Rolling Fun #9: Basketball, Asteroid Mining, Child Labor (Not Really Tho)

 
 

We’re back with another ​Rolling Fun​ episode!

A lot has happened since we last recorded: new ventures, new investments, and even new babies. In this conversation, we dive into Bo’s unexpected role in building one of the top youth sports facilities in the country, share updates on some of the bold (unhinged) investments we’ve made, and reflect on the personal shifts that come with parenthood.

We cover new investments like ​AstroForge​ (asteroid mining), ​Cascade Space​ (deep space communications), ​Ouros​ (next-gen batteries), and some early favorites like ​Terran Robotics​ (automated house building) and ​Aalo Atomics​.

A few favorite moments:

  • “Never skip a funeral and always hold a baby”

  • "I love being a dad 10 times more now. It just gets more and more magic."

  • "Building a town is like building a sports business—it becomes your life’s work if you love it."

  • "If we invest well, we can accelerate the next industrial revolution. That’s our mission."

Quotes from Bo:

  1. "This was like 11 businesses stuffed into one building… and none of them were working yet."

  2. "My job right now is teaching people who love what they do how it fits into a business."

  3. "We get 2 to 3 calls a week from private equity firms, and I tell them all: don’t do it."

  4. "It’s a 600-person organization… a real thing with real complexity."

  5. "Maybe it’s a $30 million business—manageable, understandable, and ridiculously high impact."

  6. "It’s a cartel-organized market. You need to be a trusted actor to even play in it."

  7. "Helping it really succeed is time well spent—for Kansas City, for the kids, and for everyone here."

  8. "The youth sports market is a $40 to $80 billion space, and it’s on fire."

  9. "There’s not a lot of credible business builders in this space—and I haven’t found another one yet."

  10. "In 50 years, this will be even more awesome. I love working on stuff like that."

Quotes from Al:

  1. "You couldn't just copy-paste this business into another city. You need deep trust and local knowledge."

  2. "This is a fun community challenge. If you get it right, you leave a real legacy."

  3. "I texted Bo—‘We did it’—because Eric and Jeannine had a baby. That’s how we all felt."

  4. "The bond between dad and baby isn’t immediate. But it grows—and it’s worth it."

  5. "I fixed the cheeseburger at Home Field before Bo was even involved."

  6. "Once you have a baby, every infant photo becomes magic."

  7. "The best underappreciated part of being an entrepreneur? You can get your kids working early."

Want to invest in early-stage startups together?

When new technologies meet the market, the world changes for the better. That's why we invest in obsessive geniuses building utopian technologies.

We write small checks to 15-20 very different startups each year. Previous investments include ​​Aalo Atomics​​, ​​Atom Limbs​​, ​​Ouros Energy​​, ​Stell Engineering​​ ​​Airship​​, ​​Terraform Industries​​, ​​Longshot​​, ​​Dirac​​, Occam (stealth), ​​Atomic Industries​​. and more.

Our ​​Website​​ has background on the fund, our past deals, and more.

*Startup investing is risky, illiquid, and not for the faint-of-heart. Be warned.

Accredited Investors: reply to this email, and we'll get you into our deals starting this quarter.

Additional episodes if you enjoyed:

Episode transcript:

Bo Fishback: Yeah, I don't quite know what to do with that. That wasn't really- if we would have been shooting this at my house, it would be a different conversation, which is like a weird... you know what I mean? 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's fair. 

Al Doan: Michigan was amazing. Thank you so much. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's the best, isn’t it. You guys flourished. 

Al Doan: Dude, we lived our best life up there. The boys... And was the lake up or down this year? 

Eric Jorgenson: Down. 

Al Doan: Well, cause like it was maybe two and a half feet deep for 300 yards. And so, all my five year olds and seven year olds are just like...

Bo Fishback: Go out in the morning. 

Al Doan: They're like hundreds of yards out there. And I'm like, good. Have a great time. 

Bo Fishback: No sharks, no waves. 

Al Doan: They're tossing each other. They're wrestling. No one's...

Eric Jorgenson: No predators. 

Bo Fishback: No, no, it's the best. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. No natural predators of five-year-olds down there. 

Al Doan: You can't do that in Hawaii. 

Bo Fishback: Except for bears. 

Eric Jorgenson: Except for bears. We saw a bear on the camera this year. 

Al Doan: We did Sleeping Bear dunes. 

Bo Fishback: How far did you get? 

Al Doan: We tricked ourselves into going all the way. 

Bo Fishback: You did?

Al Doan: With a two-year-old, it's like... 

Eric Jorgenson: To the water or to the cliff? 

Bo Fishback: You made it to the water?

Al Doan: Four and a half miles. 

Eric Jorgenson: In sand. 

Al Doan: In knee deep sand. We went there. She's like, let's [?]. We’ll go just check it out. Cause you watch all the videos and there's like a cliff. We didn’t find the cliff at the end. I didn't know where we went wrong. But then we're out there, and like the boys just sprinted up the first hill. I was like, we're fine. Let's go. So, we start huffing... Like mile marker 16 or whatever, the post, I'm like, how many of these are there? 26. I'm like, good night. We can't turn around now. And so, we literally got out there, through the kids in the lake, and then turned around and got back. 

Bo Fishback: Everyone was unhappy on the way home. 

Al Doan: But it was great. 

Eric Jorgenson: There's so many clues as you're getting there, when you see people coming back who are like angry and sweaty and red. And you're like...

Bo Fishback: Whenever we see those is when we're usually like, well, it's good enough, call it a day.  

Eric Jorgenson: Well, some people show up like ready to hike, like waters and camelbacks and hats and boots and shit. 

Al Doan: Even that, you’re like it’s four miles. Chill out. It's an hour out there. You’re going to be all right. But like, it's more than a job with the kids, that's for sure... I had like two twins on the arms for like the last 500 yards... It was great. I also, I didn't want to go like three quarters of the way and be like, but now we have to do it again. I'm like, we never have to do this hike again ever. It’s over. 

Bo Fishback: Okay, do you want to give us the outline? What do you want to do here? 

Eric Jorgenson: I think we should just jump. We can always edit stuff around. My plan is roughly to start by explaining why it's been so long. 

Al Doan: We've been busy. 

Bo Fishback: Lots been going on. Lots been going on. 

Eric Jorgenson: And then go... my rough vision, tell me if this is wrong, is to do like maybe two different one hour-ish episodes. One is like Bo’s story, a couple companies; Al’s story, a couple companies. 

Bo Fishback: What about Eric’s story? 

Al Doan: Eric had a baby. 

Bo Fishback: And has a company. There’s so much. 

Al Doan: Didn't Goggins publish with you guys a second time?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. He's done two. 

Al Doan: Bro, you're crushing it. You made 40 grand on that one. Glad you made another $20 million. Do we get a tip? Should we have a tip jar now? As they submit payment, it's like, how was the service? 15%, 20%... Guide us, Spartacus. 

Eric Jorgenson: All right. It's been a minute because we've had a series of extremely fortunate events. 

Al Doan: Very fortunate. 

Eric Jorgenson: Bo's had a company. Al's almost had a company. That's a different story for another time. 

Al Doan: So many companies. 

Eric Jorgenson: And I have successfully procreated. So, it's been like a year since we podcasted.

Al Doan: Has it really? 

Bo Fishback: But we've spoken many times in between. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and done our jobs. 

Al Doan: We're being great stewards. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's just important, now that the dust is settled slightly for everybody but Bo... 

Bo Fishback: With like literal dust behind us. 

Eric Jorgenson: Literal dust, yes, there's still dust actively settling. But I feel like given the setting and the length of time that it's been... 

Al Doan: Naturally, we should talk about basketball. See, that's what I was thinking too.

Eric Jorgenson: The segue. Yeah. So, like where the hell are we and why are we here? 

Bo Fishback: We're at Home Field Kansas City, one of two pretty big facilities that we have here. 

Al Doan: You introduced it to me as like, this is the largest basketball facility on earth. 

Bo Fishback: It's not the largest facility on earth. 

Al Doan: Who screwed you on that title? Who took it? Turkey? 

Bo Fishback: It is probably right now the single best youth sports facility in the United States. 

Al Doan: World? Could we say world? 

Bo Fishback: Probably world.

Al Doan: Is Russia doing anything? No, they’re not, screw those guys.

Bo Fishback: Actually, we had a bunch of kids from Sweden here a couple months ago for a while... And well, it turns out, like in Europe, all of the gyms are like these little backwoods like hole in the wall dirty. And they came in here and it was like the greatest thing they've ever seen.

Eric Jorgenson: Welcome to America. 

Al Doan: ...This is in Missouri. Wait till you see what they got in California. 

Eric Jorgenson: This is why we win every basketball gold medal. 

Al Doan: We could call it the world championship. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah... so this is a really- it's a really nice facility. There's 10 courts in here. They're fancy. It's a little bit like the airport business, like whoever most recently built an airport has the best airport. So, we kind of most recently built the best youth sports facility. So, we'll be the best until like somebody else comes up with 60 or 80 million. One of the jobs that I find myself in the context of doing is telling people that it's a really terrible idea if you're trying to build a business around it, because the math doesn't work on those things. And that's kind of like roughly why I got involved. So, like we've got two big facilities. We own a really awesome volleyball club, a really awesome baseball club, two of them actually... 

Al Doan: This facility is magic though. You walk in, you walk in, they got an upstairs for spectators. Downstairs, you walk through the tunnel if you're a coach or a player, and you come out into this. Do the players, do you have like the Disney wristband thing for food? 

Bo Fishback: We're working on wristbands. 

Al Doan: So, there's restaurants everywhere and like little [?] to get your drinks. You come dump your kids in the afternoon, they play all day, they go in, they’re buying all the food. Like they've got training facilities. Oh, did you guys sprain an ankle? Don't worry. We've got world-class... 

Bo Fishback: We have trainers. We have the whole deal.

Al Doan: We're ready to help you out. In fact, you would just come here for your injury to get fixed, but also you get to play here too... I grew up, as a Mormon, I grew up playing on carpets and three quarter size courts where the walls were also carpet. And no rug burns here. Nothing that's going to burn your knees. 

Bo Fishback: No, it's a great- it's a really, really cool place. It's a hilariously complicated business for how small it is. I mean, it's not a- we've got 500,000 square feet of sports space and three clubs. It's really like 11 businesses because we run a restaurant in here, but like we own it all. And so, it's been- I'm like not a year into it yet. I’m maybe eight months into being kind of like a serious volunteer is roughly what I am. 

Al Doan: What's the move? Is it like, do you have too many businesses for the amount of revenue you have? Do you need to trim that down, or do you need to grow them to...? Like what's the strategy?

Bo Fishback: The real trick and kind of challenge and strategy here was that like everybody loves to work in youth sports. People will do it for free. Cities and states get excited about putting money into it because it brings tourism, becomes a big real estate development project. But then at the end of the day, like when you put all the pieces together, you actually need an operating business that works and makes sense. And kind of like I got involved at the point where it's kind of like, hey, we have a lot of really, really cool shit. What do we do? Like, how do we put together the puzzle? And so, it's been super fun for me. I mean, it is like, we are running through like the process of like how you build a business on purpose with a bunch of cool assets, some of which don't even make sense to be here, some of which do, but it is vision, mission, strategy, structure, people, processes, tools, execution. Vision was great. Mission was cool. Nobody had done work on anything else. There was no strategy. There was no structure. There was tons of great people, but if you don't know where you fit in the mix, nobody knows what to do. And so like turning it from a cool project into like a real business is what we're doing. And it's super fun. I mean, it's not a big business. We'll do 10 to 15 million in revenue this year. Hopefully we'll stop losing money this year, which I think we will. Almost everyone who's tried to do something like this around the country has gone out of business maybe multiple times. People go to jail for fraud, like all kinds of crazy things when you do these big real estate projects and over promise and under deliver. This is going to be a really clean one because we have grownups involved and that's fun. That's fun. 

Al Doan: It is interesting, though, because like you'll get grants and stuff to build something giant like this, and then the business doesn't work. And then the people that buy this building buy it for half the price. That's how this stuff would normally cycle if you're doing it in New York or some... 

Bo Fishback: I mean, there's a huge one in Arizona that's gone out of business. The guys who started it actually are going to jail. It's on its third round of ownership a few years in with bankruptcy in between. And it's very complicated. And it was set to fail from the get go. This was not that. So, this building was... 

Al Doan: Then a Sutherland's ends up buying it and just puts their lumber yard here. 

Bo Fishback: It's one of those tricky things. Like there's nothing else to do with a building like this. So, you better make it work for that, or else it's not worth anything. It's worth a dollar, or it's like a going concern in a viable business. And so, I mean, it's a really... the story of how this thing got started is interesting. It's more fun to talk about what we're doing now because we're making it work. But like we own this building for free. And so, it was... I say we own the building for free, it costs a million to 2 million bucks to keep the lights on and stuff like this every year in a place. So, you got to cover that. But it doesn't make sense to do as a normal capitalist enterprise. Like this thing was funded by these things called star bonds, sales tax and revenue bonds. They've basically failed everywhere in the country except where we are in Kansas right now. They're what was used to build a sporting stadium in Nebraska Furniture Mart and it thrived over there. So, they basically doubled down and said, hey, how do we bring a bunch of people to Kansas? Youth sports people will go anywhere for, they'll spend any amount of money on. So, we run, we own most of the land around here that we're developing. We just opened a Margaritaville hotel around the corner and [?] museum, all that kind of stuff. But like the pillar of it is, can you use this as a magnet for people from all over the country to come here? And if you can, maybe you can make the business work. But let me say it's like more complicated than that. Tyler Disney, main man right here... Al’s our new face, actually.

Eric Jorgenson: Al’s done a great job pitching this.

Bo Fishback: ...Tyler runs our speed, strength, and agility group, which is like one of those, it's like one of our businesses. It's like a little $7 to 900,000 business inside of this. All of the kids in all of our sports academy train with Tyler and his team of ten people twice a week. And it's like injury prevention and how you get stronger and faster and how you measure it and get your vertical higher or your exit VLO higher in baseball. And it's like, that's one of the kind of 11 businesses in this context. You just got to line them up and make them work. 

Al Doan: I love stuff like this because like when you were evaluating the business, I remember, coming into this, you're like, yeah, the building exists now and we don't have to come up with that, but like just keeping the lights on, like there's guys here finishing the floor right now, and the fact that you can be like, guess what it costs to finish 11 courts? It's about $55,000 is what we spend every year to make sure the courts keep going. It's like, in town building, it's like, I never knew how much a sidewalk costs until you got to build one. And then you're like, oh, geez. All right. This is what facilities cost to keep going like this. It's this whole world inside of business where you'd look at this and be like, oh, man...

Bo Fishback: It seems so easy. 

Al Doan: I can take that in a minute. I could do amazing things with that. You're like, could you? Because it's actually really hard to keep everything going, keep it all- like keep all the businesses with the lights on and operating year to year.

Bo Fishback: It's funny, it's whatever... It's kind of like on the one hand, neither here nor there as it relates to Rolling Fun utopian technology investment... but it is real- like roughly my job around here right now is to like teach a bunch of people who love what they do how it fits into a business because that's not why they do it. That's not why they do it. But also like the space, this youth sports space in the last couple of years, five years, has gotten like scorchingly hot. It's a 40 to 80 billion dollar industry. And there's all these people who are throwing tons of money and don't know what to do. And like part of my job in this context is like we get two to three calls a week right now from private equity shops or whatever, who were like, hey, we're interested in talking to you about acquiring, acquiring this business, or we're going to invest in this other one. And my basic job is to be like, don't do it. Do not do it. Like, give me a minute and we'll figure it out and we'll show you how these things can work and what it takes and what needs to be free and what you can afford and stuff. But it's... we have a finance partner in this who helped with the hotel, who's super interested in the space, and they're clever, publicly traded company, whatever. And they own Caesar's Palace and some other big places. And they're like this for us is exposure to find a great operator in what is a gigantic market that has become very, very, very important to many, many people in the country who spend tons and tons of money on it. And no one has really figured out how to build a really good business in it. That's what we're trying to do. 

Al Doan: ...Do the spreadsheets all just go up into the right? That's how they stumble into doing stuff like this normally, where you're like, and I just need 10,000 people to subscribe monthly, and then we have 1% of this $40 billion market. 

Bo Fishback: Kinda, yeah. It's kinda like that. 

Al Doan: That's how they sort of talk themselves into it? 

Bo Fishback: I mean, part of it is because people love it. They love it. They want to be around it. They go into shitty facilities and they're like, God, you got to do this better. There's so much- I'm paying $6,000 a year in volleyball dues and another 4,000 in training. It's 10 grand a year. Obviously there's money. We need to build something to do it better. And then you get into it and you realize that it's like hugely about relationships. They are not super high margin business. It's not software where you're going to have an 80% margin business. Like this is a services business where like people are like in the gym with kids. 

Al Doan: Do you want to support 10 more kids? You need another person. 

Bo Fishback: And liability goes with it, and you need coaches, and it only scales as much as like you can actually build a sticky and good product. And it's like you got to build it a piece at a time, and like even if it's really, really big, it's not that big. People think we're like a huge deal because we have this facility and we have- I mean, we do. We have some of the best sports clubs, certainly in the region, maybe the country. 

Al Doan: So yes, we are the best. 

Bo Fishback: It is probably right now the single best youth sports facility in the United But it's like, it's not a good business yet. It's not a good business. Even with all of those things, it is not yet a good business. And so the job of making it one is fun. It really is very much putting together the puzzle pieces. Like, that's cool. 

Eric Jorgenson: If the biggest youth sports business in the country is 10 million dollars top line, like how fragmented is that market? That's insane. 

Bo Fishback: But also, you're competing with free everywhere because the majority of the market is a dad in a neighborhood is going to coach his kids and he's going to do it for free. You pass the hat, and everybody pays for the tournament. Like, I mean, we have like a very different kind of bar for what it can look like, but that's not right for every kid. And it's kind of like, you got to be a good steward in the community or people don't want to like mess with you. And so, it's like there's just all of these pieces where it's like... it's honestly like a fun strategic challenge. It is like a fun community challenge. If you get it right, there's a really, really big legacy you leave here. And that's fun. 

Al Doan: Can you think of another industry that's sort of an analog to this? As you describe that, I'm like, man, that feels so familiar, but I can't quite think of who else is like... 

Eric Jorgenson: Is it Al Doan building a town? I'm listening to the experiential part and the uniqueness of it and the community that comes out of it. A sport or a hobby becomes the most important thing in somebody's life or to their identity, maybe outside of their family or their work, depending on who it is. People are always seeking ways to get more involved and meet more people who are into the same stuff as them and find a way to craft their lifestyle around the thing that is so important to them. 

Bo Fishback: It is in some ways like my entry here at Home Field was like, I was not trying to find a thing to do. I was delighted to retire. 

Al Doan: He was adamantly refusing things to do. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah. And I said, no, I'm not going to mess with this a million times or whatever. But like, the truth is, my entry was like my kids take sports really seriously. And my kid came up here to do some practice. And I was like, this could be really, really special. What would it take to get it there? And the whole reason for that is that like all of his best friends and all of my best friends, other than you two, are in the sports world. They are at my house. We travel together... There is this long period of 10, 12 years of your life if you have kids who do what my kids do, that like that is your community. And it's like, that's kind of magic. That's kind of magic. And so, like letting it fail felt kind of like not great. I felt bad. It was not my problem, but like helping it really succeed is like time well spent. I don't need to make any money on it. It's like time well spent for Kansas City, for all of the kids now and forever who get to be a part of it, frankly, for the people who work here. 

Al Doan: It's a worthwhile chapter, absolutely. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's so funny how many businesses look like going concerns from the outside, but they're actually just like slowly imploding. And like this was that until you got involved with it.

Al Doan: Or they're going because somebody just loves them. Like every restaurant... 

Bo Fishback: Well, one of my partners in this, in owning Home Field owns arguably maybe the best restaurant in Kansas City. And he's like, and everybody thinks, oh, you must be killing it. He's like, no, no, we lose money on it, but it's okay because I love it. Like in a restaurant size bucket, that's okay, and a lot of restaurants exist like this. That is not true at this scale. Like eventually they die if you don't really get them on the rails. And that's really why, like I'm not- like my job here is to get this place on the rails and make it a really, really good thing for Kansas City and the people who work here. And then like, I don't know if that'll take two years or five years or whatever, but like I will be involved with it probably forever, forever until I die, because it's like an awesome thing. But you got to make them work, or at some point, people get tired of kind of writing checks for them. 

Al Doan: Yeah. Amen. Amen. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah, it is surprising how many businesses are like that... In the context of doing this through unrelated youth sports stuff, I've been approached by like dozens of people who are like, oh, hey, what you're doing there, we need to do that with our business. And I'm like, why? And they're like, well, because we're losing $5 million a year and we don't know what to do. I'm like, oh, yeah, you probably do. 

Al Doan: Like that thing you're doing where you're not losing money, can we do that? I like that idea.

Eric Jorgenson: Oh, you're losing money too? Oh, okay. I feel better. 

Bo Fishback: But anyway, so, it's a really cool place. We do have another really big facility. It's not nearly as beautiful as this because the lighting is not as good. But it's full of baseball. It's full of volleyball. It's full of indoor kind of soccer turf fields. And it's crazy because like if we drove down there right now, there'd be like 12 people in the business. And then if you showed up at six o'clock tonight, there's like 800 people in the business and there's like nowhere to sit because at four o'clock, kids get out of school, and the chaos ensues. And like having facilities that can flex and take care of that and everything, it's wild. 

Eric Jorgenson: We got to do something about school. It is really cutting into your athlete utilization. 

Bo Fishback: It is probably right now the single best youth sports facility in the United We're working on it. 

Al Doan: Which leads me to my next business.

Bo Fishback: It is a tangentially related, very interesting space, like the school where school and sports overlap, but school and interests overlap in general is really getting transformed, and it's happening fast. 

Al Doan: Turns out school is not an eight hour job. Like I learned this... I started homeschooling in second grade, and we would do the take home all your work for the week, and you'd finish it Monday in an hour and a half and be like, that's what I did all week. And then you just go play. And it was like, oh, homeschool is great because I get all this, all my time back. Well, now those AI schools that are doing like, hey, we're going to AI tutor for two hours, and then you're going to go play archery, and you're going to go and start a fake business with your seven-year-old buddies. It's like, dude, that's way more fun. And the idea that you're sitting in a seat waiting for the dumbest kid to get caught up in every subject all day long is the right way to do it, it's like, oh, this is the worst. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I'm going to interview the people that started the Thiel Fellowship in a couple weeks here. And as I'm reading the book right now, Michael Gibson, Paper Belt on Fire, and he's got- there was a chapter I read last night, it was really interesting about how universities in particular are obsessed with time. And they're like, it's about credit hours. It's about four years. It's about spending X amount of time... universities were invented when like time was the organizing factor, like pillar of a society of like you clocked in when the bell tower tolled and you got to like go home when the bell tower tolled and you woke up... And so, it's like very interesting that we're still using that. And the people who break that are like, you can do all this work in two hours, and it can be personalized by the student. Alpha School is like the, I feel like the one everybody's talking about right now. 

Bo Fishback: It is coming, and it is coming very fast and it's going to be great. 

Eric Jorgenson: Then you break it down and organize around like what you're actually passionate about. I don't care about history, but I care about the history of basketball. I don't care about physics, but I care about the physics of basketball. Like I care about biology and like self care in as much as it helps me achieve my basketball goals. 

Al Doan: It was funny, I was homeschooled while growing up, and it was like no school. But what I did is I loved reading, so I read a lot, and I loved computers, so I played on my computer a bunch. And then I did my Saxon math book that I got for Christmas as a 12 year old. 

Eric Jorgenson: I'm sorry. I feel sure I misheard that. 

Al Doan: Which as a grown up is a stupid present to get. But as a kid, I was like a Saxon math book. Thank you, mom. But then you get to college, and everybody takes their 100 level courses, and we all take bio 101 and learn and start at the same spot. It's like actually, you don't need any of this, man. None of high school, none of middle school, none of that. None of that actually matters. You just need to teach a kid to love to learn, and everything works. I mean, yeah, there's a version of this where it's like, teach them to read, teach them basic math, and then just see what they're into and go foster that. So, we've got this little school that connects to our land. Like we're out in a rural community. It's not a town. It's like maybe a village with like 12 houses and a school with 34 kids. And the teacher-student ratio is phenomenal, for 34 kids, like six teachers. But so my kids go- we actually, this year, so we raised like a hundred grand to put a new playground in. They had monkey bars and a slide that's been there for 25 years. And I was like, if my kids are going to go here, we’re going to put in...  

Bo Fishback: We need a playground. If we're going to do one thing, it's going to be a good playground.

Al Doan: It was the coolest because we all, like the community came together and built it and did the whole thing. And it was great. And then, we redid the floors of the school and painted the walls. Like it used to be just all white walls, and now it's like color and doing a thing. I'm so proud of this school and I love it so much. And also, I'm like, man, I don't want my kids to grow up in this like little school, but I'm torn because my kids ride their motorcycle to school on the first day. That's a good story when they're in college. They're like, oh, you're kindergarten, you didn't get to do that? You suck. But then the idea of getting out of that school. After summer, sending them back to school for eight hours a day, I feel like I failed as a parent almost. I'm like, oh, sorry, guys. You got to go hate your life now. It's time to go to work, you seven-year-old. 

Eric Jorgenson: Clock in at the factory. 

Al Doan: Yeah, I'm excited for that to get fixed. That'll be cool. 

Eric Jorgenson: You got to keep your kids sharp for, was it motorcycle polo?

Al Doan: Yeah, motorcycle soccer.

Eric Jorgenson: Motorcycle soccer... I can't believe... And how old? 

Al Doan: He's seven. He turned seven this year, and he's great at it. He does a really good job. Not much of a soccer player, but you put him on a dirt bike, and that guy is a force. It was funny, actually, we're looking at new motorcycles this last week, took the boys in to like LCC and Liberty to go look at stuff. And the guys in there are like, I don't think you can give a four wheeler to a five year old. And I'm like, you're selling it to me. Don't worry, I'll decide. I'm the responsible parent. 

Bo Fishback: You look way too big for this motorcycle. Don't worry, that's just what it...

Al Doan: He's like, are they going to be on it? I was like...

Eric Jorgenson: He's like, what are you worried about? He's been on a motorcycle since he was three. This conversation is a funny microcosm of the joke that is like private equity gets all the money and venture capital gets all the headlines. 

Al Doan: Wait, what do you mean by that? 

Eric Jorgenson: I feel like that's the joke amongst the capital allocators is like there's so much more written and talked about. And everybody's like loud, all the venture capitals have to be loud because that's how you like compete for deal flow and promote. And private equity makes generally way more money, way more quietly. It's a way bigger industry, more reliable. 

Al Doan: Do they? Is that true?

Bo Fishback: The venture industry is actually not that big. It's surprisingly small for how loud it is, especially for people who like are hunting utopian technology, for example. Like it's very, very loud. And the private equity business is like, hey, we're going to buy this big, great thing that no one's ever heard of and make it more profitable. And it's like... I mean, it's like...

Al Doan: We're not going to 2x it; we want to grow 1% a year and just...

Eric Jorgenson: We have a secret insight we're not going to tell anybody that we're rolling up dental practices until we bought all of them... So anyway, that's why it's been a minute. Because Bo's been, well, one of the reasons it's been a minute is Bo has been absolutely like paratrooping into this business and on a life march, not a death march, a life march of like turning around little things. 

Al Doan: It's all just a scam to get court side tickets at the Pacers games. 

Bo Fishback: I’m going well, well beyond what my wife calls super volunteering, to actually like, no, no, I have meetings today. And she's like, well, you don't have a job. How can you have meetings? I'm like, I got a lot to do. So, like just go with me on this. 

Eric Jorgenson: It'll be worth it. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah. And fun in the process.

Al Doan: Have fun at work today, Bo. It's real work. I'm doing stuff. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah, and she's like, okay. And I understand. I understand that it's a reasonable perspective. But we're making progress. We're making progress. It's fast actually, we're making very good, tangible progress. And like almost at this point, everybody- it’s funny. This is like a funny kind of company where like the core, the full time kind of people who come to work every day at Home Field, it's gotten a little smaller since I got involved, but it's in the dozens, three to four dozen people. But actually, like paid employees who identify with this place that like if you said ultimately who's in charge, and they said like it is Bo, it's like 600 people, all the coaches for our programs, the assistant coaches who get paid to go and do this. And so it's like many hundreds of people who are like involved, and then with this kind of like core group that really has got to make the business make sense and grow and all that stuff, so the guy that just came by a minute ago, Tyler's one of those guys, Nick, the other one who walked by, like they'll probably do training behind us here in a minute. But it's like a 600 person organization from like a management perspective. So it's like non-trivial. It's like a real thing. 

Eric Jorgenson: You got a real estate version. You've got multiple restaurants. You've got... you have all variety of sports... for a $10 million top line. 

Bo Fishback: And I think it's... if we really just do a fabulous job and grow it the way we should with our kind of existing facilities in this market, maybe it's a $30 million business. Like a $30 million top line business. And so like, that's not- It's a very different kind of set of tracks you're on then like, hey, we need 200 million users or whatever it is. But like it's understandable and it's like manageable. And it's also like ridiculously high impact for the people who come, whether they work here or whether they're a kid in a program or whatever it is. And so, it's like you just don't measure it in dollars.

Eric Jorgenson: ...the community. Like for the Starbond perspective, like you are bringing thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands.  

Bo Fishback: No, I think we're close to a million people through our facilities this year.

Eric Jorgenson: Holy shit. 

Bo Fishback: It’s big. I mean, that part will work. We will bring lots of people. They will spend money in other areas in the city. They will also spend money here. And we will, I mean, we'll send close to 200 kids on college scholarship this year from our programs, which I think has a something... we're something like, I think, it's tough to know exactly. 

Al Doan: Meaning they get recruited out of here to go play ball? 

Bo Fishback: We're about two thirds of the college scholarship market for athletics in Kansas City come out of our programs. I mean, it's like really, really big. And so like for those kids, for sure, it changed their life. For kids who come and play for a few years and are like, you know what I learned, I'm not a basketball player, also a great service. 

Al Doan: Suicides at 5 am are not for me. 

Bo Fishback: And so, it's whatever, it can be a good business. It can definitely be a fun business. It can never be in a single market, a huge business. But what everybody's trying to figure out like in the private equity world and stuff is like, yeah, but shouldn’t there be ten of these around the country. And I'm kind of roughly in the like, maybe, but like I would hold tight until I tell you if the answer is yes or no, because there's not a lot of people who've approached this space with a, let me say like a credible business building path. It's not like, I just want to have it because I love baseball. Oh, my kid graduated. I'm out. It's like, it's not that. 

Al Doan: Or I'm really good at real estate. I'm going to go build this one. 

Bo Fishback: There's not a lot of really competent and believable operators in the space. And when I say there's not a lot, I mean, it's like, I doubt I'm the only one, but like, I haven't found another one yet, for what’s it’s worth. I've been looking and I haven't found one yet. So, hey, if you are one of those, please email me. Bofishback@gmail.com. Holler at me. 

Al Doan: I don't believe I'm the only one, but I haven't met the other one. 

Bo Fishback: I'm on the hunt. I'm on the hunt for them. 

Al Doan: Yeah. I mean, it describes my dating life too. I know there's somebody out there. I've never seen her though. 

Eric Jorgenson: Al's happily married. He's successfully... There's also like in order for all of that to line up, like yes, you need to be a good business operator, which you are, but you also spent like, I don't know, 10 years in this community, like not just in Kansas City, but in specifically the youth basketball community, mapping the maze essentially to like you couldn't copy paste the business into another city because the personalities are all different. And if you don't have that like unifying sense of trust and getting these people, like these are just messy markets. 

Bo Fishback: It is a cartel organized market. I've told everybody here that. That is what it is like. You need cooperation from the people in the space. You need... you need to be viewed and valued and then prove it every day that you're a good actor in the space who is in it for the right reasons. And... honestly, it's like a delightful project to work on. It's super fun. On some days, I'm like, what the hell am I doing? But like, that's true with anything you're going to try to build. On most days, it's like, oh, this is going to work. It's going to be really awesome. And in 50 years, it will be even that much bigger and more awesome. And like, I love working on stuff like that. Like, it's very satisfying. 

Al Doan: That's cool, man. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's very fun. 

Bo Fishback: So it's probably enough about youth sports, but... 

Eric Jorgenson: Come tour this place. If you're anywhere in the vicinity or if you have a kid in sports, like this place is unbelievable. 

Al Doan: You got to go upstairs to the spectator deck. But the best restaurants are upstairs. 

Eric Jorgenson: No parents allowed down here. Also, I'm not going to get credit for this, but I fixed the cheeseburger in this place before Bo was even involved. 

Al Doan: Wait, what was the issue? 

Eric Jorgenson: The issue was that they were trying to straddle the fence between Smashburger and a classic. And it was just, it was all wrong. 

Al Doan: So it was just a squish burger?

Eric Jorgenson: It was all wrong. Yeah... It wasn't crispy edges, but they were treating it like a smash- I wrote a whole- they were asking for feedback, to be clear, this wasn’t unsolicited, but I wrote a whole paper. 

Al Doan: He's invented a new burger. I feel cheeseburgers always fail because they get too much bun in there. They want a pretzel bun. They want a big brioche bun. No. 

Bo Fishback: It's funny. We went to Chick-fil-A yesterday. They're rolling pretzel buns right now. And Pierce was like, that looks really good. And I'm like, it's not as good as it sounds... It sounds great... 

Al Doan: It’s too much bread, bro. 

Bo Fishback: You can't eat all that bread. 

Eric Jorgenson: Pretzel buns would work if you dug out the bread. But people, Chick-fil-A is not going to bother with that. 

Al Doan: It's probably like Five Guys. They end up with like a squish bun that's barely holding on. You're like, that's just a wrapper. That's all I want. 

Bo Fishback: Meanwhile...

Al Doan: Oh, you had a baby. You had a baby. 

Eric Jorgenson: Meanwhile I had a baby. 

Al Doan: Well, Janine did a lot of it, but you had a baby. 

Bo Fishback: Did she though?

Al Doan: The way she talks...

Eric Jorgenson: She sure takes a lot of credit. I will give her... I mean, I don't argue. 

Al Doan: You had the baby. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Janine delivered our first child, like an absolute champion, and this is the end of my parental leave.

Al Doan: Wait, how long were you in the hospital with this? Did you guys have a long labor? 

Eric Jorgenson: A couple days. It was a normal...

Bo Fishback: ...healthy baby. I've held him multiple times. He's a homie. 

Al Doan: They told me they weren't letting other people... How dare you? 

Bo Fishback: No, they said specifically anybody but Al. 

Al Doan: Oh, because I've got swine flu. Okay. 

Bo Fishback: They're already priming the little Fishbacks because my daughter is like, when can I babysit? When can I babysit? When can I babysit? She's pretty much ready to roll. 

Al Doan: That's amazing. 

Eric Jorgenson: We're trying to, not too soon- What's your infant program look like here at Home Field? 

Bo Fishback: I think we start at two years old maybe with some kids or something. 

Al Doan: Mainly strength training. Getting the legs up, walking. 

Eric Jorgenson: We're mainly focused on the neck muscles at this early stage. No, it's been... We've been in a state of newborn bliss, just cuddling and hanging.

Al Doan: Do you have any reflections on pre-dad moment to dad moment? Like, what do you know now that you didn't know before? 

Eric Jorgenson: I built it- I anticipated a lot. And so, I don't know that I had like a thunderbolt of like realization other than kind of like stepping into it and being like, oh, this is... I was told this was going to be awesome and it’s fucking awesome. 

Al Doan: It’s not even as big a deal as you think. It’s fine. It's whatever. 

Eric Jorgenson: No, I love it. It's great. I expected to love it, and I absolutely love it. It does, I mean, immediately kind of rearrange your priorities in the sense of like a bunch of stuff that seems important is no longer important. And I have always respected, but now appreciate even more the sense of like, if you're not doing what you're doing in some sense for your kids and their quality of life and like the full breadth of progeny going forward, you're going to like, I don’t know, rethink that. 

Bo Fishback: It's been great for me, personally, because on one of my two kind of like life ethos, one is like never skip a funeral and always hold a baby. Because people don't realize, they go their whole life, and you might only ever hold four or five or six different babies in your entire life. Like when they're really babies, it's a very small number. And it's like... cause it's like, when there's a two day old baby, most people are not like, come to my house and touch my baby with your dirty hands. And so like, you gotta be really close to someone to like have that invite. And then those babies change so fast. Four month old is different than a two day old. Like how many times do you hold a baby in his first week or two a life? It is almost everyone, unless you're like a nurse, can count it on one hand. It's a tiny number. You always say yes. 

Al Doan: Seven siblings. I'm at 27 babies. 

Bo Fishback: This is a completely different rubric if you're Mormon. 

Eric Jorgenson: Mormon community has no idea what you're talking about. They're sick of babies. 

Bo Fishback: I've held 300 babies. For the rest of the world though, it's actually a surprisingly rare thing. So I was delighted. 

Al Doan: That's great. 

Bo Fishback: My daughter got to hold Archer. My son got to hold him. They both just left like, there's no way I was that little. 

Al Doan: It is magic for a teenager... They are so little.  

Bo Fishback: It is magic. Their fingers are so tiny. Like my kids were like, do you see his fingers? He like blew their mind. And I was like, yeah, you were like that. And they're like, not possible. It's also a perfect excuse to talk to a 14 year old about what they were like as a baby, which is not their favorite thing. They find it impossible. They find it impossible that that ever could have been them. He's a little homie, though. He seems dialed in. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, he's very chill. 

Al Doan: I don't know if it's encouraging to you in these early stages, but like I love being a dad 10 times more now as these kids get older... When we first had our first kid, I was like, is that it? All right. Oh, okay. I don't know what to... because the bond is really between a mom and the kid. And so like, as a dad, dude, like I loved it then, but I felt a lot of pressure to love it then. But like, dude, it just gets more and more magic. I'm so excited for your arc. 

Bo Fishback: I'm positive it gets better and better every day, right up until 14. And then I feel like at some point, I might be at the breaking point where I'm like, oh shit, now it gets worse. I don't really know, but like my oldest is 14. But so far, like every year has been like, oh, this is way more awesome. We go golfing together and it's like every- it's like better and better and better. And then everybody's like, just wait until teenagehood. And so like, we'll see. But I agree, man, four months is more fun than 4 weeks.

Al Doan: I was so excited for you, I was texting Bo. I was like, I can’t believe we did it...

Bo Fishback: That's literally what Al texted me. We did it. We did it because Eric and Janine had a baby. And I'm like, we did. We did. You're right, Al. We did it. 

Eric Jorgenson: One of the things that's been most amazing is like how- it's one of the moments like your wedding where like you truly feel the community around you. Like, so just feeling like the amount of like cards and well wishes and stuff...

 Bo Fishback: I want to just say I apologize for my mom coming every Wednesday. 

Eric Jorgenson: Your mom is amazing. She's so sweet. 

Bo Fishback: She's like, I'm going to bring them food every Wednesday for the first six weeks. Here's what I'm bringing, dadadadadada. 

Al Doan: That’s the best, dude.

Bo Fishback: Go for it, mom.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, as somebody that like lives away from family, that is super awesome to have that kind of like close community. Everybody like shows up for you. It's awesome. On every story I hear about like someone's, now that we have a boy, in particular boys doing insane things. I'm like, oh, I'm so excited. We got a text from a friend, it's like our two year old took off his diaper and is currently in the front yard naked peeing like in the flower beds. And I'm like, yes, I want that chaos. This is going to be great. 

Al Doan: Like once you have a baby, all of a sudden, every like infant photo on Instagram, you're like, that's so cute. Oh, I love it. Before a baby, you're like, why are you showing me your gross kid? I don't care about it. But the instant you have one, you're like, wait, what did he do? He was peeing in the yard? Oh, that rascal. I love him. That guy. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's been extremely fun... Extremely fun. So yeah, a whole bunch of good reasons why, good things that have kept us occupied in our daily lives. 

Al Doan: So sorry. 

Bo Fishback: But should you also- should we also maybe talk a little bit about any companies? 

Eric Jorgenson: Sure. 

Al Doan: What have we been doing? 

Bo Fishback: Here’s all the reasons you haven't heard from us, but also... 

Eric Jorgenson: We have been doing some work. 

Bo Fishback: We have been allocating capital. 

Eric Jorgenson: We've been doing work. Yeah. Like, if something's got to go in the short term, it's the podcast, not the capital allocation. 

Al Doan: Wait, which companies do we have? We've had a few that have done like big raises that we've gotten into. Right?

Bo Fishback: Yeah, some big updates. 

Eric Jorgenson: Actually, so I think the last episode we did had both Dirac and Reactiv. 

Al Doan: Yeah, dude, Reactiv, they're doing their Series A right now, killing it. They went zero to a million in ARR in the first eight months, just like crushing it. 

Eric Jorgenson: Unbelievable. And they raised a seed like, what, four months after we...

Al Doan: We came in for like a nickel, and then they're like, all right, actually everybody wants in on this. We're going to raise, like I think they did 25 million was their seed, raised five at 25, I think. And now they're raising an A, they're doing like 12 or 15 million, just blowing up. They're doing great. Actually, I was up in Toronto visiting a friend. I tried e-foiling, which is... 

Eric Jorgenson: How did it go? 

Al Doan: I sent the video to some buddies, and they just sent me back, like, Zuck, all pasty and white. They're like, here's your aura. I'm like, I can't brag about this to anybody. And the guy only had a medium-large life vest for me to wear. 

Bo Fishback: Oh, that looks great on you. 

Al Doan: Just me in a little crop top, like 270 pounds of man, just e-foiling. 

Eric Jorgenson: The learning curve looks rough on those. 

Al Doan: So, like day one, you have a big floaty thing that you put on, like training wheels. I was up bumping around day one. And then it took me day three before I was really cruising without anything. But it's awesome. And also terrifying. You're surfing on stilts. So, it's like this giant leg with a motor in it, and you're like, I'm not- I wouldn't skateboard. And here I'm going... and just hitting my head on the water. It was great. But on the way back from that, I was flying out through Toronto. So I took my family. We hung out with Ross and his crew. That guy, again, we should all- we're meeting all our people. We're getting there. They're great. But it was great. We just hung out. I sent you guys a picture of his house. Like they're refinishing the street where he lives on, and it's like a pretty crummy street. And then there's his house. It's like beautiful. And he's like, I bought it this way. I didn't- I wasn't the guy that raised the money and went and did this, but in the front yard is like a cybertruck and a Porsche. I was like, this guy. He was a salesman before he became an entrepreneur, but it was so jarring. I was like, how dare you? What have you done? He's like, no, man, I just like- I like the Cybertruck, and I've always been a sales guy that had money. So it made sense. It was pretty fun though. Beautiful family, great kids. We just hung out for an hour or two before we went to the airport. It was a good time though. Love that roster. And they really are, we're a user, like Missouri Star uses them for our stuff. But, dude, they're selling into like giant billion dollar brands... We get to do a lot of effort for them because we get to do all the customer vouching calls and stuff. And it sounds really good to be like, we're a customer, also we loved it so much, we invested, and also the fund invested, and like we went all in on these guys. They are great. So, they're killing it... They're small potatoes compared to like, who's the... who's the guy that got a hundred million dollar program from the government, our nuclear guys? 

Eric Jorgenson: Aalo. 

Al Doan: Aalo, dude, those guys are killing it. 

Eric Jorgenson: They just announced their series B, which is... I was excited they announced their series A, and then raised a whole series B in the meantime, a hundred million dollars from Valor... 

Bo Fishback: Oversubscribed. Like opening up an extension to it because there's too much- I mean, they are clearly, they have captured a part of the investor market at a minimum because they are cranking. 

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, they are. I think they are the right team at the right time with the right ethos, and credit where credit is due to like the government for just piling onto this, like accelerating the nuclear program, and it’s going to be awesome. 

Al Doan: As insane as Trump is, every now and then he's like, build nuclear stuff. You're like, well, that helps us too. Please don't start a nuclear war between a bunch of warring countries. But thank you for this.

Eric Jorgenson: Nuclear energy, yes. Nuclear bombs, bad. Good. Bad. So, they've been, yeah, absolutely ripping it. I mean, that team, it's crazy, 22 months ago, it was like a dude and a slide deck, and now it’s 70 nuclear engineers and a factory in Austin. 

Bo Fishback: This is 100% one of those where like when I think about like what we're doing here, where it's like, if you can find solid deal flow through networks that you trust and are connected to the right people, it's like you're going to make some crazy bets. And like that’s one where it's like 22 months ago, it actually seemed like a crazy bet where it was like, I don't know, like it fits our strategy, if it works amazing, and then you think it's always going to take 10 years, and then it's like, oh, good bet. Let's see what happens. So like, that's pretty cool. 

Al Doan: We kind of are investing at that like dude in a PowerPoint stage, which there's some of them that like just nothing happens. You're like, oh no. Like, how'd I screw up on that? Like, I really thought he was going to do the things he said he was going to do. And then you have those like exact same examples where the guy just goes and hires 70 engineers and gets a hundred million dollar contracts and just crushes it. And so like, it's par for the course. Like we're doing the right thing, but like yeah...

Bo Fishback: That's one that has been faster and more interesting than I certainly would have bet on. 

Al Doan: Incredible updates. 

Eric Jorgenson: I think the timing turned out to be great on that one. Like we expected a regulatory slog. And that's where it might have taken 10 years, no matter how fast the company could move. And like, I think just the gates... if you want to give us credit for reading the zeitgeist correctly or just like timing it well, but like, who knows? A lot of things have to go right for things to move as fast as this. 

Al Doan: We probably would have made the same investment 10 years ago and been completely wrong. 

Eric Jorgenson: Or it would have been [?] that took 15 years to like- I mean, it's a big company and that was a good bet, but like it was much, much slower. 

Al Doan: But as long as you're there... like the thing that I give you so much credit for is like the amount of enthusiasm for acceleration and like the future and stuff that you sort of represent on Twitter too, it's gravity, man. The people that love that, they find the enthusiasm so rewarding and exciting. And like they sort of group to you and you guys- you get to find these people that are just wild, great, ambitious, crazy people that are doing cool stuff.

Bo Fishback: All things in the world of genetics, in the world of nuclear. It's like these areas where it's like this is insane and could be amazing. 

Al Doan: Just the unabashed enthusiasm for it.

Bo Fishback: It’s true because it's like if you don't have that kind of magnet for those, the vast majority of people in the world who would love to invest in early stage companies just never get to see them. They don't get to see them. Like, you have to create a magnet for it. And that is, that's awesome. And I feel kind of good about our magnet, I think... what I do, like, I feel good about that.

Eric Jorgenson: The inbound deal flow that we get as a result of like publicly doing stuff like this that is like slightly crazy is incredible. And like, as always, we're constrained by capital. I think we're doing a good job of like seeing those deals, doing enough of them, so that people are like, oh, those guys, I won't have to convince those guys, like they're crazy like me. And I'm not going to get like turned down by another MBA like spreadsheet jockey, career risk focused person. Like these guys are playing the same game, see the same vision. 

Al Doan: We did one recently, Obsidia, where these guys were like, wait, you should have more meetings with us. Don't you want more meetings? I was like, oh, we're good. We're excited about it. Met both you guys. You're great. And they're like, so should we meet Monday? I was like, no, just send over the docs. We're like, we love you. I've known you for 10 years also. Like we're going to be fine. Okay. This is it. All right. It was like very jarring for them to... 

Bo Fishback: You need to give them the talk, hey, when the sale was made, stop talking. You made the sale. Please be quiet and take our money.  

Al Doan: Unplug and get off the stage. Unplug and get off the stage.  

Eric Jorgenson: You're not customer facing, are you?  

Al Doan: What if they want an encore? You unplug and get off the stage.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's a funny one. The other, Dirac, which we talked about making our investment in the last episode we did, which is a little- 18 months ago or 15 months ago now...

Al Doan: They were the machine parts or the machine instructions, right?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Automating work assembly instructions. And they just like two weeks ago, finally announced their seed round by Founders Fund and CO2, which has been awesome. And they're... 

Al Doan: Well, they are at seed fund with customers already paying, doing a thing. 

Eric Jorgenson: And along with that announcement, a huge partnership with Simon's, which is like a perfect partner. It fills a machine. They're growing. Their pipeline is incredible. 

Bo Fishback: They're cranking in all the right places. 

Al Doan: When a solution finds a need, man, it's just like, yes, we'll take everything. 

Eric Jorgenson: They're just a machine. The ethos, like Phil is an incredible follow on Twitter. They’ve got offices in the Empire State Building, and they are just like- they embody the kind of like reindustrialization. It's interesting because they're very much like in the group that is like hardware factory reindustrialization, but they're building software in order to enable all of these factories. You need both. 

Al Doan: We've actually seen a couple of those knock-ons of like, hey, this crazy idea is trying to happen, but it also needs this. Like the asteroid mining guys, like they launched their asteroid and were like, oh man, we lost communication with it. Turns out, communication in space really sucks. Also let me introduce you to the guy that we called when this happened, we said help us solve this; he's building the Verizon for outer space. And we're like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. For that to exist, obviously, we need this. 

Eric Jorgenson: So, let's do AstroForge because we haven't actually talked about AstroForge on the podcast yet. 

Al Doan: Let us tell you what we did. 

Eric Jorgenson: And then we'll tell you what we did. So, if you were at all concerned about nuclear reactors, you're going to love this one. The first time you hear about asteroid mining, you're going to think that's 50 years away. That's too far off. That's not possible. And that was kind of my very first impression too. I feel like we've been hearing about it for 20 years and it hasn't worked. And companies have actually like raised money to try to go do this before and they haven't worked. So, a few things have changed slightly that make it more reasonable now. And we wrote all this up... so if you're an LP, you have this in the letters. But very quickly, like the supply chain around space is like way, way, way different. You can get a ton more off the shelf components to be building satellites and stuff like that.

Al Doan: SpaceX missions going up, they can take your payload. 

Eric Jorgenson: The cost of launch is 10X lower than it was previously. And mining is actually more expensive than it was before. And precious metal, the cost and value of precious metals is going up. And so, there's all of these... 

Bo Fishback: And just to be clear, the precious metals live on asteroids. 

Eric Jorgenson: The precious metals live on asteroids. 

Bo Fishback: Unlimited amounts of them are floating in space. You just can't get them.

Eric Jorgenson: You couldn't get them, until we developed a lot more capacity for space. And so...

Al Doan: What we need are oil rigs. Let's send these oil riggers up there to bring these asteroids...  

Eric Jorgenson: Like if you just think about how- like what percentage of natural resources are on Earth versus off Earth. 

Al Doan: Most are off Earth. I mean, I'm saying at least... 

Eric Jorgenson: That's my guess. 

Al Doan: 70, 80% off Earth. You look at the universe. 

Bo Fishback: Pretty big place, pretty big. 

Eric Jorgenson: Much, much bigger than Earth. 

Al Doan: Everybody talks about how big it is. I've never even been anywhere but here. 

Eric Jorgenson: So AstroForge is just like a team of unbelievable engineers working incredibly quickly to build our very first capacity, like capability for mining asteroids. 

Al Doan: They raised- the plan was they have like three or four shots on goal. 

Eric Jorgenson: Depending on how cheaply they can do it and how much money they have. So actually, what we did, when we invested, they were in the process of doing the first ever commercial mission to deep space. And so, they launched that, I think, in February 2025. And we like watched it. It was fun. But what happened was the craft, Odin, lost communication. And so, the limiting factor of that ended up being like the deep space communication network, which NASA has built a whole version of, but it's massively oversubscribed. And as a commercial mission, you can't always get access to it. And so, people were like cobbling together, you use these giant ass satellite dishes on Earth, like 30 meter satellite dishes or giant arrays fields to try to like beam signals deep, deep, deep into space beyond the moon. And that's a hard problem. And that ended up being the limiting factor of success for the first mission that AstroForge did. And so, the guy they called, Jake...

Al Doan: They were like, talk to Rolling Fun. Like, you got to know these guys. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And they were like, can you solve this problem? And he's a former SpaceX engineer. He's like built a bunch of these systems. And he's like, I think I can solve that problem and then started working on it. It was like, there is a company here. And that is what led us to do Cascade Space, which we did in Q2. 

Al Doan: In our world, we look at it and it's like, in the future, do we believe that this is a need? It will exist? 

Bo Fishback: Have you ever read a sci-fi book? Yes. 

Al Doan: We come from the what about Bobs? 

Bo Fishback: That's correct... We need this. 

Al Doan: We need the communication network. Obviously, that's got to be there.  When we find somebody building mayonnaise, we'll also do it. 

Eric Jorgenson: From a thesis perspective, Cascade is amazing because no matter what, basically no matter what use case or company succeeds in deep space... 

Al Doan: This is selling shovels for the goldmines. You're selling pickaxes and shovels here. 

Eric Jorgenson: 100%. And we were... 

Al Doan: It's just, oh, you're failing still. Keep going to space, guys. We're making money either way. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. They were in YC. I think we were the first non-YC check into that one. It's just so cool. And if they build that, it's going to be like absolutely singular capability. 

Bo Fishback: No, it's super- It's a really... 

Al Doan: The front slide on the deck is like the Verizon for space. 

Bo Fishback: I have no idea what slide two said because we were in already. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that one is like, I think the math is 20 clients, 20 customers to 100 million ARR... I mean, just millions of dollars... 

Al Doan: And delighted customers that get to talk to their spacecraft. Like nobody begrudgingly pays that. They're like, oh, good. You've solved this huge problem for us. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, so I'm really, really excited about those and it's just kind of a cool like story through. I mean, AstroForge is going to be- that's one of those things that's like hard to imagine a harder company or a bigger payoff. 

Al Doan: Well, the economics on it were like, it's like 20 million to get a craft to an asteroid and stuff and bring it back. If we can bring back the small chunk that we've targeted, it's a $400 million payoff. And so like, we'll do it- we can do it a couple of times... 

Eric Jorgenson: Let’s check those numbers, Al.

Al Doan: Is that wrong?

Eric Jorgenson: I think- is it 20x? I think it's closer to 10. I could be wrong. Don't quote us on the numbers. It’s been a minute since we looked at them. 

Al Doan: Listen, I've never been wrong about a number. I'll say this in court. 

Bo Fishback: He's never checked a number, actually. No one's ever told him that he's wrong with a number. Just go with us, guys. 

Al Doan: It's the problem with being big. Nobody feels comfortable. 

Eric Jorgenson: When you're the mayor, people are really afraid to correct you on anything. 

Al Doan: No, I'm confident. Trust me.

Eric Jorgenson: I think what Al’s getting at is that the margins of asteroid mining are better than you think. 

Al Doan: If it's successful... This is where like the margins erode pretty quick when you got to take two or three swings because nobody's ever done it before. But as soon as they get it going, it's like, yeah, this is a no-brainer, we should absolutely do this. 

Eric Jorgenson: And relative to the cost and damage and human suffering involved in mining like deep deposits of platinum...

Al Doan: Yeah, I mean, they'll still have children receive the asteroids when they get them here, right? We're not going to have grown-ups mine these. That's crazy. 

Eric Jorgenson: As long as we don't displace child labor... Part of what Matt's vision is is like I think in 50 years, we could make it illegal to mine platinum group metals on Earth because it's dirty and expensive and hard, and like we just zone Earth as a garden and eliminate that from necessity if we have a successful asteroid mining program. 

Bo Fishback: Utopia. I don't know what to tell you. Just building utopia out here, guys. 

Eric Jorgenson: Building utopia, one check at a time... One tiny little check at a time.

Bo Fishback: ...Building utopia, $50,000 at a time. 

Eric Jorgenson: We're working on getting those numbers up... 

Al Doan: You're welcome, Earth. 

Bo Fishback: I can't believe we just saved Earth, guys. That's amazing. Way to go. Way to go, guys. 

Al Doan: And Home Field. We saved...  

Eric Jorgenson: We saved basketball. We saved Earth and space. 

Bo Fishback: There's no point in having Home Field, guys, if we don't have an Earth for it to flourish in. 

Eric Jorgenson: And we made dozens of people pre-rich. 

Bo Fishback: That's right. That's right...

Al Doan: Speaking of pre-rich, I think it was Terran Robotics that we made that comment on like three years ago, those guys showed up again and were like, hey, we're ready to raise like a real round. We're like, oh, hey, what are you doing? And they're like, we've done a lot. Like, we can build houses now. We can do the whole thing. Turns out the FCC hated us flying drones. So we had to build like a different 3d printer way to do this stuff. But I've been jamming with them because like I'm into house building and stuff and town building. And I was like, wait, you guys can- it's going to work? It's really going to happen? But it's been so cool because it's like, I mean, we can sort of poke at that as a meme almost in our world, if it's like, no, it turns out they were geniuses. They're showing back up and they can build a house for like 60 bucks a square foot, and they're going to crush it. And they're doing great. I’m like, that's amazing. Let's go, you guys. It's incredible. 

Eric Jorgenson: That was a cool- Yeah, when we invested, they were using like giant like octo-copter drones... 

Al Doan: They had a hammer on a drone that was like pounding a wall. We're like, it could go. 

Eric Jorgenson: But we knew well the founders, and they were like deeply scrappy, great engineers who are like trying to solve a real problem in a novel way. And they, like true to form, iterated and iterated and iterated super, super cheap on the robotics. And they've now developed this system of like cable robots that I think will be the... 

Al Doan: It's like four radio towers on a site, and it just moves like a... 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's like the cameras in a stadium, like running back and forth on a cable, super precise, controlled environment, like pops right up. 

Al Doan: 3D cameras for all the walls so that everything gets perfectly straight and right where it's supposed to be, yeah. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's a wild... And they use like the... They have an Adobe like construction expert. The guy’s like a masters or PhD, is like one of the co-founders in Adobe material construction, which who knew that existed. 

Al Doan: I love that we all were like, how did you guys live? How did you pay your rent? It's been a couple of years. 

Eric Jorgenson: They had very quietly raised a little subsequent stuff. We were, I think, the very, very, very, very first money in. 

Al Doan: But it's still a very modest amount of money. They've cockroached a little bit and gotten through, and now they're like, we're ready. 

Eric Jorgenson: They cockroached super hard, and now they're in scale mode. I think they've come up with perhaps the most capital efficient way to build structures. 

Al Doan: We're going to try and do like a spec home in Hamilton. We're going to try and do it like later this year, I think... 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's really fun. They've got contractors, contracts in place with developers who are doing dozens of homes and like starting to do this. And what’s funny is Adobe homes currently are only paid for by like super expensive- like a couple million dollars to build a high-end Adobe home and it's all hand padded and stuff like that. And so, like the aesthetics are there for really high-end stuff. 

Al Doan: It's the children hand padding. 

Eric Jorgenson: Why do you always want the children to work? 

Al Doan: They're so underemployed. No kid I know has a job these days. 

Bo Fishback: You're not going to understand it. This is definitely a Mormon thing. Who's going to work the farm if not the children? Let’s put them to work. 

Al Doan: How do you run a dairy with grownups? 

Eric Jorgenson: A rural and a Mormon thing. Yeah, that makes more sense. 

Bo Fishback: No, he's just trying to figure out how to deploy a fleet of Mormon children to get to work. 

Al Doan: Not children, but that was my whole shtick in coming to Hamilton. They're like, you need different permits and stuff. I was like, we don't even have a city government. You can come and build anything you want. 

Eric Jorgenson: I'm the government. I'm the zoning commission. I'm your... yeah. Hell yeah. That's a great one. This is a horrible side tangent, not a horrible side tangent. It's a brilliant side tangent. I think a really underappreciated benefit of being an entrepreneur or owning a business is that actually you can get your kids working in the business way, way, way younger than they possibly could outside that. 

Al Doan: I don't know. I think child labor is wrong. I'd like to go on the record saying Eric's a monster. And Archie, I'm sorry. 

Bo Fishback: I can't believe he's just looking at this baby of his and thinking, when can I put him to work? 

Al Doan: All he's thinking is, I get to pay this kid a salary and write it off on my taxes as a model. How dare you? 

Eric Jorgenson: He'd be a fantastic model. He's a perfect baby. He's adorable. If anybody has any baby products... 

Bo Fishback: Very good worker. Very good worker. Very strong. Very strong back. 

Al Doan: Neck, not holding it up, but moving.

Eric Jorgenson: If you can hold up his neck, he can model anything that you need sold.

Al Doan: ...I need neck support. 

Eric Jorgenson: I do need support at all times, 100% of the time.

 Al Doan: I don't know what we've done to your outline and I'm so sorry. 

Eric Jorgenson: No, who needs an outline? 

Al Doan: Who else has done cool stuff? 

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, Ouros has done incredible. We invested initially. We've covered them and Ethan's been on the podcast with Eli. But then we invested again. We were one of the first checks into the pre-seed and one of the last checks into the pre-seed. 

Al Doan: Cards went around the table and we said run it. 

Eric Jorgenson: Do it again, run it. Double down, almost triple down. It turned out to be a good bet. They very quietly raised a seed from Patrick Collison and John Collison and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, who are some of the best of the best of the valley... 

Al Doan: It's got to be like the Illuminati of San Francisco. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's up there. I think also Balaji and Naval and Charlie Songhurst. And so... like absolute murder's row of seed and precede investors there. And they are, I think, the fastest moving battery company towards commercialization, period. And it's so cool to see all of the trends around like electrification and batteries and drones.

Al Doan: To remind you guys, this was the battery tech that increases the density of batteries. So, like your Tesla battery that can go 300 miles tomorrow goes 3000 miles is the idea. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, the team of battery chemistry engineers out of MIT who are like, we think this technology is the future, and we can build better batteries cheaper than anybody's ever built them before. 

Al Doan: Ethan's so cool to talk to, too, because he's very practical. You'd expect a lot of these guys to be like sort of... 

Eric Jorgenson: Academic. 

Al Doan: Yeah, academic. And he's like, no, we got to get commercialization and here's how it's going to look. And, oh, look, we're already commercialized in these pouches and we've got- we don't have a ton of revenue, but we've got revenue coming in from... They're looking for like drone companies where the weight is so important and they're going to get like dramatically better performance out of a thing if they can drop that battery weight, but still get the same amount of time out of it. And so, he's got like a couple of those contracts already lined up that they're producing. And then he's like, all right, and now I'm taking this commercialization of this, and we're going to 10X it and go here and we get to provide these clients now. He's a really fun guy to talk to because he's just, like getting from theory to application is so tough, and he's the guy that's like, I'm actually walking this walk. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that's been the failure moat of so many of these battery companies is like too academic, too slow, raised too much, like too much emphasis on like the research. And he is a founder’s founder. The first time I talked to him, he's like, I want to be the Rockefeller of batteries. And I was like, fuck yeah. And he's just an execution machine, and they're flying. So, I think we'll see a lot more from them shortly. 

Al Doan: Ouros has been cool.

Eric Jorgenson: Ouros has been really, really cool. And just like, that's one where that'll never be a household name. Like most people won't realize how big of a part of... 

Al Doan: Duracell will license their tech to... you know what I mean? 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it is wild. And talking to Ethan too, I thought it was really interesting how like batteries are an underappreciated part of the smartphone and laptop revolution too. Like it was a limiting factor for years, but like pushing that science moved, and it'll be the same thing with electric vehicle takeoff and landing, like planes. It'll be the same thing with drones. It'll be the same thing with cars. It'll be the same thing with like electrifying your house. 

Bo Fishback: I sent you recently an electric boat. You were like, I love everything but the price. 

Eric Jorgenson: That is true. 

Al Doan: Like the Tesla of boats? 

Eric Jorgenson: More like the Tesla Roadster of boats. 

Bo Fishback: Yeah. First two. And it kind of like seemed impossible because now you need a thing that floats in the water. But they're building a cool ass version. It just costs a ton of money at this point until like you can get it way, way, way, way cheaper. But it's going to definitely happen. It's just a question of when and how fast and what are the enabling technologies. 

Al Doan: I keep messaging those like personal aviation quadcopter things. 

Bo Fishback: You're just harassing these people. You're like, no, I need it for a big guy. 

Eric Jorgenson: Do you have a big and tall?

Al Doan: Every six months, I’m just in their DMS being like, so still about 260. Could you...

Bo Fishback: Like, no, I'm 270 now, please make it bigger.

Al Doan: Max weight 215. We've gone up to 230 now. I'm like, almost there. 

Bo Fishback: This is literally Al's diet plan. He's like, how thin do I need to get to get a personal drone? 

Eric Jorgenson: If you don't like an e-foil, dude, I don't think you're going to like a Batman... like flying out there like the Green Goblin. 

Al Doan: I want the Star Wars motorcycle going through my woods... I want to die hitting a tree like any normal man. On a quadcopter, 70 feet off the ground. 

Eric Jorgenson: You want to go out like a storm trooper extra. 

Al Doan: Is this too much to ask, God? I've given you so much. A storm trooper extra. 

Eric Jorgenson: All right. Let's call that a first pod. 

Al Doan: There's your year, people.

Bo Fishback: Love it. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Let's call that one. And we'll be back shortly with the other half of the companies we've invested in recently and Al’s adventure. 

Bo Fishback: I'm going to propose we find a new location for the next one, just because you only want to look at basketball courts so much, but we have lots of space in this place to do another spot. 

Al Doan: Oh yeah. The bathroom maybe; I got to go to the bathroom. 

Bo Fishback: Me too. All right. Our bathrooms are fabulous. Great bathrooms at Home Field, people. 

Eric Jorgenson: I'll see you guys in the bathroom. 

InvestingEric JorgensonRolling Fun, Investing, StartupsComment