Jake Paul & The Chainsmokers: Turning Fame into Funds, Jake Enters Politics? & Venture Bubble Signs

Summary

The episode centers on how attention can be converted into durable businesses, with Jake Paul arguing that authentic audience-building, boxing, investing, and even politics are all part of one self-reinforcing flywheel. He walks through his path from early creator growth and Team 10 to boxing, MVP’s push against UFC economics, his fund-building, and why he thinks social-media-native politicians will be next. The Chainsmokers then describe how they built their music careers through viral promotion tactics, why live touring remains their core economic engine, and how that distribution expertise translates into venture investing. They emphasize being hands-on, non-lead Series A partners across AI, infra, cyber, deep tech, and health tech. The back half turns to venture discipline, with the group warning about concentrated returns, illiquid assets, inflated secondaries, and bubble-like behavior when pricing runs ahead of fundamentals.

Notes

• Attention is framed as the core scarce asset in the modern economy.
• Jake presents his career as one integrated flywheel: content, fighting, investing, and politics.
• He says he built his audience early because he genuinely liked creating, not because he was chasing trends.
• His creator-era motivation was to entertain, inspire, and give people daily reminders to work hard and chase goals.
• He recounts a Vine creator strike where the top creators demanded $1 million each per year and abandoned the platform.
• Jake says clickbait and absurd hot takes are a broader creator disease, not just a single-platform issue.
• He argues platforms cannot solve attention-quality problems alone because competitors will keep rewarding the bad behavior.
• Jake says he fell in love with startups in the Valley and started angel investing there.
• His first boxing run began as a grudge match idea, then became serious after he trained for three months and scored a knockout in Manchester.
• He says he reused the Team 10 creator-house model in combat sports and now has 400 fighters across boxing and MMA under MVP.
• Jake says UFC fighter pay is about 15% of revenue, far below the roughly 50% share he cites in other pro sports.
• He says the counterstrategy is to allow sponsorships and avoid shelving fighters, with MVP and PFL now merged.
• Jake says he started angel investing at 18 and later formalized a fund with Jeff Wu.
• He describes investing as an attention-economy game where attention on a cap table is valuable.
• The downside of the attention economy, in his view, is inauthenticity and hype-chasing instead of real building.
• Jake says he advised OpenAI on launching a social media app and granted them his NIL for Sora video generation.
• He rejects the celebrity-VC label and wants to be benchmarked against top firms on DPI and IRR.
• Jake says his fund uses a barbell approach across early and growth investing.
• Jake’s long-term vision is to keep the flywheel going through media, fighting, investing, and philanthropy.
• He says politics may be his next chapter because he wants to help people at scale.
• He says future officeholders will need built-in followings to capture votes directly.
• The Chainsmokers describe a long Vegas run, including eight years at Wynn and a decade in Las Vegas.
• Alex says he and Drew Taggart formed the duo in 2011-12 and have been best friends for 14 years.
• They say nostalgia is driving demand and they are trying to balance freshness with the special feeling of 2016.
• The music market is massively crowded, with about 300,000 songs uploaded to Spotify every day.
• They explain early growth hacking on Hype Machine using blog graphs, remixes, and highly personalized outreach.
• That strategy helped them go from obscure to roughly 30 number ones on Hype Machine.
• Alex says modern artists may soon reject label conventions and keep more control over rights and distribution.
• For them, live performance remains the main revenue engine, especially DJ touring economics.
• Their venture entry came from using tech in touring and from becoming a distribution platform attractive to founders and consumer brands.
• They stress that they want to be real partners to founders, not passive celebrity investors.
• Their fund focuses on cyber, AI, infra, deep tech, and health tech at Series A, while avoiding lead positions.
• They emphasize go-to-market, brand building, and introductions as the value they bring.
• They argue celebrity can help with access, but institutions still hesitate because the name is an obvious point of blame if things go wrong.
• Alex says venture is a long-duration, illiquid asset class and therefore a hard place for casual investors to start.
• He says venture returns are extremely concentrated, with about 5% of outcomes generating 90% of returns.
• Chamath says consistent DPI cuts through noise because investors ultimately remember returns, not narratives.
• They warn that too much liquidity is pushing capital into hype, so managers need real businesses, not mark-up stories.
• Jason says Uber and Robinhood were initially dismissed as too dirty, complicated, or risky.
• Chamath says missing Robinhood was a billion-dollar mistake driven by ego and overfitting prior Facebook-growth assumptions.
• He says great investors often come from outside the asset class and lack prior baggage.
• The group discusses concentrating follow-on capital, including the idea of putting 25% of a fund into one winner.
• Jason describes late-stage venture as increasingly tradable through SPVs, secondaries, and liquidity for early investors.
• Jason says unicorn should be redefined by revenue, not valuation.
• Alex warns some second- and third-tranche deals are being marked up 2x to 3x with no underlying change.
• Jason calls that behavior bubble behavior.
• Alex says celebrity interest is temporary, while real advantage comes from willingness to do the hard work.