Venture Everywhere Podcast: Eric Cantor with Jenny Fielding
Eric Cantor, Co-Founder and CEO of Vincent, chats with Jenny Fielding, Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 88: Alts with Vincent.
In episode 88 of Venture Everywhere, host Jenny Fielding, co-founder and Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, chats with Eric Cantor, co-founder of Vincent — a platform that helps investors navigate alternative assets through education, media, and tools. Eric shares his journey from building one of the first internet service providers to launching mobile money initiatives in Uganda and multiple fintech ventures. He also discusses how Vincent is opening up access to private market opportunities that were once reserved for institutions, empowering everyday investors to confidently explore alternatives.
In this episode, you will hear:
Vincent’s media-first strategy (newsletters, podcasts, investor events) to build trust and literacy.
Operational hurdles of serving small-ticket investors due to compliance costs.
Breaking down accreditation barriers and easing investor entry into alternative assets.
Designing accessible, packaged investment options that fit into everyday portfolios.
Exploring how AI can enhance both investment products and investor decision-making.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:34 Jenny: Hi, welcome to Venture Everywhere, where we speak with founders in our portfolio and beyond. So today I'm very excited to welcome Eric Cantor, the founder of Vincent. And Eric and I have a great story that we'll dive into, but I'll embarrass him for a moment.
00:00:52 Jenny: We go way, way back, Eric. And I think what's interesting about our friendship is that although we know each other from childhood, I actually didn't really become good friends until I think we both got lit up by tech, which is really interesting.
00:01:08 Jenny: I consider you a thought partner in a lot of things that I'm up to. And I think that's a good segue, in a way, into Vincent, because the way that I think about Vincent, the company that you're running, it’s a thought partner for institutional investors who want to access alternatives.
00:01:29 Jenny: And I think the education platform that you've built, the content, and obviously the access is really interesting. So that's my long winded way to say welcome to the podcast.
00:01:39 Eric: Thank you. I'm glad we get to hang out.
00:01:42 Jenny: So take us back to early days of starting a company in tech. And I think one of the interesting things about you is you actually have been ahead of the curve in many ways. And sometimes as we know, being ahead of the curve can be too ahead. But you hit your first one pretty much on the head. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about that first business.
00:02:03 Eric: For sure. So Vincent is my fifth company, tech company, of different stripes. And I really just gravitated towards things that I felt were exciting, interesting. Sometimes I got lucky because those things were in the news, in the popular culture.
00:02:17 Eric: Obviously the first one, as you mentioned, being just helping businesses get on the internet and the wave one of internet 1.0 when people were trying to figure out what's a DNS, how do I register domain name, what's a website consist of.
00:02:30 Eric: And at that point, the tools were very basic, but I gravitate towards things like that that are somewhat technical and need explanation. So that was the first company. We ended up selling that internet service provider to a company called Vario. It went public. They did a pretty clever deal.
00:02:47 Eric: Some of the financial engineering you see every day now, but it was a little bit more nuanced that a little bit more of a new set of ideas. They bought 50 private companies at a 3X multiple. And on the same day that transaction closed, they sold stock at a 6X multiple.
00:03:05 Eric: They basically just printed a hundred percent profit for themselves, for the shareholders and did an IPO, which of course is very different back in that time, they probably had less than $500 million of revenue there. It was an interesting ride.
00:03:18 Eric: We got to see what M&A is like. We got to experience venture and private market investing and public markets and private markets. And really that experience has had a pretty deep impact on me and governed a lot of the things I did next.
00:03:30 Jenny: Can you talk a little bit about the next company? Because oftentimes when you have success the first time, the second time you're like, hmm, I don't know. Sometimes you have fears about, can I do it again? Sometimes you're just very bold, maybe too bold because you think I got this. So what was it like starting some of the subsequent companies? And you can talk about one or two.
00:03:53 Eric: One thing you have to understand is that back in the day, there wasn't all of this pedagogy around starting companies. We just built stuff we thought was interesting and launched it, which frankly, I think is still the right way to do it. There wasn't accelerators and Y Combinator and books on venture and people talking about investing as that celebrity pursuit.
00:04:16 Eric: And a lot of the tools were very basic. Right now you can go Webflow and build a website and have some basic interactivity going literally an hour. Back at that time, you had to buy a bunch of servers, find a data center to host it, install operating systems. Actually know people that even understood how a lot of this stuff worked.
00:04:34 Eric: So it was much more just building and grinding as opposed to this reflecting, "Oh, what does it like to start a company?" We just did stuff. And so that first company, we had the base company that sold to the public company. We also had a bunch of spin-off businesses.
00:04:49 Eric: One of which was doing domain name analysis and sales. One of which was installing DSL for people. We had a security company, a web design company. One more to do a VoIP company that's still around. So we've had this whole group of businesses.
00:05:04 Eric: Maybe I'll jump forward to my adventures in East Africa. Mobile was the next wave. And so what can you do with mobile? In my view, you can really reach and educate people who weren't on the mainstream internet, didn't even have desktop computers. And I saw a lot of potential in that.
00:05:21 Eric: Ended up in Uganda for four years building this app lab with Grameen and funded by Google to try to help just get information out to that last mile.
00:05:30 Jenny: I can't believe that was four years that you were there. Wow.
00:05:33 Eric: It went fast. A lot of things happened. We had some big launches. We won a couple of awards for ProDev at the Mobile World Congress. We definitely had some total fails as well.
00:05:44 Eric: But going into an environment like that and you think a lot and then you realize the first day you don't know anything and trying to figure out how to operate in a different culture was definitely a lot more challenging than just my first chapter, just selling, walking up and down K Street, trying to get businesses to buy a product that I knew they needed and I knew more about than they did. So it's just a question of, are you going to do it with me or the next kid that comes in wearing a suit that barely fits him?
00:06:09 Jenny: So tell us a little bit about your entree into FinTech. So you're working for Grameen, which obviously microfinance. And now fast forward, and I feel like you're one of the people that have built multiple FinTech businesses. So how did you zero in on that as your area of expertise or interest?
00:06:26 Eric: So again, I was just pulling on strings that seemed relevant, interesting, and important that I thought were worthy of my time. So I was basically embedded in a telecom, MTN, the biggest telecom in Uganda. And one of my closest friends there was managing a business unit that was building mobile money.
00:06:43 Eric: What's mobile money? Everyone probably knows about it now, but at that time it was brand new and no one even heard of it. Walk up to people on the street and say, "Hey, have you heard of mobile money?" "No." "Okay. What's your phone number?" You send them $3. And then all of a sudden the light goes off. So that was a really profound product that was being rolled out.
00:06:59 Eric: So that inspired me a lot just thinking, okay, here I'm sitting here trying to get apps on people's phone to get them to download information about health and farming, but transferring value is much more profound and doing it in a way that's much more seamless, less transaction costs, less controlled. And so that got my mind spinning on FinTech.
00:07:17 Eric: When I came back full time to the U.S. which was 12 years ago now, I was pretty set on doing something in the financial tech realm. And so the first thing I was looking at was payday lending. Is there a better way to get people cash when they need it?
00:07:32 Eric: The route that I took on that might've been a little bit indirect. That problem is largely being solved. DailyPay just raised $200 million yesterday. You've seen Dave went public, so a lot of companies in space won. It's a tough business running a lending book as I've seen and learned a little bit is very challenging, but we really didn't get there on that one. So I went back to, okay, this is probably not the arena to be playing in and what I want to do next.
00:07:56 Jenny: I do remember having late night calls with you about this idea of payday lending. You were really early thinking you may not have gotten the right product in market, but you were pretty early about how do we create payday loans that are not predatory? I think there's a lot of good in this, in the outcome that people want to see, but the process is often very corrupt and not efficient.
00:08:20 Eric: It's tricky. A lot of the FinTech stuff gets into this realm, which is like, Hey, I just built this thing and I just helped a hundred people. Look, I got them capital that was their capital when they needed, in this case, early wage access. So I know you're going to get paid $3,000 on the 15th and you need $200 on the 10th to fix your car. Here you go.
00:08:39 Eric: And then on the 15th, I'm first in line to get paid back. Fair. As long as I'm not charging you a ridiculous usury rate. It's a lot of debate in regulatory places of what reasonable constitutes, but as long I'm helping you, that's great. And then you go get the venture funding and it's like, okay, how are we going to sign up the next 10,000 people this month?
00:08:58 Eric: And that's what I think leads to a lot of the pressures. That and the fact that your lending book needs to remain intact because I cannot help the hundred thousand first person if the 10,000 person is not paying me back. So now I'm forced to take some measures to do that. I think you see a similar dynamic.
00:09:17 Eric: I know we're going to jump ahead to investing, but there's a similar dynamic in investing, which is that it's hard to find great investments. So some new investment platform found five great deals and put people into them. Okay. Now let's scale up. Now we have to go find 50 and that's harder and that causes adverse selection and pits you more against the investor versus being aligned with them.
00:09:39 Eric: In the payday space, the impact stuff is definitely there. There's been great advances that have helped a ton of people, but there's always that tension between I have to grow it fast and make unlimited amounts of profit versus I need to actually provide a product that helps somebody.
00:09:57 Jenny: All right. Let's jump to Vincent. I'm excited to talk about it. And I'd love to unpack a few areas. One is this idea of accreditation and what that means, how it's evolved and why that's been a barrier to access, which is the next bucket that I'd like to talk about is just how Vincent provides access.
00:10:14 Jenny: And then finally, really around the education part. So those are the three things I'd like to talk about. But maybe just give an overview of this idea that not everyone can just go invest in an alternative asset. And why is that?
00:10:29 Eric: The path is a little windy. I think I should mention crypto is a link between the fintech payments, how are people going to move money around, access it, and then into the alternative investments? I had my crypto phase. I was pretty excited about what the technology could do again behind Bitcoin, Ethereum.
00:10:46 Eric: I was looking at building some things. Eventually realized, I'm not really a cryptographer. I'm not going to invent the next chain and there's plenty of those. But this idea of investing, a lot of people were asking me and my co-founders, “Hey, how do I invest in that? I see you're talking about this crypto thing. How do I get involved with that?”
00:11:03 Eric: And the same for venture. What you just raised is this accredited investor threshold. So many investors in this country, and accredited investors, you're basically allowed to invest in riskier things. That's based on a certain income level, currently 200,000 for an individual, 300,000 for a couple, or an asset level.
00:11:24 Eric: If you have a million dollars of investable assets, meaning not including your home, then you're quote unquote “accredited.” There's no form, there's no certification, there's no test. Probably should be a test. But then you're allowed to do these investments.
00:11:37 Eric: And by and large it's self certified as it probably needs to be because you're writing the checks, a lot of accredited investor products are 25,000 minimums, 100,000 minimums. You're probably not going to write that check if you're not quote unquote. “accredited.”
00:11:50 Eric: What we saw was that many investors, credited and not accredited, are interested in these asset classes. And as the traditional mix of investing, I guess, 60-40, you have 60% stocks, 60% bonds is less interesting to people. They want to play in these other asset classes for a number of reasons.
00:12:08 Eric: That trend has really exploded over the last five years. Anywhere you turn, you're going to see meetings at the White House about crypto or the celebrity that's been achieved by different VC firms, investing in AI companies.
00:12:20 Eric: Even the less talked about assets, real estate has had a broadening of availability, private credit, and so on and so on. Also, if you’ve been paying attention lately, you see the big asset managers, the ones that, as you mentioned, sell mostly in institutions are starting to turn their focus to smaller everyday investors.
00:12:39 Eric: Now you could be upbeat and say that's because of inclusion. We want to make these great products available so everybody can profit. You might go the other way and say this is because of fees. I know I can charge them more. I just know the capital is there. And it's probably all the above. But helping people navigate and weed through that confusing, exciting mix of opportunities and challenges is where we have really staked this business.
00:13:05 Jenny: You mentioned the White House. Do we think that the accreditation rules are going to change under this administration? Seems like they could, which would be a real boom for the industry.
00:13:18 Eric: Certainly the SEC under Trump, the SEC is the regulatory entity that focuses on investing and really came out of the Investment Act of 1933 if you want to see how old some of these codes are. I believe that to some degree crypto has end-arounded that conversation because you don't have to be an accredited investor to invest in crypto.
00:13:40 Eric: And crypto has become one of the really high octane spaces. There's a spectrum of crypto investments. Bitcoin, I would argue with a store of value asset that's similar to gold. But then as you go out the curve, there's just wild west trading opportunities, are similar to meme stocks or to prediction markets or in some sense, to gambling, right.
00:13:59 Eric: What's the difference between betting on bonk meme coin versus betting on the 49ers this weekend with taking the points. It's not really that different. So long story short, I think that a lot of what people want to do is already out there.
00:14:14 Eric: Being an accredited investor, when someone says, oh, ‘you have to invest to join our real estate project, you need to put in $50,000.” The reason not to do that is not because the law says I can't, it's because that's a pretty big commit. If I'm not an accredited investor then I have no business making that commit.
00:14:31 Eric: So I think that the accredited investor standard is unfair in the sense that it rewards wealth over sophistication. So I do think there should be a test you can take. And there's lots of talk about this, but not a final action.
00:14:44 Eric: I've seen the consensus they were creating a test that you had to pass before you could buy this token or that token. That was pretty forward thinking and others have raised this. You should be able to show your sophistication, but the reality is I don't think there's a lot of investments that aren't being made because someone is not quote unquote, “accredited.”
00:15:01 Eric: The case that people always put up is, oh, my cousin has a startup and I can buy a lottery ticket, which is obviously gambling, but I can't invest in my cousin's startup. The reality is you can. Putting aside crowdfunding and all these other innovations that we can get to that Vincent covers, most of these five or six B offerings, private raises do allow you to include up to 35 not accredited investors if you want to.
00:15:26 Eric: Most people don't cause it's a hassle and the platforms and the standards don't really accommodate it. But if you really want to invest $2,000 in your cousin's startup, there are many ways to.
00:15:35 Eric: And so this idea that there's all these everyday investors sitting out there and they just wish they could invest in their cousin's startup and they can't. I think there might be more than zero of those, but I don't think that that's really widespread.
00:15:45 Eric: I think that's talked about a lot just to demonstrate the fact that yes, the best of the best ones have been held closely by the top institutions and people, but I don't think that's because of this particular rule.
00:15:58 Jenny: So let's move on to access then. So if it's not an accreditation problem, one of the things that Vincent really solves and opens up is access to the best deals. So maybe not your brother's startup but these really interesting companies that are being built, which is very hard for the average person to access.
00:16:16 Jenny: Can you talk a little bit about the early days of Vincent, what you were trying to solve and maybe that light bulb moment that got you really excited to start your next company?
00:16:25 Eric: That's a great question. If you look at the news today, you can see this issue floating around. So I don't know if you saw this, Robinhood last week announced a number of new initiatives. One of which was they want to take SpaceX stock in private markets.
00:16:38 Eric: The most popular company, SpaceX, is, I think the last tender was at $350 billion. It's hard to access that. There is no way for somebody to come in and put a thousand dollars into that, a hundred dollars in that the way that you could into whatever Apple stock or some REIT that's listed on your app.
00:16:57 Eric: And so Robinhood said, we're going to make it. We know a lot of people want that. There are a lot of signs, whether it's some of the 40 Act funds that have been launched, the other products that have come to market in the last few years.
00:17:06 Eric: We're going to take SpaceX shares that we own, theoretically, and tokenize them, let you buy them for $2 and trade them on our marketplace. And that to me is emblematic of the way that these new products are providing more and more access.
00:17:21 Eric: Now I should caveat that what I just said: the next day – wasn't actually SpaceX, it was OpenAI. They said we're going to do SpaceX and OpenAI. OpenAI came out the next day and said, we don't authorize any of these sales. You don't own any of our stock because the companies themselves want to be very closely held in terms of who holds the stock in their cap table.
00:17:39 Eric: So there's a question of whether that product will work, but there's so many of these initiatives, whether it's Republic tokenizing some of these things. Destiny, which is a publicly traded company that holds private companies. 40 Act funds launched by Fundrise, by Cathie Wood, Sweater Ventures.
00:17:57 Eric: There's more and more of these coming and all of this is about access. All of this is saying, Hey, there's products that were not packaged. It's not as much about accredited, though that's part of it. It's more like packaged. It needs to be in my brokerage account. I need to be able to buy it at Robinhood. It needs to be liquid.
00:18:12 Eric: Most individuals cannot tolerate a company that doesn't sell for 14 years, which as we know in venture right now is the average. Many of your companies won't sell for 20 years. If you look at the last 5 or 10 IPOs, a lot of those companies are 20 years old.
00:18:27 Eric: So I need something that I can access quickly in my brokerage account. I need something that has a minimum investment that's reasonable, something I can make as part of my overall allocation. I need something that I can sell when I need to and not take a ridiculous haircut on.
00:18:42 Eric: And so all of that together has been pulling these asset managers to offer more and more of these products to the everyday investor. And I think that trend is really what's driven Vincent and what's going to continue.
00:18:54 Jenny: And I think the education part, maybe we could talk a little bit about that because I feel like that wraps back to your early days or working in Uganda or microfinance. It's not just about putting products in front of people, but it's also around education. I've learned a ton on your AIR platform, your newsletter, listening to your podcast. So talk about how that's critical to the platform that you're building.
00:19:18 Eric: So now we go back to product. The idea is to help people be the best investors they can. We've been through a few chapters of that as we've built a few different pieces that I think makes us better at it. We built a search engine, a Zillow type overlay on top of the alternative investment world that got a lot of traffic and got a lot of action.
00:19:34 Eric: But we realized that because of the thing you raised at the beginning of the conversation, because of accredit rules and 506 offerings and how you cannot solicit a lot of the deals that are the ones people want and because the products weren't packaged properly back then, that approach really wasn't getting enough people aware.
00:19:50 Eric: So a lot of it's awareness. I didn't even know that I can invest in art. Oh, have you heard of Masterworks? So making that connection.
00:19:57 Eric: Then we got to the asset management side of it and saw a lot of how that works. And really the big takeaway there is just the compliance costs of serving a small customer are immense to the point where many of the platforms you see are struggling just with their basic economics because it's so expensive to serve somebody investing a thousand dollars versus an institution investing 10 million.
00:20:18 Eric: What we're doing today is focusing on that media and education aspect. So we've got a podcast like this one where you interview thought leaders in private markets like yourself. We've got a daily newsletter on private markets to try to keep people aware of trends and insights. We try to do a lot there with just building up people's knowledge so they can make the best investments.
00:20:37 Eric: We do some research on different topics that are interesting to us. We're working now on this issue of how does venture get packaged up for everybody as well as a couple of crypto themes, because there are some really new opportunities to branch beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum that a lot of our investors want to do.
00:20:52 Eric: The secondary trade is top of mind. We run investor events every couple of weeks. We're actually doing one next week where we dig into Stripe, which is a $90 billion payments company, but we really try to get below the surface. What is it that makes this business work? What are the risks? What's the bull case? What's the bear case? We're doing one a couple of weeks later on energy investing. So a lot of people are thinking about energy. AI is driving this massive demand for energy.
00:21:17 Eric: Long story short, we're trying to help the investor educate themselves and then launch. You mentioned AIR Insider. We're trying to launch little pieces to help you action that because information's good, building trust is good, but you got to get to the finish line. You can't just start learning about investing. You actually have to do it.
00:21:33 Eric: So with Insider, we’re delivering picks. So we'll have somebody like yourself, what investment do you think is interesting and why? And we'll share those investments out, but also give you one of these products or platforms where you can get exposure to that asset.
00:21:44 Jenny: I gave you my pick just recently.
00:21:46 Eric: I know. And it was a good one. I’m actually evaluating it.
00:21:49 Jenny: I want to move because I have a few more questions before we end. These are more around company building. My first question is you've run, built five companies. I've had those late night calls with you where things are going really well, when things are just not going well. What gives you the excitement to keep on doing this?
00:22:09 Jenny: You get knocked down a lot in entrepreneur world. So you are one of the most pure entrepreneurs I know from college days to now. So where's that drive and how do you keep it going?
00:22:22 Eric: A lot of it is just curiosity. What can we actually make happen? You've got to do things. You got to make stuff happen. You're got to swing the bat a lot and sometimes miss a lot. As long as it's interesting and there's something to learn, there's something to solve, it remains compelling.
00:22:36 Eric: We've been through a few chapters here, you and I. You've seen when things were super bearish. Oh my God, the internet might not even be necessary. And then you saw a period where everything just accelerating inevitably.
00:22:47 Eric: I do feel the last two years has been a questioning again. And now I just think there's so much to be built and so much efficiency and so much productivity gained, it's hard not to build stuff. My side project is just trying to take everything I do and try to put an AI or a Zapier or a Lindy or some agent on it. And every day I'm amazed by how much further you can get with that.
00:23:13 Jenny: I know, I remember getting a text message from you recently about how you're like, oh my God, I just built this thing. And I was like, oh my gosh, does this guy sleep? I don't know. You're running your company. You're playing around with tools. You have three kids. It's a lot.
00:23:27 Eric: It's a lot. You got to have energy. You gotta to drink some coffee. But what else would you want to do? I don't know.
00:23:32 Jenny: There is something about you, Eric, that you stay very calm, even in the periods of uncertainty or when crypto was the pariah. A couple of years ago, everyone was like, “What a joke, alternative assets.” And you guys were literally running an alternative assets platform.
00:23:49 Jenny: Everyone is crapping on your baby. You definitely remain very calm and collected. I think what's interesting about you is you have a very zoom out. You see the bigger picture of these trends, which I think is pretty unique.
00:24:02 Eric: Thank you. You got to be a little bit against the grain because we just think everything everyone thinks all the time and you're just going to be following a trend. You can also be very wrong. I've spent years on the wrong side quest. You just have to accept that and just believe that you'll keep running the experiment and keep orienting correctly.
00:24:20 Eric: But all that being said, I do think this could be the most profound moment of change we've seen in the last 20 years. So you want to be in it, not just seeing what happens and then two years later, wish you were in it. That's my view.
00:24:35 Jenny: So what's next for Vincent? I'd love to know a little bit about your thinking for the future.
00:24:40 Eric: So we've done a really good job this last year and a half of building up this distribution channel. So we have a hundred thousand investors reading all the materials we talked about. We've got hundreds of people showing up to these events. We've got great podcast guests. We’re building all this trust.
00:24:55 Eric: Each quarter we've had the best quarter we’ve ever had financially. What we need to do is go deeper to solving the problem that our investors have. So we spend a lot of time just talking, listening, surveying, asking, and trying to take the problems that I know are out there that I have and see what we can plug in for people.
00:25:11 Eric: Insider is a good example of that, but there's a number of other tools that we have in various stages of iteration. It's one of the ones I told you about to get to launch to our audience and try to make them better investors. So really this next quarter or two is going to be about putting some of those points on the board.
00:25:27 Jenny: Where do you see the intersection of AI and FinTech more generally? You’ve been at the forefront of microfinance, of alternative payments, alternative assets. You mentioned AI as an accelerant, probably the tools that you're using, but what about in the products that people are accessing? Any thoughts around AI?
00:25:47 Eric: There's two sides of AI. There's the how does it make investment firms and groups and media companies better. And for me, at least so far, the answer is it's like having an army of great interns that never call in sick, never quit, never go back to school, never question and just do what they're supposed to do. And you can constantly improve them because the underlying models that drive them are going to improve.
00:26:12 Eric: So to me, that's just more efficiency. It's letting your executives work on the big important problems, not cut and paste spreadsheets. And multiply that times a thousand, you’ll see a lot more productivity from investment firms.
00:26:22 Eric: Could mean they just don't grow as much and become more profitable, but it probably means that they can innovate and do a lot better stuff and spend more time on, in your case, choosing the investments versus doing all the stuff that you have to do to be ready to choose the investments.
00:26:38 Eric: Then you've got the investment side of AI, which is the hottest thing right now. Every day you read about the next $10 billion round. I think we're early there. It seems quite depreciative in terms of costs will go down and there's massive subsidy. When I'm running these little experiments, I'm cognitive of the fact that I'm paying $25 a month. But the value of getting is thousands of dollars a month.
00:26:59 Eric: I can write code that my engineering team would take two weeks to write. I can break basically that functionality in like 15 minutes. So if someone's paying for that, it's not me. So at some point the economics have to prove that there are going to be huge winners in AI. That's why everybody's making these ridiculously large investments, but there's also going to be a lot of losers.
00:27:20 Eric: So on the investment side, I think it's the ultimate venture outcome. It's hard to see good outcomes for things that raise a billion dollars and don't really build businesses. And there's going to be a lot of them. But there's going be a few winners. So figure out which tools are actually working and whether they can maintain what they've built.
00:27:40 Eric: Because the other challenge in this space right now is that, like I just shared, a lot of the revenue is novelty revenue. I spent $25 for a couple of these coding tools. It's very possible to cancel one of them next month. They're not integral to the business right now.
00:27:55 Eric: And when the product gets to the point where it is ready, it'll probably require a couple of engineers to be sitting there looking at it, who might want to do a totally different platform. So those tools are vulnerable in that sense.
00:28:06 Eric: So investing, you do want to play. You don't want to miss it. It's almost like the crypto thing. Put a little bit of your net worth in there so you have a couple of chips on the table, but don't go crazy because this thing can see a huge drawdown.
00:28:17 Jenny: I love it. All right. We've made it to the speed round. So just quick answers to a couple of questions. So is there a book, podcast or some type of content that you're enjoying these days?
00:28:28 Eric: One podcast I love is, other than our Smart Humans podcast, of course, and your Everywhere Ventures podcast, is a podcast called Animal Spirits. What do I love about Animal Spirits? It's a market podcast about markets, both public, private, everything in between.
00:28:44 Eric: But it's just two super down to earth guys just talking. The way they deliver, to me, I just really relate to it. There's a guy from the Midwest with a couple of kids and there's a Jewish guy from Long Island and they're just talking and they go over their favorite movies and what they did with the kids on the weekend. But it's mainly about hardcore market talk. I like that. It's about the people.
00:29:02 Eric: There's too many podcasts that are just basically glorified advertising for somebody's product and that's fine. But I don't want to listen to that. I want to know what makes you tick and what is important. I was just reflecting the other day, I've never met these guys or talked to either of them. But I feel like if I ran into them on the streets, I’d interact with them as if they were my cousin, because I know tons of stuff about their lives.
00:29:21 Jenny: I love it. And then if you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would that be?
00:29:28 Eric: I would probably say Hawaii, because I've lived in a number of places. I've never lived there. I just think the combination of perfect weather, perfect environment, easy access to everything, it seems like it would be a pretty idyllic place to spend a year.
00:29:42 Jenny: All right. I love it. I'll see you on the North Shore. And last question, where can listeners find you?
00:29:48 Eric: You can check us out at www.withvincent.com. I'm eric@withvincent.com, like invest with Vincent. You can also check out our podcast, Smart Humans, on any podcast app, and we'd love to see you there.
00:30:01 Jenny: Awesome. This was so fun, Eric. Thanks for joining us.
00:30:04 Eric: Thanks, Jenny. It was great.
00:30:07 Scott: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere, where a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Eric Cantor in Founders Everywhere.