a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: The Internet is His Religion

Episode Date: August 18, 2015

How do you face down cancer? Get told you can’t get life-saving organ transplants, and go about getting them anyway? And in the middle of that mental and physical storm, how do you find the thing that you and only you were meant to do -- and start building it? One person with answers is Jim Gilliam, the founder of NationBuilder, because that is what he had to do -- all of it. It’s given Gilliam a clear philosophy on life, and on being a leader. And what he’s learned along the way, he says, is something everyone can tap into. Gilliam first told his story in a break-the-Internet video, “The Internet is My Religion,” he’s gone deeper with his recently published book of the same title. a16z's Ben Horowitz sat down with Gilliam on the occasion of his book launch, to hear more about his philosophy on life, religion, leadership and what we all can do to move this world forward. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. How do you face down cancer? Get told you can't get life-saving organ transplants and go about getting them anyway. And in the middle of that mental and physical storm, how do you find the thing that you and only you were meant to do and start building it? One person who has the answers is Jim Gilliam, the founder of NationBuilder. And he's got the answers because that is exactly what he had to do, all of it. It's given Gilliam a clear philosophy on life and on being a leader. And what he's learned along the way, he says, is something everyone can tap into.

It's that, if that's multiple step or something, it's one believing that there is something that you're uniquely meant to contribute, finding what that thing is, and then having the audacity to say, I'm going to do it, and the humility to know that you can't do it by yourself. We've all got that.

Everybody does. Got to find it. Gilliam first told his story in a break-the-internet video, The Internet is My Religion. He's gone deeper with his recently published book of the same title. Ben Horowitz sat down with Gilliam

on the occasion of his book launch to hear more about his philosophy on life, religion, leadership, and what we all can do to move this world forward. So welcome, and I'm Ben Horowitz from Andresen Horowitz. This is Jim Gilliam. He is the author who has come to tell us about his book, and we're very excited about that. Jim's also the founder, CEO of Nation Builder. So I'm going to ask Jim a few questions. we're going to talk a little about the book

and then we'll open it up for questions from everyone. So to get started, Jim, you were raised a fundamentalist Christian. You went to Liberty University. But your family didn't start out as fundamentalists.

Tell us the story of how you got to that point, how your father kind of made that transition. What was the thing that triggered it? So we lived in, when I was little three or four, we lived in upstate New York in Woodstock. And my dad worked at IBM. They had a big facility there in Kingston.

And they launched this IBM, the IBM PC, the big answer to the Apple to computer. But they didn't have any software for it. So they had this big employee software program. It's kind of like crowdsourcing would be today because it was all within like the actual company. where they let any employee make software for the new PC and then if it was good, they would distribute it and give royalties to the folks who were making it. And so my dad and his buddy, they weren't going to make solitaire.

They decided to make an operating system. And this is like in 1980, 81? Yeah, this is 82. Yeah, it started in 82. And like this was crazy. like the idea that you could... Yeah, writing a PC operating system just like writing a PC operating system in 1982.

Yeah, from scratch. Yeah, and one that, like, did more than one thing at a time on this, like, silly little, like, stupid computer that could never do a thing. With multitasking, which didn't come out in PC operating systems for another at six or eight years after that. Yep. Yep. And they did it.

It blew everybody away in all of IBM, and they, like, had a deal to distribute it. It was amazing, like, IBM was going to have, like, their own operating system, and it was far superior to anything else on the market. They signed a deal to distribute it, and part of the deal was that my dad got this, like, sweet gig out at Almaden Research Center, which was the new big research center down near San Jose. And the day that he was packing up to move all of us out there, me and my mom and my two sisters were already actually in San Jose. He was packing it up and he gets a call from his buddy, finding out that IBM had just killed the deal. Like it was off, it was over, that's not going to happen. Why did they kill the deal?

So they killed a deal because of IBM didn't want to mess up the relationship with this new guy, Bill Gates, or his company, Microsoft. And so they gave him just like, you know, they gave him 40 grand to shut him up, and they gave him like, you know, three years in golden handcuffs, and they sent him off to San Jose this week, new job. And my dad was, like, totally devastated. This was, like, everything. Like, he was, he's a creator. He built stuff.

He just loved that so much. Probably even more devastated when he saw DOS. Yes. Yes. Yes. I spent a lot of time sitting next to him watching him type in DIR, like, or whatever. And so we moved to San Jose, and our house happened to be right across the street from this giant megachurch.

So this is the early 80s. It was the first of this kind of new form of church. There were like thousands and thousands of members. And we'd been Christians, like technically, but not really like into it, into it. Like we didn't even go to church necessarily every Sunday up to that point. But when we came to San Jose, we started going to this church. And it just sucked us in. It was incredible.

I mean, it was this whole community. There was a, like, sports leagues for all the kids. Like, my dad coached soccer and baseball. And it was a whole thing. And, but they had all these small groups and Bible studies, and they had this thing called shepherding groups. My dad got involved in that. But he became really radicalized by some of the pastors there.

And some of the books that they read, he thought about becoming a mission. and I believe that he was trying to fill that hole that had left in sort of wanting to believe in something so much. He believed in IBM. It was the only company he ever wanted to work for. He stopped going to school because they were like, hey, come on, please work for us right now because he was, you know, brilliant. And they ripped it all the way. He lost total faith in that and he threw it into Jesus. And that's how we'd be. became Christian fundamentalists.

Pretty good story. This is why you need to read the book. It's just a story after story that good. So you were raised fundamentalist Christian, but then at some point you lost your faith. Tell us about that. Yeah, so growing up, obviously there was all this, a lot of Jesus.

We were bros. but the internet like the online and all that stuff was happening as well this is sort of before the internet was really a thing just like BBSs and all the old school people here well no one talking about trade wars that was my thing and so there was these two kind of like almost opposing forces going on

for my for my attention and my passions and whatnot but as I grew up I sort of went to college, went to Liberty University, and then I got cancer. Liberty is Jerry Falwell's university. It's the opposite of Liberty.

There are an immense number of rules. Like, literally Google the Liberty Way, and you will feel, see all the different rules. Like, there's about, like, the lengths of skirts and, like, the whole thing. And I got cancer. and that just really jolted me, as you can imagine. But even more so, my mom got cancer too, at the same time. Two weeks after I was diagnosed, we were actually in the same hospital.

I was like, Mom, there's a clinic downstairs, go and check it out. Get checked out. She died five months later, and I survived. And, you know, as you can imagine, that's a big thing. a big thing. I had a lot of survivors' guilt trying to understand why did God save me and not her. She's such an amazing person. And so that was like the first shot. I stopped going to church. I was really disillusioned with all of it. But if you had asked me, you know, in fact, people who did ask me at a time, like, so do you believe and still believe in God? I'm going to be, absolutely, he's just an asshole.

But then, ultimately, after 9-11, fundamentalism really came to the floor. Again, it was a big deal. So am I really a fundamentalist? It really didn't seem that far away what was going on, what, like, brought this trade center down, like what was causing all this struggle in the world. If I had been born in Pakistan or Saudi, with like that have been me like that was like I was like whoa um and so I started to

Google um we had search engines now I'd even worked at a search engine I still hadn't figured out of one really use one apparently um but I started Googling it's like oh well what is this Bible about like who wrote it uh like is this true because the thing about fundamentalism and how I was raised is that you know our big belief is that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That's actually the phrase, inerent word of God, meaning everything in it was word for word correct. That comes from the Talmud, actually. And so if it wasn't, like, word for word accurate,

then that was completely devastating sort of the foundation of my belief system. And you can figure out that it's not word for word correct. It's about 45 seconds on the Internet these days. Now, when I was a kid, you couldn't, right? But you can't now. And this is fundamentalism, right? There's plenty of Christians, in fact, vast majority of Christians

who would not at all argue that the Bible is the inherent word of God and it's much more rational and understandable outside of that. But for me, that's what it was. And so I just lost my faith. I was like, this isn't true. Like truth mattered a lot to me.

Is this sort of factually true? And it wasn't. I'm like, this is crazy. I can't believe this. And I became an atheist. this was, you know, shortly after 9-11. So it's amazing because you're running an almost parallel inverse life to your father where, you know, he put everything he had into his work

and then lost his faith in that and gained faith through religion. And you had all your faith in religion and lost that. So how did you get your faith back? I worked really hard. So, like, that experience in 9-11 turned me into an activist. And I, being an activist, it wasn't obvious how to do that back in 2001, 2002. But I was going to figure it out. I read a book by Michael Moore.

It was called Stupid White Men. I was like, this must be, the answer must be in here. And there was this, like, you know, inset, you know, thing in one of the pages. And there was, like, ten steps to, like, take back the country or whatever. And one of the things that take over your local Democratic Party. Like, his thesis was that it's, like, all run by a bunch of old people. So it's, like, bring in sort of new people. Then you can, like, take over the whole thing and, like, actually do some good with it.

Because, you know, it's a democratic party can do something with it, right? So I tried to do that, and it was just completely pointless. but at the same time there was this new guy that was like lighting up the internet his name was Howard Dean this is 2003 and I was like okay

I get this meetup had sort of burst onto the scene it was like people coming together to the internet like in real life to organize around political candidate just intuitively made sense to me move on really came onto the scene again similar ideas like bringing people together over the internet to sort of make something happen again intuitively I got it

So I got really involved in this stuff, and eventually connected with a filmmaker. We started making movies and documentaries, and we used the power of organizing people and bringing people together through the Internet to change the stories about what was going on in Iraq, what was going on with Fox News, and all of these things that we felt were really taking the country in this wrong direction. We were able to use people connected through the Internet to have an impact there. And not really realizing it, I developed an immense faith in that power, but it didn't really come to, I didn't really get it until I needed a double lung transplant. So why did you need a double lung transplant? So the cancer treatments I had, I had actually cancer twice around the same time, and I had had a bone marrow transplant and a bunch of chemo and a bunch of radiation. and it was eight, ten years later that all of those treatments had scarred my lungs

to the point where I couldn't breathe. It's pretty unusual. Usually if that's going to happen, it happens within a year or two. But for me, it took a really long time. It took a really long time to figure out what was going on. And so my lungs had to get replaced. But because I had cancer, it was very difficult for the transplant programs to justify

giving me the lungs, because the likelihood that I would reject them and that they would waste a very precious resource on someone like me who couldn't really take advantage of it was too much. So they rejected me outright, said, nope, you're not a good candidate at all. And so I went on the internet and I blogged about it.

I vented a lot. I threatened to register UCLA surgeons or Pussy, and some of the folks who as were like reading my blog and so we're following what was going on one of them sent an email to UCLA and was like what's going this is crazy like you're only doing easy surgeries don't wonder your statistics are so great it's not okay and a whole bunch more people did that and eventually they like came they let me come in they brought me in for an appointment We had to bust through so many different things to make it happen, but it was, again, the same story.

People connected through the Internet, people I didn't even know, people I would never even know made it possible for me to live. And, you know, it was the realization that I physically could not live without two other people, like in my body, You can be pretty dense about things, but even I got that. You know, I breathe through someone else's lungs while someone else's blood flows through my veins. So, yeah, I mean, I have a new faith and the power of people connected. People I don't even know. I literally bleed and breathe that every day. And kind of out of your faith has come a life philosophy, if you will,

you know, about human potential and leadership and so forth. And can you kind of tell us a bit about that and how you think about the world these days? and your own life and how others might think about theirs. Because of this great gift, I felt this immense responsibility to give back. It was like this debt that I had to repay. And it's crazy. There's a way you can repay a debt like that. I knew it, but I was still going to try.

And so it's like, okay, well, what is, the thing that I can uniquely contribute. What is it that no one else can do that I can do? That can make it maybe a little bit worthwhile, like all this immense grace that I have experienced. And so I like to build things. Ultimately, this is what became a nation builder. But I believe that similarly, everybody has something

that they are uniquely meant to contribute. It is very difficult to figure out what that thing is. And in fact, it frequently changes over time. For me, it became very clear that what I was meant to create is infrastructure for people to bring folks together on the internet to sort of make whatever it is that they want to make happen. But that thing, once you figure out what that thing is that you actually want to do, that not even want to do that you have to do because no one else could.

Almost all the time, you cannot do that by yourself. You need other people. And that can really suck that realization. And it's only when you care about that thing so much that you have to make it happen that you're willing to put up with all of the hardship that's involved in bringing other people to make it happen, that you're willing to do what it takes to be a leader. And that's the whole thing.

It's that multiple steprovers. It's one believing that there is something that you're uniquely meant to contribute. Finding what that thing is, which for me is a lot about understanding your story and stuff like that. There's a whole set of stuff that we've tried to start to figure out there. Understanding what that thing is. And then having the audacity to say, I'm going to do it and the humility to know that you can't do it by yourself. We've all got that.

Everybody does. Got to find it. I'm fine. I've got to go start something. So kind of one last question. So then when you take that mission, how did that translate into 3DNA Corp or Nation Builder? And why Nation Builder and what's the mission of the company? and what are you trying to do there?

So 3DNA corp, as you can imagine, when I was waiting for the transplant, again, I had this realization that there was going to be three different DNAs in my body. And I was like, this is amazing if I live. I'm going to start a company called 3DNA. I have no idea what's going to do. And that was the thing that kept me going

was that like, you know, I'm going to get better so that I can build something again. And that process started with like, okay, this idea of bringing democracy to democracy. That was like the idea after I got the transplant and Obama had gotten elected and stuff like that. And I didn't really know what that looked like, but I thought that there had to be something there that no one was really looking at. And I started working with a congressional candidate in New York on what I thought was like a campaign platform. You know, it would be like social media, volunteers and things like that.

And as I was working with her, I realized that the problems that I was solving here were just like the problems that had to be an activist, and organizing people around the movies, just like the problems that we'd had in organizing people to help me get the lungs. It's leaders bringing together this loosely make group of people to just make something happen. And that's called leadership. It's existed for a really long time.

And there is just this immense opportunity for people to do that. In fact, there's a study done a few years ago by Pew. And they went and they identified 27 different types of groups. everything from like political parties and unions to like fantasy sports leagues. And they went and they asked them a bunch of different questions, right? One of the questions was, why do you leave a group? And the number one reason by far,

54% of people said the reason they leave the group is because of the lack of leadership. So what I believe is happening is that the Internet is connecting everybody to scale that's unimaginable. We all know that, right? And if you think about it, right, every highly successful, technology has fundamentally been about connecting people. Cars, planes, television, the telephone, the wheel. Internet's just a crazy, crazy version of this. So all these people are coming and they're connected together. But then because of the lack of leadership, all of that potential

is just getting squandered. So if we can connect that thing that each of us is uniquely meant to contribute in the world, that thing that is in is if we can find that, and we can connect it with all the people that genuinely want to come together to build communities and sort of be connected with each other, to like tap into that and become leaders of that to sort of actually then make that happen. I mean, talk about a wealth explosion. I mean, it's like even just 1% more of that,

2% more of that would just be like world changing. And so that's the vision behind nation builder. We're in the trenches like building that infrastructure, for when there's something you care about so much that you're willing to, like, become a leader. You're willing to sort of do what all of that takes. Like, it's not easy, but the technology is possible now. We've got it all in one system. We can, like, do all the different things that kind of help you keep track of all of it

and help lead people to making things happen, all those things. But it still requires you to really want it and be willing to make all those sacrifices. It's something that Ben talks about all the time, particularly with me so yeah you have to make yourself uncomfortable all the time okay well thank you Jim

that was pretty awesome stories yeah