① Context

Alright JJ, please tell us who you are and what you're working on.

My name is Joseph Jacks. I'm the founder of OSS capital. The only venture capital fund in the world focused exclusively on investing in open-source founders and commercial open-source companies and assets. To break that down a little bit. We invest in startups as well as crypto but we've only made a very small handful of extremely selective crypto investments. In other words, we're not really branded as a crypto VC, or you know, sort of crypto-focused investor but we've led the seed rounds for Research Hub which is Brian Armstrong's company focused on incentivizing decentralized, open scientific research and has a token and it's kind of like a GitHub for science. We've also invested in Bittensor pretty early on and we recently announced a $25 million investment the project. We believe that Bittensor is the next Etherium and we're putting our money where our mouth is bringing in all the smartest people that we know in the tech industry and in crypto. I'm putting my entire reputation on the line basically for Bittensor. I've also deployed over $120 million in about 70 companies over the last six years through OSS capital and we led a couple of series A rounds recently in existing companies, but we principally invest at the founding incorporation stages when companies are literally not yet in existence. And we find smart people and tell them to start those companies or we meet people just as they're creating their companies, and we invest in them days or weeks. Typically after they started the journey. We primarily source our investments over Twitter, I contact people over Twitter, DMs. That is how we've made 80% of all of our investments in the last six years. I have never met one of our founders we've invested, in person, before investing, I can't remember a single time where we invested or wired money after meeting founders. There are many of our founders that I still have never met in person which is super fun. I am extremely lucky to have been put in the position to do what I do. It's a very high-trust job. People trust me at this point with hundreds of millions of dollars and I'm very humbled by that on a daily basis. I’m extremely fortunate for the support of founders of companies like GitHub, MongoDB, Red Hat, Automatic, both founders of YouTube and the founding investor in Google and many other folks, like Brad Gerstner from Altimeter. I'm very humbled and grateful for their support. So, yeah, I'm trying to prove myself in my career. I've had some small early success, but I think that our fund's performance is very much ahead of us and will bear the fruits of the seeds we've been planting. I'm six years into doing this full-time. And I would say probably over the next five years, I will we start to see whether or not I know what I'm doing, because on many days I feel like an impostor.

I've never heard of an open-source venture capitalist. I don't even know if it was possible because I didn't even know if you could make money off of anything open source. That's the first thought that came to mind when hearing your introduction.

It is very intentionally counterintuitive. It's like a heavy feather. It seems like a contradiction. It feels impossible. And yet, that's actually where all the truth is in life. The counterintuitive phenomena. So I'd like to read you a tweet, and I have these thoughts that I think deeply on a regular basis. I'm constantly just thinking, I went to an event tonight in San Francisco and I was very stressed because I don't hang out. I don't physically hang out with other people that often. When I do, it's like a stressful event. So I pretty much live in a comfortable place in the woods north of San Francisco. And I'm kind of alone at home with my dog and my girlfriend just like and I think deeply about stuff regularly. The thought is a sort of poem, a prediction, but also a reflection and a variation on a story or parable. Here it is. There's no money in open source. There's only niche money in open source. There's money in open source. Most of the money is in open source. The only money is in open source.

That's the tweet. The narrative or the way I would sort of articulate the structure of that tweet and give you sort of an annotated version or a sort of directors comments cut would be that most people when they first encounter the notion, the idea of copyleft (opposite of copyright), permissiveness and freedoms at the level of technology they think “there's no fucking money in that you're a communist.” That's what they think. The world is changing very, very rapidly. AI is going to accelerate this like few people in human history have been able to articulate and I think that that's just gonna accelerate. And so we are going from there being no money in open source to there being some niche money, which is kind of the timeframe that we're in right now. Like Hashey Corp, MongoDB, Elastic, GitLab, GitHub, Red Hat getting bought by IBM for $30 billion. This all sounds insane. And it's still niche. I'll remind you that it's still niche. I mean, it sounds like it's a lot of money, my venture fund has deployed $100 million, but these are tiny numbers. The broader venture capital ecosystem deploys at this point $5 billion or more in commercial open-source companies. I'm a pimple-sized player. I'm a tiny little microbe in the ocean of whales. But after the niche stage, it's going to be like, wait a minute, it's actually not niche anymore. Shit. Now there's like there's like a $10 billion or $20 billion open source company that is public now. And it's not going to be tiny little $4 or $5 billion companies anymore. It's gonna be like ten times what it is now and people are gonna be like, oh shit. And then a decade away, maybe like 15 years away, it's a world where half of the stuff is like open source companies and open source protocols and the other half going to be proprietary stuff like we see with OpenAI or Google, but by this stage, it's going to be like there is money in open source. And then within a decade of that it's going to be most of the money is in these open-source approaches and the definition of money will have changed and evolved as we reach that sort of tipping point. So that's when crypto is probably worth 10 trillion or 20 trillion and then as far as I can tell, this is where I am the least confident, but I would say within 30 to 40 years, I don't think we're going to have a notion of money anymore. And all technology will be self-replicating and reproducing itself. Everything will be open source. There will be no more money. And I don't know what the world looks like at that point. But you know, it'll be interesting.

And what do you think of other venture capitalists?

I just think that most VCs don't have anything that they truly believe in. Which makes them hard to be indistinguishable from soloists. Because what do you care about? If you don't believe in anything, it means that you don't deeply truly care about something. To me, I mean, maybe this is harsh, I think that's like someone without a soul. Like they don't have a burning philosophy for anything. You know?

Unless it’s for money?

Unless it's just for money. But again, where do we fucking end up? A world with no money. So what's going to happen to those people? It’s all a bit ridiculous if you ask me.

② Challenge

Thanks for that context. What’s a challenge you would want to work on in the simulation? What in your life is most pressing at the moment? An area that’s either working or not working, but something most important for us to explore together over the next hour.

We should we should talk about Bittensor. I'm a really big fan and advocate and evangelist for it and what it represents for the future of our world.

Alright, so just tell me a little bit more about that without giving up too much. What's the challenge with this area of your life you’ve chosen?

I find the challenge that Bittensor is facing and the sort of motivating force pushing it forward intersects so incredibly deeply and powerfully with what I have been working on for the last six years of my life professionally. And what I deeply care about and where the world and humanity is headed. And I think it is paramount that people pay attention to this. So there are three ways in which AI is going to evolve over the coming decades. We might not have that long. We could have five years or something but I'm an optimist and I think we will be around for millennia, which is to say many thousands of years, many millennia. I'm not sure if it's going to be like 10,000 years, but I would say thousands of years. Somewhere between three and 10,000 years is that I would be competent to say that we're gonna be around past that. We're gonna be like a shadow. We will be like a shadow of what we are now. But I think AI is a centralizing development on the timeline of homosapiens we are observing and witnessing this as the current latest iteration of homosapiens and we have a choice to make. We have many choices to make. We are actively making many of those choices. A combination of the largest choices ever are being made simultaneously. To me from my perspective what is happening is we have one aspirational antichrist, Sam Altman, running open AI and doing what he's doing. And then we have a cohort of companies like Google or Apple doing the same thing. So that's proprietary world domination, regulatory capture, what I call ‘decel’ effectively. They are all about money optimisation. And that is the tapestry of OpenAI, Cohere, Adept and Anthropic. There's like a handful of companies that are somewhat evolving their strategies as they go along. But it's largely proprietary, closed, monopolistic, and aspirationally antichrist. Sam Altman is “Aspirationally Anti-Christ.” This is the first door. There is a second door. We have open-source AI companies like Misdraw, Stability AI, Hugging face, Sakana, Liquid AI, and a few others. And they've raised some smaller amount of money, but they're making a big impact, a really big impact. They've raised around $2-3 billion, much smaller amount of money,. Very small, relative to the 300 billion on the other side in the proprietary side of the market. A third door is staring us in the face, and it's called Bittensor. What is the third door? It’s the intersection. A sort of integration of some of the ideas on both sides of fully closed AI and open source. But it allows for decentralized value distribution in a cryptographically guaranteed way. And that is the same promise that Bitcoin is making relative to the dollar and to gold and it's the same promise that Etherium is making relative to proprietary centralized computational systems of any level of complexity from web services to Google Search. And that vision is still in its infancy. Vitalic Buterin’s ideas are but a decade old, we're barely into a decade of his vision. That's very early. And at 300 Billion, you know, scratching the surface of its potential. So I care about the third door and Bittensor, to me is something that pulled on our heartstrings. Both philosophically and financially speaking at OSS Capital, we've jumped in with a pretty meaningful commitment for our venture fund’s size relatively speaking. We’ve invested $25 million in the project, and we're also jumping into the ecosystem and community and are very excited about it.

③ Character

If Sam Altman is the Aspirational Antichrist, then how would you label yourself in two words?

Wow, I'm not sure I want to compare myself on any level with Sam. But I would say, I don't know. Jeez, well, I did pick a figure that was pretty intense on his side, so I'll just try to be as try to be as even possible. It’s a really good question, you gotta give me a couple of seconds to think about it. It’s some version of a Robin Hood character. Where the folks I seek to liberate and seek fair compensation for are like startup builders, scientists and open source engineers, as opposed to just like, the proletariat or the poor, you know, whatever the metaphor isn't actual Robinhood for like, stealing from the rich to feed the poor or whatever, you know. I’m here for open-source founders. I am an “Aspirational Robin Hood” if I could label myself.

Cool. To move forward in the simulation are you happy with this character choice? Is Aspirational Robin Hood the character you want to play moving forward in our conversation?

Sure. That’s fine. Let’s jump in.

So from here on out. I'm going to refer to you as Aspirational Robin Hood.

I love it. I love it. Okay, great. Awesome.

Cool. I can tell you love it because I can see the smile on your face.

④ Facts

🅐 Doing

All right, Aspirational Robin Hood. Let’s look at what you are doing in your life as an investor, both in these projects and beyond this project. We're looking for the doings. What are some of do as this character?

I’m very consistently saying the same thing I've been saying for close to the better part of a decade, actually probably about a decade now, maybe a little more than a decade. That open source is the most profound and important paradigm for invention and innovation humanity has ever invented and everyone must understand that, jump in, contribute capital, heavily invest or risk being left behind.

I’m convincing wealthy people who have made money by building massively successful open-source ecosystems and products to give me some of their money to invest on their behalf. So I can make them a 10x or 50x return. And then what I do is build pools of capital and I invest it in the next generation versions of who they were for society a decade or two ago.

If I could, concisely, enumerate, I back the renegade, fringe, dismissed, not taken seriously trailblazers who put their lives on the line, their relationships with their families and friends, and their whole social status to try to make the world better and build with open source as the wind behind their sails. That is vastly more than a sufficient amount of responsibility to take up. I wouldn’t mind ten carbon copy matrix clones of my body and my brain to help out with this load. I am very happy and very busy.

Understood. What things that you're not doing Aspirational Robin Hood?

Pretty much everything I do is digital. I'm kind of a recluse. I don't have too many friends. I'm quite intensely sort of constrained to a very tight schedule on my computer most of the day because I'm on a lot of boards and I'm doing a lot of things that require just nothing but my computer so I don't have an office. I'll go and visit people in person occasionally and spend selective time with some people in the Bay Area, but pretty much almost everything is over video calls. I could probably be doing more things building things in the physical world.

I'm not building things myself or programming or doing development in the open-source community, and I would love to do that also. I just don't know if I have as much time because largely I'm just making the best quality decisions I can make and talking to founders and that does consume a lot of my time. So I would love to have like a green wall on GitHub. And people in my world know what I mean when I say that.

🅑 Having

Great. We'll go to things that you currently have. The havings are the outcomes, the results, the actualities of your world. What do you have Aspirational Robinhood? You have a venture fund, an investment thesis, and a busy schedule for example.

I'm very fortunately the beneficiary of our business having grown as a result of being accurate with our thesis. I have built up a small fortune of returns for myself as a result of the success of the fund. But I want to point out a few extremely important things that I want to make sure everyone understands. There are three years of prioritization in how capital is captured d as a result of what I do. For one, I have limited partners. Those are the people who commit capital to my pools of money. Secondarily, I have the founders who are the beneficiaries of that capital. Under my capital allocation, I make a decision and then someone receives funding. And then you have me who is third in line. At the top of the list are the founders who make most of the returns of the new value, the second entity on the prioritisation stack is the limited partners. I am number three, I am a third in line. I have right on returns and that is as it should be. And many VCs do not understand this. And they have enormous unhealthy egos and relationships with those three fundamental personas in this startup ecosystem. The venture capital general partner is a servant job, so I have servant responsibility and duty of care. I believe that it is evolving to where you can do that servant job and also be a founder of a company. For example, Sam Altman, and I'm kind of messing with him calling him the Antichrist. He's probably not the AntiChrist, but think he's made many detestable decisions. But his brother Jack is very successful and runs a HR software company called Lattice. And it's a billion-dollar unicorn and hundreds of millions in revenue. Jack runs a fund, roughly about the same size as mine. Jack is a very successful operator. I respect that. I think that that's an admirable thing. I like to think I'm pretty busy doing what I do. But Jack can both run a pretty successful startup that has hundreds of employees and also run a fund with a portfolio and he's leading seed rounds and theory day rounds. It's pretty impressive. So yeah, I admire founders, especially for operators like Jack.

Got it. So you have profitable returns, a servant job, a duty of care, admiration for founders and industry judgments. What else do you have?

An inner peace and contentment over the fact that I wake up every day and I get to do what I deeply love to do in a way that I cannot describe. I deeply love what I do. And I'm also somehow able to be compensated, doing that very handsomely, which is very mind-blowing to me. The other thing is I think I'm pretty good at it. I have some level of competence. I think I'm good at what I do. And I try to remain as humble as I can in case I think I'm doing a better job than I am. I try as hard as I can to do that and ask for critical feedback. Everyone I meet I try to get some critical feedback from them. I'll ask you but I don't want to turn the tables that fast. We can do that at the end.

I look forward to the tables being turned. What things don’t you have Aspirational Robin Hood?

Physical painlessness. It would be interesting to live in that reality where this is an absence of any physical pain, where that doesn't necessarily prevent me from living a productive life and existing within society and a healthy way. Like I don't I don't have that now. So it'll be kind of interesting. The other thing that I think that I don't have that I think I think would be super interesting would be to be able to time travel. And another thing that I would be very interested in having that I don’t have is understanding the nature of the universe and the fundamental essence of our reality. And the relationship between mirrors and reflections. And the sort of fractal mental complexity of small quantum particles up to things like snowflakes and certain tree growth patterns. I don’t have that understanding.

Got it. So you don't have physical timelessness. You don't have time travel. And you don't have a full understanding of the nature of reality as Aspirational Robin Hood. Is there anything else you don't have?

Too many things I could list. I mean, gosh, you put me on the spot here. I would like to have the talent and the ability to do lithographs and drawings at the talent and creativity level of MC Escher.

🅒 Being

Let's let's move on to being now. What are your ways of being in the world? These are not your feelings per se, more so the expressions that colour your character. As Aspirational Robin Hood, how have you been you being?

I feel a strong sense of responsibility and obligation to make as great of a contribution as I can to the world and my observable universe of people that I know I can impact and do my best to make that impact.

Is vigilant the way of being?

No, I would say the way of being is evangelical. I was raised Baptist Christian. I learned how to read Shakesperian-level English at age four through studying the James version of the Christian Bible. I would be woken up at 5am by my dad with all my siblings, my brother and three sisters. I was entirely homeschooled, by the way, so that's why I'm like super weird. And we would go into the kitchen and we would read the Psalms and Proverbs of the day. I developed a very strong sense of the importance of belief in things that have the potential to change the world and to make the human experience as impactful as possible.

Thanks for sharing that. I love that. So evangelical is a way of being. Are there any other ways of being an Aspirational Robin Hood you are living?

I often feel one with everyone. And that I can feel where things are sort of drifting in the wrong direction. I can kind of poke and prod a lot based on what I say in tweets but also expressed through investment decisions. Hopefully, that ends up manifesting in positive ways.

So provocative is a way of being as this character?

Sure, I would say I can provoke things that I want to happen that I think are hopefully largely good things. I mean, I'm not a perfect person I might have deep down subliminal, not fully internalized motives that might not be net positive and unhelpful. It would not be intellectually honest If I said that I knew the source of all of my motivations to be unilaterally, and morally pure. I don’t think anyone can say that with a straight face.

Got it. Is that being humble? Is that being cautious? Are you being questionable? Even if you are Aspirational Robin Hood with a very direct mission, what's the way of being that has you ask whether this character has limitations?

Yes, I’d say humble and questioning. That is very insightful, Kristian. Krishnamurthy is an Indian philosopher and is known for just very direct and raw world views on the importance of questioning and the importance of curiosity and the importance of pushing oneself to be the absolute brink of honesty. The instructions are out there. Very few people have the privilege of accessing them, but the instructions are out there and they're not out of reach. I think if you dedicate yourself enough to the art of questioning you can expand consciousness. Questioning and curiosity are the most fundamental human conditions and they should be nurtured at all costs.

Humble. Questioning. Nurturing. Great ways of being for sure. Let's look at the ways of being that you don't get to be as Aspirational Robin Hood. What have you not been being in this character?

I don't think I would ever be able to reach the level of wealth as like Elon Musk, or, say the top 10 wealthiest people in the world currently. Not that I would care about that or that I want that, but that's probably something I wouldn't be based on the path I've chosen and I'm very happy with that. I'm very happy with that.

So what's is that as a way of being that you are not being? What does that look like?

Technically it is a way of being because it's like a list of levels or tokens. It's like a point system. So when you say you're number five on the list, that is a way of being. Your number five. Now you're not number five always because there's the numbers are constantly shifting around and stuff. But the way of being is numbered and shifts higher and lower up the list. Those different brackets give different ways of being.

So ultra-influential the way of being you are not being or don’t get to be as Aspirational Robin Hood?

Not necessarily because there are plenty of extraordinarily rich people who no one knows about and who are not even remotely influential.

Got it, but I care about you in this simulation. So what are you not being in simple terms?

I see what you mean. It’s a hard question for me. Let me think. Okay, so I would say so, I'm not being extractive. I'm not being profit-maximizing or money-worshipping. I'm not being unsustainable, not being communist or egalitarian or authoritarian.

Awesome. All right. Take a deep breath. We’ll take one together. How are you feeling right now?

I feel good. Yeah, the deep breath helped a lot. I feel good. I feel curious about what comes next.

⑤ Choice

There are things that you want in your life and in your ventures, which you stated at the start of this call. Is Aspirational Robin Hood the character that’s going to get you there? That is up for question. Maybe, maybe not. Let’s have you choose. What's the opposite version of Aspirational Robinhood?

Aspirational Anti-Christ.

There may be a desired character that you want to be that you haven't gotten to be up until this point in your journey. Is there a character that's opening up in this conversation that is more than Aspirational Robin Hood?

I know for sure what this is, I would be a classical guitarist. professional. I could choose to do this professionally maybe three months out of the year. I would have enough money to have maybe two or three houses around the world and a beautiful instrument collection, and I wouldn't need any more money. So I have I have enough money right now to do that, by the way. I could if I wanted for the rest of my life, but that is a very different life and it would just be one of creating beautiful music daily. And just existing in that incredible pleasure of reaching higher and higher levels of musical accomplishment. I was an aspirational, classical guitarist growing up and I decided to put that entire career path on hold when I was 15, which is 20 years ago. I'm 35 now. I have a couple of really beautiful instruments but I don't practice as much as I used to. For me, playing the classical guitar is better than sex.

Got that. Okay, you took an interesting answer to my question, which is great. It's beautiful. I sense you can have both and that you're wanting more than just Aspirational Robin Hood.

Yeah, I'm wanting more there. I mean, dude, come on. I'm doing this interview with you. I could have been practising my guitar. I should have been practising my guitar. Probably.

Cool. I wasn't asking you this to say go and stop your life now as a venture capitalist and start playing guitar professionally. I was asking about the character you’d ultimately love to be. if you feel your Aspirational Robin Hood character is too limiting, what is a new possibility for you?

I'm good with Robin Hood for the rest of my life, honestly. I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm pretty young and healthy. I work out. I take care of myself. I take my pills every morning so to speak. I'm not I'm not like the crazy longevity guy that does like 50 tablets every morning but I have my own health protocol. You know, I take my fish oils ha! I hope I have a long life. I hope I don't die of some weird cancer or something. But I will do venture capital for the rest of my days. If I live long, that means at least 60 years more, I'm happy doing it. I know the thesis has a long of runway. It will be relevant for the next 50 years or more. It will be accurate and it will be true in the way that I read the tweet when we were starting the conversation.

I get Aspirational Robinhood is a lifetime vision for you. I see it moves you. But when I asked you about a desired version of yourself, there was something about your musical expression that revealed something important that I don’t think is wise to skip over it. So are you happy with Aspirational Robinhood or do you want to upgrade it to something that embodies the musical side of your nature as well? I'm just prodding you to explore this possibility. It's like there's some musician in your heart who wants to express music and simultaneously be the Robin Hood character. I’m challenging you that both are possible without sacrificing either part of yourself. A synthesis of sorts.

No, I'd like to be some version of what people understand to be Robin Hood, but I'd like to have that like in a living legacy form to where I am living it out in real time, ubiquitous on the societal terminology playing field as the term Robin Hood.

So is it Living Robin Hood or Aspirational Robin Hood? I’m pushing you to choose the exact character that you love most, so you proceed to the next stage of the simulation and live out this reality with full force.

I'd like to be the living open source. An open-source that lives open source. Yeah, I think that's it. Living Open Source.

Does Living Open Source move you to your core?

Yeah, absolutely. It’s superior. It’s the chief aim.

Cool. I saw a shift in your face. You wouldn't have noticed it, but your weight shifted and your shoulders dropped as well. You relaxed into it. It was kind of beautiful to witness visually for me. So that's great. That's a good sign. The body reveals the truth. All right, Living Open Source is that the character you want to proceed with?

That sounds good.

Let’s take another deep breath together. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Now, let’s close down our eyes. And let our simulation begin.

⑥ Simulation

Simulations are personal and private. Each simulation can touch on the most intimate, sensitive or raw parts of a person’s world. We only share the details of each simulation if permission is granted.

⑦ Integration

Living Open Source, we’ve come to the end of our simulation, however, it’s only the beginning for you.

That was very cool. Do you have any feedback for me?

Yes, I do. You are a visionary builder on the frontier. Your venture is probably 80% of your bandwidth, and maybe the other 20% is dedicated to your girlfriend, dog, or whatever. I would challenge you to simulate across all areas of life and be open to the biggest transformations for your work not necessarily happening in work-related simulations. Big breakthroughs and epiphanies of thought can come when you're not thinking or simulating about your project, which is a paradox. So if you went to work on your relationship with a family member or your bodily health, you may stumble upon a $100 million opportunity for the business. That's the magic of simulations. People come in here and think “Right, it's work time. Let's talk about the project.” Yeah, yeah, right. We need that. My feedback is like, don't be closed off that a random trigger in another area of life is not the key to your next big commercial or creative discovery. There are so many blind spots in other areas of life that can feed into the breakthroughs of the thing that you want. The greatest thinking on the thing that you think about doesn't come from thinking about that thing. It's kind of a weird one. That's all I would suggest, as a fellow person on the path. My biggest breakthroughs of late have come from areas that I wouldn't normally look at that I go and look at because I surrender to the process. Non-related simulations have turned out to clarify things in things like my business. The energy blocks of one thing were feeding into another. Yes, founders would probably rather fucking build a rocket and go to therapy. I appreciate what that meme is pointing at. I love to build and create too. But other areas of life store gold also. Simulations is holistic and integrative in that sense. Beyond the money or behind the business, there's a soul and a heart. Creators have got these other important areas and that stuff doesn't get spoken about freely or publically because it's private. This can put a strain on the creator if a healthy release is not found. Simulation helps creators transmute this energy and use other tensions for deeper creation. Do you have any feedback for me?

You’ve started to tap into something that I think is special. Simulation could be a movement and a framework for anyone to use with anyone else: a loved one, a friend, not just a book about people who are good at what they do or their craft. I think you've discovered a formula for enabling greater degrees of connectedness between people in more raw and authentic ways. And I think that deserves its categorical celebration. In other words, you need to honour the fact that it is something that has unique potential in its category. It could be a totally distinct thing, I'm not fully sold on what that thing is.