Hunter Walk – Building Picks and Shovels

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:49)
My guest this week is Hunter Walk, the co-founder of Homebrew, a unique venture capital firm. Hunter is a tool builder, having spent his career before venture at companies like Google and YouTube. The topic of our conversation is the intersection of creative expression, technology, human behavior and problem solving.
We discussed his time at the company behind the video game Second Life, building tools for creators at YouTube and why a very hands-on style of early-stage venture investing represents an interesting use of his skill set at this stage of his career.
Please enjoy my conversation with Hunter Walk.
Sounds like from reading by your background that you were the co-founder or very early at the company behind the game Second Life. Talk about that company and that game. We're going to talk about YouTube too, but this whole idea of people's digital presence is really interesting to me right now. The rise of eSports and all these things is one component of that that I've been thinking about. Talk about what Second Life is for those that might not know what it is and what role you play there.

**Hunter Walk** (1:46)
Second Life is a virtual world where you're sort of represented by an avatar, a 3D creation of yourself that you can customize to look like you or not look like you. In fact, it was very interesting to see people would, there were very predictable paths of when men or women would sign up for the service to either make themselves photorealistic. They'd want to look like their digital selves would want to look like their real selves or they'd want to look idealized, muscles and abs if you were a dude, long hair, boobs if you're a woman, whatever type stuff or extreme. Just move the slider bars and let me see how crazy I can go.
And the idea was that we were trying to build sort of a fully virtual but also constructible world where the inhabitants could shape it. So if you could sort of think about what maybe kids use Minecraft where the idea you have a bunch of little parts and kind of Lego, virtual Lego. But we also had a coding language where you could actually program these things to do things or if you were going to want to make a dress for your avatar, sure, you could go buy that from somebody else in the world, but you could also design it in Photoshop, upload it and apply it to yourself. So it was highly creative, highly malleable. We had a virtual currency that predated Bitcoin and at various times was a floating point currency.
So I think it traded more favorable to the US dollar than like the Thai baht at times and stuff.
And it was Burning Man in some ways. So when you think of a virtual world, I think you can kind of think of two extremes. You can either think of Disney World, someplace that people have created for you to walk through, or you can think of Burning Man being dropped in a desert, scorching heat, no supplies, and having to figure out how to survive using the people around you and your skills. For better or for worse, we chose Burning Man. And that probably actually turned into sort of a ceiling on the number of people who wanted to survive in the desert.
But I was the sort of first non-engineer on the team, the founder of this guy, Philip Rosedale, who's actually now building another version of this in VR. I had been thinking about this for a really long time, built one of the first high quality video streaming products that was bought by Real Networks and became CTO of Real. And so he felt like now was finally the time to build this. And I came on and it was my first job out of grad school, where I sort of came to a conclusion about how I was going to make professional decisions before, you know, I was sort of throttling between this and my left brain or right brain. And then I finally realized maybe I'm a little bit of both.