#1 - Turner Novak, VC at Banana Capital

Podcast: Relentless
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 3214s
URL: https://anchor.fm/s/e402cdc8/podcast/play/81319667/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2024-0-15%2F363580984-44100-2-970796f104ffc.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-03 01:59:09

The following is a conversation with Turner Novak, the founder of Banana Capital and the host of the Peel. If you would like to learn more about him, you can follow him on Twitter at Turner Novak or visit his website, bananacapital.vc. This is the Relentless Podcast. So let's start this off with, you know, I remember hearing you like first immigrate to the U.S. when you were like a really small, small kid, parents split up. And your mom starts like a, I think it's like a wedding gown shop. Is that right? Yep, I mean about that. And like what that, you know, what your mom being an entrepreneur, you know, what impact that had on you? Yeah, it is actually started before we moved to the U.S. when we lived in Canada. She, I think she sowed her own wedding gown. That was kind of how it started. She was just kind of always into that sort of thing. Fashion, clothing, she kind of always did some sowing. Like she hand sows, growing up we had, there's usually two rooms in our house that were just filled with multiple sewing machines, reams of fabric. Like if you go to Joanne's fabric, one of those fabric sources, they literally rolls of different materials and we just had those all over the house, and specifically in those two rooms. And then she'd have multiple kind of work in process gowns, and she'd have multiple clients at once, which kind of all all over the place. So yeah, that was, how it got started, I actually don't know the story, but I believe just she started helping friends make theirs and then eventually you can start charging money. It's kind of how you put trap any business. You kind of fake it till you make it, I guess. So that was I believe her original strategy. Yeah, I've actually noticed that you've said that a few times in a few different interviews where you're like, you don't want, you don't want it to be fake, but you do want to pretend like you're, you know, going to be successful or whatever before you actually end up being successful. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I got a good way to think about it is, it is a good observation. You don't actually fake it. I think more so you just do the job without getting paid or without getting compensated. Like you do whatever you think will be the thing that is working and that you're, it's a business. You're making money on it like create a pursuit. You just start doing it whether or not it's actually a thing. And at the same level that you would, that's kind of how I've always done it. But I think that yeah, fake it till you make it is like the sound bite, but you don't actually fake it because if you're faking it, it's not real and it's not authentic. So you just assume, like you, you just assume, okay, you're 150 episodes into a podcast. What is the quality like of that 150th podcast? How do you act when you're putting out that 150th episode? Just do it for the very first one, just start doing it. Okay, yeah, yeah, that's the, that's the way I'm thinking about this too. Um, okay, my next question is, uh, when you were a kid, you know, I, I, I was listening to the Danny Miranda podcast and you said that you were number two in the world at Gears of War at one point. How did you get there and what kind of like, what kind of level of persistence and driver whatever took to get there? Uh, and do you think that that translates it all into what you're doing now with Twitter and, uh, you know, if you see, I think it does, yeah, the, so the way I got there was that game specifically. The ranking was slightly skewed towards how much you played like you did have to be good. If you played a lot and you weren't very good, it wouldn't matter. Like if you were within probably like the top 100 in the world, like if you're maybe like the 100th best player in the world and you played the most event like the most games logged or like time spent, you'd probably be ranked number one in the world. If you were like the 10,000th best person in the world and you played more than anyone else, you might be ranked like a hundred or a thousand. So I would say I was like, I was good. I was like the best in the world, but I just played a lot and there was specifically a week that I had the number two ranking. I mean, it's just, I just couldn't keep it up. So I had school and all that kind of stuff. So like, I literally could only play like 12 hours a day or whatever the number is sleeping a little bit in then school. And honestly, the thing I'm more proud about in video games was call of duty. I don't know how many people I call duty. I prestige in one day. I don't know if anyone knows how that works, but I got through a full level, like a full prestige in a day. It was a, it was a double XP day and we had a snow day. So I just said to my friend, I'm like, I'm just playing it all day and I don't really remember what I just, I just didn't. Basically, you played literally like 18 hours that day or whatever it was, which was maybe it was embarrassing probably to admit when you're a 16 year old. But now it's like, yeah, it's kind of, I do think that that's converted it all to what the way that you use Twitter. Yeah, maybe I think you said to be relentless and just not give up really able to lot of things because like things aren't going to work. Like I didn't, I kind of accidentally became an influencer. Like I didn't sign up for Twitter and think, I'm going to get 100, I don't even know how many followers I have. I think I have 164,000.2 or something. But I didn't show up until like that's the goal, it was just I was trying to get a job in VC and oh, go ahead. Yeah. No, I was kind of one of the things that you said is that you started out with like 99% serious and 1% like humorous, why is that not that way? What? Zero? Zero percent humorous. Yeah. Okay. Like what did you, you know, what did you find or see that was like, okay, no, I need to be doing something different? Well, initially when I started, it was trying to get a job. So if you're trying to get a job, probably need to be serious. So that was just the initial approach. And it was just like the very first kind of thread I did on Twitter was Snapchat did this big redesign like six or seven years ago at this point. And Kylie Jenner came out and tweeted about how she doesn't use Snapchat anymore and the stock like tank. It was just like the beginning of like a 90% drop in the stock, right? So it was kind of after the IPO and I just always kind of used Snapchat and I always thought it was pretty good product. I got all the negative sentiment like I understood the concerns that investors had, but it had a lot of things. I think people just were overlooking and just didn't quite like, I don't think people actually understood the product or what their business model was, the majority of people. And they did this big redesign of the product that I was like, this is, this is such a good move. Like this is the stocks. This is going to be huge for boosting margins, boosting all the metrics and the numbers that drive the performance of the business and like no one cared. I think the stock dropped when they, when the redesign was kind of leaked or whatever. So I was like, okay, this is just an interesting place where I'm, I was like 95% confident I was going to be right. Like it was one of those things where you don't know for sure, like you may not have the full story, but I was pretty confident that I was going to be right over the next couple of years. Like I didn't know at the time, like based on how the world was reacting to it, like I could have been wrong for a while, but I was pretty confident I was going to be right. So I just kind of, this is the very first thing I tweeted on Twitter was I just made this thread kind of like dissecting the redesign from a product perspective and then also from kind of like a Wall Street analyst type perspective on how the product was changing and then also how I thought it would improve like the cash flow basically of the business. That was the very first thing I tweeted. I maybe got like 50 followers from it, like it wasn't like a lot. Maybe got, I think it got about 100 likes, something like that, which is pretty good when you just kind of start from scratch. I think I had maybe 100 followers on Twitter, it was just like high school friends. And I think what I did was I included the cash tag. So on Twitter, like the stock price, you put a dollar sign in front of the ticker. And then that's kind of like a hashtag and people, people don't really use hashtags what they do use the cash tags kind of. And I think a guy named Alex Heath, he's a reporter who I think at the time was working at business insider. And then I forget, I think the information and then he went to the verge and then the information that he's back at the verge. Still friends of them, still talked to him. He was probably, I think he was the first person that actually caught it and shared it. And so yeah, I just met a bunch of people through that. I just kind of tweeted about that same theme for like a couple months and just kind of just sharing my opinion on stuff and then kind of slowly branched out into other categories. Like other adjacent things. And then I believe, I just kind of, I'd always kind of want it to get into venture in VC. It was kind of like the long term goal. And I had seen a couple people doing meme accounts, like making funny content related to it. And it always did so well. And founders loved it. And I also kind of saw the world of like the content marketing that the VCs were doing. And I saw how founders thought about that and how other people thought about that. And I was like, man, there's got to be a way to ingest a humor into this and almost make like a meme account that is tech venture focused. And maybe like at the end of the day, now I think what it is, it's my mom's like a meme account that monetizes with venture capital, like with like management fees from the font versus like sponsored influencer posts type stuff, which is actually a little bit different. Now that I have the podcast, we're doing a little, it's just like having people spawn to the episodes, like it just helps with the costs of producing them and stuff. But so yeah, I kind of, I just met some of the people around the accounts, gave them ideas, suggestions, and they did so well. So I kind of slowly started doing them myself and they're just easier. I'm kind of naturally was the class clown growing up, made jokes in the group chat. And it was just so much easier than putting in, you know, spending 10 hours writing this thread versus 10 minutes or 10 seconds writing a tweet that gets 10 to 100 times more, you know, engagement or performance. But and I think I had to make sure that I was still doing serious things or attached to it. So I kind of thought of the humor and the funny stuff was like a top of funnel. Like if you look at all my best tweets over time, millions of views from some joke and then a serious tweet that gets like 5,000 or 10,000, but like that bottom of the funnel was like the reason that somebody reached out and I ended up investing in their company or ended like they ended up investing in my foundational thing. So yeah, the humor is kind of this top of funnel and the serious stuff, which I, I mean I do it like 1% of the time now. I don't really put out very serious content publicly anymore, aside from the podcast. So the podcast is kind of an attempt to slowly skew back. So that was kind of the thinking on all that. Yeah, that's actually kind of interesting. I'm trying to think I would actually be really curious to hear what your thoughts are. I noticed that in your blog posts, you almost are like very consistently correct on consumer social apps for some reason. Like I don't think I saw a single instance of you being like directionally wrong. So you're mostly directionally correct. Why do you think you have like an ability to evaluate social companies? I don't know. I don't know the answer, but I would assume it's, I mean a combination of, I try to like look at data like actual, how things are doing versus what the narrative is. And then also try to think about just what I'm seeing in consumer behavior because I think that factors in, because that will impact the data. Like if suddenly everyone says phones are unhealthy and we're never going to use our phones again, it doesn't matter what Instagram's numbers are. If no one ever uses the product again, it's going to zero because it's zero usage. So you kind of infuse both of those together. And then I think a big thing for why I've been able to be successful as a consumer investor is living outside of any of the major hubs like I live in Michigan. And you're just, I think about and like surround myself with a lot of the tech finance product world and thinking and like the direction the world's moving. But I also just have a lot of just the average America all around me. So I try to stay centered in like state outside of any bubble. You can kind of, you can go into the bubbles and you can go out of the bubbles. You can move in and out. I just think it helps me just be a little bit more rational about things. I think it's, it's good to be contrarian, it's good to be contrarian and right. But I think timing is really important too. Like you can be like there's been people that have been saying, hey, I was going to like take over the world for, you know, decades. And maybe now they're finally right, but you looked crazy saying it in the 90s, right? Or like Web 3, maybe crypto is a thing that, you know, everyone, it's like infuse in our daily lives, but you kind of looked crazy now if you were talking about that a couple of years ago. So I think timing is important on those things. So I think it helps me understand that. Yeah, just I think there's no like, I don't need to worry about social signaling or anything like that because like I'm not, I'm not going to the party that tonight with all the co-investors in the company that we want to, that we invested in together. So I just think it helps me kind of disassociate social signaling with like some of the decisions I made because I, that's not how I know those people, like I'm not them through Twitter. Like I reach out, they reach out to me and we just kind of have a relationship. We hang out, get lunch time in San Francisco or when they're in Ann Arbor, maybe we've co-invested together, but there's less of like social reasons that I'm doing things. So I just think it helps me make different decisions. So I mean sometimes they're bad decisions, right? And I think also the tricky part is you kind of, I had a lot of investors ask me why I was not investing in crypto when it was the thing, and it was the thing for a long time. And it was really hard to, to not make, and like I literally, I made one very small investment in a friend's company, but then that no crypto investing. And it was really difficult, like it was hard to, to stick with that. I know, I, I, I heard you talk about like one, one, one of the like, uh, things that you do before investing in like some app is you'd like ask your wife. And I did she think, did her, you know, decision-making or thinking on crypto impact your decision to not really pursue it? I also understand that the incentives are kind of fucked, but yeah, I think it did, yeah. I mean, it's, it's always kind of like a gut check. So she, I think she's very smart. She's usually, I mean, she realizes these things before I do. So like anything consumer behavior. So I, when, when she's paying attention to something, I'll start paying attention to it too. Even though I think it's crazy and don't think she's right, it's kind of one of those things where like she's, she's good at this stuff. So if she says something is worth following or paying attention to, I will pay attention to it. Because I, because I know she's probably going to be right, even if I don't think she is. Um, maybe we all have people like that where you're like, man, that person just always, you're so good. Um, maybe I'm just lucky that my, my wife is like that. Um, so yeah, that's definitely not just in crypto, like in everything, like even the investments that I did make, I have invested in two companies where she started using it. And I reached out to the founder and end up investing. I believe too. There might be more. Um, and I just, I mean, I just think she is, like I said, usually right. So it's like having a, a super smart signal on the team, yeah. Like, well, yes, strong signal, but it's like, it's just having like a different, and it's, it's totally different than, like, like one time I did not invest because, like every VC told me terrible investment, no one would do that. It was this thing that was targeted almost at middle America versus someone who lives in LA or New York, and that's where all these people were. And they were like everyone said, bad idea, no, and my wife was right. Um, and I, it's like, it was, that was the first time that happened. I was like, okay, I'm never making that mistake again. And she, and like her reasoning and thought process was all, it was all good. And it was all sound and solid. So. Yeah, it's actually kind of funny that you, that you say that you do that because I don't know if you've read Peter Lynch's books, but he definitely talks about, like he used to walk through the mall and with his, like, kids and stuff and say, you know, which, which stores, uh, do you guys like and stuff like that? Yeah. Kind of interesting. You, I mean, I think you can learn a lot from, because I think the, I think the tricky thing is it's, it's a meme in venture tech communities of platform shifts, and there always has to be a platform shift. And if there is, there will be opportunities. So like, we must deploy capital. I mean, I think that's another, I think that was the issue with crypto was like, it became less of an investment and figuring out how to get returns. There's more of a, we must deploy what has been raised. I think that's just prevalent across all of EC is like, you got a billion dollar fund. You need to figure out how to put that money to work. And your business model is, if you rate, if you raise a dollar, you get 20% of it in fees over 10 years. So if you raise a billion dollars, you've just earned 200 million dollars in fees, well, if you raise another billion, or if you raise two billion, more fees, twice as big, it just becomes more of a putting dollars to, or it becomes a raising money. That's the business model. So I just think it impacts just how people make decisions. So I think that's kind of helped me just think a little bit differently and end up avoiding some landmines. I mean, I have made a mistake for sure. I made some dumb investments, but, and they're all, they're all things like everyone else is like, that's dumb. Like, I would never invest there either, so it's kind of the opposite problem. Yeah. Okay, on a slightly different note, I've seen you tweet a lot about Timo recently, and I know that you studied Pendo Oduo a few years ago, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that and why you think it's interesting. Yeah, the reason I thought it was interesting was because its own, Timo is owned by Pendo Doe, which is the, it's the largest e-commerce platform in China, just based on number of active customers. So they're smaller than Alibaba, just terms of like size of revenue and all that stuff, but they have the most customers. So and they basically went from zero to a $200 billion market cap from 20, it was like 2015, it was founded to 2020. If anyone's familiar with China, Chinese stocks pull back significantly from the highs in 2020. And it was also an e-commerce company, which like COVID highs, so it had like two things going against it. It was probably overvalued at $200 billion, and then it got down to like $40 billion, maybe was the lowest in terms of valuation, and it's back because, I mean, partially because of Timo, it's back at like maybe 170, 180, I haven't looked at it recently. So anyways, it was just like, okay, I just thought this was an interesting business in China, I was like zero to $200 billion in five years. I don't think anyone's ever done that before, that's insane. So I just thought it was an interesting business, followed it, was always kind of thinking, man, I wonder if someone could do this in the US or in Indonesia or in Europe, Africa, Latin America, like insert whatever market, it wasn't like a thesis, like I was trying to deploy capital, like I didn't have that issue, but I was like, if I meet somebody that's doing it, I'm open to hearing the pitch, because I think it could work, right? Like you need to localize it, but you know, maybe, like it worked in China, maybe there's an opportunity somewhere else. So the one big takeaway was Pindodo, D.D., or PDD, specifically said in all their communication, everything I could find, they were, they're focused on China, they're never going to leave China. So when it was like the end of 2022, I think it was like the fall of 2022, talked about launching in the US and I was like, what? It's insane. Like they said, they're never going to do this. And maybe that was just Chinese management team speak that I didn't decipher well enough, but I was like, wow, if they're launching in the US, I'm like, this is, this is, take it seriously. Like I don't think, I don't, like they basically took wishes model, you got to wish.com. It's like the worst shopping destination ever. It's like a dollar store on the internet, terrible business at this point. Like I think they might have delisted, like they're probably going to go bankrupt, but they're basically taking that and doing the same thing, but fixing a lot of the issues that they had. So I was like, okay, and I always out wish was an interesting concept too, because it was like no one had figured out how to do dollar store on the internet. It's like potentially an opportunity if you can solve it, but there isn't one yet. So yeah, when team launch, I was like, man, like pay attention to this. This is a serious team and their serious muscle behind it. I think they had like $16 billion on the, on their balance sheet. So if you think about how TikTok spent, you know, I think it was a total like a couple billion dollars to blitz scale and scale up in the US. PDD had a similar amount of money if they wanted to use it. So yeah, I just kind of, I knew, I didn't know if it was going to work. Like it kind of took me, I just was looking into it and trying to understand their model. I wasn't 100% convinced it would work, but I knew that it would be something that would take up a lot of oxygen from things. It would be a lot of, a lot of time spent talking about it and people would be very visible. And then yeah, just kind of looked at Pindodo's model, figured out maybe what they were going to do in the US. And then yeah, so that's kind of how I was following it and paying attention to it from the beginning. Okay. Yeah, it's a, what, so I heard you talk about in one of your interviews, you were talking about kind of like trying to apply business models that work in one geography to another geography. And you said something like 30% of your companies are based outside the US. I'm pretty sure that you're invested in like Joker or something. How do you think about that? How do you think about investing outside of the US and taking like what you said, one business model from one country that works and applying it to another geography? Yeah, I think it doesn't automatically work, but I think there's, it just means there could be something there, like could be worth digging into. And usually if like humans are pretty similar across like at all, like we all want to buy things online, get them faster, et cetera. So kind of the thesis with something like Joker, I just had always thought this, the grocery delivery was a way to build a wedge to like sit in front of Amazon in an e-commerce purchase behavior. So the thinking was like if, if you use any of these grocery delivery sites, you probably go to the grocery store a couple of times a week and like it's different if you're single, if you have kids, you know, if you're married, if you're old, younger, whatever, like kind of varies across categories. So it might sound a little bit ridiculous, I mean, we get groceries like four or five times a week, our family. So it's like a very frequent behavior. And it's also a little bit of a different fulfillment, like the way like most e-commerce platforms, like if you're building a retailer, a lot of it is like you basically, you find like a new use case that no one else has solved. And then you build like the lowest cost supply chain of fulfilling that product or products or experience. So and no one had really solved groceries online. Instacart did, but there's just like some ways that the model doesn't work because it's a marketplace, it's all third party, like they don't do their own fulfillment. So they can't do as fast delivery. Also, they don't have like a touch point if you're ordering something from like a Kroger or a Meyer or Walgreens, they're not connected to their like ERP system and know exactly what's in inventory. So there's like almost always stockouts. So it just felt like there was an opportunity for someone that was like totally vertically integrated. It's more capital intensive. So 2021 was a good time to like start to raise money for something like that. And then if you look at what Amazon's businesses for a while, most of their cash flow came from the cloud business. But I believe at this point, actually, most of the cash flow, the majority of their cash, the generate comes from their advertising business, which is basically you sponsored listings and like what you're browsing and buying things and people, the brands pay for placement. And like that's that's probably about half of Amazon's valuation, like their enterprise values, just from their advertising business. I haven't looked lately on like what all their numbers are, like most recent quarter, but I think they're doing like 30 billion in revenue on the advertising business. And it's all kind of, you know, there's some people to do that that work on that. But that's in insane high margin product. And like that's all cash flow. Like that, that thing probably generates 25 billion in free cash flow of Amazon, which they can invest in more warehouses, better e-commerce experience, to then make a generate even more ad revenue. So that was kind of the thinking it was like there's probably an opportunity to do something like that. Especially in grocery. There's a lot of offline ad revenue and grocery. So if you go to the grocery store, the way things are placed on the shelf, like people pay basically for placement. Yeah. And like within the store, there's a lot, there's roughly like a hundred billion dollars that spend that's offline. Like literally you cannot measure it. And if you talk to people in the industry, they're like half of it works, half it doesn't, we don't know what half works and what doesn't. So like we just kind of do it. And if we didn't do it, we're missing out a lot. So like it's a big market, but like you cannot measure it. And like that's probably Instacarts. That's one of Instacarts big opportunities like capturing grocery, advertising revenue. And then specifically with Joker, what I liked was it was in emerging markets where there's just less e-commerce competition. Like it was, they were initially started to launch in 10 different countries. And then now believe I don't know what's like been publicly communicated. But I think the last they publicly said is like Latin America is their focus. So that was kind of the thesis. And then I guess the other thing is just the the labor costs are a little bit lower there. And like I said, there's less competition on the e-commerce side. And then penetration like e-commerce penetration and like mobile adoption is kind of inflecting in some of these markets. So just kind of felt like an opportunity. Yeah, I actually, I follow Zimato just as like a passion. I don't know in the stock, but it's interesting to me. And it's kind of wild. How fast they're growing and how many people they serve. Anyway, yeah, I would actually like to know so you started. Like I think you've already always been interested in investing and business. But I noticed that you're like career path up to, you know, even a few years ago, didn't like my understanding is you were interested in early stage investing. But you did a bunch of decisions like studying accounting at like Grand Rapids. Why did you choose to do that versus anything else? And why did you decide to stay there instead of going to, you know, SF? Yeah, it's a good question. I grew up on the internet as a kid. So kind of understand the language of the internet, I guess played a lot of video games. And I grew up also, which my parents separated when we moved from Canada, Winnipeg to Grand Rapids where I grew up. And so my mom like never really had money. I mean, she volunteered at friends' businesses, got paid, you know, gift cards to the grocery store, cash under the table, got food from the church food pantry for a couple different chunks growing up. And also did not get my green card like official. I was on like a like a temporary, like a one-year visa every single year until I went to college and the only way because it was expensive to apply for. And I basically had to like tell my parent, like tell my dad basically that I need to get into school. Like I need to become a permanent resident. Otherwise, I pay insane out of state tuition basically. We couldn't really afford it. And so got my green card like permanent residency the year of like my senior year of high school. And then could do like in state tuition, which I still couldn't really afford. So the idea was stay at home, go to school, which I ended up actually just moving to moving on campus and living on campus. But always just tried to limit student loans, all that kind of stuff. And one semester during school, I worked three jobs. So I was working like 40 hours a week total. And then also took 18 credits, which was like the craziest year I like worked all weekends, worked throughout the week. I had two two internships and then worked a job 12 hours a day, Saturday and Sunday. That was crazy. And I met my girlfriend and my wife senior year of college. And so we didn't end up moving. And I just there's really not that many options when you're living grind after Michigan late to tech stuff. And so worked at a bank lending money to small businesses because it was the most interesting job. I learned a lot. It was it was fun like some aspects of it. And then yeah, just all the the jobs like I kind of my my first internship as I was where my first job I worked in a factory of a friend who I went to a video game tournament with. Like we want if anyone listening knows a major league gaming, they were like the one of the first called MLG. They're like one of the first professional video game leagues basically, which was like it was so cool as like a high school kid like watching people play like Halo competitively. And this was in the like mid 2000s. And so yeah, we went to a tournament together got absolutely smoked. Like we didn't win a single. It's like it's a double elimination bracket. You play play best of two in each match. I mean, we didn't win a single like game within any of the matches. We just got absolutely destroyed. I mean, that was when I was like, all right, it was kind of I'd kind of already want I want to college and I was like, I'm going to take life seriously. And then not I'm not going to play as many video games, but I met a friend who was like, you're so good at video games. Like, let's let's play together. And then we got this thing like, let's go to this tournament. Anyways, we got smoked. So he his mom gave me a job in the factory that she worked in. Basically, what was the factory making? They're making shelves for JC Penny and Sears. So, all right, I think I don't know if either of those still exist, but that was like the big thing we made. We made a couple other like random products, but yeah, working a factory was started 6am. You got out at two, which was kind of nice, but still, I mean, you have to wake up like 5am in the morning, drive and work in a factory. And then you could work over time on Saturdays, you could come in and make like double pay. So it was making nine bucks an hour. I think I made what is that like 14 bucks, 14, 50 or something, 15, 13, 50. I forget exactly. All right, who's double? I think you guys double or half one and a half. I can't remember. I think it was maybe double, but anyways, so like coming on Saturday, make a hundred bucks. Like at the time, that was a lot of money for me. And so yeah, that was my very, very first job. And then I got a job working in the there's usually those factories are staffed from staffing companies. So like it's like an outsourced recruiting firm and it's a factory. I mean, job retention and like it's very low turnover is very high. So we I got a job working at the front desk hiring people in this for different factories. So this is the one that staffed our factory and my job is like help hire people for other tons of different factories. So yeah, just kind of every job I got was it was sort of like figuring out how to make money. Like I probably could have worked at Jimmy John's or something or Wendy's, but you get paid minimum wage. Like I started doing these internships. I was making 10, 12, 15 bucks. One of them was making $20 an hour in college. Like it was I think like my like run rate like all in annual comp was more than my mom was making at the time. So it was like that was the that was the option. And then yeah, I just I never, never moved just because of, you know, circumstances, like circumstances we got married and we got a kid immediately. So just always kind of hung around Michigan and still here. So I live in an hour. So good spot to be. Yeah, that was that was actually kind of interesting to me because your story when I was listening and like learning about your story did not make sense where you were like, I'm interested in startups. And then it totally makes sense that you couldn't get, you know, you had to pay in state tuition. You needed to get a green card for like the state that you'd been living in your entire life, right? Yeah. And that that to me makes a whole lot of sense. Yeah, and I mean, so I don't have a relationship with my dad anymore. I mean, I haven't talked to him in saying five or six years. I don't even know is basically when I had kids. And so it was kind of always, I was kind of always working from like, I wasn't in a position of strength. If that makes sense and how I made some of those decisions. And it was just out of necessity. Yeah. And and and I was always really interested in investing. So there were, there were some options in Michigan or LA. But I remember specifically, so I was the president and the investment club in college for two years. One of the kids, one of the guys who was a couple of years older than me was a previous president. It was pretty good friends with him. He was coming. So he was getting a CPA, which is like your accounting license. It's basically like, it basically tells the world your professional accountant, you know, accounting. So he was getting that and he had to take some credits to like be qualified for it. So he was in one of my accounting classes my senior year. And I just remember he's like, so this Facebook thing that just went public like I was short in the shit out of it or something like that was the extent of what he said. And I mean, he's like one of the smartest like investors. I knew like I knew him pretty well. Shorting Facebook after the IPO was actually a pretty good investment for if people don't remember, it was down like 50%. Like the six months after I went public. But that is how people thought about tech companies. Like people are like Netflix. It's a giant bubble. Like look at their look at the financial metrics. Like according to that, this company should be insolvent or like they're going to go bankrupt. There's like wire. Why is the multiple so high? Why are people valuing this so high? So that was kind of the world around me. Meanwhile, I was like walking past like I'd leave class and walk down the hall like the other computer labs. And you can see there's computers where like you can like there's like eight in a row against the window. And you can see what kids are on every single kid is using Facebook in class. Well, the teachers are talking. So like it didn't quite connect with like, okay, it's a bad business quote unquote, but everyone is using it. Like it's a good product. So it was kind of always like these two worlds that I kind of was was living in and you kind of learn different things about different pieces of both of them. So yeah, and it was definitely really supportive and your actual experience. We're kind of like clashing. Yeah, and it was hard to make the jump in initially. It was very very long process. Yeah, I would actually like to talk about that because I remember you like worked, I believe in a nonprofit for a few at least like a few months after I think after college. What was that like? So I worked at a bank for a year and a half doing credit. Basically lend money. It's like debt. And then I worked for the endowment of a nonprofit for about three and a half years. So we were just the team that managed their endowment portfolio. So if you're familiar with any of these colleges, you know, they've got very big endowments and they invest them in different asset classes. And it was the best investing like period, you know, even like tech job really like we invested in some VC firms like it was literally like the best of like any of those things I could find in Grand Rapids. And it was really interesting. I did learn a ton like basically what you do is you just talk to smart investors and you get to hear them ask some questions. That's also where I got to this realization of they all say the same thing. They all have proprietary deal flow. They're all differentiated. They all have a proprietary process. They all have like pure, they're all top core tile funds and like returns. They all say the same thing. Yeah. And then they're all, you know, they went to Harvard and like that common track. So I mean, I learned a lot from that process. Yeah, I actually kind of noticed you talked about basically having like I'm actually kind of curious how long did it take you? You said it took like roughly two years between when you decided you wanted to go into venture and then like actually committing to it, I believe. Getting a job like first. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And like, I noticed that you were talking about kind of, I mean, I don't know if you describe it as having a chip on your shoulder, but you didn't, you know, you talked about not, you know, coming from like a PM role Uber or something or, you know, going to Stanford. How did you think about becoming like you said that you posted on, you know, posted about snapchat on Twitter and you started writing a blog. But how did you think about getting in, breaking in? The way I thought about it at the time, this is 2017, 2018. It was just building like a public track record, basically, where, you know, I could point back three years later and just be like, hey, I was right about this. That's, I mean, that's kind of what you do with investing, except you're not making any money. So that was kind of the process. Creators was not a thing like creator economy was not coined yet. I mean, I'd know what you would I was doing. Like I was literally just making, making this up and just getting feedback live and learning, learning how to do all this stuff. I mean, like influencer wasn't even a word. And I didn't want to be like, I wanted to, my thinking was get a job, have a portfolio company that IPO'd. And like 20 years later, I would start my own investment firm. That was kind of my thinking. It just, I get, it just happened faster than I thought it would. So, uh, which is, which is great. I mean, there's probably some downsides to that, honestly. Uh, but overall, I think it was it, that was kind of how I approached it. And so what I did was I did this fantasy VC portfolio. If anyone plays fantasy football or fantasy sports, like fake sports, you have a fake team. I did that for VC. I just pretend I had a million bucks or 10 million bucks, made some fake investments, wrote a fake memo in each one. No idea what I was doing. Looking back, I mean, they sucked. Like, they're not very good. But I learned a lot from that process. And then I met a lot of people from that. And then, uh, that is how I got some interviews. I kind of had five interviews all at once just over the course of like a month, a couple of months. Yeah, I'm actually really curious. So when you first started doing that, like whether or not they were good, you actually started. And then did you think that people were going to take it seriously? When you started doing it or were you just like, I'm going to, you know, just try this because I've seen it, you know, work with paper trading and stuff like that. Yeah, I think I was pretty convinced they would work. Well, because I wasn't, I was mostly trying to find new startups. Like ones that didn't seem to be super hyped up or like we're still semi under the radar. Just like, so I could have like a unique take. So that's a lot of people that was interesting. Like one, one guy was like, I'd never heard of any of these companies before. Like, who even cares if it works? It's just like you are bringing different ideas to the table. And that's part of what, you know, investing is just like, unsourcing new ideas and new themes. Whether you're like public market or private market, it's just like, you're bringing a different view to the table. And so like some people value that. And yes, it was, like I said, it was a very, very long process that like, yeah, years of just like pounding it out and just like trying. Yeah. And I, it wasn't really like a measured thing. Like it was, it was kind of fun. Like it really was fun to just like share my thoughts. And so I wasn't really, I never really got too impatient. Like it was kind of enjoying the ride. But there were times where, you know, it was just like a lot of, it was just a lot of work and just like hours put in. So there were times where it was like, it's this ever going to go anywhere. And it was always, it was always kind of like a part time fun thing. Like it wasn't my full time thing. So like I kind of sit and wait. But it was also like, there's got to be like some goal to all this, which is basically just get a job. That was, that's what it was. How many, okay, how many cold emails and like cold reach out did you do before you ended up actually getting you said you became like a partner in guilt, right? It wasn't actually a lot. So I, I don't do a lot of cold outbound for anything. Like even, even today. But I think my cold, like I, I don't know the number. But my cold outbound response rate is like 80% or something. Like it's like an insanely high number. But I only do, I don't really do cold. They're all like, it's awful. Yeah, well, and it's like just like people that follow me on Twitter. So like they, they've already opted in to see, to see me. So I don't really do a lot of cold. And I think that's really the strategy that I take for banana investing. It's like it's all, it's all warm. Like if, if it's not, if I haven't done it, if it's not warm, then I haven't done a good job of like getting in front of someone. So like sometimes I'll cold email someone. Like it is a cold email. I don't, but you don't follow me or anything. And they'll be like, Oh, I've seen your TikTok. Like I love your TikToks are so funny. Or I listened to your podcast. I'm like, amazing. So like I don't have to sell myself. So you get up, you get a lot of inbound. But then also your, your outbound is just, it's like warm outbound or hot outbound. Like they'll be like, I was going to reach out to you. So like that sometimes that's a response. So yeah, I think I just, you know, you basically make your cold outbound as warm as possible. So you like, you don't do cold outbound because it's all, it's all warm, which maybe that's a bad strategy. But I think it's a little bit different than how a lot of people do it. Yeah, I was actually kind of wondering I, so I have really not used TikTok. I've actually actively tried to stay off of TikTok. I don't want to get addicted to it. But I downloaded it and watched a bunch of your TikToks because I was like, okay, I don't know exactly why he's doing this. But I spent like 30 minutes just scrolling through your TikToks. And it was kind of funny. Like a few of them. I was really laughing. What the hell is like the marketing behind, what is the idea behind that? Because you're, you're getting like five, you know, to 500,000 views or something on some of them. I think like at least 50,000, you know, at least. Yeah, I think the, they're not serious. I don't think I have a single serious video on my TikTok. I might have won. But it started one of my friends. So you, we've probably all seen these like really embarrassing, like influencer videos about day trading or analyzing stocks. And then just really bad. Like the objectively, you probably shouldn't put that on the internet. And yeah, I was like, I think a joke. One of my friends, his name's Nick Etch Carian. I think it's how you say his last name. He was like, what are you going to do? What is it? What are you making a parody video? Because I was like my tweets were kind of funny. He's like, when you make an parody video of like the stock influencers. So I, I did want analyzing, I think I analyzed Spotify's earnings or something or no, no, Shopify's earnings, I think. And it was just really bad. Like I just, I just said things that were really, really, you could tell I didn't, I didn't know what I was talking about. And I think I was like holding my baby at the time too. It was just so, it was objectively like a terrible video. But it was like, it was like a parody of people that will like break down stock. Like it's bad. Yeah, you're making fun of them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I always never, that's the thing is I don't really make fun of ever like an individual person. Maybe I've done that one time, but I just don't think that's, I try not to. Like I just, instead, it's like a class. I usually do like a entire class of people or like an idea or a concept. And I usually try to make fun of myself. And never try to like single anyone out, because it's really hard to create content in the internet. It's really hard to be a founder, a short company. So like if you are putting yourself out there, I will support it or not comment, right? So yeah, I, I think, I think Toby, the founder of Shopify, responded to the like reply to the video and I posted it on Twitter. Which is, which is awesome, because yeah, he follows me on Twitter. So like, and that was the kind of people that were following me on Twitter, too, just people have founded companies, public, like publicly traded companies, following my thoughts. A lot of them, they still follow me and like, honestly, some of them, like a little DM maybe like, Hey, are you, are you like a real person? Or are you like a meme account? So it's, it's fun. But yeah, that's how it got started. And then I just, every once in a while, like I always use TikTok, because I mean, it was the day that musically rebranded as TikTok. I remember seeing it and was like, it's like, what's up with this? Yeah, but I mean, your initial thinking is like, who cares, right? Like, that's probably what everyone thought. And I started using it. I was like, holy cow, it's like the best product I've ever used. And that was actually one of the things I tweeted about back in 2018, a lot was just, I think I had this really long thread going for like two years, just following, posting a lot of news about it, because it just like felt like one of those things that was, it was a really, really good product. I just kind of felt like with SoftBank had invested a couple months prior. And they had like $3 billion that they'd raised. And I was like, they're going to make this work. They're going to, they're going to force it. And the company that owned it basically had a similar product to like the Facebook news feed in China, which is a very high margin product. And I was like, they're going to make this thing work in the US. So that was another example of things I tweeted about quite a bit. I mean, I still, I kind of use TikTok, like not a lot. I usually just try to like pay attention to what's going on. And like, just make sure I understand how the product's changing. And sometimes it's good for consumer trends, like all search things and look them up and see what the youth are saying. So do you think, do you think it all about how like a new company can scale really quickly? You know, like I'm super fascinated by like Mr. Beast. And even like what is it prime or whatever that Logan Paul and KSI are doing. But they have been able to scale businesses insanely fast. I think they're both doing like more than probably a billion dollars in revenue annually. I don't know if Mr. Beast is yet, but he will be next year, you know. How do you think about that? Yeah, I think there's just the new brands. Like they, if you just take like the new celebrities, but they're very like in tune to, they have like a direct connection to the audience. And if you think about like how, how did we do marketing? Like specifically think about like marketing the kids. So Kellogg's cereal is maybe an interesting comp to Mr. Beast Feastable product. Like to chocolate bar, but whatever, it's selling food to kids. Kellogg's used to have these characters like Tony the Tiger, Frosted Flakes, Toucan Sam, Fruit Loops. I don't even know any other Kellogg cereal, but they're characters. And they were in these commercials. Lucky Charms, they had the leprechaun and be a rainbow. They had these stories that they would tell. And like that's how they'd sell the product. But and these are just like Mr. Beast, he's a character. He's introduced characters into his, uh, into his shows or into his content. Like I think, um, like, like they did this one where they were all trapped on like a floating boat in the middle of the island. Yeah. And like he had, I think four friends or three friends that joined them. And those are recurring characters. And eventually they're all going to launch products like here. That's kind of like the, the playbook for this. Um, and it's basically just like attention. Like you understand how the algorithm works. Um, pretty soon. I mean, in the algorithm, just weights and the platforms wait towards whatever they make money. That's the kind of content that they'll push. So you just have to figure out that was part of my thinking with TikTok was like, understand short form video because it's the direction. They're all going to, they're all going to tilt this way. So if you're out there writing threads and shooting out text, but the platforms don't want people consuming that, it doesn't matter. No one's going to read it. You need to figure out what they're going to be waiting and you need to take advantage of the low hanging fruit. So, um, yeah, I think the, like, and I think younger generations too, they don't really identify with like, um, you know, proctor and gamble launching a new product. Like they don't even know what that word means. Like it's, it's the company that owns all these brands, but they identify more like an individual and like a person. Um, and that's, I think kind of the, there may be like holding companies. They'll probably be people behind these like teams behind them. But, and then I think you can do like influencer marketing. I mean, influencer marketing. So, I mean, we've been doing it for generations. What we just haven't called it that hasn't always been on the internet, but that's kind of people buy from other people. Um, and we're just going to get into like making that more efficient, more programmatic. I mean, it's hard to scale in influencer marketing campaign. Um, but that's essentially what this is. Like, but instead of, instead of giving up all the margin, because in order to sponsor an influencer, you need to make money doing it, after you pay them, it still needs to be profitable. The influencer just takes that margin for themselves and launches their own product. So, that's essentially what's happening. Okay. Uh, final question, what is the most difficult experience you've ever had to overcome? The most difficult experience I've ever had to overcome. It was pretty hard to, uh, close banana fun to in May of 2022. That was an interesting time. Was just, if you can imagine, if you're, if you're dialed into tech startups investing, it was a hard time to just clean, completely closed. Yeah. So, and yeah, I mean, I, I mean, I had just so many horror stories from a lot of people. It was just a hard, hard time to, to do any fundraising. Okay. Well, uh, Turner, thank you so much for coming on and being the first guest. Yeah. Thank you. This is awesome. Thanks for having me.