes, we help with a lot of that, specifically with OpenAI Sora. I actually was the one that told them like, hey, this could be a good idea for you to launch a social media app and was involved in the whole process of building out the app. Really? Yeah, Speaker 1 (14:34) and Speaker 8 (14:34) then granted them my NIL to, you know. People can make videos with it. Name interest likeness. Yes. Speaker 5 (14:43) You just raised $100 million for that fund. You call it the anti-fund. So is this, you're going to compete more aggressively with the traditional VCs or do you want to be sort of a compliment? How do you see this evolve? Speaker 8 (14:55) No, like that's what I hate about this like celebrity VC thing. That's, it's just annoying. Like if a lawyer is an investor,