Jeff Clavin argues that Jake Paul's experience absorbing internet hate and physical punishment in the ring is the same 'pain tolerance' muscle that makes a great investor or founder, calling it a rare, presidential-level quality. ✦ AI generated
Jeff Clavin · a16z Podcast · 2026-06-22 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 11:14
“When did you know that you were going to like be partners?”
Jake has just seen a lot of [ __ ] like coming up in Hollywood, going through the influencer phase, going through controversy, like surviving it, having haters, like most people do not eat that much pain. And I think that if you think about investing or startups, it's pain tolerance.
verbatim transcript · starts at 11:14
11:14people and I think the context switching is pretty wide as a founder but to go from like go entertainment mode to like serious quantitative analytic mode that broadly is is very very impressive one and then two I Um, Jake has the one word that you mentioned is that resiliency. Like Jake has just seen a lot of [ __ ] like coming up in Hollywood, going through the
11:41influencer phase, uh, going through controversy, like surviving it, having haters, like most people do not eat that much pain. And I think that if you think about investing or startups, it's pain tolerance. And if you're literally fighting and punching people or getting punched in the face for a living. And then two, like the internet punching you, right? Which is like the most toxic environment like internet troll trolls
12:07like hating on you. If you can survive that and thrive in that environment, that's presidential like head of state level courage and resiliency. So those two things I think is what is inspiring to me in terms of like how much can I context switch to which how much pain tolerance can I have and hopefully that's what we can imbue with our startup founders and our portfolio companies and our co-investors right
12:34like that human quality that is very rare um is inspiring to me and hopefully for the people that we work with. >> On that note Jake what can people learn from you about resilience and pain tolerance? Is it just something you've had since you were a kid? Is it something you've learned over time? Is it something you've, you know, just sort of like been pushed off the deep end?
12:54>> Yeah. No, I I think it's a little bit of all of those things. Um I think I had like a very intense father, so I think it started there. um and just being able to deal with with with him and um growing up in that environment and I think the hard work and um that led me to a very public career. Uh it all started with people actually like