Nasjaq - Venture Investing in Hard Tech

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Nasjaq: [00:00:53] Today I’m excited to be joined by Jack Najjak on TikTok, a chemical engineer turned TikTok influencer and venture capital investor. Jack’s interests, including going to Mars in 2040, helping new companies navigate the startup life and creating weekly videos for over 700,000 followers to help educate the general public on these topics.

JohnPaul: [00:01:11] Jack, welcome to the show.

Nasjaq: [00:01:12] Thank you for having me JP. It’s great to be here. So Jack, I saw your TikTok and I was like, this guy is constantly making great content, talking about space and this tech industry and hard tech and soft tech startups. Can you go a little bit more into how you even got on the platform and what was that initial [00:01:31] moment you had when you realized, wow, I want to double down on TikToks. I think this is going to be a huge platform. Yeah, for sure. TikTok has been an amazing platform to grow on as a new creator. Originally, I started posting YouTube videos and it was actually, I was just talking about stocks

Nasjaq: [00:01:46] that thought were interesting. Then I’ve always been interested in startups. At one point in the summer of 2019, my friends left their jobs to start a, not necessarily a startup, but just a business. And I started a vlog where I went to Dallas and I started vlogging them and it was called millionaires by 2020. [00:02:04] And essentially, I was just making content about startups, but YouTube is very difficult to grow on. So eventually, I got on TikTok and I was making a few videos and then there was a recap, a video that I made of after Elon presented the Starship presentation in late October or September 2019. And that went viral at the time, 200,000 views. And

Nasjaq: [00:02:27] I was like, okay, there’s clearly something here. I like TikTok, it’s growing as a platform. And so I kind of just doubled down on doing hard tech. And essentially, I chose hard tech because I think that commonly I say that the media is somewhat pessimistic. Engineering content creators are focused on making e-bikes and then public investing content creators [00:02:47] are focused on the public markets. And so I kind of invert that, I talk about private markets, I talk about applications and I talk about optimism. So that’s, that all converges into startups. So, so then it kind of became like, okay, I’m going to talk about these cool startups that nobody else is talking about. And at the same time, talk about the

Nasjaq: [00:03:04] cool hard tech that is already being talked about like Tesla and space ads. So where do you get that information that you use to create your, you know, your weekly or daily videos on what happened in space and startups? So you’re listening to a lot of podcast, you have a certain go to place to like aggregate articles or where you find [00:03:19] this, this information kind of how do you do that research? Yeah. So the weekly videos that you’re referring to are every Saturday and Sunday I do on Saturday, I do a video on what happened in hard tech startups this week. And on Sunday, I do what happened in space this week. And it’s not necessarily startups in space. But I find

Nasjaq: [00:03:38] that information, I have an RSS feed set up for like cool startups that I want to be looking for or like, for example, I have an RSS feed notification for lilac solutions. And they announced, I think it was like a partnership last week. And so that’s why they were in the video. But then otherwise, it’s kind of just me doing some, some professional [00:03:58] googling and reading about portfolios of funds that I like. And also Twitter is like the most valuable resource out there. So yeah, it’s kind of just everywhere. And then I choose the top stories that I like that week. And then during the week, I make videos about more in depth content instead of just like general news.

Nasjaq: [00:04:17] So during the week, are you able to talk a little bit more about that content production process that you’ve put in place? I think what I’ve seen on your videos is you do a really good job basically pumping out content that does well with the algorithm is engaging and has multiple images that are showing up, you know, just one after the next as you’re [00:04:34] talking about the topic, are you able to talk a little bit farther about that? Yeah, so the way that I make these videos, in my opinion, relatively engaging is that I think a lot of science content might talk about like a black hole or something in the edge of space. But to me, that’s not really applicable to like my life or anything. So

Nasjaq: [00:04:54] when I do these videos, the way that I do it is I try to make fast content and I try to make it as applicable to my daily life as possible. All startups aren’t really applicable to daily life, but it’s like talking about how a new battery processing method will like increase. Going back to Li-Like solutions, talking about how their lithium extraction [00:05:14] process increases lithium extraction from 40% to around 80 or 90% efficiency. And then we can produce lithium for a much cheaper price. And then that helps Tesla because Tesla can do supply chain contracts with them. I think that’s really cool to an audience and not many people are hearing that. And then secondly, with the videos in general, I try to take

Nasjaq: [00:05:34] editing tips from like, I’m a huge David Dobrik fan. And essentially the way that he cuts together his vlogs is very fast and it’s chopped together and it’s quick bits. And I try to take that method of editing. You mentioned applicable in your daily life. I think that’s one of the things that I’ve [00:05:51] noticed on TikTok content a lot is that you have to make it applicable to the viewer. And if you go to niche, those videos aren’t going to do as well or that content’s not going to resonate as well with the viewer, unless you can really show them like, Hey, this is how your future could be because of this company. So I’m interesting that you are actually

Nasjaq: [00:06:06] making that loop and you’re seeing that that is important to the success of creating content. When it comes to these other platforms, Instagram, wheels, Twitter, fleets, LinkedIn stories, YouTube shorts, Snapchat stories, Pinterest, you know, stories now, all trying to capture on this 30 second 60 second clip that people can watch on the platform. It’s like what I [00:06:27] call the new frontier of TV. Are you using any of those other platforms? Have you seen any other traction of pickup or are you just kind of really focusing on doubling down on TikTok? Because in my opinion, it has the best algorithm. Yeah. Yeah. So TikTok definitely does have the best algorithm. This has been beaten to

Nasjaq: [00:06:43] death. But the thing that they did was their video success is not tied to your follower chart. But as for Instagram, it’s difficult for me to post on the Instagram reels specifically because the Instagram reels limits you to 15 seconds. And I believe this is due to like music to copyright laws and TikTok. All my videos are almost 60 seconds. So I can’t repost my [00:07:03] videos to Instagram reels. Although I have made a few specifically for reels and it’s clear that Instagram is trying to promote this new avenue for creators. That said, I think Instagram is not necessarily my favorite platform, especially for the startup community, because my goal is like, yes, to have a general broad like science enthusiast like engineering audience.

Nasjaq: [00:07:28] But I also want to be able to find people that are really interested in building the future. And to me, that happens one on like video platforms. So on YouTube, such as with content creators, like real engineering, Scott Manley, like all these people have engineering audiences that are excellent. And then also on Twitter, there’s there’s a huge VC startup community there. [00:07:49] So I take the video approach by using TikTok. And then I take the Twitter community approach by obviously using Twitter. So those are the two platforms that I focus on. And I haven’t gotten a ton of value off of the fleets or the reels or anything like that. So you mentioned, you know, you’re looking to build in an audience that has engineers. Why does a

Nasjaq: [00:08:12] social media audience matter so much today to you? And why are you doing? Why are you looking to build an audience of engineers? Well, for one, if my end goal is to eventually invest in startups, and I’m actually putting together a deal right now that I’ll be announcing pretty soon that I’m really excited about, I will also have [00:08:32] to help these companies that are building hard tech with hiring. So one of the biggest value ads that I can bring to these companies that I’m working with and talking about is that I can help them with hiring. For example, Adam Limbs is building prosthetic limbs. And they’re taking like some DARPA funded and Johns Hopkins produce technology and they’ve licensed it and they’re starting to

Nasjaq: [00:08:53] bring it to market. And what I did was I made a video with them and they ended up getting like three Java evicans per day from qualified people. And there were countless other like anecdotes they had customers that wanted to start using their prosthetics. And so this was like a huge value ad to the company. And then secondly, if I have a lot of engineers in my audience, and my whole thing is [00:09:17] saying like, Hey, you can actually go build a startup. Like, I’m showing you that these are all the people doing it. Lylak solutions, Adam Limbs, Deep Green, like all these people are people that have gone out that were engineers to start building a startup, you can do it too. Then hopefully, when they want to start a startup, they’ll message me and hopefully they’ll also like be more inclined to

Nasjaq: [00:09:39] start startups as well. So it’s mostly just like, you know, this has been commonly said, but we’ve kind of stagnated in the physical world. And hopefully, I can inspire some people to start changing that. That is a great goal to inspire these engineers. And one of the things I think I’ve noticed on TikTok is, as you mentioned, the the virality of that content being able to actually send three [00:10:00] people a day to apply to send a resume to a startup based on one TikTok video. That’s insane. And they didn’t even have job postings. Exactly. It’s just like we’re showing so much opportunity to push so much demand. I actually was watching a couple of TikToks yesterday about the life 360 trend, which is where you know, one guy who kept posting videos about life 360 about how if you got

Nasjaq: [00:10:20] a one star review on it, they could kick it off the app store and they literally took their one star reviews or their five star reviews and dropped it to like, I think one or two stars because hundreds of thousands of people gave it a one star review. And the founder actually ended up connecting with the TikTok and was like, Hey, I’d love to talk to you. Because this is insane what [00:10:36] you’re able to do. And kind of one of the things you mentioned on when you were discussing, what is the difference between a hard tech and a soft tech startup for listeners who don’t really know? Yeah, for sure. And just to go back to the life 360 CEO, he actually turned around his his brand using TikTok. It was impressive. He is now like a Tiktoker. He has hundreds of thousands of followers. And

Nasjaq: [00:10:58] people are like, standing the life 360 CEO and being like, Oh, he’s just a guy, he’s trying to make an app that like helps us like he’s completely turned around that brand by working with the Tiktoker and and doing a really excellent job there. Now Sherman Williams, I’m not sure if you saw the paint company or the Tiktoker, they did not do as good of a job. But that’s beside the point. As for soft tech and [00:11:19] hard tech, I think these definitions are pretty malleable and flexible. Some people have different opinions on it. But hard tech to me is essentially you’re building a hardware product that is novel, has some aspect of novelty. And then soft tech is it’s essentially software only. But then soft tech can also include deep tech, which can be like novel software. And then maybe soft tech also just includes like SAS

Nasjaq: [00:11:43] or something like that. I’m not like too ridges on these on these definitions. The way that I think about this is I typically feature hard tech because it’s very easy for me to put a camera on that and be like, Hey, this is like separating lithium from brine for Li-Lak solutions example, or Hey, this is a robotic arm. It’s a lot more difficult to do that with software. And and it to me, it’s just like, [00:12:06] okay, we’re improving software. But I’d also like cooler things physically. The one software video that I have really made is like, I guess discuss some crypto stuff. But also I have discussed GPT three, which I thought was really cool. Yeah, that software is insane. I’m I when that was released, everyone was talking about it and how it’s going to change writing forever. And I’ve been able to interact with a little bit, don’t

Nasjaq: [00:12:29] have a license, but I’m super excited for for for GPL three. One of the things that you keep on mentioning is battery technology. So what do you see as the biggest push of renewable energy in the next five years? And then do you think battery technology has a place in the con going conversation? And in my opinion, obviously, yes, it has a place. But how do you think that’s going to evolve? And how do we [00:12:51] get how is it going to improve? Yeah, so how do I think that battery technology will improve over the next five years? Yeah, how do you think it’s going to be in, you know, with renewable energy and work with renewables? For sure. Yeah, so one of the biggest things is reducing the duck curve. This is seen in California, in that there’s essentially not many people are using energy, maybe in the afternoon, but

Nasjaq: [00:13:11] then everybody comes home at four PM. And then all of these AC units get turned on, and then it draws a lot of energy from the grid. And they have to turn on all their coal plants, or whatever. And essentially, you need batteries to store the energy so that when everybody starts increasing the peak load, we don’t need to turn on the coal plants. This is one of the biggest things that batteries will be [00:13:31] used for. And then obviously, like the electric vehicle revolution is going to be huge. I think that what Tesla has done is showing showing that you can build a battery supply chain again. And I’m still diving into the data here. But my current thesis is that it used to be extremely difficult to break into the battery supply chain as like a startup, mostly because you’d have to secure like a

Nasjaq: [00:13:53] huge contract with Panasonic. But now there are multiple battery verticals that are available, such as like you could maybe build like a battery specifically for an Apple watch or an AirPod or a type of electric vehicle or a type of electric semi truck or any of these battery enabled devices. And what this will do is increase the R&D or the like the potential for R&D to actually be used specifically [00:14:19] because like maybe you need a solid solid state battery for one type of application, but then you need a silicon anode for another application. And you know, we’re already and so people can develop multiple types of batteries and really develop out the research and technology. And one leading indicator of this is that Tesla themselves is using three different anodes for their different

Nasjaq: [00:14:40] trucks or cars. They have like a high nickel anode, they have a high and like a low nickel anode. And I think one of them has a couple, I’m not exactly sure the details, but they have three, three cathodes and and so yeah, people are producing a multitude of battery types. So do you see batteries as being one of the, I guess, pain points for the renewable energy and [00:14:59] also for the ongoing conversation to going green? I mean, for me, when we did kind of some analysis on Bitcoin miners versus batteries, we found that Bitcoin miners are about 10 times cheaper in storing that energy capacity, of course, with a Bitcoin mining operation, you only can relinquish your power rights or give them back to the grid, which prevents those peak or plants or coal

JohnPaul: [00:15:20] plants from turning on, you can actually can provide consistent power. But I guess how do you see

Nasjaq: [00:15:26] batteries interacting and are they the most important thing in your eye to this push to renewables? Not necessarily. I think that one, we’re going to need a ton of materials to get enough batteries like online. And I think we will need batteries for a while, specifically, not necessarily to like balance the load always on an energy grid, but just to like power all these devices, these [00:15:49] electric cars, because you know, even if we did have say coal plants producing all the energy in the middle of a city, I would still want electric vehicles instead of instead of gas powered vehicles emitting pollution in the middle of the city, right? You’d want to concentrate the pollution in one area. So you’ll still need batteries. Then it becomes a question of if you need batteries for

Nasjaq: [00:16:08] devices or if you need batteries for devices plus storage. So I think that’s the question there. Secondly, I think that what might happen instead of producing a ton of batteries is that nuclear power plants such as, and not necessarily the massive ones such as the 100 megawatt reactors, I think that companies and startups like Oklo and NewScale are really deploying or will be [00:16:34] deploying these soon. And these nuclear reactors can provide base power. And so I’ve been speaking with Oklo and it seems like they have like some really impressive reasons that they’ll get to scale. And if this happens, then, you know, maybe the Bitcoin problem will solve the base load, but if not, then the nuclear will solve the constant base load problem. And maybe we won’t have as

JohnPaul: [00:16:55] many batteries for storing energy. No, I’m excited to see where the nuclear

Nasjaq: [00:16:58] conversation can go as we do see, you know, wind and solar is great, but it does have some some lifespan issues there and it is subsidized. So it isn’t necessarily the most efficient where this modular nuclear startup set have been coming out, even though recently some of them got their funding cut. I don’t know if you made a video about that, but I definitely saw it somewhere. [00:17:16] And I think that hopefully, you know, we can get to that point where we are able to deploy safe modular nuclear plants and power generation across the US and in the world. One thing I do want to touch on before we move over to another topic is your most recent, one of your most recent videos about the stripe airship and using starlight to provide internet.

JohnPaul: [00:17:38] So where did this idea come from? And I’m excited to see, you know, if it actually happens,

Nasjaq: [00:17:44] that would be amazing. Where does attraction you’ve gotten so far on that? It will happen. I will bring this in reality. If I have to beam it into reality, I will make it happen. That’s a great question. So it happened because Ryan Orbach from Stripe, he previously led Stripe’s like climate pro or he is leading Stripe’s climate program or working on it. He [00:18:05] posted a tweet and he was saying, I know that there’s a lot going on in the world right now, but it feels like Starlink is kind of under hyped. And then he had a tweet underneath that and he was like, CC at Jack Mass Jack. And so I was like, okay, so I asked him, like, are you asking me to hype it up? Or are you asking for my opinion? Why it’s not hyped? And then I started like riffing

Nasjaq: [00:18:24] ways we could hype it up. And I was like copying maybe like Mr. Beast thumbnail type things where it was like live streaming a night on a private island with Starlink satellites or whatever. And I went through a few like maybe like live streaming a gaming tournament across country using only Starlink or something like that. And then it was like, oh, I like airships. [00:18:43] It would be cool to use a Starlink receiver on an airship going over the mountains because typically you would never have internet there. And also I just want to see more airships in general. I think that airships are a luxury way of travel. And I don’t think that they’re necessary for cargo or fast travel. But if we have cruise ships, I think that we should have airships. We can design

Nasjaq: [00:19:05] them safely now. We can put hell on gas in the mixed with the hydrogen gas to make it inflammable. Or we could use helium, although there is a helium shortage, although you could say, like, if you really want to be cool about it, we’re going to go mine some helium from the moon. And I’m mostly just messing around there. But then there’s also like vacuum airships as well. [00:19:28] So you won’t even need gases, although then it becomes like more of a structural problem. But the main thing is that I think that airships have typically represented like the time where we used to dream about the future. So there’s a lot of cool concept art about airships, maybe from the 1930s being like, hey, the future is going to be massive cruises. And that future never really

Nasjaq: [00:19:49] panned out. And that happened also with nuclear future people were going to be living on the moon by 1970 or whatever. And for really 1990s or 2000s. And all of this concept art that used to be part of the future kind of faded away. And I think it’s just extremely important that we bring some of that concept art back into reality and say, hey, it actually is possible. Why did we give up on this? [00:20:16] So yeah, I’m currently looking for sponsors. I think what we can do is we already have one of the phase clan members who’s one of the biggest gaming Twitch streamers out there. He’s on board. He wants to like do a gaming tournament from an airship will obviously be live streaming the travels using Starlink. Casey Handmere said that it is like technically possible. We might have to

Nasjaq: [00:20:37] do like some software things with SpaceX to make that happen. I’d love to like put some company’s logo. Maybe it’ll be striped on the side of it and maybe raise awareness for stripes climate program. Or if anybody else has any ideas of what they want to promote, that would make sense. I think definitely reach out to me. And I want to make this happen. I have engineers who reached out to me. [00:20:57] This is the beauty of the audience that I have is that I have engineers who are already building airships that reach out to me. And like I’ve been talking with this guy as well. And like he’s like, hey, yeah, I can build this. Like we can do this. It all come together. And so yeah, that’s where I’m working on. I just think meaming a lost vision of the future and making a reality will be like

Nasjaq: [00:21:16] super powerful. I wish you best of luck in that, man. I definitely want to see it happen. Do you have like a budget? And you have any idea how much airship would cost even build and let alone operate, but really build, I guess? Yeah, we can definitely do it for under 10 million. Okay. Like that’s that’s for sure. And then I would I would be hesitant to say like less than five. [00:21:37] But I do genuinely think we can do it for pretty cheaply, especially if we don’t make anything massive. We’re not looking to like scale it up a ton. Yeah, I definitely think we can do it. I’m actually discussing with the engineer that I was mentioning. He’s also a founder of like a satellite supply chain company, which is really cool, but named Pantheon Orbital. And yeah,

Nasjaq: [00:21:56] I’m discussing pricing with him and how we’ll actually build this and like what the timelines are. But this is going to happen. So yeah. So stay tuned. And how do people reach out to you? What’s the best way I usually relieve that for the end? But do I want to give that information now? Twitter DMS are probably the best, but you can also email me jack at NAS jack.com. [00:22:14] And how do you spell NAS jack for everyone who doesn’t know NAS J.A.Q. It’s like NASDAQ, but for startups. Awesome. I didn’t actually make that realization until you told me over the phone. Makes total sense. Yeah. Yeah. The original phrase was like NAS jack, hijack the NASDAQ, skip the nine to five, take a risk, build the future. And I don’t necessarily

Nasjaq: [00:22:38] want to be out there saying like hijack the NASDAQ. But yeah, it’s definitely like, you know, I’m Jack and I’m building NAS jack and it’s like the alternative to NASDAQ, which is the nine to five life. Like if you want to genuinely build the future, work really hard. You know, I’m talking with people who are building cities, building satellite supply chains, [00:22:58] you know, robotic arms, nuclear fission reactors, like all these things are possible. And yeah. So NAS jack is like the alternative reality to NASDAQ. I love it. So talking about building the future. So if you had a chance to go back before you started college, would you choose the same career path of being in biomedical engineering, or would you potentially not even go to school

JohnPaul: [00:23:19] altogether and you know, build content and work on a startup? Can you talk a little bit more about,

Nasjaq: [00:23:23] you know, how you view college? Yeah. So is your question asking me like 2013 me or 2020? 2020 you looking back and having an opportunity again. Okay. So in 2013, I would still go to college. In 2020, I would not. And that’s mostly because the internet has just like taken off since since 2013. Since you know, now it’s very viable to be a high schooler without a education and [00:23:53] essentially, you know, even if you’re an engineer, just make projects and show people that you can build stuff. And I think you’ll get hired by not necessarily like maybe a big prestigious firm. But honestly, if you’re the person that’s building projects, you don’t want to be at this prestigious firm because they might not be getting stuff done. So currently, I would not go to

Nasjaq: [00:24:12] college, but you also have to be motivated. You have to be able to promote yourself. You have to be able to put together a project like list of what you’ve accomplished. You have to be able to do projects on your own. And you also have to be able to like say, find somebody like say if you’re mechanical engineer, you have to find somebody at a CNC shop and get a job there and and start like [00:24:31] learning that way. But I totally think it’s viable. I think that everybody’s going into debt over this thing that’s like socially accepted. And you should always be wary of social socially accepted norms, especially when every single person is complaining about having student debt, everyone. Like, so why would you why would you even consider going into it? It blows my mind. I would not. So,

Nasjaq: [00:24:52] you know, I can say that kind of stuff. But I also think I exemplify it in terms of after I graduated, I was a chemical engineer, I had I studied chemical engineering. I did biomedical research. I did some computational methods, grad courses. And you know, I could have gotten a job as a chemical engineer. So, so I was in Canada. Sorry. And then I could have gone to Houston or something and [00:25:15] gotten a job and oil and gas or has a as a junior chemical engineer or whatever. But instead, I looked up from Canada or I was in Canada and I looked out and I said, I want to go to the coolest place in America. So what I did was I drove down to the Gigafactory, Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada, and I talked my way into a job. And I literally, I just I just went out there and I talked to

Nasjaq: [00:25:34] people and I said, I want to work at the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada. I think this is a really cool place. It’s like the future manufacturing and let me in. And so, so I was at like a car dealership and his wife turned out to be part of the hiring team at like the Gigafactory. And so, so yeah, I talked to people. And, and you know, that was not like the junior engineer role at all. [00:25:57] But then eventually I left and I was like, okay, this like massive kind of company isn’t necessarily for me. It wasn’t it wasn’t because of extra work or anything. I’m just always attracted to startups. And so I went to Austin. I did my own startup. I started it. It was going going all right. Like I was doing well. I was learning a lot. And then I met a YC team who I ended up joining.

Nasjaq: [00:26:19] And I was one of like the first few engineers and I set up like their manufacturing and supply chain. So it was it was like I did not go the standard route after after that. And then I started posting on the internet. And I think the internet just accelerates anything that you’re doing, not to keep going beyond the question. But like the way that I think about the internet is the [00:26:39] internet is an artificial general intelligence and AGI. And you talk to it. And you can say, I want, I want good things or I want bad things. And whatever you ask of the internet, it will bring to you. And so if you ask for good things, it will bring that good things. And that’s why I think that you don’t necessarily need to go to university. I agree with you completely. I myself dropped out

Nasjaq: [00:26:59] of school on that. That was a great answer. I have so many follow up questions. The first one I want to ask you is you mentioned mentors. So who would you say your mentor is or the people you most

JohnPaul: [00:27:09] follow and you know, can you tell maybe specifically if you have a story where a mentor impacted you

Nasjaq: [00:27:14] to kind of take this leap? I mean, most people don’t just show up and at Tesla’s Gigafactory or you know, in Nevada and say, I want to get a job here. But I think what I’m what I tell my friends and when I realized from running my own startup and company is that that’s very feasible. If you have some skills and you have some things you’ve worked on, you can easily walk into most of these [00:27:31] places and talk to some people in the city in the big town, find out who you need to meet, go to a meetup and then get a job in under a couple of weeks at one of these big companies that is always looking for engineers, people who think outside the box. So as for mentors, I mean, I definitely had like one or two professors that I really learned a lot from in terms of just being diligent,

Nasjaq: [00:27:52] working hard and just seeing seeing what they’re producing in terms of kind of what I was thinking of when I went to the Gigafactory. You know, this is like a super common idol or whatever, but I was thinking like, like, what would Elon do? Like, Elon, he had a job. I just vaguely remember he had two jobs and like he had one job during the day and then he’d go work at [00:28:13] coding like some mouse or something for an early tech company during the night. And you know, he also moved from Africa to Canada and figured out his way and then he moved to the States and figured out his way. And I was, I’ve always moved around a lot. I don’t have a problem changing my location. Like, it wasn’t like I was born in Canada. I was born in Houston, Canada, and then I moved

Nasjaq: [00:28:35] to Canada, Calgary, and I moved to the Netherlands. And then I went back to Canada for university and then Nevada, Austin, back in Houston, and I’m currently about to go to San Francisco. But as for the question for mentors, it was kind of like, I, at that moment, I was thinking like, Elon would kind of just do something like this, because he has done stuff like that. [00:28:54] Yeah, that’s, I mean, I agree. I definitely agree with you on that. Elon is a crazy guy. And I’m glad to hear, you know, he is one of those mentors. I feel like that a lot of people in the past, you know, 10 years have started looking up to him and he has inspired, I think, you know, hundreds of thousands of engineers to work on problems that are bigger than life like. And hopefully,

Nasjaq: [00:29:13] if you mentioned, push this world into the reality of the future that we, you know, we thought we were going to have in 20, 30, 40 years ago. Totally. So I’ve got this question down. I just, as you were talking, do you fear failure at all? Like, do you fear like you could end up failing?

JohnPaul: [00:29:28] Or is it just, can you talk more on that? Like, what does that even look like?

Nasjaq: [00:29:31] I’ve failed so many times. I failed so many times. I’ve had multiple like YouTube channels. I was bullish on my YouTube channel when my friends quit their business and that, you know, ended up not panning out. Although now I have 8,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is an at time I haven’t been posting there. But I’ve made videos that just have flopped. You know, I started a startup and then [00:29:52] I left that to go to the YC startup. That’s technically a failure. You know, I failed at the Gigafactory, I guess, by not becoming like a senior engineer there. I’ve done so many things where it’s like every single time I would rather just fail like, like recently, very concrete example is that in the last two weeks, I’ve just been running two miles every morning. And

Nasjaq: [00:30:14] it wasn’t even like a question of if I should try it because I was like, well, if I do one week of it, that’s better than doing none. And so yeah, I tried to not consider failure as like losing. It’s more learning. And so, you know, if I failed at the Gigafactory, technically I learned what it was like to be there. And then if I failed starting a startup, it was like, well, I learned what it [00:30:35] was like to do that. And then I got the opportunity to go to the YC company and learn a lot more there. And I don’t know. I mean, everybody will fail. People fail thousands of times. Steve Jobs failed. Elon, you know, has failed. Like everybody’s done things and you should be trying things. You shouldn’t be a 4.0 GPA with the perfect resume that has never failed. I think you’ll end up,

Nasjaq: [00:30:57] I don’t want to say, but like a generic kind of thing. So no, I understand. I think that’s a great, great response. And as you know, we’re saying, failure is really the opportunity to learn. And one of the things I want to touch on, which I think a lot of people have a struggle with, especially when creating content is failing with content creation and understanding that you need [00:31:18] to build consistency in order to fail and pass through those failures in order to get, as you

JohnPaul: [00:31:24] mentioned, you know, whatever you’re looking for from the internet. Can you talk a little bit more

Nasjaq: [00:31:28] about how maybe you’ve had struggled with creating content consistently or even like that process and if like those failures, what you’ve learned from them in, you know, content creation specifically, it seems like you have been doing it for a while now. And this is like, you know, one of the most successful avenues, the TikTok channel that you have. But how do you view failure in the sense [00:31:46] of like content creation or even like being a successful content creator? Yeah. So the way that I think about failure, and this is so difficult because I struggle with this every single day. It’s like, I’m currently working on setting up a system to make my videos, you know, maybe within like the first three hours of the day, and then forcing myself to do it within

Nasjaq: [00:32:07] that time period will make me be less afraid of failure or something instead, like giving myself the entire day to make a video, because then it kind of like builds up in my head. And I struggle with this a ton. The way that I think about it is like when I first started posting TikToks, my first TikToks were just me like running around or doing the classic trends or whatever, [00:32:26] or like riffing on them. And they would get, you know, 200 views or whatever. And then I had a viral video recapping the SpaceX Starship presentation when it was first announced. And then, you know, I kept making videos after that, but it’s not like everyone goes viral after that. I did have like a pretty good streak in September, October, November. But then there’s just lulls and you have to always

Nasjaq: [00:32:49] push through it. I think the way that you can think about it is, is instead of looking like you’re externally failing, like everyone’s looking at you and being like, wow, what a failure. You should honestly just be like, okay, am I happy that I published that? Like, yeah, okay, next one. Like, okay, I published it. Good. Like the technically the airship one that you mentioned [00:33:10] was was a failure to me because it got 60,000 views. And, you know, to somebody else, that’s totally not failure. But to me, it’s like, okay, I didn’t even crack 100. Are you kidding? And I’m putting out this cool idea. But I am glad that I published it because then it led to your question 10 minutes ago. And now I’m talking about it. And then I’m also happy because somebody from

Nasjaq: [00:33:30] Clean Technical wants to make an article on it. So I’m, it’s like, I could have been scared to even publish the initial tweet where it was like I quickly mocked up a airship that had the stripe logo on it. And it was like me hanging from the airship with a Starlink satellite receiver on the top. And I could have been scared to publish that. But now I have, you know, I’m talking [00:33:51] about it in this podcast. I’m, I have a Clean Technical article on the way. I’m talking with an engineer, but the video still failed or did it? I don’t know. So it’s like, it’s all how you, how you look at the failure, I think. But I think the way to think about it is don’t externally worry too much. Like don’t think, Oh, my parents will think of me as a failure. Or like, if I don’t

Nasjaq: [00:34:12] get a 4.0 GPA, it’s more like internally, like, are you happy with the things that you’ve done? I think that’s a great way to look at it. As you mentioned, 60,000 views. So one person on TikTok is a lot. 60,000 views to our content creators getting millions per video is a failure, or is not enough. But even as you mentioned, it’s not necessarily everything comes down to views. [00:34:30] There’s value that’s created outside of that view count. You know, you only need one view from one investor, from one person, the right spot to make that connection, to make an idea like that hostel. Totally. There have been so many edge cases that I’m like shocked that something happened from this like random thing. And it’s like, it’s insanely powerful, these edge cases.

Nasjaq: [00:34:51] And I would agree with you on that completely. One of our, one of our technicians on one of our mining sites actually made a video and then it led to closing a sale of over $400,000 in revenue. And then, you know, profit for the next 24 months from one TikTok video. It’s like, wait, what is that? I was like, okay, we need to double down on this platform because it says, you know, [00:35:09] even it’s an edge case because it hasn’t happened again. But it’s like, wow, there’s a lot of opportunity here to capture on in these platforms. And kind of like you mentioned, looking at the internet, like really, whatever you want to get out of it. And if you believe that you have a positive, you know, message for the world in that you’ll be able to provide value that other people

Nasjaq: [00:35:28] are going to see that value in the internet. It’s going to reward you or these more appropriate other AIs are going to reward you for creating that type of content. Yeah, totally. How many views did that video get? That video got like 1.2 or 1.3 million, I believe. [00:35:41] So it was one of his, it was actually his first video, which I ended up betting him. I said, you know, he was like, I was making my TikToks and I got a video that got like 3 million views. And then, you know, he was like, I want to do this. This sounds fun. I’m like, yeah, awesome. Let’s do it. I’ll make you a gentleman’s bed of $1. If you can get a video

Nasjaq: [00:35:56] over a million views in his first video, I did, you know, kind of million views. It just shows you put out that content. But more importantly, I think the energy behind that content of your intention of like putting together that quality content, but then also like not have like just being like you mentioned, be able to like push it out there and do it consistently helps because [00:36:13] then you’re going to get one that might be a home run or might get a higher, you know, higher view ratio. Exactly. If you never put it out, you’re never going to get a million views. That’s just fact. No way around me against that. So the first time you were exposed to blockchain

JohnPaul: [00:36:27] or Bitcoin, can you tell me a little bit about that story and maybe how you kind of came into

Nasjaq: [00:36:31] that into the space? Yeah, in high school, one of my friends bought a mining rig. Oh, wow. So it was maybe like 2013. I don’t know. It was maybe like 500 or 1000 bucks or something. And he was like, do you want to split it? And then one of my other friends ended up splitting it. At the same time, though, to be fair, I was investing, I was using my money to invest in Netflix and Tesla [00:36:50] at $30 each before the splits. So I think the return on that money was still pretty good, even if it didn’t go into a mining rig. But yeah, he started mining it. I’m not sure if he ever, I think he actually ended up selling it at like 700 and was like pretty happy with that. I’m not exactly sure. But that was my first experience with it. And then the second time that I like really,

Nasjaq: [00:37:11] I mean, I had always known about it and everything, but I didn’t want to deal with having a wallet and like figuring that out. And so then the second like main time was obviously during the 2017 spike. I was like early on that. So I can at least say that I didn’t get like burned terribly and buy at the top. But that was the time where it was like, I actually start buying before that I had known [00:37:33] that it was like a good investment. I never, it just makes sense. Yeah, that is the thing. Why is how does it just make sense to you? I’m curious. It’s just like a digital currency. And it, yeah, it’s like fixed supply gold will be found in mind and diluted and all this stuff. You should just move on into the 21st. But it’s not that easy, obviously. And I’m over-simplifying

Nasjaq: [00:37:55] it for sure. But I’ve never been like a full on hater or anything like that. What are your multiple income streams? And are you able to talk further about how you built them and which ones are the most profitable or why it’s important that you have passive income growing up? Yeah. So having passive income is super important. I mean, I’ve owned Apple for a while since $80 [00:38:14] and before the splits. And that paid off dividends. And it’s not a ton just because it’s just a position from when I was younger. But yeah, it’s paid off dividends and you get money from that. And in general, it’s not necessarily passive income, but just owning stocks. It has been a bull run for the last few years. And who knows when that will really end. And I’ve been pretty

Nasjaq: [00:38:39] fortunate during my investing time span to have been doing it during a bull run. But yeah, I’ve done pretty well. It’s good to see the money grow over time and actually being put to work. As for my personal revenue streams as a creator, is that what you want me to expand on as well? Yeah, if you could talk about any software revenue streams, you can create our revenue streams. [00:38:59] Yeah. So as for other revenue streams, I think that the most important thing about working online is that you aren’t tied to just a nine to five paycheck. So I think in general, everyone should try to make $1 online. I think that’s a super important goal. And you can do that as well, like outside of your nine to five. And so for me, now that I’ve made the $1 online and I’ve scaled

Nasjaq: [00:39:25] up from there, as a creator in 2020, the main sources of revenue are like, you get AdSense from TikTok, creators funds, you get I’m part of the TikTok education fund. So I get paid a cash amount for each educational video. And then I also have merch. I also have a sub stack where people can essentially support me. It’s like my Patreon, nazjac.substack.com. And then the big [00:39:50] thing is working with companies that want to promote their hard tech startups that maybe need help hiring or they’re looking to generate some media attention, either for upcoming investment raise or just like they announced a new product and they want to get it out. So then working with that, I can do things like affiliate links. So I’m working on a project with Z-beiotics,

Nasjaq: [00:40:11] who is working on genetically modified organisms that can process acetyl-outahide. And so when you actually go out drinking acetyl-outahide builds up in your gut, and this is what causes a hangover. So if you drink this drink with bacteria that processes acetyl-outahide, you actually wake up and don’t have a hangover. This is mainly because dehydration is not the main cause of a hangover. [00:40:33] So I can obviously work with Z-beiotics and sell their hangover, cure drinks. And that’s awesome. You guys should definitely check that out if I have the affiliate link live by this time. But as well, they’re working on further revenue streams or further genetically modified organisms that they can create to sequester carbon and all this stuff. So it’s

Nasjaq: [00:40:53] like an initial revenue stream for them too. And related to that, they’re starting with one revenue stream, which is their drink. And then they’re going to develop a new revenue stream with the carbon sequestration bacteria I’m doing, like one revenue stream by doing brand deals, working with these companies. And then the big thing that I’m like, the overall goal of NASDAQ is to be an [00:41:15] investor. And so if I have a revenue stream from these brand deals and I take all of that money, this is my thesis. I take everything that I make as a creator and I put it into startups that I’m bullish on that I can work with and that I can help grow through multiple methods. That’s where the lion’s share of my returns are going to be, really. So yeah, it all starts with the small

Nasjaq: [00:41:38] domino of AdSense and maybe your first brand deal and then merge Sub-SAC and then it goes all the way up to investments in world changing companies. So two things I want to touch on there was, one is the brand deal. And how have you had companies approach you and what type of size the deals you’re looking at? Is that $1,000 for a video? Is that $5,000? 10,000 for a video? How does [00:42:03] that look like on the side from an engineering company or from a startup? Yeah. So if it’s an engineering company, one of the biggest things that I can do is help hiring. Like I mentioned with Adam Limbs, they were getting three job applications from qualified people per day and they’re still getting job applications. They’re still getting a ton of news. And then I also help

Nasjaq: [00:42:19] them. They were running a WeFunder program and WeFunder is essentially like a crowd sourcing fundraising thing. And they’ve raised like hundreds of thousands of dollars and at least a few thousand of it was from my video. So I’m working on them to get the exact numbers, but they had multiple investor notes saying I’m investing specifically because I saw like this was this [00:42:39] thing that triggered my interest was my video. And so that’s huge. I mean, if I can help companies fundraise, if I can help them hire, all I’ll say is like it’s definitely above the thousand mark but yeah. So I can definitely have all these value ads for sure. No, there’s a huge value ad there. And I think one of the things that we’ve talked about offline that I want to talk about

Nasjaq: [00:42:58] now is influencers investing in building startups over the coming years. Who do you see either doing

JohnPaul: [00:43:06] this well and how do you see yourself playing into that? As you mentioned, turning this content,

Nasjaq: [00:43:10] this ad revenue into equity. Yeah. So hopefully it’s more than just an ad revenue, but yeah, the ad revenue, the brand goes. So as for how I think that will play out, I think we have already seen and it kills me that some Tiktokers beat me to the first like TikTok angel investment headlines. But we have seen some Tiktokers do angel investments. I’m specifically thinking of I believe it was [00:43:35] Bryce Hall, Josh Richards, and Griffin Johnson invested in Atmos. I’m not sure if all of them did, but they’re investing in some of the YC companies. And so they have some deal flow there mostly because they can promote this to like a broad audience. I think what I’m doing is a little bit different in terms of like my audience is more engineer. So I might have engineers from my

Nasjaq: [00:43:55] audience that and this has happened, they start a startup and they’re like, who is the first person that I can talk to about starting a startup? And when I was having this conversation with this person that I’m thinking of, specifically they told me, I only know of investors YC and you. And I was like, what? And I was like, you haven’t like talked with anybody. And they’re like, [00:44:17] we don’t even know like who to talk to it. Aside from that, their product is amazing. They’re killing it. They have users throwing themselves at them like just because they don’t know investors does not mean that they can’t build a product. So that’s amazing. And so I think what is great about my audience and what I love and what I love interacting with them about is like, hey,

Nasjaq: [00:44:37] how can you build this startup? Like, what are you working on? How can I help you? And so I’m the first person that they reach out to when they start building stuff. So I have a lot of excellent deal flow on like new companies. And I think that deal flow is super important as an investor. It’s one of the most important things is the quality of the deals that you have access to [00:44:54] and quantity to be able to find those investments, which will have that 10 or 100x return, which is, as we’ve seen, where all the value comes from in equity investing and especially angel investing. Yeah, it’s all about power loss. And I feel like most of the world is this point. Bitcoin and everything’s a power law. I’m going to keep looking at the world there.

Nasjaq: [00:45:15] So, Jack, we’re coming up to the end of the podcast. I want to give you an opportunity to talk, to ask any questions about Bitcoin or Bitcoin mining to myself before we close it out for the

JohnPaul: [00:45:24] dress of the day. Yeah. So what do you think about this current run? Well, I think the current run is

Nasjaq: [00:45:30] insane. It’s always good to see Bitcoin price move up. I’m hoping it was hoping it was going to happen after Christmas. I think we will have a correction of 20 to 30% from the now $20,000 price point. But it’s interesting because no one is talking about it who was talking about in 2017. So for me, I was on college campus at NC State and all of my friends were asking about it. [00:45:53] People all over the school were talking about it. Everyone was talking about Bitcoin. Right now, the price is the exact same and no one could care less. It’s insane. No one has noticed. People have not educated themselves. I told one of my friends, I was like, hey, you need to buy Bitcoin. It’s going to go up as my normal preaching. And then it came to the

Nasjaq: [00:46:14] moment and she’s like, oh, what’s Bitcoin at? I’m like, oh, it’s up 70% in the past as I told you. And it’s like, what? So I think there is still that conversation of these new investors are all institutions. And they’re buying on great scale like crazy. And we’re seeing tons of interest in our equity round and in debt financing of mining equipment, [00:46:33] which before there wasn’t much interest at all. So I just see this as a real indicator. The space isn’t going away. And that 2021, 2022 is going to be life changing for everyone in crypto and hopefully build, help increase the products and increase the amount of users that are using these products in this space. I think everybody’s securing positions before being super loud about

JohnPaul: [00:46:55] it. That’s like super obvious thing that everybody’s doing. What do you think like the price will be

Nasjaq: [00:47:00] by the end of 2022 or something like, I know it’s absurd to do these price things, but I think that all of this institutional buying signals something massive coming. Yeah, the fact that we hit 20K so quickly makes me always saying $100,000 Bitcoin price. And in 2021, I’ve been saying that on previous podcast for a while now. I think we will blow past that. I think we could be hitting at least [00:47:22] $250,000 per Bitcoin. And that’s going to only spike. It’s going to be a quick spike. And then after that, it’s going to be a crash. Just like we see normal Bitcoin power laws here. It’s just as we see this 10X increase. We do have to contract. We do have to let the market figure out where that base price is. But I do at least seeing it hit up close to $250 per coin, which is crazy.

Nasjaq: [00:47:41] Because now it’s at $19,000. And when I got into the space, it was at $70 a Bitcoin. So the one thing I wish I could have done better was holding more bitcoins. The one thing I device I could have given any of my family and friends was to buy Bitcoin. I did. But at the time, it was still new. And the ideas were still not understood, as you mentioned, the scarcity, [00:48:01] the only one being $21 million. And the fact that it is a really a scarce asset or scarce way to transmit money and trust across the internet. So what are your mining rigs doing right now? I guess it’s the time to get into your mining rigs. Yeah. So for mining rigs, I mean, right now we’re looking at doing a $42 million debt raise for mining equipment.

Nasjaq: [00:48:23] This mining equipment is going to be $15,000 of the new S19 pros machine, which would put us about 1% of the Bitcoin network a little bit over that. And that just came to light over the past couple months is that there’s now private lenders who are willing to lend capital to mining companies that have extremely low cost power. So right now we’re working on getting all three of those [00:48:46] components, the power, the lender and the equity partners together to hopefully close out of deal before the end of the year. And we’re seeing a ton of traction and are getting some term sheets on the table now, which is super exciting. Going back to the institutional buyers,

JohnPaul: [00:48:58] do you think what do you think caused their shift in thinking? Like, do you think that they saw the

Nasjaq: [00:49:02] 2017 bubble and then got educated and then we’re like, okay, we’re just going to wait for it to

JohnPaul: [00:49:07] kind of die down before starting to buy in? Or what do you think was kind of the shift of like, hey,

Nasjaq: [00:49:11] we need to get into this? I personally think microBT and Square putting, we talked to Michael Saylor putting 500 million on the balance sheet of a publicly traded company, showing this isn’t going away. We did due diligence on this, and we’re going to put our money where our mouth is. And that was huge. Because everyone else in the space was like, oh, it’s not going away. One company [00:49:32] dished it. And then all these other companies started saying, yeah, we’ve already had positions, you know, funds have said we’ve already, we’re allowing our fund to direct and crypto to purchase crypto. That’s huge. And now I think with the overall printing from COVID, you know, six months ago, seven months ago, that only compounded the problem. Yeah, so essentially everyone’s looking

Nasjaq: [00:49:51] out and seeing that the buying power of the dollar might be decreasing a little bit. Exactly. One of the things I heard in the space was, you know, with COVID and with the stimulus package that they put in, in the Federal Reserve issuing, you know, basically buying $1.2 trillion of mortgage-backed securities. What effectively that does to the market is it effectively [00:50:12] effectively makes people build houses for like the next 10 years. They’re dropping the interest rate from 3.5% to 2.8%. That means you now have tons of workers in the economy that’s now are going to go build houses and it’s going to continue to build supply, continue to, you know, keep up with this artificially created demand that we have because of the Federal Reserve coming in and

Nasjaq: [00:50:33] buying these $1.2 trillion of asset-backed securities or mortgages. And so what that does is it makes us now have it to compare one price point to the other. And so what I mean by that is basically now we’re comparing how many apples does it take to buy a house? How many cars, Teslas, does it take to buy a house? How many bitcoins does it take to buy a house? Instead of [00:50:53] necessarily like how many US dollars does it take to buy an apple or how many US dollars take to buy a car? Because what’s happening is the US dollar is losing value relative to everything else in the industry. When you have massive purchases of trillions of dollars of assets, it’s making it so that if you don’t own an asset, if you don’t own something that’s scarce, which is land, gold,

Nasjaq: [00:51:12] equity to some extent, but Bitcoin really, you don’t have the opportunity to capture that upside into protect your wealth. And I think a lot of investors are seeing that and with interest relates being so low on cash, they have access to the capital markets, they have access to these credit facilities. Why not buy this scarce asset in the world? Yeah, that makes sense. [00:51:30] Yeah, and that’s what going back to it. It’s like what I was saying when it just makes sense. Yeah, it’s a scarce asset. It’s not going to increase. It’s that simple. It’s not going to go anywhere. It’s digital. And if the internet goes down, we have another big problem to solve. So

JohnPaul: [00:51:44] Bitcoin isn’t going anywhere. But I appreciate the time, Jack. This was an amazing conversation.

Nasjaq: [00:51:50] I hope all of our listeners got out some great tidbits on content creation, on what it means to overcome failure and how to look at it differently. Do you have anything else you want to hit on

JohnPaul: [00:52:00] before we close off for the day and then where can people connect with you?

Nasjaq: [00:52:04] Yeah, essentially the main thing is if you’re working on building the future, if you’re building startups, if you’re researching cool things, I’m currently interested in terraforming the Sultans Sea. And other cool projects and just general startups. So reach out to me, hit me up. Twitter DMs are probably the best. Email me jackatnasjak.com. Check out my

JohnPaul: [00:52:26] TikTok at Nasjak and we’ll build the future. Make it happen. Thanks again for coming on, Jack. I appreciate it. It was a great to have you. And subscribe to my sub stack, Nasjak.com.

Nasjaq: [00:52:36] Nasjak.substack.com. And you’re launching a podcast, right? Yeah, yeah. I’m going to be writing some short fiction on what I think future things should happen in terms of how we’ll terraforming the Sultans Sea, like I just mentioned, or what the stripe airship will look like. So that’ll be some short fiction stories. And then yes, I am also releasing a podcast. [00:52:55] Soon I have the first two episodes recorded. It’s not released yet, but it’ll just be, I haven’t come up with a name, but it just search Nasjak in Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast and follow me on Twitter and have post notifications on. So you’ll get notified when I

JohnPaul: [00:53:10] release it. Awesome. There’s so many ways to connect with Jack. He’s super busy. I appreciate you coming on, Jack. Thanks again for what a time. Awesome.