Founder’s Field Guide
Episode 3 Creating and Selling Superpowers
Founder’s Field Guide

Episode 3: Creating and Selling Superpowers

Creating and Selling Superpowers

Leore is the co-founder and CEO of Lob and Alt. We cover how APIs enable developers to create superpowers, pricing strategy for businesses, and collectibles as financial assets.

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[00:02:55] – (First question) – Origin of Lob

[00:06:14] – Creating and selling superpowers to other people and its value proposition

[00:07:23] – Defining an API in his words 

[00:08:44] – Early breaks for Lob

[00:10:45] – Early lessons in responsible growth

[00:12:19] – Physical infrastructure behind Lob

[00:14:14] – Surprises in mail delivery

[00:15:00] – Progression through their pricing models

[00:18:10] – Leaders in the world of making the world programmable

[00:19:07] – Their interest in the physical world

[00:19:45] – Hardest part of scaling a physical business

[00:21:09] – Building a culture that keeps people around

[00:23:13] – Why he is fascinated by negotiations and what he’s learned from it

[00:25:20] – Scarcity, time, and leverage impact’s on negotiations

[00:26:35] – His interest in collectibles and the formation of Alt

[00:30:18] – Size of the alternative market he focuses on

[00:30:54] – The focus on cards 

[00:32:18] – An overview of collectible cards industry

[00:33:19] – What is the API of card collection and trading

[00:35:51] – Competitors in the space

[00:37:19] – Buying a LeBron James card

[00:38:21] – Building a fund around the collectibles and the strategy

[00:39:45] – What it means to be a technology company 

[00:40:23] – Collectibles beyond sports 

[00:41:30] – Defining a good investor

[00:43:32] – Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

[00:43:43] – Qualities he looks for in investors 

[00:45:03] – What does the collectible universe look like over the next 5-7 years 

[00:45:43] – Cultural value of assets 

[00:48:50] – Managing his time while launching two businesses

[00:49:51] – What he’s most excited about over the next 6 months

[00:51:45] – Consolidation of API businesses

[00:52:19] – Kindest thing anyone has done for him

Creating and Selling Superpowers

API’s & Origin of Lob

Patrick
So Leore, I've been looking forward to this one for a long time. We share a lot of common passions and interests. We're going to go all over the place, touching on entrepreneurship, the companies you've been building, technology, programming, the whole nine, baseball cards, collectibles. It's going to be a great conversation. Welcome to the show, and I think the best place to start would be the origin story of Lob and its mission, which I find it’s mission in particular to be quite fascinating and we could probably talk about it for an hour.

Leore
Yeah. Excited to dive in on everything. So yeah, the journey to start Lob is actually a long one. When I grew up my dream job was to combine engineering and business to create this machine that would just trade all day long so that I could go and travel the world. So I started my career on Wall Street, and I remember when I was at the desk at Citigroup, utilizing my engineering skills to be very transformative and progressive, and everyone kind of just kept telling me to just keep doing what I was supposed to be doing.

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