Summary

Anti Fund is officially announcing a growth fund paired with what Geoff Woo sees as Jake Paul’s scarce advantage: commanding attention at scale. Its announced roster includes Anduril, Etched, Cognition, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Saronic and Modal — “maybe all the tier one names.” Woo’s thesis is that capital is increasingly abundant while mindshare is scarce, making cultural distribution a potential investing moat.
Paul’s career has functioned like disciplined capital allocation: experiment, read the numbers, then “double, triple, quadruple down” on what works. His first boxing event produced 1 million pay-per-view buys, sold 30,000 tickets and became, by his account, the most-viewed amateur event ever; those signals justified going all in while keeping content as distribution. He credits that approach with making him one of the highest-paid athletes on the Forbes list.
Woo underwrites Paul less as a celebrity than as a founder who has achieved personal “escape velocity.” Paul can move among entertainment, athletic training, negotiations, analytics and TikTok production while tolerating punches from both opponents and the internet. Erik’s economic test is blunt: “If Jake can just live his life and get a bunch of views and someone has to light $100 million on fire to get a bunch of views, who do I want to be partners with?”
The 2026 talent prescription is to maximize technical intelligence and human magnetism at the same time. Woo’s formulation is “max your IQ and max your EQ,” alongside looksmaxxing, health, charisma and “better vibes than everyone else.” The advice is to join or found alongside “the smartest, most ambitious people possible,” while still going deeper into math and computer science because understanding models improves one’s ability to wield them.
Paul argues that creator reach is harder to build than it was, so durability now depends on identity, diversification and monetization rather than followers alone. He sees himself, Logan Paul and MrBeast as rare survivors from an earlier platform era, but distinguishes a personality-led franchise from a format-led operation. The commercial bottom line: creators can have “a lot of followers, but not the cash — and cash is king.”
Attention can absorb controversy, but only for people with the resilience and business model to convert it. Paul rejects the universal claim that all press is good press, although he considers himself unusually capable of surviving it; Woo’s rule is to take calculated risks but avoid fatal ones: “Don’t go to jail, don’t die.” Both think streamer culture is nearing a platform-enforced ceiling after escalating toward ever more extreme behavior.
Paul increasingly sees politics and education as a possible next arena for deploying his audience, influence and risk tolerance. He would consider office only if he believed he were the best person to help, says President Trump endorsed the idea onstage and encouraged him backstage, and sees himself in that arena over the next 10–15 years. His first policy emphasis is education reform, financial literacy and initiatives such as Alpha School and Trump Accounts, with benefits compounding over 30–40 years.
Anti Fund’s founder filter is world-class potential plus the resilience to “eat a ton of shit,” validated through extensive references. Paul and Woo say their edge comes from years of exposure to deals, litigation, hustlers and failures, supplemented by calls to domain experts such as Palmer Luckey’s team. Woo is also considering founding another company now that Betr requires less of his time, while recognizing that “OpenAI or Claude” could reproduce a new product the following week.

Deep dive

1. Anti Fund is combining growth capital with cultural distribution

Paul and Woo formally unveiled a growth fund whose announced roster includes Anduril, Etched, Cognition, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Saronic and Modal. Paul joked that it contains “a lot of the tier one names, maybe all the tier one names.”
Woo’s structural thesis is that managing $1, $100, $1 million or $1 billion presents a similar core problem: a very small number of conviction-driven people must make unusually good decisions. Capital is the lever of society, but in a world with more capital, attention is more scarce.
That scarcity explains the partnership. Woo views Paul as an entrepreneur, tastemaker and cultural leader who helped establish influencing as a career; Paul brings distribution and convening power, while Woo brings computer science, Silicon Valley networks and a record of seeing around corners.

2. Paul follows numbers across careers, then concentrates aggressively

Paul’s operating rule is analytical: when something works, “double, triple, quadruple down,” and when it fails, “sweep the things under the rug.” He readily concedes, “I’ve failed so many times to get to this point,” treating resilience rather than a clean record as the durable asset.
Boxing began as an experiment, not a predetermined reinvention. After the first event generated 1 million pay-per-view buys, 30,000 ticket sales and tens of millions of press-conference views, Paul concluded, “I’m going to become world champion,” with boxing becoming the core and content remaining its distribution layer.
The same entrepreneurial interest preceded his celebrity career: Paul recalls visiting Silicon Valley at 17, seeing young teams “building the future” and learning venture vocabulary. Woo later declined to invest in Paul’s first company; it failed, which Paul now cites as evidence of Woo’s judgment.
Paul’s less visible compounding mechanism is professional reciprocity. He says entertainment is often transactional and short-term, whereas he built a network by being highly professional, asking the right person for help and doing favors without charging — “always knowing the right person at the right time.”

3. The partnership’s real underwriting is context switching and pain tolerance

When Anti Fund launched, Jason Calacanis warned Woo that partnering with Paul would damage his career. Woo treats that as a playful full-circle moment, while also jokingly telling Erik that he is a “VC-turned-influencer” and that Anti Fund intends to compete on both investment performance and influence.
Woo’s strongest observation is Paul’s range: red-carpet celebrity, professional athlete preparing for a headline fight, operator negotiating detailed metrics, then TikTok performer. Combining that context switching with years of public hostility amounts, in Woo’s phrase, to “presidential, head-of-state-level courage and resiliency.”
Paul traces that tolerance to an intense father and hostility that began at school, where classmates created anonymous accounts and even teachers criticized him. His response is categorical: “What else are you going to do? Just be a coward and quit?” Knowing his intentions matters more than comments.
He supports therapy and childhood-trauma work, particularly when it explains adult anxiety, but adds a firm hedge: therapy can become self-victimization or a recurring “sad loop.” The therapist matters, and the objective should be understanding and change rather than being trapped in a cycle of generally negative sessions.

4. Founder taste comes from scar tissue, not celebrity intuition

Woo says Paul entered Hollywood at 16 and encountered “weird, crazy, hustler, scammy people,” while Woo accumulated his own repetitions through Stanford, Y Combinator, pitches, bad deals and mistakes. What can look like innate EQ is partly a very large sample of human behavior.
Their founder screen has two load-bearing questions: does the person have a credible reason to become world-class, and are they tough enough to endure the path? Woo also cites personality reading, track record and trusted background information.
Anti Fund actively borrows judgment from its network rather than pretending universal expertise. For one defense-tech opportunity, the team contacted Palmer Luckey’s team and asked what it thought of the group; Woo says category-specific reference checks have “proven to work really well.”

5. AI makes technical depth and human charisma complements

Woo’s looksmaxxing framing is broader than appearance: if intelligence is increasingly metered through compute, then relationships, health, charisma and “better vibes than everyone else” remain scarce. Andreessen Horowitz’s media operation, he jokes, is effectively “looksmaxxing the VC world.”
The discussion lands on doubling down rather than abandoning technical fields: Erik argues that if models automate math and computer science, one should understand those subjects more deeply, because knowing how large language models work improves one’s ability to wield and prompt them. Woo summarizes the complementary goal as maximizing IQ and EQ.
The career choice is secondary to the peer group. Woo advises a 22-year-old to “gang up with the smartest, most ambitious people possible,” whether by starting a company or joining OpenAI, Cognition or another high-growth organization. Erik says he would probably try to enter VC, while Woo says he would seed Stanford friends’ genius ideas.

6. Creator economics reward durable identity, cash generation and focus

Paul doubts his original playbook could be reproduced now because audience formation is much harder. His early edge was relentless production — a 15-minute video every day that consumed the whole day — combined with a reality-show ensemble, music, comedy, fear and eventually athletic spectacle.
MrBeast’s operation is Paul’s useful contrast: Jimmy is intensely quantitative and optimized “every little thing possible to hack the algorithm,” while Paul describes his own process as analytical but more creative and instinctive. Erik argues Paul’s audience follows the person’s unfolding story, not merely a replaceable format.
Durability also required expansion without abandoning identity. Paul’s ranch videos, TikToks, boxing, politics, business and brands reach audiences that may barely overlap. He says monetization matters because many creators have “a lot of followers, but not the cash — and cash is king.”
That does not mean taking every adjacent opportunity. Paul has weighed acting opportunities by considering time, compensation, collaborators, script quality and box-office downside; opportunities now generally need to be worth $10 million, $20 million or $30 million while protecting boxing and content as his “bread and butter.”

7. Controversy is useful only when it stays survivable

Paul says not all press is good press for everyone, though it often has been for him. His first mainstream backlash came from jumping on a news van and mocking a reporter’s shoes; what appeared damaging became attention he could survive and turn into further visibility.
Woo’s broader rule is: “Everything you do has risk. Just don’t take fatal risk.” Avoid death and jail, keep placing calculated bets, and remember that most people are so cautious they cannot even be canceled because they did not exist publicly.
Clavicular illustrates the escalation: Paul credits his success to showing audiences something unprecedented, exposing himself fully and discussing relevant issues with abrasive authenticity. Paul also notes the drug use and other streamed behavior, and worries his own YouTube excess helped set a bar younger streamers must exceed for hours daily.
Paul expects only slightly more escalation because platforms already prohibit or deplatform some conduct; he thinks streamer culture may already be near its peak. His recovery framework is faith — “God gives his toughest battles to his most important soldiers” — while Woo secularizes it: choose a mission worth taking arrows for, because conviction makes controversy endurable.

8. Politics, education and new ventures are the next compounding bets

Paul frames speaking about politics as part of using a large audience to help people and exercising an American right. Erik praises his willingness to risk business and optionality rather than merely stack more zeros. Paul says President Trump endorsed the idea of his running onstage and encouraged him backstage, though he would seek office only if he believed he were the best person to help; he also says he might act if a candidate such as Mamdani gained traction and threatened what he calls a “socialist-communist thing.”
Education is Paul’s highest-priority issue: he says the system has not been reformed since the 1920s or 1930s, praises Alpha School and frames reform as planting a fruit tree whose payoff arrives in 30–40 years. He suggests teaching practical financial literacy, including taxes, rather than the Pythagorean theorem; Woo insists students should learn both.
Geoff connects education to Invest America or Trump Accounts, and says Paul is supporting the team working on them: children should see portfolios compound and become stakeholders in American innovation. Woo’s college advice is similarly pragmatic — institutional “badges” still help people without another world-class credential, even if the underlying educational content changes.
Paul says he is serious about walking onto the Stanford football team as preparation for an NFL slot-receiver ambition after boxing. In business, Betr’s fully built-out team has opened capacity for another company, and Woo is considering founding one, while knowing a startup could be copied by “OpenAI or Claude” within a week; the ambition is still to “play a bigger game” and shift humanity.

AI Security After Codex and Claude Code — Zico Kolter & Matt Fredrikson, Gray Swan Nikesh Arora on the Frontier Model Problem: Breadth vs Depth | The Future of Token Costs