a16z Podcast - One on One with Marc and Ben

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

On social audio app Clubhouse, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are hosting a new live show called "One on One with A and Z", where they go deep on questions submitted via Twitter. The show is based in part by a newspaper column that Andy Grove did in the 80s, where readers sent in questions for him to answer in his column. In this mega-episode of the a16z Podcast, we've combined their first two episodes into almost three hours of discussion and debate about some of the most important topics in entrepreneurship, tech, and culture. Each of these episodes also initially aired on our new show, a16z Live, which captures and share many of the live discussions and events featuring, hosted, or co-hosted by a16z partners (with outside voices too) on Clubhouse and beyond. 

Hi everyone, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Amelia. And this week, we're sharing two one-on-one conversations with Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Mark and Ben, covering everything from company building to tech trends and culture. These originally took place as live chats on social audio app Clubhouse, where Ben and Mark now host weekly one-on-ones, the name partly inspired by a newspaper column Andy Grove did in the 80s. And these conversations take place every Monday at 7 p.m. Pacific time. You can find these and other conversations at our separate new feed, A16NZ Live. But we're sharing these first two episodes here, nearly three hours worth, where Ben and Mark cover everything from advice for founders, the evolving ways we work together

remotely during the pandemic, and how to create great co-founder relationships to the future of major tech trends like decentralization, crypto, voice video and text, and much more. First of all, thank you, everybody, for joining the inaugural tryout of a new show that my partner, Ben, and I are considering putting on on a regular basis if it goes well. It's called one-on-one with A&Z. It's actually inspired by our kind of hero of Silicon Valley and being a CEO and running companies and creating technology, Andy Grove, who in the 1980s, he used the most advanced communication technology of his time. in the 1980s, he had a newspaper column in the San Jose Mercury News called 101 with Andy Grove. And in fact, there's a book of his columns that I highly recommend people buy. It might be out of print, but he would take questions. And sort of,

it was a very rare opportunity for somebody to ask, people ask questions of somebody like him. So, you know, we're no Andy Grove, but, you know, we'll do our best. So we put out a call for questions on Twitter, and we got, I would say, an extraordinary range of very very smart questions. I would say I was, I was actually very impressed by the depth and seriousness of the questions. I would say for people who have given up on the idea that there is intelligence on the internet, at least these threads refuted that. And so thank you, everybody who submitted questions. We line up a dozen that we're going to start with today. And then if this goes well, we'll continue to solicit. And we'll do new questions. And then the goal, this is at least starting

out as a guest-free show. And so the goal is to basically to engage in questions from anybody who wants to ask them on Twitter. And then maybe we'll argue about the answers every now and then. So I will start us right off in the deep end of the pool with a question from a Twitter username of the Network Hub, which is I would love an expansion into the wartime and peacetime and CEO concepts. And then I would add to that, where do you see wartime and peacetime CEOs in the industry today?

And so, Ben, maybe you could start. You wrote in your first book quite a bit of topic of wartime, peacetime CEOs. For people haven't read it, maybe you could basically articulate the theory of what you meant by that. And then I would love to know, like, where do you see these two types operating in the world today? Yeah, so that's a great question. So, you know, piece time, wartime CEO is the original blog post was kind of about these two different modes of operation. And, you know, I wrote it because, actually, Andy Grove was one of the inspirations for

it, interestingly. But I wrote it because, you know, when you read business books, it's always about, you know, delegating management and don't micromanage and, you know, whatever you do, never publicly humiliate anybody or anything like that, right? And then you read the stories about kind of the most legendary CEOs like Steve Jobs. and Andy Grove, and they were always publicly humiliating people, and they oftentimes would drop down to incredibly low levels and make very, very specific decisions about things. And so I wanted to kind of articulate, you know, my interpretation of what they were doing. And it really came down to

these two modes that you're in when you're CEO, one being kind of wartime and one being peacetime. And I kind of wrote it to convey, you know, at the time, the feeling of what each one was. And, you know, uh, you know, the peacetime CEO doesn't, you know, care about the details. They let, you know, their people handle those. And I think I wrote something like, you know, a wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnats ass. If it, you know, gets in the way of the prime directive. And so that kind of feeling of being all over everything and really, much more dictatorial versus more empowering and kind of enabling was the contrast in the original post. I think the thing that I missed or I didn't do a good job of explaining

an original post is why you're in one mode or another. Like, what is peacetime and what is wartime? And, you know, I think that peacetime, you know, if the general direction of the company is correct and you're expanding and growing the original idea, then peacetime is really good because it harnesses, I think, maximum creativity in an organization. And you kind of, and everybody understands. You hired everybody in for a certain kind of job and a certain kind of strategy and then you train them in a certain way. And then you really want to unleash them to do their thing. But that's different when, you know, the company is in a crisis or has to change directions very quickly. And the way I would kind of describe it is, you know, if you're building the American

military for the Cold War, you know, you build it in a certain way with certain kind of weapons, certain kinds of strategies, certain kinds of training for military personnel. And then one day you wake up and you find that you're fighting ISIS. And everything about what you built is wrong. And now you've got to get your leadership from where they are to where you are. And that generally requires a very different mode. And that's often when you go into wartime because if you let them kind of get there on their own, it's going to take too long.

And, you know, I just give one quick example of this. And then, you know, I was working with a company who got very hard hit by the pandemic through the nature of their industry, but they had been a really successful kind of company growing and doing things. And, you know, they had some, but I would say peacetime executives, you know, very good, like a really credible, you know, head of HR and so forth.

But, you know, they kind of, you know, we're having trouble with attrition and so forth and wanted to kind of give this very kind of generous re-uping of everybody's equity. And that's just like a very peacetime idea. It's kind of, you know, let's retain everybody, you know, We need them all because we're building this big thing and, you know, we've got to compete with Google and so forth on that. But the real situation was we can even afford to keep the people we had. So what were we doing? We need a wartime mentality. No, no, no, no.

Like, we're not going to do that. What we're going to do is we're going to find the, you know, the exact people we need and we're going to overpay them. And then, like, if other people quit, like, we're going to live with that because we have a leaky boat and, like, we can't carry all these people short. And so that, you know, that's kind of the difference in mentality to expand on that original thing. If you look at today, you know, companies are in peacetime. I think Salesforce.com is clearly in peacetime. They're sort of, you know, for the most part, you know, expanding a major footprint, a giant kind of system of record lock-in type of position.

And they're looking for more and more ways to enhance that and, you know, protect themselves a bit. but it's not dictated by the CEO, you know, from on, you know, every move that the company is making. You know, and you'd contrast that with, I think, Zuck said he was going into wartime. And, you know, he's got really specific crisis on his hands with, you know, what's happened with social media and kind of the perception of it and so forth. And so he's clearly in wartime mode. And I give that back to you, Mark.

Yeah. Now, two follow questions for you. So one is how long can a company stay in wartime mode before it breaks in some way? Yeah, no, like I think you can go for a very long time. I mean, I think that, you know, in some ways, like jobs always ran Apple that way. And I don't think Cook does like nearly as much, although it has some remnants of it. But the CEO, like, has to be able to organize in a way where he or she can engage. at a very, very fine level of detail on, you know,

it ends up being like really minute decisions in some ways, you know, right down to, you know, very specific things about a product or something because you can't afford to get anything wrong. You can't afford to make a misstep. And so if you're in a mode where you can't afford to make a misstep, then that can be done. It takes a very specific kind of leader,

which is why most CEOs can't actually run in the other mode. If they're wartime, they run in war time. With their peace time, they run in peacetime, generally can't switch modes. Yeah, well, you could argue that, like, history shows that there are two different, you know, there's both those two kinds of political leaders also, right? And so you've got sort of the famous example of Winston Churchill, you know, who was, you know, not that, you know, necessarily like, you know, destined to be like prime minister and play the role that he played until World War II.

And then sort of immediately upon the end of World War II, he was tossed right out. Yeah, because he was just drunk at that point, right? Like, you know, he just, he couldn't, he was too bored. Like, it wasn't intense enough. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. It's really hard. It's really hard to find out somebody you can change personalities in that sense.

Yeah, and then the other question, you brought this up, and so I'm keying off what you said is, you know, the wartime CEOs, there is this pattern, or I guess, question, is there this pattern where they do tend to humiliate people in public? And when that happens, you know, to the extent that you believe that's a pattern, like, is that basically like 100% always over the line, like they're just pushing things too far? Or are they doing it to prove a necessary point? You know, should it be part of the standard toolkit? How do you think about that? Yeah, so I think they're good about it. It's not arbitrary. It's to drive home a really important point into the culture. So, you know, if you, you know, jobs would do it. do it to kind of just say, look, we're not good enough here. Whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, like this is just not good enough. It's not Apple standard.

And one of my favorite examples is Andy Grove. He was crazy about being on time. And that made sense in Intel, because Intel had to be high precision because they're making chips and everything was about chip yield and all these kinds of things. So like being on time, you know, it was part of that. part of, like, we don't make mistakes. We are highly disciplined organization. And so he's out a meeting, and he's running Intel.

And Intel's, you know, a giant, most important company in Silicon Valley. And somebody comes in late to the meeting. And he looks at him and he says, all I have in this world is time and you're wasting it. And I can't even imagine how that would make that person feel. But I guarantee you nobody who was in that meeting or heard about that meeting or knew anybody in that meeting was ever late. to a meeting again at Intel. So it's kind of a technique for changing broad-scale behavior, you know, with a very sharp message.

And look, it's a sacrifice. It's a confusion idea. It's, you know, the good of the whole is more important than the good of an individual. Right. Okay, good. I'm sure this will probably already generate follow-up questions, which we'll certainly be happy to take for next time. But let's move to the next topic, which is very, very,

very topical, very relevant. And this is, I paired two questions here, so I'll read them both. So Amman Bedruden asks, are there any noticeable differences you've noticed about the characteristics of successful founding teams or, let's say, you know, startups and tech companies in a remote work from work from home world versus in person? What are your portfolio companies learning to do that other startups might be missing? And then Rosalie SEPLA says, what are your thoughts about BCs investors and startup founders looking outside of Silicon Valley to build? Is it realistic? Is it permanent? Is it possible to build something big and magical in Miami or Houston

that looks and feels as successful as what was built in San Francisco? And I have a thousand thoughts on this, but Ben, please start. Yeah, I wonder if we're going to agree. So, you know, it is pretty new the work-from-home thing. So it's a little, I would just say the jury's still out. On the one hand, on the other hand, like the productivity, like just like at the outputs of the startups in this, work from home mode, it is very impressive in terms of just anything, you know, like time to

revenue features built, is that any way you'd measure velocity of a startup, it's really hard for us to tell that they're working from home. I would just say that across the board. I do feel, and I'm not sure about this, that there used to be a bit more of an advantage to the really magnetic, hyper-energetic, charismatic CEO when they had everybody in the office, then they have now over the more low-key introverted CEO. I do feel like that gap closed a bit in terms of, you know, assembling the world-class team and doing all those things. I just feel like the even more nerdy CEOs have, you know, gain ground on that a bit.

But, you know, it is, that is a little hard to tell. You know, some of the people are, you say, I would say the people who are executing the best are the ones who are, you know, just really over-communicating on everything. Frequency of all hands, really amazing onboarding ideas. how they get people oriented into the company, you know,

and those kinds of things. You know, a really aggressive use of all the tools, you know, not just Slack and Zoom, but every new tool that comes out, you know, doing all their, you know, continuing with all their events online and all these kinds of things. So just, you know, the people who are really leaning in and acting like work from home is going to last a while, I think are doing a kind of more effective job with their people

than people who are just waiting for it to go away. And then on the, well, why don't I stop there and let you answer the part of the question and then we'll talk about Miami? Yeah, so absolutely. So I say a couple things. So one is, look, I am just like completely flabbergasted, you know, as I know a lot of people are by this experiment that we've been running. Like if you had asked me in, you know, December of 2019, you know,

what would happen if basically all tech companies sent everybody home, you know, I would have predicted catastrophe. Like, I am just, like, positively shocked and enormously impressed. Like, I go so far as to say, like, I don't actually know of any tech companies that have not run well through this, through this whole process, which is just like, which is just astonishing. Like, I would have predicted disaster. And it's just because, you know, we just, we, those of us who have been a business for all, we just have, like, so much experience for what it means for everybody to be at the office and how valuable that is. And the idea that you're just kind of blowing that up and going to this totally new mode of operation and you're not going to have, like, huge negative fallout. has been, like, incredibly surprising to me.

And so, like, my views on, like, what's possible now have, like, really broadened, really broadened out and expanded, you know, to the point where I might get carried away on this topic, but, like, I think the world has really fundamentally changed. The other observation I would make is we're running all these experiments, and the experiments are fantastic, but the experiments, of course, are all incredibly unnatural, right? Because it's not just that we sent everybody home,

it's also that we sent everybody home, you know, A, because of the pandemic, you know, B, we shut down all the schools and sent all the kids home. which is a real challenge for parents. C, we told everybody they can't visit their friends and family. D, we told everybody they can't go to restaurants or like sporting events or shows or like dinner parties or anything. And so we've run, like I think I'm ready to make the argument.

Like we've run the harsh version of the experiment. When we come out of this, I think is when we get to run, I would say the more normal version of the experiment, right? Which is like, okay, what if you could work from home? But you could also like your kids could go to school and you could go out to dinner and like you could go see your family, right? And so like, however well things are working now, like I think you can make a case that, you know, the companies that continue to do, you know, continue to be either total or partial work from home, things will go even better

than they're going now. Ben, would you agree with that or do you think that's too optimistic? Um, I think it's certainly possible. I think that, um, you know, one thing is, you know, young people in particular, like their social network is at work and they value that. It's one of the things that, you know, we've had comments from our own employees saying, you know, all the joy is gone from the job. Like the thing I like most was being around the people, all these smart people and so great, and I get to see them. And, you know, it's like a very big part of my life. And being remote, you know, that's gone. And so I think that's a real thing.

And then the other one, you know, you get into things like career development and, you know, how that works. And I kind of think in a way it would be better work from home because, you know, maybe less politicking and all that kind of thing. But you think that's an open question. And then, you know, the final open question for me is just, you know, kind of information in sales. Like so in a meeting, my friend Steve Stout had a great. thing he said to me on this, which is, look, the information you get, you know, particularly in a sale situation before the meeting and after the meeting is usually more valuable than the information you get in the meeting. And so I do think there's real

competitive advantage to being face-to-face because there's not really a before and after a meeting on Zoom. So, so I, you know, it's definitely going to be interesting to find out. I'm not sure. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing that I really notice is that My extrovert friends, you know, which are, you know, a lot of the people who are running companies or senior executives and companies, you know, basically the big debate that they're having is, you know, do we all go back to work? Do we all go back to the office? In fact, you know, maybe for the reason you just described, you know, because they like being around people. You know, or do we go to a hybrid model, right? And so the hybrid model, of course, is one in which, you know, maybe people are in the office, you know, three days a week or four days a week or even two days a week. And, you know, maybe there's flex and, you know, they're starting to work on like, well, how do we have, you know, how do we do meetings and our meetings all on Zoom or do we have, you know, conference rooms with Zoom setups and so forth. And so there's sort of this kind of hybrid thing. And I think, you know, probably the, my sense is the media in Silicon Valley Company

is probably assuming the world will go hybrid, you know, for the most part. Yeah. What I notice is that my introvert friends have a very different point of view on this, which basically is like, basically it's like finally the world has discovered that all this, like, in-person stuff is not necessary. And in fact, you know, My introvert friends say I'm getting a lot more joy out of the way things are working now. I have one company where, like, there was this actually very interesting form of feedback in the survey that they did last fall,

which basically is the engineers were all of a sudden like, ah, finally we're on a level playing field with all the sales guys. Yeah. It's like we're not just getting talked over in every meeting. And so, and then with the introverts point to basically is like there are actually two kinds of tech projects that have been very successful over the last, you know, 30 years that never involved offices, right? And one form is open source, right? Which I don't think there's been a single open source project, you know, including Linux and Gnu and, you know, many, many, many, many other things over the years, you know, where there was ever quote, quote, quote, on office. You know, it was, it was always fully distributed. And in fact, you know, primarily, you know, completely online communication, you know, tremendous amount of basically, you know, the old days, you know, USNet and IRC, you know, these days, you would be like, you know, whatever slack and things like that.

And then, you know, more recently, crypto, right, in which, you know, many of the, you know, world's leading crypto projects, even the ones that are set up as companies, you know, just kind of assumed, you know, default remote. You know, honestly, to the point where it was making me nervous last year as we were, we were funding more crypto companies that were remote first. And so what those companies basically say is, look, like, it's all in the mechanics of how you build, you know, basically the communication infrastructure and the tooling. And if you build that stuff all properly, you know, you're going to basically, you're going to

basically be able to run these things fully remote in perpetuity. And yeah, some people might not like it because they want an office to go to, but for the people who like that kind of thing, they'll be hyperproductive in that kind of environment. Yeah, anyway, so what's your view on that? Yeah, well, I think with both kind of open source companies and, well, and crypto companies kind of are open source for the most part, you don't, the thing that they don't tend to do at least, you know, in that mode is kind of sell.

to organizations. And like if you sell the individuals or individuals within organizations or that kind of thing, the whole face-to-face thing is, I think, a lot more overrated than if you're kind of trying to, whatever, convince IBM to go wall-to-wall slack

or something like that, then that becomes really complex to do over video if your competitor is showing up in person. And so there are certain kinds of things that I don't know that I've seen people solve yet. But, you know, maybe like the people get used to, like, living in that way and communicating in that way and that works. I mean, I definitely am open-minded about it just because it's been so shocking what's happened so far.

Well, it may also just, you know, it may just be different kinds of companies, right? And different kinds of employees that kind of sort, you know, kind of sort along this axis. I think that's right. And then, look, there are, you know, we just, I just talked to a crypto company. I won't name the name, but, you know, very smart founders. And, you know, they're building, you know, one of the hottest projects. And it's a developer platform. And they can't wait to get back in the office because they just like being in the office with each other so much.

Yep. Right. Yep. Yeah. In fact, there are other companies, of course, that we know that literally have, you know, have, they literally now have homes or compounds. Yeah. You know, it's often in very creative places, which actually turns out to be good for the burn rate, among other things. Yeah, for sure.

So let's go to a third question, which is actually a management question that kind of follows from Susan Groff, which is in the hard thing about hard things, you warn against the management standard. Don't bring me problems without bringing me a solution. And I think she means by that that you disagree with that statement. Is that right? Yeah. Well, I think it's a dangerous culprit. idea. So I think that as in it, you know, this is, and you're really good on this topic, which is how the system should behave and how you should behave as an individual are not the

same thing. And, you know, for the system, i.e. the communication system of a company, if people have it in their head that don't bring me a problem if I don't have a solution and I don't know the solution, or if it's just like too hairy and complex a problem for me to like know how to solve right like if i'm an engineer like do i really know how to do the ceo job better than you and i can tell you how to solve this effed up problem that i'm dealing with then you you lose the information uh which is extremely dangerous because you have to know what's wrong with your company if you're going to fix it i'm like that the first step in fixing a problem is knowing you have a problem and so uh i think it is like a really dangerous idea now

individually in a career, I think that, you know, as you're kind of trying to be a good employee, it's good to try and think of a solution for the problems you come up with for sure. So I think that part of it is fine. But, you know, I think the challenge for CEOs is how do you get bad news to get to you? Because people are afraid to, you know, tell the CEO the bad news. And one of my favorite parts of the movie The Wiz is when Eveleen did that number, ain't nobody better bring me no bad news because it's like you know because I'm going to be pissed and I want to deal with that that bullshit and like a lot of CEOs do give off that vibe and I think that that you know companies always degenerate that have that culture and when you think about

well how do you encourage it you have to normalize it you have to make it so that hey we love problems we love to hear about the broken shit in the company you know it makes us feel good and you know one of the things that I did use to do is in order to come to my staff meeting and staff meeting was always kind of, you know, when you're a CEO, people want to be in that meeting because it's kind of the innermost circle. It said, look, you're not allowed in the staff meeting unless you tell me something broken in the organization. Because I know that we have a lot of things broken because we're big enough. And if you don't know one, then you're not doing your job and I don't have any use for you in my meeting. And so that would kind of normalize.

everybody goes, okay, not only are we allowed to talk about it, but we're being forced to talk about all the things wrong with the company. And then that just kind of made it normal. And then once it's normal, it's just easy to deal with it because it takes the emotion out of it. You know, whereas if somebody once a year comes to you and says, hey, your culture is all messed up and it's broken and like we don't have a strategy or all the things people say when it gets out of hand, then it makes you feel like, okay, that's abstract, it's weird. I don't even know what the fuck to do with it? Are you criticizing me?

Like, you get all that, and then it just makes it worse. Whereas if you know every little thing that's wrong, it never gets to that point, and you can solve things, and it's just kind of normal way of living. Yeah, and so Susan asked, added the question,

how do you build a culture where critical information flows, especially now when everybody's remote? Because presumably, right, the mechanisms that you had in the past, probably are not working in this environment. Yeah, you know, that's a really great question and I think it's a little hard to answer because

you know we're in the middle of it I think that you know we I can say this you know at our firm you know and as you know Mark like we're redesigning all the meetings we're trying to make better and better use of the tools and then I think that as a as a leader you just have to you don't bump into people in the hall so if you don't call them individually and you're doing actually a good job of this too which is like you know also helps me is just like call people up and and talk to them because in lieu of bumping into them because you're not going to bump into them and so you're missing a whole lot of communication and particularly you know where you kind of get like people like to people in a meeting don't

want to say, hey, this is all screwed up. But, like, if you bump into the hallway and you go, hey, like, how's it going? Anything in your way? What's making it hard to do your job? Then they'll tell you. But you have to recreate that artificially, I think, is probably one of the biggest challenges. Yeah, so as an introvert, I never like bumping into people in the halls. And so that technique never worked for me. Seeing like, this is better for you. This is better. So, yeah, so Ben alluded to my technique. So what I'm doing now, which has worked quite well. So, and it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a two-part win, which is I've been going for these really long walks, either in the morning or the afternoon, you know, finding some place where I can go for, you know, two or three hours on a walk. And then basically I just, I literally keep, you know, keep a rolling cadence of one-on-one phone calls and try to touch everybody, you know, who's, who kind of is in this category, you know, maybe once a month. And then I bet, and then what happens, I just pack all those calls into those walks. And, yeah, and like, I think number one, it's been good. And then, and then, Number two, it's like, people do, like, this is a time where people really value feeling connected.

Let's say so far, everybody's been very excited to talk to me on my walks. Nobody has, nobody has said it's not a good use of time. Yeah, yeah, everybody picks up the phone right away. It's great because nobody's doing anything. Right. That's good. Exactly. So actually, okay, on a related topic.

Okay, so Anisa Mirza asks, can you tell us about a time you felt most lonely and isolated as a founder and advice to fellow founders struggling with this? So let me just, I'll just start by saying, like, this is honestly something I always struggled with, you know, specifically when I was the founder of companies. It's honestly, you know, it's been easier with the venture firms are different. So this has been easier. But, you know, being in the hot seat as the actual founder of a company, you know, it's really hard. And then there's, there's like an even more advanced version of the hard, right, which is like if you're if you're doing it on your own, like if you're a solo, they call a solo founder. Yep.

Or if, you know, or if for whatever reason you get in a situation where you can't, you know, you can't have this. kind of relationship with the other founder of founders. And so I think part of it is just like, it's just really tough. And this is part of the kind of, I think, thing that comes with founding a company, honestly, which is just like you do, and as well as being a CEO, which is like you really do naturally basically internalize all the issues. And you internalize all the problems and all the stress and you, you know, personally identify with it. And you get emotionally wrapped up in it. Yeah, exactly. And then you really. really do have a major issue figuring out who to talk to, because if you talk to people in the

company, you know, you really risk, like, really warping, you know, kind of a lot of things which we could talk about, you know, if you talk to people on the outside, you know, there's, there's two problems. One is, you know, they just, they might not understand, right, which is a real, real challenge. And then the other is, you know, they might be sympathetic, but they just, like, fundamentally, like, don't understand what you're going through. And then the other is, of course, like, you have to be very careful who you can trust because, you know, these are all the most important things, you know, and if the company's high profile or it's raised a lot of money or whatever,

like there's real risk involved. And so I guess I would say, I for one, like, really struggled with this. And I, and I just say that even without giving an answer, because I would just say, like, this is, this is super normal. And my experience is like a lot of founders, at least, like, really never want to admit this. Yeah.

It feels like admitting it, basically signals weakness. And signaling weakness as a founder is extremely dangerous. And so, Ben, the ultimate weakness, like, You're terrified. You don't think you can do the job. You don't think you belong. You can be CEO. You don't want to do the job, all those things.

Yep. Yeah, I mean, you've also, you know, this, what you described is kind of was the main reason I wrote the hard thing about hard things. I mean, that book was basically about this problem, which is, you know, people don't, there's, and you're, the other CEOs. tell you how like screwed up their company is right you know so so you feel like you're all alone i mean the worst the very very worst moment that i ever had on this was um and i wrote about in the book but you know we were on the we were going out to do the ipo the impossible ipo literally called the ipo from hell by business week well we were on the road like so well we're on the road IPO from hell we have three weeks of cash

it's you know the NASDAQ dropped I think every single day we were on the road our comparables dropped 50% well you know in the three weeks we were selling the things just like the worst fucking time ever and you know I get a call

you know well we're trying to get this thing done from my father-in-law who you know like and you have to know my father-in-law he and I were close but he never called me like he just he was a guy who called you on the phone like that wasn't his thing and you know the other thing about him was like he had been through everything in life you know his his father was shot when he was five years old yeah he was a black man in Texas and you know he and his mom his mom couldn't do anything so he she had to marry this

horrible guy with 12 kids and they like literally you know had him out like they wouldn't let him eat with them. They would throw his food into the pig pen. He'd have to fight the pigs for the food when he's five, like that type of shit. So he'd been through like that, and then he had two children who had passed away and like just to really been through hard, hard things.

And he called me, and I could tell by his voice he was shaking. And, you know, he said, look, Felicia can't breathe, but she's my wife, but she's going to, you know, We think she's going to be okay. We're at the hospital. And I'm on the road.

And like, I know I need to go home. Like I, but I can't go. The company is over if I go home. Like, there's no way this IPO is landing if we go. There's, I mean, you know that, Mark. Nobody else knows that. But you and I know, like, there's no way. If I went home there, it's open.

And, you know, trying to make that decision between, like, the company and all 500 employees going, like, getting. laid off and everybody losing their money and the whole thing being over or like not going home when like my wife's like in an emergency situation in a hospital was like the worst feeling in the world and I couldn't even you know it was one thing I couldn't even discuss it with you because what could you tell me other than to go home like there's no it puts you in an unfair position and like we ended up completing the IPO and I still feel badly about that but

You know, it's just, I would just say, and, you know, one of my wife's favorite piece that I wrote is called The Struggle, because it's about that feeling that I had that day. And all I can say is, you know, you just have to keep in mind that that is the path to doing something larger than yourself, to doing something great, is to go through that pain. And there's no way to it other than through that pain. So it's part of it, but, man, it's hard. And you've got to focus on what you can do, not on what you can't do, because there's a whole lot that you can't do in that situation. Yeah, and then you highlight is something that I think gets missed in the public discussion a lot, which is, you know, the way these companies get talked about,

it's like, you know, the founders or CEO or whatever are kind of doing these things for themselves and for their own aggrandizement. You know, there's probably some truth to that from time to time, you know, to be totally honest. but you know you alluded to something which is like it wasn't just you and it wasn't just me right and just in a in your situation it was 500 other people uh who worked for the company and by the way it was even beyond that right because it was also like all the customers you know that had like their careers on us yep right like if we went away like all of a sudden they just look like idiots you know for having having you know kind of trusted us and so like and then there's

it's all the families um and then of course you know this was in a time you know which you know hopefully won't repeat but this is it and this is at a time where like you couldn't just go across the street and get a job, right? Yeah, you could not get a job. Yeah, like, I mean, there's like nine months a year, year and a half to get a tech job at that time, yeah. Yep, and so like the pressure, and you know, in boom times, I think you kind of forget this just because it's like, okay, one of these companies doesn't work out, people

presumably can go get other jobs, but like, number one, that's not even necessarily true in boom times because, like, you know, different people have different backgrounds and maybe it's not so easy. And then the other is like, it doesn't, the times aren't always like this. and they won't always be like this, you know, for, for any of us either, you know, going forward. So, so this level of pressure. And, of course, you know, it sort of combines, which is like when the market turns down, you know, it's much, much easier to get in trouble as a company, right, and to be faced with these challenges.

Yep, you know, it all goes together. It's terrible. And then, well, the other thing is all the people who you're letting down are all the people who trusted you, right? They trusted their career with us. Right. And now, like, we're going to just. break that trust massively. It's a scary

feeling. Yeah, so maybe we could end on, maybe on this question we can end on a practical note. So I've never been a part of it, but the CEOs, there's this thing called the YPO, a chance for a young president's organization that a lot of CEOs I know have been a part of.

And it basically, I think it's a good model which they basically set up essentially a trust bubble. And basically it's a sort of a very carefully calibrated organization. We become part of a group of peers. And then they basically sign up to like really trust each other right because they got to like actually talk about like the real shit um and it can't leak um yeah and so i know a lot of CEOs has been through that who

like that a lot and then you know the obvious you know kind of you know kind of homespun version of that is you know kind of a group of founders basically creating the same the same thing or working with you know their you know their venture firm or their angel investors or whatever to to figure out a group like that yeah no i look i i've heard great things too i've never been in one um i kind of wish i had been in one. But I think that's a lot of it. Like just knowing that there are other people who have it worse, I mean, like one of my favorite conversations I have with CEOs. I have one CEO whose business just got absolutely wrecked by the pandemic, you know, but he's still, he's still doing like an amazing job with it. But, you know, he said to me, Ben, I'm the first post-revenue company.

You know, they're pre-revenue company. I'm the first post-revenue company. And I said, no, I was the first post-revenue company. And so it's, you know, just so like that feeling that he's like, okay, I'm talking to somebody who, like, screwed it up worse than I did is a nice feeling. So having a group with people who will tell you the truth, I think would be a huge help. Yeah, another version of that would be the for-profit, the nonprofit company used to be a for-profit company. Yes.

Planned yourself running a charity. So let's see. Let's keep going. Actually, on the same management theme. So Sunil Roger Rahman asks, who is the best CEO you worked with whose companies did not succeed? You know, so let me say this first about that,

is that we've worked with a lot of really outstanding CEOs whose companies didn't work. And kind of at a high level, actually, one of the greatest CEOs, you know, that I ever met was Bill Campbell and his company Go failed miserably. Yep. And so, you know, sometimes the idea at the time, you know, the timing is just wrong. And no CEO, no matter what your skill set can necessarily get you out of that problem.

And so I, you know, a failed company to me doesn't mean that the CEO is no. good. That is not how I interpret that at all. But, you know, we've had, we've had a lot of great ones in the portfolio. One that comes to mind that just did an amazing job. But, you know, like the technology just wasn't going to get there was Jason Rosenthal at Lightrow. I thought, you know, he did an amazing job as a chief executive, but, you know, building the team, executing the plan, pivoting, winning the deals, everything that you would want a CEO to do. But it just didn't, you know, work at the end of the day. Yep. Yeah, I'd highlight, I was actually going to answer the question in a different way, complimentary way, which is, you know, the related question is like, you have

these things. And you mentioned Go, Bill Campbell's company, Go is an example from the early 90s. You have these companies that didn't work, which then in later years turned out to have been like an explosion of talent that like made its way. Like if you look at, so I'll just back up for people haven't heard about this. So actually way, there's a way before the iPhone and way before the iPad, Like 20 years earlier, people had these ideas for basically handheld computers, tablet computers, computers, you know, handheld computers that were phones. Like, these ideas were old ideas. And so there was an entire generation of companies in late 80s, early 90s around what at the time, at the time the term was pen computing. The idea was a computer in your hand that you would interface with a pen with a stylus.

But it was basically that's that idea. It was basically iPhone, iPad, 20 years too early. And so there was a whole generation of startups that actually formed to actually build those things at that time. And I think they basically across the board all failed. Yeah. General Magic. Yeah. Go. Every single thing. Every, yeah. I don't think anybody succeeded, right? Yeah. And so a total wipeout. But what was interesting was, so Bill Campbell's company with this company called Go, and basically they were building iOS, like 20 years earlier. And then they were working with another company called EO that was building the chip that didn't work, which basically today is like,

you know, the Apple, you know, they're like the Apple chips. But, like, Go became legendary in later years because, like, Bill went on to play these, like, you know, central roles in the turnaround of Apple and in the, you know, kind of creation of Google and all these other companies. And then there were all these other executives that came out and go. Like, if you trace the family tree, like they ended up running, like, it felt like half of Silicon Valley. And they did a great job. A great example of a friend Stratton Sclavos, right? Stratton, Dona, Dudec, Sclavos, Mike Homer. Yeah, that whole executive staff were built great companies, yeah.

So to Stratton is one example, I think, was the head of sales at Go, and he was, he became later the CEO of Network Solutions and basically built the domain name industry that we, you know, that we know today. And so, you know, that company was a talent explosion. You mentioned General Magic, which was another one of these talent explosions. Like, it didn't work at all, but like those people are all over the valley, you know, still. And then, you know, even the pay, even, you know, the PayPal Mafia, like, you know, PayPal worked. You know, it worked better than Go. But, you know, it didn't get that big, you know, before it, before you been bought it. Yeah.

Right. Exactly. And then again, that, that talent explosion is like all over the valley. And so there's something special, you know, in some of these companies where they just like, it's like there's something about the people who were selected. You know, there's something about the nature of the mission of those companies that, you know, cause those people to want to be there. There's something about the leadership, the coalesced all that. There's something about the, you know, you know, just like, and then there's almost something

about the tragedy of it almost, which is like, you know, like people who are at those companies tend to have a burning desire to prove themselves. Yep. Yeah, I noticed that with the PayPal people, people, I don't know if they, you know, I don't know if they would say this out loud. I don't know if they admit it to themselves, but like, I think they all look back and they say, wow, you know, that PayPal could have been a big independent, you know, could have been a Google, Apple, you know, Microsoft Amazon class company, you know, for example, had it not been built right into the teeth of the of the 2000 crash, you know, along with their company. But yeah, it's, so there's something special. And then, you know, the other thing that you kind

of see when you've been in the business for a while is basically it's like, okay, sometimes you have your choice, or maybe, Ben, this is a question for you, which is like, sometimes you have your choice. You're hiring for a job and you've got one person coming out of basically a failed company where it's like, okay, they had really good people there. Like, I know that, but like, you know, how do I think about that on their resume? And like, it never got very far. and did they really see what great look like and did they really learn good things? And then you've got somebody else who's coming out of a company that basically is just like extremely established and dominant, you know, and very powerful. And there you've got this totally different set of questions, which is like, you know, what did they really do and how hard did they work and so forth?

And so, but like a lot of people would go for the basically the name brand in those cases. And by the way, not just because it's the name brand because like the feeling is, okay, if somebody who's been at a big successful company has probably learned more about how to succeed than somebody who is at one of these. one of these companies that didn't work. Yeah, and I think that logic gets way overplayed and is a lot wrong. You know, people really focus on hiring, of course, out of companies like Google and Facebook, partly because, you know, they're so powerful in their college recruiting schemes. So they get a lot of raw horsepower in terms of into the company. But if you would compare that to kind of the people who came out of PayPal or general magic,

I would say, you get kind of more for your money out of PayPal or general magic because you're getting someone who went through the extreme struggle of trying to find product market fit with some of the smartest people in the world. And that, you know, that gauntlet that they ran, you can't produce at Google. Like, there is no experience at Google that matches that. You know, there's no like just amount of, you know, particularly when you talk about leadership positions like you can't replicate that in a company that's got a monopoly it's just there's no there's no real inventiveness sense of urgency that that that can exist in those environments in the

same way so i do think but but it's not you know it's not just any startup it's the special one um and right you know those are you know the ones that have the you know all those companies had an amazing VC funding you know brought in like crazy talent and, you know, and still failed. So that, you know, I would say if you get somebody out of a company like that, that's going to be the best. Also, the other thing is, you know, in the special case of salespeople, I think, you know, companies who try and recruit their sellers out of monopolies is just silly because that's not really selling. That's just, you know, accepting orders.

Like, how hard is it to sell ad words, like not hard? whereas how hard is it to, you know, sell the second place or the third place enterprise, you know, piece of software and make your number almost impossible. So you have to take into account the degree of difficulty in the job when you look at some of these things. Yeah, you may remember Bill Davidow, who's a selling about a legend who wrote a book on high-tech marketing.

He said the definition of a great marketer or somebody who can sell a dog. Yeah. And he didn't mean a k-9 to be clear. He meant like a product that sucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Or not even a product that sucks, like a product that nobody wants. Yeah, right?

Yep, yep, yep, yep. No, it's funny, you know, Ali Goethe actually I'm doing a session with him on Clubbust tomorrow at 5, but Ali is the CEO of Databricks. And he hired the head of sales there, Ron Grabowski. He... he had come from a company that was literally selling FTP, like FTP, but like a more secure

version of it. And that's what he was selling. And he was able to, like, literally get that company public selling that. And so, you know, Ali and I always talk about it. He's like, the reason he's good is he had to sell FTP. You know, now he's selling like the AI platform for the world. And so it's so easy for him. It's like crazy.

And then all the guys who could sell that working for him at the last place also incredible. Yeah, well, it's like taking the ankle weights off of a marathon runner or something, right? Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. It's just, yeah. Large ankle weights. Large and very outdated ankle weights. Okay, good. So let's move on. So Arjun Shaw asks, and Ben, this would be great for you. So what methodical ways can an unknown or under-networked founder leverage to gain access to startup capital?

You know, I think that our friend, Paul Graham, had the greatest line on this that he made into t-shirts, which is, you know, make something that people want. If you, the great thing about the world today is it, you know, it doesn't cost, it costs your time to. make something, but if you make it and people want it, every investor will pay attention to that. And, you know, that's the best calling card by far, much better than any kind of networking or, you know, work or finagling or anything like that. If you can, you know, manifest your idea. And, you know, we're seeing this in music, too, by the way, where it used to be, you know, you'd have to, like, know somebody and get to Hollywood or get to New York.

all this stuff. And now you've got guys like NLA Chapa, you know, 16 years old in Memphis and makes a song and puts it out. And all of a sudden, he's got an $8 million contract. And I think that's very true in venture capital right now, which in, you know, look, in the old days, it would take a lot of money just to get a company started. And that's not the case anymore. You need a laptop. And so that's, you know, if you really have the gift and, you know, have the inspiration and the genius. then, you know, make something that people want and you will get the money. So let me ask the, let me ask the tougher version of the question then building on that, which is like, okay, that sounds good, but like, you know, basically, you know, everybody knows, by the way, you know, correctly or not, but everybody knows that like venture capital, very common for venture capital firms to only take warm introductions, right, which means introductions. Introductions brokered by somebody they already know.

And that, you know, a lot of investors won't look at things that, you know, quote, and quote, come over the transom, which is to say, kind of just, you know, show up or get sent in. And so, you know, if I'm somebody, and by the way, this was me once upon a time growing up in the Clarkfields in Wisconsin. But somehow you met Jim Clark. Well, that was Jim, Jim, Jim decoded that one. Like, had I not, at Jim, I would have had this very direct, direct issue. But, but, you know, the serious form of the question, right, is like, okay, like, you know, look, these VCs and these

angels and everybody, like, they're all running around doing deals today. they're running around doing deals with people, you know, kind of through these networks that they've built, you know, over the years. Like, you know, look, maybe they didn't all start with, like, a silver spoon in their mouth. They're kind of built into the Silicon Valley network, but, like, somehow they got there. And now they all talk to each other and they talk to kind of people who are like them. And, you know, they're so busy taking referrals from the people that they know and have worked with in the past. And they, you know, they don't really want these kind of cold, these cold leads. And so basically, like, how do you punch into this network?

Like, you know, I guess I'd say, if you don't have the thing somebody wants, or even if you do have the thing, you know, you build the things. thing that people want? Like, how do you, like, what's the best way to punch to that network if you're not already in it? Yeah, so, so I would say, you know, kind of first off, you did make something that somebody wanted, which is the browser, which is how Jim Clark found you, right? And Jim Clark wasn't a VC or anything. He was a guy who had built a company. And I think that, you know, particularly when you make technology products that people want, technology people find out about it. And then there it, It's a very short path to get to somebody like us.

If you know anybody in technology who likes your product, I mean, that is a pretty fast connection. Like, it's not closed end in the least. Like, it's not like, I would say, things I've heard about trying to crack into Hollywood, which is like a much more closed and difficult, they're in a challenging system in that way. And then I would say, you know,

There's so many ways to meet tech people now, you know, with social media, with Clubhouse and so forth. I mean, my wife runs a show that, you know, is like, you know, people inside and outside of tech. And then we do a lot of work to try and expand our network to get to more and more people. But, you know, you just, you got to meet people. They have to get to know you. you know, if you're smart, they always want to introduce you to their other smart friends and, you know, builds on that and so forth. But, like, I think the main thing is to engage it and not get discouraged and not feel like

you don't belong. I think that the thing is most people get self-defeated on this as opposed to, I mean, I also came from the outside, right? Like, you know, nobody in my family ever worked in a company or started a company or knew anything about companies. You know, we were all politics. And then my mom was a nurse. And, you know, so I, you know, like, how do you get in?

And you just keep, like, trying to meet people. And look, you have to have the talent. It's a very competitive field and all that kind of thing. But if you have the talent and you work, what I think we see is, like, most of the people in Silicon Valley, interestingly, are outsiders. Like, when you think about the people we fund and you go back through their history, like, they didn't, you know, they came from,

other countries, like, let alone, like they're not, most of them are not from the U.S. Yeah. Yeah, including some pretty exotic places like Communists, Romania. Yeah, communist Romania, we've got people from Jordan in the portfolio. We've got people from Egypt, you know, just all over the place, you know, quite a few people from Israel. And, you know, like a lot of, most of English and the second language, you know, we just had blad on the other day on two of the other.

the clubhouse things like, you know, he's, he's not from here. It's a, you know, it's an amazing place in that way. Yeah, I think maybe two tactical or two kind of practical things that people can think about. So one is, you know, one of the just amazing opportunities exist today is that these big companies, these big companies are now so big. And they're hiring so many people. And they're hiring so many people in lots of different places. And so just the most obvious thing, I would say, an additional what Ben said is, like, look, like, go to work for one of the giants. Um, you know, and preferably

one of the giants is still on their way up, right? So, you know, a company with like, you know, continuing momentum. Um, and like, even if that involves, like, this would be my cheat code. Like, if I, if I just, like, showed up here and I didn't have any connections. That's what I, I just like, get into any of these companies. Um, and then work your way up. Um, once you're inside and you'll just like naturally build a network,

like, if you work at it. And then the people at those companies at the big tech companies, a lot of the, you know, engineers and the managers and the DPs and so forth that those companies are like highly connected into the startup world. You know, many of them come from the startup world. And so that's like one sheet code. I just bring it up because I think there's a specific version of this problem, which is somebody who's in like, you know, another city or whatever and working at a, you know, maybe not even in tech or in a mid-size tech company that maybe Valley people haven't heard of and

they're wondering how to kind of get plugged in. It may be there's like one more step in their career path. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a really good idea. And, you know, companies are networks. So like everybody, every employee there is in the network, and everybody quickly finds out his gift. And so, you know, you go to a company like that and you're good, and it will get recognized.

Really fast, by the way. And then the other is, there's a book that I read years ago that I can't believe I read, and I have no idea why I read it. But it's always stuck with me, Ben, you'll find it's very funny. The book is called Never Eat Alone. Oh, yeah, yeah, I know that book. Okay, yeah, yeah. The ultimate networking book. It's the ultimate networking book.

And what he basically says, this is years ago, but the way I remember it, what he basically says is, look, flip the problem. Instead of being the person who's trying to figure out how to get in the network, basically be the person that helps everybody else get into networks. And basically what he says is, look, and he structures them basically as dinners. And so he has this basically, this whole template laid out for basically how to start holding dinners and then basically how to invite like cross sections of people. in those dinners so they can get to know each other. And then, of course, you know, the next step beyond that is you become known as the people who, the person who brings people together. And then before you know it, like you're starting to like broker people for like jobs.

By the way, you're starting to introduce people who end up, you know, in romantic relationships. And by the way, just that skill, if you're elite at that, you don't need any other skills. Like, that's good enough to make your career. Right, exactly. And so, and what he points out is people don't have to wait. This is the thing that's stuck with me in the book. You don't have to wait until the, you're successful to do this, right? Because there are always lots of young people running around

who have this exact same problem. And so you basically start by gathering all the people like you, right? You know, especially like, you know, people who are earlier in their careers. And then basically as people's careers develop, you get into this feedback loop, right? Or, you know, sort of members of your network people participating, right? You know, they start gaining power and influence and they start knowing people. And then you're able to, you know, through them, pulling other people. And then it's also this kind of thing, you know, try to do with the firm, which is it's sort of a pay-it-forward, you know, kind of thing, which is, you know, instead of starting by asking people for things like

introductions to people, you know, start by giving them. And then you end up building basically so much gratitude through that, that the rest of the especially really easy. Yeah, yeah, definitely. It takes a lot of social courage to do that. But, like, if you've got that, yeah, that definitely works. Yeah, and he says, people overthink it. It's like it doesn't need to be like a fancy steak restaurant

or like a fancy whatever this, that. it's like, you know, a bunch of, you know, card tables and, you know, in pizzas, you know, is a good way to get started. So it's a, it's actually a low, a low-cost way to go. Ben, we're about an eight. Are you good to go a little bit longer? Sure. Okay, let's keep going. All right, we're going to shift to a few industry topics that are very hot right now.

So Jitem Thakar asks, when and what do you think would be the inflection point after which the centralized web would gain traction as a potential competitor to traditional centralized Internet. cloud and then i'm going to ask you to start yeah so i think there are um i wouldn't characterize it as one inflection point so i i think that um what we're seeing already is kind of multiple inflection points so we kind of you know the first one was kind of bitcoin like really holding value and and uh you know people are going wow this really is going to be worth something um which is amazing because it's just a piece of software, right? And, you know, just like the fact that that happened is such an incredible breakthrough. And then, you know, there was a quick inflection point that went away, or two quick ones on Ethereum. One was Cryptokitties, and then the other

was ICOs. And, you know, for regulatory reasons and performance reasons, those didn't quite take, but they certainly built awareness and created a lot of developer activity. And then that's led to defy, which is another, I think, really important inflection point. And then also NFTs are non-fungible tokens. And we're seeing just some major amazing activity in that space, both in the art world and then also with Depra Labs and collectibles like NBA Topshot and so forth. So like every time there was a new, really interesting application of the technology, you know, things start to inflect.

There's a huge amount of energy now to kind of build decentralized social, just due to the, you know, de-platforming and so forth. And, you know, many of the building blocks are there, you know, with storage systems and then, you know, the ability to do naming, you know, then there's various naming things and then also like what Ethereum, you know, can provide there and whatnot. So, you know, there's a need for that. He's built one that's performant and it's usable.

It's the current social networks, but as that comes, it's very likely to move things forward. But, you know, or when you think about kind of how one technology really challenges another, it does happen in waves. So if you think about SaaS, you know, first it was just little companies who would buy it, then the features got more robust than bigger companies, and then security got better and even bigger companies. And now the pandemic is it, and, you know, hopefully everybody will go to it. But, you know, it's going to be a lot like that. I don't think it's going to be like one application and one point in time. Yeah, so I make a couple observations.

So there's a few aspects of this that I can't talk about because of professional affiliations. But, you know, I make a couple observations. So one is, like, this question now exists at every layer of the stack. And that's new. And I think, honestly, I think the world, I think the world, change when parlor was was killed because parlor parlor was killed i mean by the way parlor of all things built on wordpress like maybe the worst technology effort of our lifetime and yet and yes um and so like the thing that was so striking is like parlor was taken out at like every layer

of the stack in the same day right um like they said like they said literally like every service provider they had dumped them on the same day and like you know look maybe that doesn't happen to like a lot of things maybe that, you know, we'll see what that trend is. But like, a lot of the really sharp engineers and entrepreneurs that I'm, you know, talking to that we're talking to on this stuff are, you know, basically since that moment, are now thinking, and I would say a much broader way about this question, which is like, okay, like, there may be issues now at every layer of the stack, right? And by the way, those, you know, obviously those issues now exist level of the app store. Those issues exist at the level of, you know, DNS, those levels of

payments they um can i meant i don't know if i if i ask you if i can mention it i will have already mentioned it but um can i can i mention the personal connection you have to be platforming in the in the payment space you know that's a very dangerous association for me because he keeps getting banned so i'm going to go ahead and mention it because it's just too good it's too good not to and plus i know he like he would enjoy the publicity And by the way, like, you know, he's, I would justifiably, I think, fairly upset, I think, about what happened. But, like, yeah, Ben's father actually got banned at one point from the payment networks and from the banking system. And so for those of you who think that sanctions are something that we only apply to Iran and North Korea, that's no longer the case.

Yes, yes. People can Google this if they want. I won't force Ben to go into it. But at the payments level, I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. And then, you know, also like, you know, at the CDN level, you know, and then the CBN level is like, you know, only one step above the ISP level. And then, you know, the app store is like adjacent to the browser, right? And so, you know, if the, you know, if the companies that make phones are willing to ban at the app store, you know, potentially the browser at some point becomes identified as loophole, you know, the email client. And so like this thing, you know, what, and again, for good, bad, and different, however you look at it, like this thing that happened seems to have really, let's just say energized, some of the smartest people we know into thinking, I would say much more broadly about this. Now, you know, this is like a big challenge. And so if you literally said, look, the challenge here is to build like a parallel internet, right, or a parallel like tech stack. Like that's really hard. On the other hand, like, you know, maybe that opportunity is getting larger. We'll see. The other thing I would say is,

you know, people say about, about, I was arguing with a friend of mine, an economist friend of mine the other day, and he's like, look like, this censorship thing, like, yeah, everybody's all in a tizzy, but like not that many people are getting censored. It's not that big of a deal. And aren't people just going to stay where they are? And it's like, well, there is another reason for decentralization, right? And that reason, at least historically, and that reason is what, what's called permissionless innovation. Right. So, so censorship is like, Censorship is like sort of the, it's the thing that you saw that now goes away, right?

And then permissionless innovation is the thing that doesn't exist yet, right? And this is really what the web had going for it like early on and what actually TCPIP had going for it early on. And actually even what like Twitter had going for it early on, which basically is you could build whatever you want. And you could build whatever you want without asking anybody for any permission. Like to just give an example, to build the browser to build mosaic. I never had to ask anybody's permission. I didn't have to go to the phone company and ask permission. I didn't have to go to, you know, the tech company's answer permission.

Like, I could just build the code, deploy it, and it just worked. And so these distributed systems, right, have this, generally, they have this characteristic that you can build whatever you want on top of them, which sort of falls out naturally from the fact that they're distributed, which is to say there's no central, you know, kind of no central trip point. And so the other way to think about this that I think about a lot is like, okay, when you have a centralized system of any kind where there is this joke point, probably they're not just censoring things that already exist, probably they're preventing

things from being built that don't exist yet, right? And these by definition are things that you can't see, right? So my friend I was debating this with, he's like, okay, well, give me like six examples of the things that don't exist yet. And I'm like, well, like I could, I can make up examples, right? I can hypothesize examples, but we won't know for sure until it's possible to build because at that point, what you'll find is like a thousand really smart, creative people will come up with ideas that you and I would have never thought of. And so that's the other form of energy that can be potentially unleashed here. And I'm really curious to see, you know, kind of how many layers of the stack this happens in, because I think it might be a more dramatic

change than people think. Yeah. And to your point, I think the internet, like if you look at the number of brand new things that nobody had thought of that were built on the internet because there was permissionless innovation, I would expect the same thing to happen here. And already, kind of we're seeing that, like, nobody built, you know, digital trading cards on the centralized system. Right. Because one, they didn't have permission. And then the other was they weren't going to make any money. So the other thing, like the central ice thing doesn't not only ban you and not give you

permission, but also taxes the hell out of you, even if you do it, as we're seeing with, you know, Apple charging 30%. You know, you build an app on that, like you pay them 30%. You build an app on the Internet, you don't pay anybody anything. And you build an app on the decentralized web and the decentralized system, and you're not going to pay anybody anything. And I think that really changes the velocity of innovation by, you know, it's not by like twice as fast. It's like 10,000 times as fast when you do that.

Yeah, that's right. Bill Joy had something on this. He said years ago, Bill Joy was the founder, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, which actually itself was one of these platforms that people built a lot of things on. And he said, Joy's Law. He said, no matter how great your company is, most of the smart people in the world don't work there. Yes. Right.

And I think that's the biggest argument for decentralization right there. Right. Exactly. Okay, good. And then look at a related question, which from Ryan Gentry is, has crypto had its Netscape moment yet? Why or why not? And let me actually expect. That's a good question for you.

So I guess I was at Netscape. You found a Netscape. You were there. You were dealing with the consequences of everything that I said in public. So let me expand the question, actually. Let me actually differentiate or propose a framework, Ben, to talk about this, which is, let's say there are Netscape moments and then there are iPhone moments. And I think they might actually be different.

So the Netscape moment, I think, is what we were just talking about, which basically is the moment of why people going, aha, now that this thing exists. I can build X, Y, and Z on top of it, which is based, and I say that because, like, Ben will certainly remember, like, you know, early on an escape, it was not actually clear what the internet killer apps are going to be, right? Like, you know, that's a question we got every day, right? Like, every day, we're like, what's a killer app? What's a killer up?

And it's like, fuck, we're the killer app. Exactly. And then, you know, look, people, you know, smart people, you know, Jeff Bezos, you know, famously got in his car and drove to Seattle and with his wife and, you know, started at Amazon, but like that was, you know, that wasn't part of our plan. And so, you know, nor was eBay, nor was, you know, Yahoo or any of these other things. So, yeah, so the Netscape moment is kind of like, okay, it's the moment of the arrival of permissionless innovation in which people can build whatever they want. And then let's say the iPhone moment is like the moment of like broad-based

sort of fundamental high engagement consumer acceptance. Like where basically a large number of people in their personal lives just go, okay, like that's the thing and I have to have one of those and I'm going to use it all the time. And so, Ben, where do you think, where do you think crypto is on both of those fronts right now? So I feel like we're past the Netscape moment. And the reason I say this is so, and you remember, nobody remembers this, but me and you, Mark, but in early 1995, IBM bought Lotus. Yep.

And when they bought Lotus for $3 billion, had they instead bought every single internet company, including Netscape, Amazon, and eBay and Yahoo, they would have paid, they could have bought all those companies for less than they paid for Lotus. So that's where it was after the Netscape moment, because that was 95, which is a Netscape moment here. And, you know, crypto, like, Bitcoin's worth nearly $700 billion right now. Right. So, like, I feel like crypto were past that and people have gone a high and the developer energy is amazing against it right now and that

we just see a higher and higher caliber of developers coming in every single day on the crypto team. It's like head spinning what's going on. So I really feel like we're there. I don't think and you know you're kind of

a I would say more of a master of consumer behavior and adoption but I don't think we're yet at the iPhone moment when kind of everybody is like, okay, I have to have that. I still think it's a little the world of crypto is a bit confusing to people, but I feel like it started with, you know, between NFTs, the rise of Bitcoin and what's going on in distributed finance, I feel like we're getting close. Why don't you describe actually, it's super hot all of a sudden, this idea of

NFTs. And as he said, it looks like this may be like one of the things that really tips this. Maybe describe for people who haven't heard of NFTs what they are. Yeah. So, you know, it's a way to own something that's a digital good. So, which is kind of an amazing and weird concept. And it started, you know, kind of the first really popular one was this thing, CryptoKitties, where, you know, you could get these different cats and they would have properties and they could do cool things like breed with other cats and then you would get more crypto kitties. But the thing that makes them different than just a picture of a cat on the Internet is from a kind of cryptographically strong standpoint, I own it and I have one of one, just like I have one of one Bitcoin or like one of one E. So it's mine.

And I now own this good. And it's a virtual good, but of course, baseball cards are virtual good. like Honus Wagner card is worth millions of dollars, but the cardboard that it's printed on and the stale bubble gum that it came with is worth nothing. And, you know, that's the same for, you know, I don't know what the canvas and the paint

that Boscat used costs, but it was nothing compared to the value of his painting. And so now you can do that digitally, but then you add on all these amazing digital properties. So NBA Topshot Dapper Labs, there was a LeBron James dunk, which is a video, you know, that you can own that and have the one of one card that you can then trade with your friends and all these kinds of things. And that, you know,

went for $76,000. And a lot of it, you know, it's a better card than you can do on cardboard because you have the full power of computers and so forth. And they can have different properties and so on. And, you know, the art can have different properties. So it's really like a super exciting field and you know it's so exciting for visual artists right now because all of a sudden there's a whole new way to kind of share your creativity with the world and make money and all these things and you and a whole different kind of collector and and whatnot so uh you know it's it's it's really taking off yeah i've been arguing you know people kind of people some people are too very vehemently that this thing should you know these kinds of things either shouldn't

shouldn't work or won't work and i'm like well you know you made the point on like the paintings. I would also say even like sneakers. Sneakers are some goods, right? Like, yeah, sneaker, $200 pair of sneakers is like $5 of plastic, right? $5 of plastic and then I don't know if they pay the Uyghurs at all, right? I'm sorry, that was an all-collar joke. Please don't assassinate me, Chinese government. Exactly. Don't worry. They're not listening. They made a pub house today. Oh, that's right. We're off the hook. So, yeah, and so like, you know, $195 of your $200 sneakers or whatever, you know, which a lot of people collect.

And, you know, a lot of people collect sneakers don't even wear them, you know, which is like, I can tell you, nobody did that when I was a kid. Yeah, not in Wisconsin at least. Wisconsin. And so, like, it's already $195 virtual good that hapless to have $5 a plastic competitive. And so I would say, and I would also say look like, you know, and again, like a lot of people are cynical about this kind of thing.

But it's like, look, like a big part of the entire point of life, right, is aesthetics, right? Like, the design of the thing, you know, the way that we live and the design of things around us and, like, artistic creativity, right? And, like, all that stuff is virtual. Like, by definition, it's all virtual. Yeah, it's a, it's a feeling. You know, you're buying a feeling. And what's that worth?

You know, potentially a tremendous amount of money. Yep. Exactly. And so, yeah, this is the kind of thing that gives that we've been in a lot of confidence in kind of the consumerization. Crypto actually tipping, actually, I think, like, basically people. right now. Yeah, it certainly feels that way. Yep.

Okay, good. All right. Three more. Let's see three more, and then we'll try to see if we can wrap by 830 or so. So two related questions. So Joe Filo says, what are the great problems that today's entrepreneurs must solve?

And Anisa and Mirza says, what are the most important startups not being built? Yeah, those are such great questions. And I almost feel too small to answer them. But, look, I think, you know, one of the ones that we just discussed is so important, which is, you know, decentralizing everything. And I think it's critically important for many reasons. Well, here's, you know, one of the biggest, you know, decentralizing many of our kind of public and government institutions, meaning, you know, our government is very centralized. And as a result, like all kind of centralized things, it's subject to kind of slowness, rot, incompetence, corruption, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I'm not saying do away with government, but I'm saying, you know, put the more power in the hands of the people to organize themselves and to make a contribution to society permissionlessly. Because right now, one of the most exciting things that we see on these platforms is, you know, the ability to kind of self-organize and, you know, self-organize, agree, make contracts with each other, and do things, you know, from, okay, our neighborhood needs a bridge or needs, you know, security or, you know, needs a better park or all these kinds of things. we can't do this without going through, you know, getting permission from the government today. But, like, we absolutely can do them. We just need a different way to organize ourselves and get to a kind of a permissionless society. And I think that's, you know, it's a step that we need to get to and one of the most important things that I think we need to build. You know, look, there's a lot of things that have to happen technologically.

plate. But when we think about the scale of society, you know, we're just running into a lot of issues with how big we are. And it's not, I'm not saying that it's bad guys and all politicians are bad. Congress is a bunch of assholes or anything like that. I'm just saying, like, we're really big. Just like when companies get really big, like when the country gets really big and old, the old systems, the old processes, the old rules work much less well than when you set them up. And so having a way that everybody can contribute to working together would be, you know, probably the most important thing for our country and for mankind. And that's obviously a very broad problem statement. And so there's potentially entire

industries. I mean, beyond just like many of our products, there's probably many of industries. I mean, what you just said. Sorry, humankind. I really correct myself. I don't think. Yes. I use the old language, which is definitely outdated. And, you know, potentially animal kind. We'll see. We'll see what we can do. So, yeah, so the lens I would put on this is basically they'll apply a little bit more of sort of an academic or abstract kind of framing, but you can actually go online. There's a unit of the U.S. government called the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they kind

of track the economy really closely and really well, probably the best sort of analysis like it on the planet. And, you know, they will basically give you on their website. They'll just show you basically the breakdown of basically the entire economy right into into slices. And what you notice, if you look at that, like, if you do a pie chart of like U.S. what they call gross domestic products, so like the total output of the U.S. economy, it's really striking what you see because you see these, basically these small slices of the pie where tech is like super active and super relevant, right? And so media and

entertainment, right, or like, you know, video games, obviously, or like, you know, retail, right? Or, you know, electronics or, you know, there's just like, you know, if you just kind of go down the list of the things that Silicon Valley does. Like, you know, we, we tend to do really well in kind of those smaller slices of the economy. And then there are these other things that are these just giant slices of the pie, right? And, you know, the big obvious one is like health care. Health care is one-sixth of the American economy and growing, right? And so on its current course of speed, it's going to go from one-sixth to one-fifth to one-fourth to one-third to one-half of the economy. Of course, it has the characteristic that, you know, many things are

causing it to get that large, including the fact that nobody wants to pay for it. But, you know, that's really big. And then there's another, you know, really big slice for education. There's another, you know, a really big slice for housing. There's another big slice to Ben's point just simply for government, like for like basically just like the operations of the country. There's actually another big slice for, you know, basically law kind of in there. And these are things in which tech is either, you know, either somewhat present but hasn't had a huge effector. It's just basically like not present, right?

And so you just kind of say, like, historically, you give an example, historically, you know, private homes, like private home construction is this just gigantic industry in the U.S. It's really central to people's lives. It's really central to, you know, what's called the American dream, the idea of, like, being able to own your own house, able to raise your family there. And, like, you know, Silicon Valley historically has had almost nothing to do with this. Transportation, by the way, is another big one. Silicon Valley, you know, 10 years ago had almost nothing to do with transportation. You know, we've really worked our way in there now, you know, sort of between like what Elon's. it's done with Tesla and then with self-driving cars and with, you know, transportation as

service, you know, companies like Lyft. And so, you know, that's an example we're actually making progress, but that's one that's really striking because because as of 10 years ago, we really hadn't. And so I think, you know, part of the process, but a big part of the opportunity for the industry for the next, you know, 20 or 30 years is to go basically take on those challenges. They are more complicated, right? They're very large. And so when things work in those markets, they can get very big. But they are very complicated. There's a reason why we're not as far along in those sectors.

And it's because those sectors, they're typically more complex. There are more economic issues, right, in terms of how various things are paid for. You know, like with health care, there's also generally a lot more government involvement in those markets, right, a lot more regulation. And so they are harder. But it is pretty clear to me that, like, a lot of the future of this industry ought to be in those markets. And then see what you think of that. I totally agree. I mean, I think that's a great way to look at.

It's like, what are the things that we need to build everywhere where prices are going up, you know, and that because that's going to have the biggest impact because that's clearly where we haven't applied technology and things have gotten older and bigger. And when things get older and bigger and you don't apply technology, they generally get much worse.

Yeah. And it's clearly much more expensive, no question. Yep. And I would also say, like, and we might spend some more time on this in another program, But I would also say, like, this issue is actually central to what's happening in our politics. And that's not a statement of left or right. It's actually a statement of the animation, both on the left and on the right, which is basically the extent to which it feels to a lot of people in the country, like, their ability to live a better life than their parents did and their ability to raise a family and their ability to own a home and their ability to have, like, high quality health care and high quality education.

Like, you know, these are, like, fundamental markers of, like, basically, satisfaction in life, right, for people and for their families at, like, a very deep level. And so, you know, those sectors, right, housing prices just keep rising, education prices, just keep rising, health care prices, just keep rising to Ben's point. Like, those sectors generally are on a one-way track of rising prices. And I think a lot of the political anxiety, both on the left and the right, is oriented fundamentally to this. And to think about that, just like close your eyes and imagine that all of a sudden, those three things all of a sudden started a fall in price. Right. And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, wow, like, I can get a really good house. it costs like 20% less than it did five years ago and it's going to cost like 20%

less five years from now. Right. And like it's these, this is going to be something that's like affordable for me. Right. And it's, you know, same thing for like a high quality education. Same thing for high quality health care. And so, you know, it's like today, you know, today if you just track prices, you know, you know, a hundred inch, you know, a hundred inch, you know, uh, TV that like covers your entire wall, you know, is on its way to being costing $100. Right. And then a four year college degree is on its way to costing a million dollars. Right. And like literally annoying dollars. And it kind of feels, I won't say what I'd rather have. Well, it kind of feels like it should be, yes, that is one question. And of course, right now with COVID, they are kind of the same thing. But, you know, it kind of feels like that should probably flip, right? Like it kind of feels like that. Those are probably not the directions you want to go from a societal standpoint. So we in the tech industry have work to do.

Okay. Closing question. Final question. What unwritten rule of about, oh, sorry, Norse Dickey asks, what unwritten rule about the world did you discover and how did you discover it? So, and this is one, that people by default hire themselves, and they basically profile themselves

and they understand themselves. And so to be good at all, or even competent at doing anything with a diverse group, you have to learn to both understand talent that you don't have and see talent that you don't have and value talent that you don't have. And that is a skill that I would say most managers never developed and it takes a lot of development to do. And I discovered it, look, just by working organizations

and you notice, oh, you know, there's a woman manager. She seems to have a lot of women working for her. Oh, there's an Asian manager. He seems to have a lot of Asians working for him. Oh, there's a white manager. He has a lot of white managers working for them. And then if you get deeper into it, they tend to have the exact backgrounds

and the exact skill sets of the hiring person, which is natural. You know, I know what I'm good at it. I can test for it in an interview. I value it highly. But if you want kind of a team that can do more than what you just view, yourself can do, then you have to be able to recognize things that you can't do. And that is, I would just say something that almost nobody can do naturally. It's something that takes work and effort, and most people don't know that they need to learn it and

put in the effort. They think they just need to be not sexist or not racist, which doesn't work, by the way. You actually have to really learn it and understand it. And the analogy I like to use for this as a football team, you know, if, like if you were a wide receiver and you just can't evaluate people who weigh 300 pounds and you put everybody on the team runs really fast and is really skinny, then you're going to lose every football game. And I think that's the way people just don't look at other kinds of talent that way,

but it's really kind of critical and organizational development and business and these kinds of things. Good. We may come back to that in the future show. That is a very deep topic. I would nominate two. So one, I just said, I got from Steve Jobs, but I think about it all the time, is Steve one said, this is a great, it's a classic Steve thing. All of the things in the world around you were designed and made by people who are no smarter than you.

I've always found that to be. Is that true? Well, I always feel they were more smarter than me. It was to say it was true for Steve. Yes. the rest of us might have uh might be might be pulling ourselves up for a while um but like look there is a lot to it um there there is a lot to it which is basically like nothing that exists around us like just magically happened like and and and it i have to find like i don't know if people

have this experience now as a kid it's kind of like i always kind of have this question of like okay why is it that way um and then the answer was always like well because it is right and then you know the next version of the answer is like well because it always has been right yep right and then it's like and actually you know it's interesting you know when i was a kid it was like free free wikipedian it's just like okay then i'm stuck right like i'm like okay like okay that's it that's all i'm going to find out and like if i want to like dig into like i don't know like you know why did chairs have four legs in that three or five or like any any question right it's like okay you know trip the library kit card catalog like you know interlibrary loan like you know

good luck um you know at least today you can just literally some of my favorite uses for wikipedia which is like literally, it's like, okay, how did that happen? And so, you know, the world has really opened up in that way. But the derivation of that is just like, okay, all this stuff got designed and built. And then when you go back and you kind of dig into like, okay, who did it and how did these things come about? Like, you know, it's generally some crazy story, right? Like it generally is not, you know, somebody in like a big, you know, research lab doing dot, dot, dot, dot. Like it's, you know, usually some crazy person out in the fringe somewhere who like had some crazy idea.

And like that was the thing that took. So it's basically like, the message I carried away from what he was saying is like, the world is actually a more inviting place for invention and for creativity. Yeah. It seems because like literally that's everything. Oh, my, you know, my favorite book on this is the one that you recommended the tube. Yes. About the invention of television.

And I'm like, wacky that was. It's like, guys, it's like trying stuff. And then all of a sudden you had TV. Yeah, so I'll just give the brief. I love that book. So it's called Tube. It's like an MIT history series or something. But, like, yeah, the legend of TV, you know,

is there was this guy, Philo Farnsworth in San Francisco in, like, the 1920s who just, like, figured it out, and that was that. But it actually turns out there was, like, this 50-year backstory. They basically started working on TV right around the time they got the telegraph to work. So it was, you know, kind of around that time period, 1860s, 1870s. They were just like a bunch of crazy people who just had this idea that says, well, you know, we can do sound, you know, they had radio starting to work, they had telegraphs starting to work, and so it's like, well, we could do pictures.

And then... But, like, they didn't have anything. They didn't have any, they didn't have any building blocks. Yeah, that was all that started with that idea. Like, they didn't have, like, you know, this is a time where they didn't have indoor lighting yet, right? And so the extent to which some of these people spent, like, decades of their life, like, there's this guy. It goes through the whole story of this guy, I think a Scottish guy. And he literally invented and actually deployed analog television.

Sorry, that's not right. Mechanical television. television is a mechanical device so imagine like no tube you know forget even flat screens like no CRT no tube no nothing like and he literally it was like spitting blocks it was like a television made out of Legos

which is that different than Charles Babbage's original computer which is like a computer made out of wood powered by steam yeah exactly and so he had this thing it would literally sit and it would spin these blocks that had different colors on them To show images, you know, it's like a 32 by 32 grid or something like that. And like the thing is sitting there like chunking away spinning the things.

And he got it to work. And he took it to the BBC, which owned all the spectrum in the UK at that time. And he said, please, could I have a slot where I could like test this thing? And, you know, of course they thought he was like completely out of his mind. And then they finally gave him, I think, if I recall correctly, the Thursday night and midnight slot for 15 minutes. Yeah, that's right. That was right.

It's Thursday midnight. Which is what they gave, like, rap music, by the way, when it started out, too. Exactly. And, of course, BBC is like, yeah, look, you can have this slot. And then if there's any consumer demand, we'll expand it. Right. And it's like, okay, consumer demand, number one, for this crazy mechanical television, but number two, at Thursday night at midnight.

Right. Like, you know, thank you so much, you know, BBC overlords. And so, and this is like, you know, what, 20 years or something before Philo Farmsworth got his thing to work? for like a decade or something like a decade or something like that. So anyway, the point being is like there are these backstories to these things where like they were genuinely new. And by the way, look, like a lot of people don't pull this off. Like a lot of people, you know, a lot of people are this guy and not follow Barnesworth.

But like the thing actually had to get built. It took like a huge amount of invention and creativity to do it. It ended up having a big history, you know, obviously a big impact on history. But like it, you know, this was something that people volunteered into. Like there was never like a program, right? There was never like a national, I don't know, a National Science Foundation for television or something at that point that decided that this was going to exist. And so anyway, the whole world kind of works like that. So actually, we're past 830.

Why don't we leave it there, Benjamin? Thank you for joining me for the first trial. Absolutely. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, everybody for coming. We really, really appreciate it. And a special thanks to everybody who submitted questions on Twitter. They were amazing.

And the ones we didn't get to today, we will get to. Yes, absolutely. 100%. Thank you, everybody. have a great night thank you so welcome back welcome back this is the second uh show of one-on-one with a and z um which as i said last time is a show that we are starting and running weekly mondays um at this time to uh basically in the in the in the model of something andy grove used to do uh which in his in his in his in his era was a newspaper column in our area era clubhouse room um and uh so we are going to um uh

read a bunch of questions proposed by folks on Twitter. And then we will answer them and then argue about the answers until probably around midnight. I have to say that once again this week, the quality of the questions is extraordinary. So we have no shortage of great questions. We've picked out 11 of the best questions. And we're queuing up all the others for future shows. But I would say the questions are guaranteed to be fantastic. and then we'll see about the answers.

So let's dive straight into the deep end of the pool, and let's start off with kind of the most serious of the questions, perhaps, and then kind of work our way, hopefully up a little bit in terms of cheerfulness. But this is a really, I think, important question and a really profound question for this year as sort of COVID drags on. So Ashley asks, Ben says, quote, layoffs break trust. A third of people in San Francisco have filed for an,

unemployment, and a lot of that is tech companies having to restructure and scale back at the end of 2020 due to COVID struggles. How does Ben view long-term traumatic impact of this period? Yeah, that's a great question. It actually reminds me of my career during the dot-com bubble and a lot of playoffs and trauma in that sense. So that does have differences. So let me kind of start with just why. And it's obvious, but I think it's subtle. as well as why layoffs break trust because when you're a CEO, you kind of, you know, look, people

are nice to you because you're the boss. And you can take that too far in your mind thinking they really like you and maybe they don't like you as much as you think they do. And then when you do a layoff, that gets tested in severe ways. So like a layoff is a breaking of trust because you literally broke the promise, you know, when you hire people, you tell them this is going to be a great company. It's going to be awesome. You're going to have fun here. Your career is going to advance. And then all of a sudden, you're firing people and sending them home. And a lot of CEOs will make the mistake while saying, well, you know, we laid off, you know, maybe we laid off people who we didn't really need or didn't really want. And that may be true, but those people

who you laid off are closer to people in your company that are staying than they are to you often and in every case. I mean, there's no way you're closer to every employee than anybody else is. And so the people who stay, you know, you're going to lose trust with them because they're friends who they respect it and liked and so forth, get laid off. So you've got this huge kind of trust crisis, so to speak. And the reason why that's so fundamentally bad is that trust is the kind of essential ingredient of any culture, of any organization. And the reason is trust is so highly related to

communication, right? And that if I trust you entirely, you barely have to talk to me because I know whatever you do is going to be in my best interest and I trust that it's the right thing. And if I trust you not at all, then you can talk to me all day long. And I'm not going to hear a word you say because I don't trust you. And in an organization that's detrimental to have a communication breakdown like that and a trust breakdown like that. And you kind of hear, you know, like if you follow football, you always hear, well, you have to trust the system.

Like the players will say you have to trust the system. And the reason is, okay, if I don't trust my teammates, then if they don't do what they're supposed to do, then it doesn't matter what I do. And therefore it doesn't, you know, and as soon as it doesn't matter what I do, then you have chaos. And that's very true in a company and very true in a military organization and anything. And so, you know, when you have layoffs, the first thing to do is you've got to start to, the day you do the layoff, you have to start working on rebuilding trust on making sure that everything that you say is true at that moment that you're restoring honesty and so forth.

And you do the layoffs in the right way. And I've spoken a lot about this in writing and so on. But, you know, if you're in that situation where you're doing a layoff, just know that it's going to be the end of your company if you don't start rebuilding the trust and the faith in the, in the organization in a real way that day. It's exacerbated in COVID, and this is something I've noticed kind of in our own firm, is that kind of face-to-face is a natural free trust builder. like it's basically like if I'm with you and I can see you and I can see your intentions and you know if I can you know shake your hand or give you a hug or touch you like that's that that that creates trust in a way that's almost impossible to do on video it's it's actually the one thing that and so you know so you have that problem on top of it so I think that you know

Any leader right now has to be thinking very hard about, okay, how can you create trust, how can you maintain trust, how can you rebuild trust, you know, coming out of this, particularly if you stay remote because that, you know, it's such a fundamental underpinning of everything that you're going to do. So, well, let me ask you two questions. So first of all, you know, when the dot-com crash happened, you know, there was I would say widespread view that it was the fault of the tech companies. Yeah.

Right. It was like our fault. When, you know, the financial crisis happened, it was, you know, the fault of the banks. Yes. You know, when a company. Which was, I think, I feel like it wasn't more true with the banks, but what was true with the banks is they actually risk our money, meaning taxpayers, whereas we just risked our investors money, which, you know, as the VC, like, we know that we knew the job is dangerous

when we check it. Like, that seems more fair. But anyway, yeah, we're still, we're still waiting for the tech bailout from 2000. And then, you know, when a company gets into trouble by itself, you know, it has whatever bad product release or something, you know, it, you know, it blames itself or it blames its executives or its CEO, but it's like, it's pretty clearly somebody's fault. COVID is, you know, COVID's different, right? Because COVID's, like, at least in theory, like COVID is nobody's fault.

And, you know, it's like a, you know, it's like quite literally after God, you know, kind of territory. And so I guess the question is, does the fact that the COVID is in anybody's fault, does that make any of this easier? Or does this just, does that really actually not matter because we're talking about people's lives? And that's just actually not a factor. Well, there's a couple things on that, though. One is not every company is laying off. So if you're doing the layoff, you know, and particularly I see this in like software, like SaaS. So like it's one thing you're a travel company.

and that kind of thing, that's a little, maybe you get a little more of a pass. But let's say you're like a SaaS software company, but the way, you know, your stage of development, you know, your way of selling, so forth, you're gonna have to do a layoff. There are a lot of SaaS companies that didn't do layoffs. So, you know, at that point, you are gonna take the blame.

And then the other thing that happens in a layoff is you end up laying off some of the wrong people if you're big enough. And I just give you an example, like I laid off, and it kills things. So Eric Vishria, who's a great partner at Benchmark Capital Now and used to work for me at Opswear, I laid off a really good friend of his who was one of the smartest guys in our company by accident. Like I didn't lay him off directly, but he was laid off. And, you know, I had known Eric since he was 19 years old, and he had been working for me for years.

And he was so mad at me, he was, you know, ready to quit over that. And that didn't have anything to do with the fact we did the layoff. It had to do with the fact that we laid off the wrong guy. And, you know, so you do have those kinds of issues as well. Yep. And then let me outline a scenario. So I don't, like after the last year, I don't want to predict anything anymore for the rest of my life. The world is apparently getting very strange.

But let me lay out a scenario for what follows kind of COVID. And I think there's actually pretty good odds of this scenario, which basically is like, okay, like we've passed through this like one way door where we now realize, like we being CEOs and investors, like we now realize that it's possible to structure and run companies differently than we all thought. And we know that, you know, remote work is a lot more viable than we thought. And then that opens up, you know, all kinds of questions around, you know, where should our workforces be located? And some of that is employee driven because they want to move. And some of that is like, well, you know, like a lot of my friends who are like CEOs in New York,

they're like, oh, like, I don't need all these back office people in New York anymore. Like, I can move them to, like, Minnesota or something, and it's going to be actually just fine. I didn't know I could do that, and now I can, like, you know, save our shareholders with a lot of money by doing that. By the way, I can create a lot of jobs in, you know, places that maybe don't have them. And so there's all that. And then there's just like basically this sense, I think, among CEOs, or there will be that basically is like COVID is to some extent to get out of jail-free card for doing anything you want to do to restructure your company in a way that maybe you were always thinking. about, but, you know, maybe you would have thought would be too, you know, too dramatic or, dramatic.

And so there's a real scenario coming out of this that a lot of companies are going to go through a, you know, really, like, dramatic level of restructuring and change that will result in, you know, potentially a lot of, you know, what you say geographic movement of jobs, but the thing with when jobs move geographically is the people, you know, people don't usually move en masse, right? And so you end up cutting jobs in one place and adding jobs somewhere else. And then there will be companies that simply like don't hire back, right? They'll just be like, okay, now's a chance to like replace, you know, 5,000 people, you know, customer service people with software, right? And we can just basically say, like, this is all part of the

restructure we're doing after COVID. And so it feels like we're going to go into a period where there's going to be a lot of change in the economy and in jobs. And then the good side of that is like academically, like basically that should, that should lead to like really rapid productivity growth in the economy. And that's good because that should lead to economic growth and wage growth and so forth, like in general that this is like an economically healthy thing in terms of the growth rate of economy. But in the process, like a lot of people's lives will get disrupted. And so I guess I'd be curious like what, you know, we've been going to do that a lot, you know, with, you know, kind of technological change, I would say, over the last 25 years.

So then this is an accelerant even on that. Yeah. So, you know, as a, you know, sort of as a CEO yourself and then as somebody who talks to and advises a lot of CEOs like, how do you, you know, how do you think, Given the opportunity that they will use in front of it, like, how should they think this through? Yeah, so, look, I think you have to embrace the future. And like a really simple analogy that, as you know, a user on the firm is, look, when Google introduced free lunch, like, I don't care if you think free lunch is good or bad, at some point, you had to offer free lunch because you couldn't hire anybody because everybody expects free lunch, right? And so you can't hide from the future if you're a CEO. And if people are offering work from home and kind of changing their business and making it more efficient, you can't stick your head in the sand on that.

You have to really understand it and look at it and see if it's going to give you competitive advantage or disadvantage. And one of the things that really kind of knocked me on the ground when I heard it because it convinced me so much that you have to, you know, that work from home is a real, real thing that we're never going to get away from because it's very important is a lot of the young women who work for us said, like, this is the first time in my life that I've been able, that I felt like I could have a career and be a mother and be good at both. And so, like, that's a much bigger thing than, you know, a commute or anything else.

And so now, you know, you are in a new world. And so I think the first thing is you've got to embrace the new world and you have to understand it and you have to, you know, as our friend Cheryl Sandberg would say, you have to lean into it and not run away from it. Having said that, you know, as a leader, I think that things that are kind of, there's categories of things that are kind of unknown unsolved in this kind of new environment, you know. trust and loyalty, particularly if you hit a crisis, like if everything is going well in the company, you can get away with bad culture, bad management, a lot of bad things. But when you hit a situation where like a competitor gets the better of you or, you know, you're in a tough position, then all these things matter tremendously. So kind of getting out and really understanding, okay, how is career development different? How is, how are people,

feelings about our organization different, and what can we do to make those optimal in the new work environment, I think, are critically important questions. And if you ignore them, it'll run through your fingers as soon as you hit a crisis. So it's funny, George Tenon, and our friend George Tenet, every time I saw him at Allen Company would say to me about Trump, because at the time when we were still going to Allen Company because there was no COVID, But things were going, like, reasonably okay in the country. There were a lot of, like, he'd say a lot of crazy stuff, but it wasn't really like a, it didn't kind of melt down the whole country. But what George used to always says, like, just wait until there's a crisis, then we're going to be totally screwed because this guy just says crazy shit all the time.

And, you know, like in a crisis, it's going to be problematic. And I think that that's kind of like what this is. It's like, I don't think it matters unless there is a real crisis, but in a crisis, it's going to be the only thing that matters. Yeah, a friend of mine observed is like, you know, up until now to like, you know, either fire somebody or to quit, you know, it was always like a thing, right? Because you're like in the office, it's like, you know, the secret meetings in the conference rooms. It's like, you know, somebody's actually going to leave. They have to pack up their desk. It's like, you know, you have to stay goodbye to everybody, right?

It's like there's all this shame, right? It's like this whole thing. Oh, yeah. And so my friend observed, he's like, okay, if all the meetings are going to be on Zoom, then you just log off Zoom one day, right? And you log in a different Zoom the next day. And, you know, it's a different set of faces. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, that's a really good point also in terms of kind of what I spoke about earlier, right? So then maybe your peers don't care about you as much either. Right. Right. They're fine. You got fired. You're not really my friend. I only knew you on video.

It's not like we had a beer or something. That's an interesting point. I think that's, I think there's a lot of truth to that. There's this concept, there's this concept of psychology of the, it's called the parasycial relationship. And so it's sort of the friendship, actually, it's actually the one feeling people like filter celebrities, they don't know. But it's basically this idea of like it feels like it's a relationship, but it's not. Yeah. Yep.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's right. That's right. It definitely cuts both ways. I mean, it's an interesting, it's a very interesting observation. And then, you know, maybe you just have to get like a thousand times better at training and onboarding because, you know, the workforce is going to be even more fluid than it is now. Right, right, exactly. Okay, good.

Well, we can come back to people have, you know, feedback on that. This is obviously a critically important topic. So feel free to ask more. follow questions on Twitter, and we'll continue to talk about it in the weeks ahead. So second question, Zeng Tan asks, what is something first-time founders, especially ones who haven't had prior startup experience, miss in which they could course correct earlier? And I have a big nomination on this one, but Ben, I'll let go first, and then I'll follow. You know, I can tell you the one that every single one of them misses is, it's a psychological

trick. So basically, your first-time founder, you become CEO. you don't know how to do the job because it's not a job that you know how to do intuitively. Nobody does. But yet you're CEO and you're recruiting everybody in, so you're supposed to know how to do the job. And so that kind of psychological paradox stops you from really doing the real work to learn how to do the job, meaning ask the right people, the right questions at the right time

so that you can come up the learning curve faster. And I'll tell you where this manifests itself always is in executive hiring. I don't think we have a single founder that went out and aced executive hiring like their first time through it. Everybody makes tons of mistakes and asks them to fire all their execs

and rehire them. And the reason is, you've not been CFO. You've not been head of HR, but here you are hiring it. You don't even know what the job is. you know, you're out there like hiring a Japanese interpreter, you don't speak Japanese, and you're not getting any help. And you're acting like, you know how to do it because you think

you're a CEO, which you are, but you're not really. And so the right kind of the right answer to that is, you know, really get some help, get trained up on like, what is that job, you know, what's the difference between a good CFO and a great CFO through the mouth of an actual CFO. Like, how do you go about learning all those things? And almost every first founder. There's a whole class of things around that that they screw up, but it all comes from that same point of, I'm really supposed to know how to do this, but I don't. So rather than ask somebody and reveal myself, I'm going to just go ahead and screw it up. And then, of course, in Silicon Valley, there are many, many advisors who give advice, despite the fact that they have

no idea what they're talking about. So that exacerbates it as well. But they always sound confident. confident. They've heard it from somebody who knew, right? It's like a third-hand weird type of thing. Yes. So the thing I would nominate, and I've been, I'll be curious what you think of this. The thing I would nominate is it goes to the nature of the relationship with the co-founders. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's a good one. So this is a separate thing than what Ben was talking about, but although they're saying myself, you know. Yes, yes. No, thank you so much. Yes, well, there's still time. Um, so, um, so, and basically there's two scenarios here.

So scenario number one is you're a solo founder. And, you know, I think there are certain people who can do that. I don't think I could do it. And in fact, I never have and I would not want to. Just because like doing it by yourself. Like I, you know, kind of, it goes actually to some stuff then you were talking about, which is like to not have anybody to talk to who's like in the same, you know, in the same boat with you, you know, with all the same knowledge, like to have to like have all that pressure just be on you.

Seems intense. So anyway, go ahead. Yes. Yeah. And then you can wind off track very fast. Right. Because you don't have somebody to calibrate. Yep.

Yeah. So you're like living in your head, right? Yeah, exactly. You're like having all these debates with yourself and you're under incredible pressure. And so that's a, it's a, it's a, it's really tough. And of course, this is one of the reasons why people then have multiple founders. So then the multiple founders thing, basically, the way I think about, I guess give a, the conclusion first and then explain why. So the conclusion is as follows, which is like I've had many, many conversations with like founding teams.

where they're very, very worried about, you know, who's going to be on their board, and they're very, very worried that the VCs are going to, like, judge them and fire them. And, like, you know, every once in a while that happens. And there are, you know, some famous stories of that happening in the history of the valley. But they're very worried about that. What they're never worried about is them turning on each feather. Which happens quite a bit. Which happens quite a bit. And, you know, if you're, if you're in our job, basically what you see is the ratio of this is like 100 to 1 or something, right? Or maybe it's more. Maybe it's like 500 to 1 or 1,000 to 1, which is,

Like when there's a traumatic event at the top of the company that affects the founders, it's virtually always the founders turning on each other. And it is almost never the investors or the board members. And so it's like, okay, like, why can that be? And then, of course, the thing that you do is you basically, like, you have this conversation with the founders. And they, in every single case, they assure you that won't happen to them, right? Because, like, you know, they've been, you know, they've known each other since age six.

You know, they've, like, you know, been best friends forever. Those ones do better than the ones that, you know, met at Y Combinator or that kind of thing, I have to say. Yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly. The more recent ones are the shotgun weddings where somebody said, oh, you two should team up. Or somebody said, you know, or even worse, to get funding, you have to go find a co-founder. And then you do it on the fly.

Yep. And so then it's like, and basically it's like, okay, well, why does this happen? Right. And I would say, like, I don't know, Ben, what you would say, but it maybe is like, I don't know, half of. successful companies or something, there's like a founder schism, or maybe more. Yeah, I mean, well, if you look at kind of just Silicon Valley, well, I mean, you know, just pick any big company and go, well, where is the other founder? Like, where is Larry Ellison's co-founder?

What happened to all the co-founders at Facebook? You know, like, we're all of those. Yeah, why didn't, yeah, why didn't Paul Allen? It's actually funny. Why didn't he ever go back to Microsoft after he actually got better and went on to have quite a life? I'm like, why didn't you go, you know, he's all there before he didn't go back. You explained that in that book, you know, like he heard him talking about it. Exactly.

So Paul was so mad at Bill. Paul was so mad at Bill for a story that he tells in the book, which is an amazing story, that he literally held the story for 30 years before he wrote in a book. And then he published it in the book without giving the Microsoft people any advance warning. He was so excited to have his revenge. So that's like a great example. So it's just like, okay, like there's these founders splits all over the place. And then it's like, okay, well, why is that?

And my view on that is the reason it's just because like it's just flat out the pressure, right? It's just like, okay, you might have known somebody, you know, hopefully for longer than a month or a year. But like, you know, you've been in various circumstances together, but you haven't started a company before. And then you're in this like incredibly high pressure, you know, hot house, you know, kind of situation in which like things really start bearing down. And then that's when you start to discover things about each other, right? And so you start to discover things about level of commitment. You start to discover things about work ethic. You start to discover things about responsibility, conscientiousness.

You start to discover things about like emotional control. You start to discover, you know, loyalty issues. And all of a sudden, oh, and then the other thing that happens right is like there's often like a big competence difference. Right. And so like one founder will turn out to just be like a lot more competent. Or even, let's even use a different word, scalable, where, you know, one founder is the CEO, they're scaling with the company, you know, the investors are just putting huge amounts of effort and trying to make sure the CEO of the CEO, and the other founders are like, you know,

wait a minute, like what's happening here? You know, what about me? And then, you know, they're often getting, you know, kind of sidelined in the process. And so, so it's just, it's basically just like, okay, like, this is something that is really worth thinking through. And I guess what I would say is, like, I don't know if I've ever actually met a founding team that has really thought this through. And then I have, so far I have an exact, I would say 100% failure rate at convincing people how important this is. And by the way, the tip off on how and how the tip off of my failure rate actually is that it goes to founder investing, which is founders really ought to revest their stock, like frankly, as often as they can. And in my, in my view, or at least

like at the time of, like, raising venture capital. Right. Yeah, they always feel burned when one of them walks away in the other words, building the company. Oh, people get so mad. I mean, it is, it is, you'll have one founder who literally walks away with just a giant amount of money for, you know, in retrospect, doing very little work. And that person is just absolutely furious because they feel like, you know, they got iced

out of the company. And they're missing out of the glory. And then you've got this, the founder's CEO who's still running the company who's just furious that there's this person out there who's made all this money and continues to make money every day, right, based on, based on work that he's not doing. And so- We've had so many of those conversations because it's usually the CEO that remains, and the CEO usually goes, why am I getting more stock?

My co-founder left not doing anything and has the same stock as me. Like, I've heard that, I've heard that at least a dozen times. Yeah, exactly. And so the, and you would think it's like the emotion of this. It's like, don't these people have like enough going on. and isn't there like enough real work to do and like isn't it shouldn't people be happy that they're successful and this is the kind of thing

where it just like it gnaws at you like so deeply and especially like under pressure like this is the kind of thing it's like the burr in the saddle where it's just like yeah no it's a big for sure well you know reminds me of the

what you talked about is kind of there there's a great line I forgot which samurai book but basically the samurai kind of in the code was in ordinary times matters of character cannot be determined but when something happens all is revealed and that kind of gets at the thing is like they join each other in ordinary times they don't know you know you don't know the integrity the honesty the courage of your co-founder at that point

then you get married then you divide up the company then something happens and then you find out who the real person that you found in the company was, is, and it's, it's difficult. Yep, exactly. And so I would say for first-time founders, tread very carefully if you're going to do it yourself and tread very carefully if you're going to do it with somebody else. And this stuff matters, like this stuff matters so much during the process of then all the work that follow. So this stuff will definitely have a big. Actually, you know, one of the best things that ever happened to us is like we had like a pressure incident when we were raising the A round. And I think that that helped the company get through

like some of the horrible shit. You know, that just because, you know, we had something happened. So that kind of revealed a little bit about who each other were. If that hadn't happened, like we wouldn't have been tested so early. It might have been a lot different, right? So we have something to thank that guy for. Exactly. We won't name names today. No, no, no, that's right. So, all right, next question. And actually, it's somewhat related.

So Vinayak Renaday asks, is there any observable difference between founders of $1 billion versus $10 billion versus $100 billion market cap companies, you know, sort of, let's say, you know, by venture standard, small, medium, and large outcomes? Independent and externalities like market slash speed of adoption slash killer talent and the exact team. So specifically differences in the founders. You know, the CEOs that we've worked with who have had the really big outcomes, you know, be it Todd McKinnon or Mark Zuckerberg, you know, kind of across different kinds of things. So there are, like the common things are just unlimited determination and extreme courage. I would say like those are the two like character traits that they both have. There are other things like founder velocity and this and that and the other. But to kind of get to really big, you have to, one, you have to walk away from a lot of money many times.

So, you know, that takes like a tremendous amount of determination to do that. And then you have to, yeah, you just have to like be willing to walk through an unbelievable amount of pain along the way. So those are kind of the character things, at least that I noticed. You know, there's other like talent-wise and, you know, how brilliant it they are and how great the ideas are, of course, huge factors and what the outcome is. Yep. So I agree with that.

And then the thing I would nominate that's, you know, of that. The thing I would nominate is, I think it's, it's the ability of the CEO, the founder's CEO to calibrate the importance of direct control versus building an organization that can scale. And I guess what I would say is like the most advanced founders, my view anyway, is that, you know, the most advanced, the most advanced founders of CEOs, like their attitude basically, but it actually goes to actually goes to something Andy Grove said in his book, which is the output of a manager is the output of his organization. And so the sort of company version of this is, you know, the company is, the company is the extension of the CEO. Like, just focusing for a moment on the CEO, like, the company is like an extension of the CEO's ability to, like, get things done and have things happen. And so the CEOs who think, I would say, very kind of broadly and expansively about what it means to build an organization that can scale in order to get more and more done where the CEO doesn't have to be in the room, you know. It's definitely a requirement for the large outcomes. Like, you have to do that at some point. Yeah.

And then I guess I'd say, you know, founders, there are founders where the companies clearly have that potential where they just, for whatever reason, they feel like that's just too much of a threat or a challenge or what it is, but like they kind of feel like they need to have too much control in the moment and they can't quite ever let that happen. Yeah, that characteristic is a tricky one to develop because you have to be, in order to do what you're saying, you both have to be. okay with like things being broken in the organization because they're you're letting them

out of your control. So you're going to have things that are embarrassing to you that are kind of bad. But then at the same time, you have to be extremely urgent about getting all those fixed. So it's that balance of not basically stretching yourself out so thin because you have to review every stupid word and everything and you have to, you know, like to rewrite people's code and do all these kinds of things that people feel the need to do at the extreme micro level. But at the same time, you have to really care about kind of pushing things forward and getting them better. And that's difficult psychologically.

Because if you can't take the fact that things aren't good, like that. Like, most people are either happy-go-lucky, like, okay, it's fine, everything's broken and I don't care, and that's terrible, or they're, like, so incensed about it that they're too controlling and they don't, they're not able to grow the organization effectively. Right. And then you get this thing where it's like, there's just clearly more potential, but it's like the company just simply can't get to it. Yeah. Yeah. Look, there's a lot of things that are really important and amazing to do, and you're just not going to do them. And that's usually the best rates you make is to walk away from a real opportunity because there's a bigger one that you're working on. Yeah. Yep.

Okay. All right. Next question. So our friend Louis Anslo asks, how do you think about neuro atypical founders? Is ADHD, which is, I think it's attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, considered a net positive or a liability, something. to be managed and worked around or something to be balanced out

with a more neurotypical co-founder. And I would extend a question from ADHD also, of course, to sort of Asperger's or the autistic spectrum. Yeah, which is, yeah. Yeah, so this is, you know, it is a kind of topic I've spent a lot of time on because, you know, I've got an autistic daughter.

So the whole kind of, the way, like I think one model or a way to look at this is, you know, there's a kind of a distribution of nervous systems. And then you do have, you know, in that distribution, there are ones that are very deviant that are a few standard deviations off the norm and so forth in various ways. And, you know, certainly autism is pretty, you know, kind of off the mean. but interestingly genius is also way off the mean and there's a lot of you know there's there's been much written about kind of overlapping characteristics so you know they there's you know for years everybody talked about bill gates as kind of Asperger's autistic kind of tendencies from rocking to

you know his messy hair and all those kinds of things and um you know Einstein was known for continuing to put the spoon in his mouth long after the cereal was gone and that kind of thing and Van Gogh cut off his ear and gave it to his girlfriend, which if you work with special needs kids, you know, that's very inappropriate social behavior. So, you know, all these kinds of things that, you know, we would consider to be maybe a mental health issue or something atypical are also kind of present

in people's nervous systems who see the world differently, who have some special kind of genius. And so for us as investors, you know, that kind of thing, we'd never rule somebody out on that in that, like, if they are a genius, they may very well be manic, they may have ADHD, they may have all these things. But then there is a follow-on question, which is can they function? Are they functional? You know, can they, and particularly can they function in the context of an organization? and look, that's a high bar, and, you know, many people who have those conditions, you know, can't, and it's not for them. So it's not automatic that, you know, we see somebody who's, you know, bipolar and we go, okay, we're definitely giving, you know, her all our money because she's going to be amazing. She may be Elon Musk, she may be amazing, but she may also, like, be impossible to work for. And so it's, you know, there's not an easy answer, but I would just say that, you know, like, people with deviant nervous systems are special in our society.

And, you know, like some of them can make great contributions. And some of them, you know, we need to take care of. But the one thing we definitely don't want to do is, you know, use CRISPR to eliminate some of these conditions because they contribute amazingly to moving us forward. Right. Yeah. Yeah, you know, the other thing that maybe is happening, you know, culturally, you know, historically there was a lot of shame and still is associated with, you know, a lot of mental conditions, including these, you know, they were sort of, you know, considered to be things not to talk, not to be talked about it, to be hidden away. You know, the stigma, it feels like the stigma is coming off over time. Yeah. And in fact, you do run into more people who basically are, you know, you run into people all the way, all the way on the other side were like they, you know, sort of are very happy to announce it.

And then just a lot of people who are just more open about it. And so, you know, it may be the kind of, it may be the kind of thing that it's going to get easier to discuss, and then also as a consequence, like, easier to deal with and easier to help people with. Yeah, you know, our friend of late Bernard Tyson was really good on this topic where he said, like, the name mental health is a dumb idea. Like, it should just be health because how is mental health different than it affects physical health? And by calling it mental health, we stigmatized it. And that's really been kind of the dumbest thing that we did is stigmatized mental health. Because not only, you know, it's treatable in many ways, but also sometimes it's a huge advantage. So it's great.

We're making progress there. Yeah. And then a book, I actually haven't read the book, but I'm really looking forward to it. There's a researcher that probably the world's leading autism researcher, his name is Simon. Barron Cohen, so B-A-R-O-N, C-O-H-E-N. And his son, by the way, is Ali G, or Borat, although fortunately, Simon is a lot more serious than his son. And he just, he's written a number of books on autism on the autistic spectrum, and he just wrote a book called The Pattern Seekers. And he actually tells sort of the historical story that Ben was referencing, and he sort of, he goes, apparently the thesis of the book, he's kind of goes through history showing how, you know, a large number of the people who, like, really moves.

civilization forward over the last few thousand years are people who were, you know, somewhere on the autistic spectrum or had these, these various issues. So anyway, I haven't read it. I've heard it's great. So for people who are interested, I would recommend that. Okay, let's see. All right. Okay, good. Okay, change the topic, different topic, different domains. So Palak, Zatakia asks, views on text versus audio versus video, content consumption, and creation patterns and how the world read internet will change in each of these three directions. And of course, this is like a very relevant question.

You know, this is a very relevant question just because, you know, we live in a world saturated obviously with media and there's all these controversies around, you know, social media and, you know, streaming and video and all these things over the last decade. And then of course, here we are in Clubhouse, right? Which is like, you know, essentially a brand new medium.

You know, that kind of, you know, borrows from, you know, everything from, you know, conference calls to talk shows, but like, it's fundamentally a new dynamic. And so like, where is this all headed? And so let me advance a thesis, and I will say I am shamelessly ripping this thesis off from somebody who's in the room. And in fact, it's actually in the top row of the room, our friend Antonio, that basically borrows on work done by media researchers like 50, 60, 70 years ago,

including Marshall McLuhan and this guy named Walter Ong who did this sort of very interesting work on this topic, where he basically, the thesis basically is that there's sort of two kinds of cultures. In terms of how media intersects culture and sort of, you know, potentially determines culture or determines the shape of culture, he said there's sort of two kinds of cultures. There's oral culture or what he calls orality. And then there's literary culture or literate culture. And think of this historically. Think of this historically as, you know, there were people way before there was writing, right?

And there were people way before there was math, right? You know, so ideograms and like all the numbers and all these other things. And so how did those people communicate and how did they, you know, sort of shape their ideas, transmit their ideas? how did they develop culture? Like, how do they develop ideas that actually passed on from generation to generation? And they were,

and they were, by definition, oral cultures, right? The one thing that they could do was speak. And so the entire culture was built around this kind of, this kind of oral foundation. And then, you know, later on, it's interesting, like the Greeks,

I think, sort of were one of the inventors of writing, but then they actually continued a largely oral culture for the next few hundred years. And then, you know, kind of literary culture developed, you know, the actually Christianity. The Bible, you know, was a big part of it.

And then, you know, started. Yeah, sure. Right. Right, exactly. And then the printing press kind of kicked it into gear, like, for real, right? Because the printing press lets you move from a very small number of people who could literally hand copy out books who were called scribes to a world where you could have mass production. And, right, the thing that was, the very first thing that was mass produced was the Bible. The very second thing was scandal sheet newspapers. Fake news media.

Literally, scandal sheets in and around the Vatican, spreading all kinds of scripts. all those rumors. And then, you know, the Enlightenment basically, right, like in the 1700s, you know, around there, the Enlightenment basically was like, okay, now we have this basically technology for literary idea transmission. And so now we're going to write everything down. We're going to, like, also do the same thing with numbers. We're going to, like, have mathematics. We're going to all of a sudden have, like, all of a sudden, like, all of the big debates are going to happen, like, through the written word, right? We're going to have all like manifestos and we're going to have like, you know, the American Constitution and like, you know,

these things are all, you know, philosophy as we understand it now, right, is distinct from religion, which is, you know, basically through process of writing. And so then we moved into this world where we have a literate culture. And the thing about this change, at least the way the theory goes, is the thing around this change is that if you think about it like an oral culture, like pre-rational is not quite the right term, but it's like the focus is not rationality or logic. The focus is on interpersonal interactions. Right, relationships, right. So oral cultures, in the theory,

oral cultures are social in nature, they're emotional in nature. They have to do with, right, around human relationships, they have to do, they're very family-centric, tribal-centric. You know, they're very focused on establishing, you know, very strong bonds, you know, between family members or tribe members. They're very focused, you know, for a very long time, by the way, they were all inherently religious.

Like for a very long time, basically, families and tribes both essentially were religious cults to be. And the religious cult was basically the sort of the idea of the community as encoded into its traditions transmitted orally. Basically ended up in the form of a cult. You know, it passed through generational lines. And so, and of course, what didn't they have, right? They didn't have like almost everything today that we would think of as like science or rationality or, you know, basically. like, or like, let's say abstraction, right? They didn't really, they really have abstract concepts because, like, how would you, like,

even if you thought of an abstract concept, how would you ever possibly communicate it? And so basically it's like, okay, human civilization then is like an oral culture up until, I call it the Gutenberg in the Enlightenment. Then, you know, in the West, you know, in various places at various times, we become, you know, in theory, literate cultures, you know, but of course the oral culture doesn't die, right, and the oral culture kind of continues. That's right. Exactly, right. Exactly. And by the way, right, what is sort of a classic expression of oral culture is music, right? And it's like, so it's like, why is there music and why is their music with lyrics? Right. And if you think about it, like if you go back like over the last few thousand years, it's basically because what they could do was they could, the only way to get information reliably from generation and generation was to encode it in the form of a poem or in the story, right? Or in form of musical lyrics, right? Like Homer or Proverbs or all the those things, right?

Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. And there's actually all this research about how basically, like, they use like the structure of like poems kind of through the like the, you know, around the Greek time or even like, you know, sort of later on. It's like, you know, there's this like very dense information packing. It's like they're optimally structured for like maximum information for a line.

Because like you're just like the odds of it getting through, right? We're just not that high. And so you had to really focus. It's still like that. There's such an awesome amount of wisdom in some of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the thing is it's all, you know, this idea of the Lindy thing is like the things that last. And it's like whatever, whatever songs or poems or, you know, you know, sort of epic poetry, like whatever survived was kind of by definition the best of what those people had to offer. Right. That they remembered.

Yeah. And it was important enough to pass down to their kids, right, across, you know, dozens or even hundreds of generations. So anyway, but like oral culture continues. And of course, oral culture is like, you know, conspiracy culture, right? is it's like, okay, like, how do we explain what's happened in the world? We can't deal with the abstractions. And so we need to come up with, you know, basically, you know, these social kind of theories, which are sort of the form of conspiracies. So anyway, it's like, okay, we had oral culture, then we had literate culture. And then it's like, okay, does the internet and social media, right?

And, you know, for that matter, things like Clubhouse, like, are they a continuation of, like, literary culture or are they a return to oral culture? Right? And by the way, here we are talking. Yeah. Right? And so what we're doing here is, you know, very similar to what our... Although in this case, we're talking about books, so...

We are. Well, so it's actually funny. So I'll just have one more little story on this and then get your reaction. So Socrates, right, who's like, you know, one of the smartest people who ever live. Socrates actually hated writing. There's a famous thing that he did in one of his things. So Socrates actually never wrote anything down. He only ever spoke.

And that's why it's all what we know about this. Plato, yeah. Plato, right? Plato wrote everything else down. And so literally, it's like, Socrates refused to write a thing down on principle. And then there was this, like, Plato kid following him around, right, in Athens, like, scribbling all this shit down. And Socrates is like, okay. Yeah, he was anti-writing, right.

Socrates was anti-writing because he thought it messed up your memory. That's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah. He said, look, everything that's important, right, is something that you should be, like, so one of the famous things. He said, one of the famous things he said, look, the problem with writing is it doesn't talk back. Yeah. Right. And so it doesn't matter how often you read something. You're never going to get anything different, right? Whereas when you like talk to somebody, you know, he has the dialectic. When you talk to somebody, you have the opportunity to actually gain your knowledge, right? Because you can actually stress test each other. And so he was actually, he should all over, he shed all over writing. He was like the original lead. He's like that new writing technology sucks.

Exactly. Exactly. And so anyway, like the theory, and this is from Antonio, but the theory basically, the theory would be basically the internet is sort of paradoxically essentially shoving us back or forward into a new oral culture, which is why it's so rife with all of this, you know, crazy, you know, whatever you want to call it, conspiracy, misinformation, you know, sort of. And I would say, right, for good and for bad maybe, right, which is just like all, let's just say all kinds of wildly creative thinking and expression that would never make its way into a book. or into a, you know, whatever, you know, at least a classic version of a magazine or newspaper. But all of a sudden, just like people are able to talk, and literally what's happening is people are talking about it. And so the theory basically would be like we're headed actually back into what is actually a much more oral culture and for better or for worse. That's an amazingly interesting take on that question. And I think it's right. It's interesting, though, You know, the other thing I was going to bring up is, and you mentioned Marshall McLuhan,

but the medium is the message. Right. And it is, you know, one of the things about the different formats, you know, be it kind of a very short form text on Twitter versus the longer text on Facebook, which is, you know, longer text on medium or substack versus Clubhouse versus Zoom. It is, the ideas that you can get across are all very, very different. And like, one of the things that's been amazing on Clubhouse is, listen. It's absent on Twitter.

And it's mostly absent on other things. You know, there's kind of our conversation, I would say. Listening and adding to the knowledge is, you know, the kind of additive knowledge through conversation is not something that happens on the other social networks, or at least not for me. And so this has been a real breakthrough on Clubhouse, I think. And so it's exciting to see where it goes. But it's certainly oral. So maybe more like Socrates.

Yeah. Well, we definitely need the Socrates at Clubhouse. I'm not sure. Less like wing that, you know. Maybe that's Elon. I'm not sure. So, you know, I guess the question, the question I'd ask you, Ben, is like, how do you, because I know you, you know, you think a lot about music, like, and sort of music not just as like a form of entertainment, but like as a mechanism of, I think you'd say, like, cultural transmission. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. And so, like, how would you think about, like, the role of music, like, you know, in this framework? Well, it's interesting because, you know, music is, and when you kind of spend time with musicians, like the, thing that they're always after is the feeling. Like, how do they translate the feeling and the meaning of the feeling into kind of a work of art? And, you know, often, like, the huge challenges, how do you, like, create a new feeling or, like, or correspond, you know, kind of anchor in a feeling that you have. And, which goes very much, you know, like, It's not surprising that it's part of oral culture in that sense.

And so I think that, and then in that way it kind of always tries to both drive as well as represent the culture that it comes from and that it, you know, either of the time period or the locale or what have you. but it is also like dramatically affected by social media because people are going for shorter and shorter feelings in music I would say you know is one of the kind of weird kind of challenges that goes on because people want okay I want that feeling for this five minutes but it's not like you know when we were kids we would listen to albums over and over and over and over again. and get very attached to them because they would kind of bring us to literally a place of time and a set of friends that we can otherwise get to. Right, right.

Yeah. Okay, good. For people who are into this topic, two books I'd recommend. So one, as I mentioned, Walter Ong, his book was called Orality and Literacy. And it is available on Amazon. And then there's another book that came out. It's an extraordinary book, by the way. by an anthropologist named Joseph Henrich, spelled H-E-N-R-I-C-H.

And he just wrote this book called Weird, W-E-E-I-R-D, W-E-I-R-D, and which is a great name. It's a great name. And weird as an acronym, weird as an acronym for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and Democratic. And it's a great book. It's sort of this take down of basically the entire field of psychology on the basis of, like, the Western Psychology basically has only been studying, basically, undergrads at Western colleges as their test subjects for like the last hundred years. And that those are like the most uncharacteristic people in the world as compared to like

everybody else. Yeah. And actually, which is a whole topic. But anyway, the point, the point of bringing it up is the first chapter actually opens on this topic of oral versus literate. And he actually goes into the science. And I was not aware of this. It's an incredible, he gives an incredible explanation.

When people in a society become literate, their brains physically change. And what happens, he says, is that you need basically more neurological processing to deal with written language. And so what happens is your brain expands its ability to interpret basically symbols. And in the process, it steps on the part of the brain that interprets faces. well and that goes together right like you know they it screws up the whole relationship culture if you don't remember anybody's name because you don't recognize their face it screws it all up that makes a lot of sense yeah exactly and of course you know there are people by the way there are people who literally have this you know thing called you know face blindness

you know where they literally literally can't tell the difference you know I've actually had this happen where like I literally don't recognize somebody I met two minutes ago right It's just like, for a long time, I was just like, okay, I'm just like something's like, I'm just confused or something. And it's like, oh, this is actually a thing. But anyway, you know, this is actually like a real, there's actually a real thing in the brain. Like there's a section of the brain that is devoted to basically interpreting faces. And that is the section of the brain that like deals with, you know, basically how to,

but it's not just recognition. It's also like how do you interpret emotion, right? Right. Right. How do you do bonding and have relationships to know when somebody's upset? And so anyway, it's interesting because like it's an actual physical change in the brain. And it's a non, it's not a change. in the DNA. It's a change in the actual physical structure. So it's a neuroplasticity,

but it's probably, but it's heritable. So he, this is the thing that freak me out is he says it's heritable. Yeah. And so I got to say, I'm not enough of a neurologist to understand this, but yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a neurological change. It's a charitable, despite being not genetic. And at least in theory, like if it's not genetic, at least in theory, presumably this means like if, you know, there was like a nuclear war or something and we, we reverted entirely to orality, you know, presumably are over time. our brands will go back, yeah? And by the way, you know, justifiably so, because they would need, they would need that skill. So anyway, all right, that's enough on that topic. Yes. Okay, let's see.

Let's go to, let's go to these are now, let's go to some more personal topics, or more individual level topics. So Gabby Goldberg asks, how do you structure your days and your work in general to avoid burnout? And then related Ishani J. Patel, that starts laughing right off the bat. What does your morning routine look like and how does it set you up for a successful day? And so, I laugh because it presumes that like I avoid burnout, which I don't think that's true. But, like the things that I find, I mean, there's just general, like routine things like wake up, drink some water, exercise, and then, you know, kind of, I like to not do correspondences in the morning, like I rather kind of breed.

you know, what's ahead of me for the day. And then I find it to be very useful. You know, look, and you and I are really lucky in that we're able to do the thing that we like doing the best, which is, you know, meeting people who want to change the world and learning about their new ideas. I mean, like, and then, like, helping them do that. I can't even imagine doing any other job.

Like, I would definitely retire if you kick me out of the firm or if I could get you out of it. So getting back in touch with that, like why I am excited about it. And I usually go through my calendar and I ask myself that question, like, why am I excited about this meeting? Why am I excited about that meeting? And by the way, if I'm not, I cancel it because, you know, it obviously is they don't need me for it at that point.

In fact, you might be counterproductive. No, exactly, because I'm just going to be angry and get us a bad reputation and a negative score on some system. Right. What about you? How do you keep putting out and bring that? Yeah, so I've had kind of two modes of operation in my life. And, you know, this firm has kind of kicked me from one end of the second.

So for a long time, I would say I would describe it as just sort of pure fury. Yeah. So. Like to prove yourself. Yeah, no, like the chip on myself. That's been a challenge for me is like, you know, I don't have nearly the chip on my shoulder that I once did. Yeah. Although you've done a better job at maintaining it. I look for new motivators. Well, we'll talk about that in a second.

But yeah, so like for a long time, like how I worked literally was like wake up in the morning, just like work all. You go to sleep and repeat. And so it wasn't like it was not structured per se. You know, there's some loose adherence to a calendar, but mostly it was just work all the time. And then when there's more time left over, like work some more. And so, you know, if you're sufficiently motivated, you can. do that for a while and probably maybe you don't want to do that your whole life um you know with this firm i would say well two things one is this firm and then you know obviously having a family which i did you know relatively late versus versus a lot of people it's like okay like

both this this firm or this business and then having a family just simply demands more structure um if you want to like honestly yeah you can't just work all day and that's really bad for family life for all of those young couples listening do not recommend um and And so what I've done actually is a 180. So I wrote this productivity blog post, I think in 2007, and I basically, it was, I actually sort of lifted it from Arnold Schwarzenegger who claimed to have this as a technique. And basically it's the, it's the idea of not having a calendar. Yeah.

So it's this idea that like your day is wide open and then you just like work on whatever is the most important that day. And, you know, this is like what Warren Buffett says he does. Right. It's like, like, well, actually, Warren Buffett says he does this. He's like, look at him. It's like, look at me up and you're like, hey, let's get together next Thursday. You know, my answer is no.

like I don't book things like in advance, but like, you know, if you do find yourself in Omaha next Thursday, give me a call. And, you know, when you're, when you're warm buff, you can do that. When you're Schwarzenegger, you can do that. And so like, I was sort of like trying to push it as far as I could in the other direction. But like, you know, in this job, like basically what I've done is a total 180. And so now I've gone to like total structure. And this goes to the burnout question. So it's like, okay, how can you? could you use total structure, not to just drive yourself crazy, but to avoid burnout? And the thing that a friend of mine told me, the thing, the thing to basically do is schedule

all the stuff you like to do first. Interesting. I would think it would be the opposite, but that's interesting, yeah. Oh, so this is the thing. This is the psychological thing. This is a friend of mine is the psychiatrist. So he said, look, he said, the thing that people have, he's like, well, look, there's some people who just, like, you know, are on a schedule with their whole lives, right?

And, you know, a lot of athletes are like this, you know, and they just, like, naturally follow a schedule. And if it wasn't written down, they would follow it anyway. And, you know, these are the same people who, like, It's their checkbook, right? And so some people But like for the rest of us, including me, like that doesn't happen naturally. And so basically what happens is people realize enough control over their lives

and things are slipping away. And so they're like, okay, I'm going to now get organized, right? And I'm going to have a schedule. And so they create a calendar and then they put in the calendar all of the stuff that they have to do. Right. And then now they look at that thing and it's like a rock, right? you know, hanging from your neck. Yeah.

And then you get, yeah, then your whole day is wrecked. You get in a bad state. It's like this every day. And maybe, you know, I've had this experience. I'm sure you have like every, you know, it's just you wake up in the, it's the opposite of what you said. Instead of wake up in the morning and look at your calendar and getting excited, it's looking at your calendar and being like, oh, my God, like, what have I done?

Right. I'm ruining my life. I hate my life. I want to skip it. Yeah. Well, and there's actually, there's actually this thing. It actually, sleep scientists actually say there's this thing called the revenge effect. and I've had this in the past where literally what happens is you're doing things all day long that you have to do

and then you basically go home at night and you're like finally I have time for myself and then basically what happens is you stay up too late basically inflicting revenge on yourself right like and specifically inflicting revenge on the person who tomorrow morning is going to have to wake up and do it right um right and so and you just like you know the idea of going to bed just like makes you mad and so you don't do it and then you you know you then your health starts to suffer it's a it's a lot of professionals end up asleep disorders in part because of this. And so it's like, okay, like, that's dysfunctional. That's why he says basically you flip it. And so what you do is you open up the calendar and, you know, you start from scratch if you're like taking this seriously. And then you block out all the stuff you want to do, right?

And then it's like, okay, here's the time I'm going to spend with my family, you know, whatever, spouse kids, dot, da, dot, da, here's the time I'm going to spend by myself. Here's my, here's my, I want to watch TV at night. Here's my hour to be able to watch TV. I want to play Xbox. I want to go on a walk. I want to, you know, whatever. I want to zone out.

You know, I want to have time. That's not scheduled. Right. And it's just like boom, boom, boom, boom. Like those things go on the calendar. Right. And then those things are as important as everything else. Right.

Yeah. Well, you know, that's such an important point about all of this is people get into feeling guilty about the dumbest shit. I feel guilty if I don't take every meeting somebody asked for. Right. Or like, you know, but what. the organization needs from you is they need that energy, they need the, like, the positivity, they need the sharp thinking. They don't need you to, like, drag your ass through 30 meetings in a row that you don't want to go to. And, you know, people get that mixed up in their mind all the time.

And it's particularly, you know, like if you're a CEO, because, look, you hired all these people they want to meet with you. You've got customers. They want to talk to you and so forth. And it's, you know, how can you say no to that? But you got to say no to that because they don't want that you. You know, they want the good you. Well, and specifically, like where this heads, right, is that you will be like bleary-eyed, like unhappy, you know, hungover, sleep deprived, overweight, right? Yeah, right.

You know, diabetic, like unhealthy, right? This is probably why everybody used to smoke. Right? Because it's like the one thing they could do the thing I control over. And so, yeah, exactly. And then like, yeah, you get in the meeting and somebody's in a fall mood and it's like, it does that do with the meeting. It's just that that is meeting number 28th for the day. And, you know, yep, yep, yep, yep, no, definitely. Yeah. And so, yeah, so it's the direction of energy, right? And then basically, like, my friend says, look, you know, there are no free lunches. And so you've got the 24 hours in the day, seven days of the week. And so you fill in all the stuff you want to do, right? And then you fill in all the stuff you have to do. Right. And then, you know, you probably. have, you know, at that point, 15 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. And so, then you need to start prioritizing, right? But then, and then you basically want to prioritize on both

sides, right? So you want to, like, really focus in on, oh, you give me an example. Like, I like, you know, I like working out and I like watching TV, okay? Like, those are going to happen together, right? And so, like, you know, during the week, I'm just not going to watch TV where I'm not on the treadmill. You know, like, that, that's just a tradeoff I have to make because it just literally doesn't fit, or to your point, the tradeoff at work, which is like, I'm just not going to, I'm not going to take that. I'm not going to take that. Yeah, I'm just, I'm not going to take that 14th call. You know, there, there is a limit on how much I can do. And then this made me sound incredibly productive and functional. So let me compromise that by saying my morning

routine. My morning routine is what I call hot docking. And Ben, you've been the recipient of this many times, which is my morning routine is the opposite of the get up two hours ahead. And like you said, like, you know, drink some water and meditate and review, like, I don't do any of that. He just walk right into the meeting. Yes. And by the way, work from home has been, I've had to watch this because it's been getting, it gets a little crazy. But like, literally, it's like, oh, my first call, you know, my first calls at 8 a.m. The alarm is set for 758.

So roll out of bed, slap the headphones in, and off we go. So that's the other side. Okay, three more to go. So Dave R. Watson asks, do you believe in gut instinct? And if so, can you give an example of when you've used it successfully? Yes. Well, it's interesting because there's like a scientific kind of explanation where there are a gigantic number of brain cells in your gut. So your gut is actually like fairly smart at doing certain things.

though I think it's mainly at like controlling digestion and things like that. But the way I would describe kind of gut instinct in terms of, you know, particularly if you have a job leading an organization, a lot of it comes out. So you're synthesizing all this information from many, many, many places. And it all kind of accumulates in your nervous system, ultimately as a feeling. And, you know, when I was CEO, like CEO of a struggling company, if there was something wrong in the company, I would get physically ill.

I'm like, if there's something really wrong, like I would automatically get physically ill. I knew there was something wrong in the company. I could just feel it. It was that kind of bad. It gets so tied to your nervous system. And kind of the one time that I actually remember the most, actually, was the conversation between you and I had Mark over. There's a long conversation, but we got an offer to buy opsware.

for like a little over $4 a share, I think. And at the time, I didn't look, and we had been through so much. Like it would have been like a nice, you know, a nice like get out of jail free card almost kind of thing. Yep. But I knew like I could feel like where we were in the market, what was going on and so forth. And I knew that was like just too low a price to sell it for. But I couldn't, I literally couldn't articulate why. And I remember we had like six conversations about it.

But I knew I was like, no, we're not going to sell it. We're not even going to entertain that one because I know it's wrong. And that was, you know, getting back to the co-founder thing, the fact that you had enough trust in my knowledge to not make me articulate it, like that is to whatever, 14 and a quarter of a share, which is what we ultimately sold it for. But that was 100% of good feeling in that I kind of articulate it. which is kind of a little bit, I think my definition of that.

Yeah, so that's, yeah, so, yeah. So I think the key word in what you said is synthesis in my view, which is basically like gut instinct when it's useful, it's the result of the fact that you have spent, you know, just an enormous amount of time, right, ingesting information, right? And so this is why, like, Ben's talking about when you're CEO, but like, you know, when your CEO,

you're talking to people all the time around the state of the company. You have this, like, composite view that forms, right? This is the result of like a thousand conversations and like a thousand pieces of information. And like, you know, to your point, like, maybe with a gun to your head or something, you could like diagram it all the way out. But like at the end of the day, it's the summation of all of this information. So I think that that's a really big deal, right? And so like, you know, for people who put that level of work in understanding something,

like, you know, their instincts could often be quite good. What I see, and this is something I try to guard against it myself, I don't know how successfully what I'm trying to. What I see is people who are really good at that, who really have that dialed in for the first call at 10 or 15 years of their career. And it's just because like it's actually an earlier conversation having. It's like they're working around the clock. They're talking to everybody. They understand everything. Right. You can ask them like any question about the field. You can ask them any question about their company. You know, anything about the technology. Like they understand all of it because they're absorbing all this information. Right. And they're making these gut calls. And these got calls, you know, they're not always right, but they're often right. And you talk to successful people, and they will credit a lot of this to do those things. And then what happens at some point is they just like, they stop doing all that work. And they still use that and they, but they believe they can still do it. Yep. That's exactly right.

And so now instead of, you know, having the decision based on 1,000 conversations or 1,000 pieces of data, it's based on 300. Right. And then, you know, before long. Or three. Right. Exactly. Right. And then, you know, and this corresponds with, you know, the reason this is so like,

like this, you know, kind of deceptive when it happens is, you know, this is kind of when people are at their most successful, right? And so this is when, like, people have had this, like, amazing run in a lot of cases. And everybody trusts them. Yeah. Yes, everybody trusts them. Everybody talks about how smart they are. Everybody's complimenting them all the time. You know, they've, you know, if it's in tech or business, they've made money. And then it's like, okay, now they've got hobbies. You know, now they've got, you know, they're taking a lot more, you know, personal trips and they're, you know, out of the office. And, you know, they're just not like, there's not, they've just advanced beyond, like,

just that sheer level of work. And then they're still making the gut calls in there. And now they just, they literally have no foundation whatsoever for the gut calls and they don't even know it. Yeah. Well, it's funny because when we, this was one of the most challenging parts of starting the firm

is that there were some things that I had done a lot of work on. Or, you know, like, well, the first investment I made was, or the first that I went on the board of was ACTA, of course. and that was something that I knew for 20 years I knew that category. Like I'd been working on it forever, you know, since we did LDAP at Netscape. And so like it was the easiest investment choice ever for me.

And then, you know, I, you know, I know people well enough. I really like Todd and Freddie. But, you know, that one was too easy. And so over time, you know, I would say almost every mistake I'd, made in venture capital is exactly what you're saying, which is I didn't have the knowledge I thought I had. And so I had to kind of rebuild the discipline to go, you know, know enough about things to make an investment or to not like screw up an investment that somebody else was going

to make where they had done the work. Like that was a relearning for me after, you know, and as you say, like success is your worst enemy. As soon as you start thinking, you're successful because of you, as opposed to the exact things that you did, plus a lot of luck, then you totally ruin yourself. Yeah. Ben will recall we had this, we had this discussion with Jeff Bezos when we were first starting the venture firm. And you can tell the story, Ben. Do you recall the conversation with Jeff? You're talking about why we went to go build another company?

Yeah, that one. Yeah, that one. Yeah. Yeah. So Jeff, Jeff says, well, I'll, you know, I'd like to invest in you guys in your venture capital firm, well, why aren't you going to just, like, quit and go start another company? Like, you can obviously do that. You're, like, super successful entrepreneurs.

And I said to Jeff, I said, Jeff, if you, for whatever reason, like, sold Amazon or retired, would you go and, like, start another company and be CEO? He's like, absolutely not. And he said, well, why not? And he said, like, I love the fourth grade, but I'm not going back to the fourth grade. Right. And it's, you know, you don't want to live your same life over again as it was. It was such a funny moment with him.

Yeah, exactly. So that's that problem. Okay, second to the last question, penultimate question. Ash R.O. asks, what you suggest to those who will be going to college now so that they can be future-proof, innovate and futuristic technologies, not just bytes, but also biotech energy, et cetera. And so let's like, let's double underline there, I think, the sort of future-proof concept. Like, how do you, what can you get out of college or how do you think about college or skills, acquisition at that age such that it's still going to be relevant, you know, and useful to

you 10, 20, 30 years down the road as you either go into different fields or as the actual, you know, as the topics themselves change. Yeah. So I, you know, I'll go back. I think I've said this many times in the past, but the most important thing in college by far is learning how to think and just learning how to think and becoming more sophisticated about, you know, understanding many more ideas, you know, what they mean, what their impact is, and getting, you know, then the beautiful thing about colleges, you're with so many people from so many different backgrounds. You can get so many perspectives. And then, you know, taking that ability to learn into the future with you. And that's, that's the only way you can future proof because things

are going to be very different. I also think, you know, like people think of computer science incorrectly you know and part of it has just been let's like learn to code and it's like well that's a little bit of it but I would think of information science in general is kind of like it's a tool like mathematics and so it's very useful because you can apply it to so many things and the principles are applied to so many things and so you know you should think about learning things that are in that class that are tools that you can apply to every field and certainly, you know, mathematics and computer science can be applied to anything. And, and, you know, like with really interesting new results if they haven't been applied before.

So that kind of thing is also very valuable. Yeah. Yeah, so, yeah. So people may know, this is one of the reasons why I was confident in writing this essay called Software Reads the World almost 10 years ago now. Yeah. And why I was kind of so confident pegging things on software. And it's literally this process of like, well, we just saw it with a moment. Moderna vaccine as an example, right? So like, you know, prior vaccines, I try to develop a vaccine

for COVID the old-fashioned way. Like, you have to get a culture. If you get a sample of the thing, you have to culture it. You have to try to develop a, you know, sort of a defanged version of it or diluted form of it to turn into a vaccine. You know, that's kind of how vaccine developments happen. And with the Moderna vaccine, they got, they literally never had, I don't think the live virus early on. They just had the genetic. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they did not. They didn't, they didn't have a lab. Yeah, exactly. This is a good thing, too, because it's been known to escape from the lab. especially, yes, I'll stop there. So, yeah, so what they got was they got the genetic code, which is, which is data, email to them and from China, and they were able to copy, basically, I think it's like, I'm sure it's more complicated than this, but they copy and paste it out of the email, right, and like put it into their program that, you know, drives their manufacturing process.

And two days later, they had the vaccine, right? And, you know, obviously a far more effective vaccine and they would have had the old-fashioned way. Like, you know, that process, you know, it's just an example of, like, a lot of biological science now. It's this very interesting intersection of computer science and engineering on the one hand with kind of, you know, wet, you know, kind of classical wet biology on the other hand. And so, you know, and this, this is leading towards a future of basically like, you know, vaccine, you know, vaccine development and therapeutic development, literally happening on laptops, right, which is like a, which is, you know, which is just like an incredibly wild concept, right, to be able to, you know, CRISPR, the ability to be able to program genetics, you know, synthetic biology. So you've got this thing where all of a sudden, like, computer science is this lever into this whole other field. And so the same thing is true in material science. The same thing is true in, you know, increasingly in chemistry. Like there's all these different, you know, economics, all these other fields.

Even, by the way, like analysis of either in the humanities like analysis of music or analysis of language, it's increasingly computational. And so I do feel like we have this kind of magic, a lot of sometimes call it like alchemy, like almost philosopher's stone, right? The legend of the philosopher's stone was this thing that turns lead into gold. And we never found that. But we did find this thing that basically turns code into things that happen in the real world. Or, you know, quite literally like ideas that you type into a computer that, like, pop out the other end in the form of like a vaccine. And so, like, I think like that's going to be a really good bet across many fields for the next 30 years. For sure.

And you know, the mistake we made. We called it computer science. That was the dumbest name ever. because people think it's tied to the machine. Right, right. Where it's a completely abstract set of concepts for describing and understanding the world and changing the world and programming. Right, that's right. That's right.

Exactly right. So, yeah, exactly that. Okay, good. And then we are at 819, so we're right on track. So let's go to the last question. So our friend, Wakas Ali, asks, has Mark gotten you, Ben, into trouble because of his sense of humor? what's the key to building the kind of co-founder partner relationship you both enjoy?

And, of course, I have to immediately challenge the question and the assumption that my sense of humor has gotten us into more trouble than your sense of humor. My sense of humor has definitely gotten us into trouble as well. Please discuss. I feel like your sense of humor has gotten you into trouble. I think maybe my sense of humor has gotten us into trouble. The problem with your sense of humor is that it's all. like sarcasm and and and but you've got like a sarcasm poker face so nobody knows that it's

sarcasm and if it's on twitter they definitely don't know it's sarcasm definitely do not know i can confirm that and yours then well and then mine because my sense of humor always evolves around saying things that are unacceptable to say in polite society And so it's just, yes, they're both problematic and very, very problematic. Yes, exactly. So, yeah, I will just tell you, like, I will say, I will say this, whenever Ben says something completely inflammatory, and it's usually quite funny, but completely inflammatory, and there's blowback, my immediate reaction is, oh, thank God, it wasn't me.

Yeah. It happens. And I'm just, and I'm literally, I'm literally, like, so grateful that it's not my fault this time. Yeah, well, that's a nice thing because you never get mad at me because you're just happy. And I know I will do it in the future. And then, okay, the more serious part of the question, what's the key to building the kind of co-founder partner relationship that we enjoy? And what do you think? Well, I mean, I think the big thing is that we don't, like we care about each other's feelings, I guess, but not enough to prevent us from saying anything.

Right. And so, like, we're both okay. I mean, to me, the real key is that we can argue and hurt each other's feelings a lot and not have that affect the relationship at all, which is, you know, it's a difficult thing to do, and it's a trust that you build over a long period of time. But it's the only way you can actually learn from each other is if you challenge each other and, like, not on some. whatever bullshit theoretical concept or something, but like a core, core thing, like Ben, the way you're running the firm is you're fucking the whole thing up and like people aren't communicating correctly and we're going to run right into a wall.

Like, if you can't say that to me, then the relationship's just not that valuable because who the hell else is going to say it to me, right? And that's the magic of co-founders. And like, you know, and by the same token, I could tell you like,

you know, you're fucking all mad about this thing and like you're full of shit. You're like, you can't even know what's going on. And you have to be able to hear that. And then we get stronger every day. But if you like if you've got a happy relationship or you've got a relationship where you don't like each other, like neither of those work, it's got to be, you know, it's got to be where you really, really interact on controversial things that you both have strong feelings about and can get to an answer. Like, that's a relationship that's got value. Yep.

And then I had two things, or at least here's how I think about it. So, and this is how I advise people when they're thinking about having this, you know, kind of partnership or having like a, you know, like a founder partnership or something. Basically, it's like the way I think about it is, like, the partnership has to be more important to me than being right. And what I mean by that is like there are all these issues that come up and there are all these opinions that I have. Right. I've got an opinion on everything. I always think I know what to do. And like everybody, you know, I love expressing my opinion. So like, I love getting my way, right? Like I'm a control freak as much to anybody else. And so it's like, and by the way, I'm convinced that I'm right, right? Because like, you know, I've been, you know, doing this for a long time. And I've been, you know, made time. And you spend a lot of time talking to yourself and you talk yourself into it. I do. Exactly right. I have a very vigorous debate in my head and I end up with myself. And so it's like, I'm right. And so. It's like, I'm right. And so. I show up and, you know, I still do it. I show up in the discussion.

It's like, okay, I'm right. I know what to do. But it's like, okay, like, what's more important, like being right? And I say being right because it's the way, the lighter way of saying this is what's more important making the decision or the partnership. But it's easy in the abstract to say, oh, the other person should make that decision. It's much harder to let the other person make the decision when you know that you're right. Yeah, right.

Yeah, that's a tricky thing. Yeah. Right. And so it's that feeling of like, I actually know what the right thing to do here is. And he thinks he does, but I actually know. And, like, he disagrees with me. And, like, I have to get my way because I'm right. Right.

And, of course, what's happening is, you know, you, he, the other person is saying, like, the exact same thing to themselves, right? For the exact same reasons, right? And I mean, you know, and then, of course, it's in the heat of the moment. So who knows who's right? You won't find out until later. So the way I think about it basically is, like, the partnership has to be more important than being right, which means basically, at least here's what I tried to do is.

You have to seek out opportunities to let the other person be right. and to make the call. And the way I think about it honestly is I think about it, it's almost, I don't mean it like, I don't mean it mechanically like this, but it's a little bit like, it's banking trust. It's kind of how I think about it, which is like the more decisions I can let you make, like the more you'll trust me that if I really have a strong point of view, right, someday and if I really put my foot down, right, that it's not just me being me, but like this must be at an incredibly unusual level of severity because, you know,

there's another thousand times where we were discussing serious topics. And I was like, well, look, here's what I think. But let's go with what you think. Yeah. No, I think that part's true, definitely, too. You do need, like, a tremendous amount of mutual respect to pull that off, of course, because otherwise it just drive you crazy. Well, you can't.

Somebody fuck up the whole company. Yeah, right. Well, that's the thing. You can't, right? The thing that would kill that is if you then try to do the accounting, right, after the fact. Yeah. And so like if you try to keep track of the number of times when you defer to the other person and it turned out they thought they're right and it turned out they're wrong and you're sitting there like two years later and you're like, well, shit, like that's happened like 20 times. Like then you're, I think basically it's over. Yeah. And you know, and on, it's funny. And on investment decisions in particular, that's the most dangerous shit. Mm-hmm. Right. Actually, this is the Annie Duke book thinking and that's what she uses the word. She introduces the term resulting. which is evaluating decisions after the fact by their outcomes as opposed to the process you put in of.

Yeah, yeah, and making sure that process is right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, so I think that's the, I think that's the, yeah, so I would, I would nominate that as the thing. And I would just say, like, it's just observing other people, like, that's a, that's a, that's a hard thing. Like, it's hard, it's hard to make ego. You know, we're in this world, like, we're all high ego people. And so it is hard on the ego.

And you have to, like, it's a level of. commitment to the partnership that has to supersede the eco, which is really hard. Yeah, that's hard. And then just finding somebody who you can deal with at that level, who you can tell, who you trust them enough that the number of mistakes that you, they make, you're going to be okay with. Right, right, right. And then the final thing I'd say is the thing that Ben said earlier, which is like, you probably won't really know if it's one if it's like an actual like solid partnership until it

really goes through serious stress right and you go you like when you really don't right when you really go through the shit like and it's got to be something like really serious like something existential to the company or to the you know to the effort or something you know to your lives like you know yeah like a dot com crash and three layoffs you know going public with two million dollars in trailing revenue that type of shit that kind of stuff exactly and so but now the good news is like going through the shit, like number one, you, you, you, you discover a lot about the other person, and that's incredibly illuminating and gives you the foundation. But the other is like, you know, if you go through enough shit together, it's like the new shit you go through, this isn't that bad in comparison. And so you kind of both get calibrated and you both kind of calm down, which is. Well, and you also know, like, you know, the thing that happens when things go bad is paranoia, right? Like, it's like, okay, are they, you know, the other person, you know, going to fuck it all up? Are they trying to fuck it all up? Are they trying to fuck me, are they going to ruin my reputation? Are they going to, like, you know, all that kind of thing goes through your head. But, you know, if you've been through that, then you know where

that comes out. And so that, and the paranoia is as bad as the actual problem, by the way. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yep. Okay, fantastic, Benjamin. It is at 28 p.m. We have nailed the timing. Thank you so much to the people who asked all the questions. Please keep the questions coming, and we will see you all back here in exactly six days and 23, 23 hours. Yeah, thank you, everybody. Great questions, and thank you so much for listening. Okay, fantastic. Have a great night.