Howard Lindzon Tells Us Why He Launched His Own SPAC

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Tracy, you know, we've done a few episodes on SPACs. And obviously, at this point, I don't think anyone has missed the incredible SPAC boom that we've seen over the last several months.

But I have to admit, I still have tons of questions about how they work and where this all came from.

Tracy Alloway (0:37)

I was just thinking, if we timed our Odd Lots SPAC episodes for every time a new SPAC entered the market, we'd be doing, what, like two or three episodes per week for each SPAC. It's been insane, the number that have come to market.

Joe Weisenthal (0:52)

No, it would be way more than two or three episodes per week, Tracy. You know that last Friday, so we're recording this on, I think it's Tuesday, February 23rd. Last Friday, there were 13 SPACs filed in one day last Friday. And then I think there were like another five that were out by like Monday morning the next week. So we would never, we would just be all SPACs all the time.

There's no way our producer, Laura, would be able to handle the long suffering producer.

Tracy Alloway (1:24)

So here's one thing that I always think of when we talk about SPACs. I get a little bit nervous when the focus is on a particular capital markets tool. Like it's never a good indicator for where you are in the cycle when people start talking about the actual packaging of the product versus the content.

Joe Weisenthal (1:45)

Yeah, that is a pretty, I agree. I mean, that is kind of weird. People are more interested in the phenomenon of SPAC than like the companies.

The other question that I have, and this is something, is like, where do they come from? Because one of the things that we've seen is that a lot of them are associated with a very well-known name, like Colin Kaepernick, for example, the quarterback, has a SPAC. What I was like, did he reach out to someone, say, I want to do a SPAC, or did someone reach out to him and say, Colin, you should really be involved with our SPAC. There's like a bunch of names like I saw.

I swear to God, it's so weird, like the former editor-in-chief of Cosmo, the magazine, is involved in a SPAC to take the clearing company behind Weibull.

There's a bunch of weird stuff. But where did these come from? And who brought in the, where did the, whose idea was it to bring in the former editor-in-chief of Cosmo to do a SPAC? Our former Bloomberg News colleague, Betty Lewis, doing a SPAC. Where did that come from? I have all these questions. I want to know, like, was it over some Zoom? Like how did this happen?

Tracy Alloway (2:51)

Well, when a venture capitalist loves a company very much, they get together. No, that's not where SPACs come from.

Yes, I agree. Like, obviously, this is a hot phenomenon in markets right now. It does feel like a bunch of people are jumping on the bandwagon. But how does the actual process work? Who approaches who? And then of course, like, how does the actual process of raising money and finding a company to acquire or merge with work?

Joe Weisenthal (3:18)

So I'm very excited about our episode today because I think we might at least answer some of these questions and where they come from, what the opportunity is with someone who is very open and honest and I think will be really help us demystify the whole thing. We're going to be speaking with Howard Lindzon.

He is a VC. He is a founding partner at the venture capital firm Social Leverage. A bunch of big winners, he was an early investor in Robinhood and StockTwits and eToro and a company called manscape.com, which we'll learn more about. But I basically know Howard Lindzon and a lot of people do because he's been on Twitter for a long time, talking about tech and investing, extremely open and he's always sort of one of these people that I think just has this sort of uncanny intuition about where the puck is going, as they say in hockey. And it's like, sometimes I see him and he's talking about stuff and I'm like, this is crazy, but he always ends up sort of being right and sort of has this just sort of feel of where the market's going, where stocks are going, where VC is going, where tech is going. And now he is the CEO of a spec. And he is recently, I think in late January, filed the S1 for social leverage acquisition corp.