All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - #AIS: Pear VC’s Mar Hershenson on making successful founders

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

This talk was recorded LIVE at the All-In Summit in Miami and included slides. To watch on YouTube, check out our All-In Summit playlist: https://bit.ly/aisytplaylist 0:00 Pear VC Founding Managing Partner Mar Hershenson gives a talk on making successful entrepreneurs: can great founders be created, or is it something they are born with? 17:04 Bestie Q&A with Mar: Catalyzing great founders, why the PayPal Mafia created more unicorns than early Google employees, creating more opportunity for underrepresented founders, inducing failure & more Follow Pear VC: https://twitter.com/pearvc Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect

Next up is Mara Hershenson, who's going to talk about entrepreneurship. Come on out, Mara. Mara is going to talk about creating successful founders. We will be off tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. When you're when you're trying, bring man David Sack.

I'm going to win. And I said we open sources. Well, I have a pretty positive and optimistic talk in the movie, maybe a little bearish in general. I'm a smart, I'm one of the founders of PairVC and I am very fortunate. I actually work with many startups, I've worked for the last decade with 100 plus startups through worth of worth of 100 billion dollars and they're worth over $100 billion. And they all have one thing in common.

When I invest, there's actually nothing. I'm the first check. There is no product, there's no customers, there's just the founders. So it is no surprise that I often wonder, are these founders born? Are my cards dealt as soon as I invest in one of these founders?

Or is there anything I can do to change them? That's a big question. And I think many of you would say founders are born. Take, for example, Palmer Lucky. He's talking tomorrow. He was a prodigy. He created the first prototype of the Oculus Rift at 17. And he sold the company to Facebook at 22.

Clearly, there's something special about him. Or Melanie Perkins, she started her first business at 14. Then at 19, went on to build the largest year book business in Australia. And now she runs one of the most successful startups. And then Elon Musk. I don't think I need to say anything. He's definitely someone special, something in his DNA, right?

So you wouldn't be surprised. Many people ask me what makes a good founder. And there's a bunch of characteristics. You can Google it. People come up with a bunch of things, like wrist-taking, resilience, ambition, et cetera. And in fact, there's some research by academia that shows that people have some innate property.

So researchers at Northeastern surveyed 100th of entrepreneurs, and they counted that 42% of them had started a business as a kid. So actually that's a good hint for anybody making an angel investments. Maybe it's a question you can ask. Now, there's also data that shows that founders can be made. And while there are 37% of founders, the repeat founders in companies today, 59%

repeat founders are in the top unicorns. So that means at least you learn something from your first experience. So it would be reasonable to believe that there is some relationship about, you know, what's your chances of being successful to how you're born However, I do believe there is some form something you can do, right? There's some energy or some modification that would put you up in that chart And I think the wider arrow shows that at the early parts of that chart you need a lot of effort And in fact, this is what I've learned from being an investor.

Roughly, and these are all rough numbers out of the 10 companies we back, two will fail. No matter what we do, that's just almost our destiny. And Jason wrote a blog post in 2015, so that's a long time ago, that's titled, you don't have what it takes, I recommend you reading it. And basically the summary is, some people just don't have what it takes. It would take so much effort to change them that you might as well give up, right?

Okay, so now that 10 companies will be back, two will succeed no matter what. You know, us people in venture like to take credit, companies we back, two will succeed no matter what. Us people in venture like to take credit, but truly the founders, there's a percentage of founders that work independently of us. We backdoored as early on this picture of their founders, and I can tell you that Tony Shoe, the CEO,

would have made it with or without any of his investors. And then there are six companies that I think we can influence. Okay, there's something we can do. And the question is perhaps, what could you do with that 60%? How can you make them more successful? Or maybe better, if you're at the top 10%, can you accelerate their success? That's a big question and that's what I'm really passionate about. Can you create more successful entrepreneurs? And why is it important? Why should you care? I think

this is the right audience, you don't have to say there are many numbers to show that having more entrepreneurs is good for the economy. You can read them, but just more entrepreneurs means a better world. So the question is, how can you build this entrepreneur? Is there a magic machine where you can actually take a regular founder or a regular person that outcomes a successful founder? Okay. a regular person and outcomes a successful founder. Okay, so at the risk of being elitist, I am going to say that one of the closest machines

of entrepreneurship Stanford University, and the numbers actually show it, 10% of unicorns have founders that attend at Stanford. And what's even more, in the all-in summit, I actually went through all the linked ins. 40% of the speakers attend that Stanford. And I think all of us have started something, whether it's 538, like Nade, or VentureFirm, or a company,

or multiple companies. So there's some special gene, right? And the question is, what does Stanford have that other people don't have, right? It's a higher ed institution. So for sure you're going to go and take some classes, gain some skill sets. They put you around, people that are like you.

And they have a brand. So you have access to capital, network, et cetera. Having been there, though, I will tell you that the skill set doesn't quite matter as much. You can go online and learn some of that. But you're peers around you. And the next degree around you actually really, really matter. And in a way, what these people are doing

is transforming your character. And I can tell you that firsthand. Just imagine yourself, you may be a founder or an investor, I don't know, you are dropped in a world where you're basically are surrounded by people that are constantly thinking about starting new companies. This is smart people. The ambition is very, very high. There is innovation almost breathing everywhere and nerding out is very okay, right? So by doing this throughout years you actually become one of them and your peers are really fundamentally changing your character. You become somebody

that starts to believe in themselves, you can do it. You learn basically to expand your own ambition, right? You You may think 100 million exit is good, but if you go to Stanford, you know that's not good enough. So you're setting your own bar. It's a really interesting process. And the question is, are there other machines like this? Or is Stanford just the only way to do it? Well, the good news is there are other places that do this.

Or the other forms of doing this, I would say. And one of them, perhaps, is the PayPal Mafia. I think a lot of them running around here in the next couple of days. You all know that they started many successful companies, Tesla, LinkedIn, Palantir, firm, YouTube, Yelp, Yammer, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right? There's something magic about having been there at that point in time. I haven't researched them, and I don't have that much direct contact, but according to Sarah Lacey, who is a journalist,

and she spent a lot of time researching them, she concluded there was the confidence that they gained when they were there. Now, I'm not sure, but maybe in the Q&A, they will reveal the secret. There's other mafia. This one I'm more familiar with. This is RAPI. RAPI is a company that was founded in 2015.

So not that long ago, in Colombia, and it really transformed the Latin startup environment. There's been 100 plus companies companies created by rapi employees. It's crazy, even almost 50 in Colombia. It almost literally changed the country, which is a big deal. I have the privilege of working with a few of these founders, and there's something coming in them.

They all have this sense of ambition that super fast growth. It's really interesting how they're almost cut from the same cloth. So there are other places. And I think we had the mayor here earlier. I guess he would claim that Miami is on its way to doing some of that. So there are places. So I want to tell you about a couple of experiments that are personal to me that I've been running

and hopefully will inspire you to do something on your own. The first one is I teach a class at Stanford. It's a startup simulation class. You have to, for one sec, forget as at Stanford. I'm actually taking it to other colleges as well. It's not your usual class, okay? So it's actually not your usual class in the sense that I never lecture. There is no lecture.

So me, there's almost no communication for me. So I've been teaching this class for six years. We will take eight teams. These teams have four to five people. And you cannot have a startup when you come to this class. In fact, you must be way earlier. You only have an idea or you may have a couple of ideas, but if you have something that

you've been working on for a while, you're automatically disqualified. So everybody that comes in knows very, very little. And then what the class is designed to do is to just maximize your peers interaction. Because I believe that that's the way that you create founders. So how do we do that? First, we're very lucky that I can actually craft the class. So even within Stanford, you have to get admitted to this class there's only 20% acceptance,

so I'm able to figure out who do we want to get in. And then the trick is to force each of the teams to present to each other every week. And I know it sounds really simple, but just by doing that you're actually motivating and teaching by example. And the results are pretty incredible. We actually have one to three companies per year that get started. I think we have two unicorns. There's 600 million capital raised. And I think what's really, really interesting

is that every year I'll get some pretty nerdy PhD student that goes off to be a successful founder. So it's very impressive. And this one, which is really interesting, when I first started 20% of the kids were females. And I said, well, I bet we can shape the class. So throughout the years, we've been increasing female enrollment. And I can tell you that the results have not changed.

We actually now have more female founded companies. And this is actually something I care about. So I went. Thank you. Thank you. APPLAUSE OK, so this takes me to my second experiment, which is actually even more successful and has nothing to do with Stanford.

Okay, so there's no Stanford involved. Okay, so about a year ago, a year and a half ago, I decided, let's get a group of women together artificially, and again, the same idea, this women cannot be founders, founders okay these are women that are just high potential okay and we actually have 30 to 40 women per cohort we've done it twice and the goal is like hey can we teach them about being a founder increase our confidence or ambition the risk taking etc etc so how do we do it? Same thing. The first thing is we inspire them with great leaders.

So we would bring women that are successful in their own right to tell them that it is possible to be like them, right? I think in many occasions, we just lack that role model. And the next is we force them to connect with each other. So sometimes it's talks, sometimes it's funny events or dinners, we even had a manicure, pedicure session. The point is that can you get them to talk to each other. And the results are literally insane.

So we have 78 women through the process. I think they've incorporated 45 plus companies. 35 of them have raised more than a million dollars. And they're backed by people like Sequoia, and Breason, Paradigm, Dragonfly, and of course, Pear. So, I mean, it's incredible numbers. These are not regular numbers that you would see in a random group of people.

And I think, again, it's important because I think we have something to say about what, thank you, about what the next generation looks, right? I mean it's for all of us in the audience, 2% of all companies have an all-female founder team. That is very crazy if you can do the numbers. So I think perhaps Richard Branson said it better. Everyone is born an entrepreneur and everyone has the potential to be an entrepreneur. It's just that not everyone gets the opportunity. So I think my quest is about making those opportunities.

And I will say that you as an individual have your first responsibility about doing that, right? You have to create opportunities for yourself. And I would say the most important is to surround yourself by the best people. So you have to play up and challenge yourself. And sometimes, you know, people don't go to places that have the best people, because they have the worst job at the company, and that's wrong attitude. You should go to wherever the best people are, so you can learn, transform yourself. I have two very practical pieces of advice that I give my founders.

First, this is very simple, but you can actually read. You can read a lot. One of my founders asked Drew, who is the founder of Dropbox, how he became a great CEO, and he said, I read a lot. But then I have actually gone and looked at our top 10% of our portfolio, and there's one thing those CEOs have in common. They are reading machines. So I don't know if reading will make you a great CEO, but I know it won't hurt you. So, and the second one is get a coach. I say even Steve Jobs had a coach. If you don't have money to get a coach, get a peer group, because again, it's about character

building. And I think what investors can do. So if you're an investor in the room, I know it's a very ego-high business, but it is not about us, you know, we are not the ones who make the companies. I think our role is to have create opportunities for our founders to grow, and that actually will help to portfolio. And I think for society, perhaps we should have an early intervention program, much like a gifted program in schools. If you detect that there are kids that have that gene in them, why not pull them aside and

create an early intervention program. And I'll give you an analogy, which you will understand. I'm from Barcelona, Spain. My fellow countrywoman is Montserrat Cavalli. She was a great opera singer. And of course, today, probably I'm too old to become a great opera singer, but perhaps I wouldn't, I would have had some chance, right?

Maybe just sing opera in the bathroom at some point if I had been taught early on. So that's the thought. And you know, just imagine a world where you can actually increase the total founder potential by just 10% or even shape who becomes to be a founder. So with that I guess I'll go to the Q&A. Wow. Awesome.

Thank you. In the middle. You're in the middle. You're in the middle. That's amazing. What a great talk. That's amazing. This is very intimidating. I know, but somehow the four of us are going to get through it.

It was an incredible talk. Somehow. Gone, you're good. I have to say, you know, we're watching the talk backstage and the nodding that we were each having and, you know, collectively, we've invested in, you know, I would say closer to a thousand companies now. And we're nodding and thank you for putting my blog post up there from years ago, you don't have what it takes.

And I just realized, you know, wow, one of the fundamental problems we have, and I think having David here from the PayPal office speaks volumes, one of the fundamental problems in entrepreneurship is that you point it out is people have to see it in order to be it. And you know, when you look at what happened at PayPal, and I'm really interested in hearing David's perspective on this, they got to see each other at Stanford, and 40% of the speakers have been to Stanford here at this event.

I didn't even know that. I think you're doing that statistic. But it seems like the fundamental problem. We haven't society. You can expand this. And then we were talking about how the mayor are being on before. Are you getting to a question? Do you have to you, yeah, and the rest of us have questions.

But this is the fundamental problem. We need people to understand that entrepreneurship and opportunity in this country is available to 100% of the people here. They have that opportunity, but because they don't see someone like themselves, a woman, a person of color, a person of a woman who is a person of color, etc., etc., etc., they need to see it to be it. That's the problem, isn't it? Well, you summarized it really well. Now it's you to do the talk next time. Well, I list it. I'll do that. Yes.

When you started this program, what was your goal? What did you think was going to happen? Honestly, I didn't think it was going to be... I didn't think that conclusiveness would be as big, right? I mean, if you get 20% of women to start a business, that would have been amazing. But we're getting almost, I would say, 60% of them or 70% of them are going off and starting a business.

It's crazy. I mean, when you take both of those two programs together, the results are pretty crazy. They're pretty crazy. Yes. So OK, take it out of the Stanford context for a second. How do people pick a city? You're in Cincinnati.

What does it mean to have a peer group and a network that can create or catalyze like a PayPal like Mafia there, or even if it's in Miami, or in LA, or wherever you are? That seems like a really hard... It's a really hard problem, so luckily I'm young enough that I'll be able to... But Drew, but Drew may make that a little bit easier too, right?

I think you need that, you know, it's not just enough to get a bunch of people together, right? You have to see it the right way. So that's why I said, you know, even for the female program, we'll get hundreds of applications. And we have to go and interview everybody and see who can have high potential, right? So again, there's a little bit on the choosing of who goes into that program, and then you can shape them. So again, it's that curve. If you are too far to the left, then your job is really, really high. I used to probably once a week read business insider or insider. And then I stopped about seven months ago, or no, maybe like in the last few months, and I'll

tell you why I stopped. It was for two reasons. There was this article that they kept running, basically bashing the founder of Glossier. And to me, it just didn't make any sense because it's like, there are lots of people who go through trials and tribulations at startups. And when you read about her journey, it didn't seem particularly different than anybody else.

You try products, some of them work, some of them fail, you learn and you move on. But they would run it, and they were just hammering, hammering, hammering. They did it with the away founder too. There's a two-way luggage thing, which was the craziest story. Unbelievable. I read that story. I was like, what did you do wrong? I never really understood what was going on.

I was like, everybody work harder. Yeah, she was like, work harder. Let's make this company success. The mic cracker does that it give more race. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, can I give you more equity? Well, I think honestly that happens even to me. I mean, on board meetings, I look, you know, I'm not an asshole. I'm a bitch, right? That's the summary of the situation. Welcome to the club. Where are ourselves?

Well, I'm not. I'm a bitch. But anyway, that's why I stopped reading it. Because I was like, this is really ridiculous because what is it telling people? And then separately, they kept running this ad. And then, you know, I'm not, I'm a bitch. Yeah. But anyway, so that's why I stopped reading it because I was like, this is really ridiculous because what is it telling people? And then separately, they kept running this ad promoting this company called Cerebral,

which last week got a DOJ Sapino for selling Adderall illegally to people. And so it's like, this is the imbalance that you see when things are presented that don't really make a lot of sense to it. There is a term for in the industry. I didn't come up with the term chicks for clicks. And so they will look for a female founder.

And no, chicks for clicks. Chicks for clicks. Chicks as in a word for females. Chicks for clicks. They're all trying to get clicks. If you go after a female founder, you're going to get 10 times as many clicks. Oh, really?

Yeah. It's just more exciting. The third of the story, I think think was such a great example of that. It was like a failed biotech company. I'm not saying that there wasn't fraud and stuff that happened there. But man, I mean, the way that that escalated the storyline. Yeah, it was. It was known as this as well.

I mean, it's a founder plus a female founder. You know, a founder misbehaving quote unquote plus a female founder just equals a little more. Even the wife of the founder of WeWork is more famous in some circles. She's seen more talented. I'm curious what your questions are for David about the magical moment of the PayPal Mafia. What was the secret sauce? Being the 17th most important guy, PayPal.

Hey, he's now the ninth. What was the what was a secret sauce like being the 17th most important guy PayPal He's now the ninth He was clearly the fifth or something you tried that joke or anything Don't try don't try and resuscitate it now you had your chance on the pot. That was brutal Yeah, no no I apologize to the entire fan base for free cash intros. Come on. Look, I'll tell you something. Every guy on the stage, no one will ever tell them what I said because everyone works for them or wants money from them.

So we can only do it to each other. We can only do it to each other. I'm sorry. All right. So the answer is that at PayPal, we recruited our friends to work at the company because literally nobody else was willing to come work at this crazy startup. Peter recruited his friends who he had gone to college with at Stanford, Max recruited

his friends from U of I. That's how the initial team was recruited through friendship networks. But it wasn't like this was some exclusive club. It's just that nobody else wanted to be a member. And. Well, sorry, can I just say, at Facebook early days, it was exactly like that as well. It's like, we had really qualified people

from great schools, but it would not be the people that you would have thought. It's like the folks that spun out of Microsoft, couldn't succeed, and all of a sudden we were like, oh, or like, boss used to teach Zuck CS. And. and it's like yeah why don't you just come in as like the t.a. of the class it was not it was a very rag tag did the trust make everyone because they all knew each other from before did the trust give everyone like

a stronger sense of like being vulnerable and developing themselves better because I do see like a lot of people well I mean I see a lot of these companies and everyone's all it's all like it's like you see early stage companies and it's very political who's gonna last is not because you don't really trust each other you never work together Well, I know each other. Yeah, what I'd say is that you would think that the the friendships would would make it like this sort of calm friendly environment PayPal was actually a very frictional contentious environment and but I do think think there is a trust element to it,

which is we were constantly debating what the truth was, and what we needed to do, and what the big risks to the big business were. And so we were yelling, in fact Peter, when he hired me, he told some of the other people on the team, look, I want to hire David, because I need someone here who I can yell at. And meaning, like, he didn't have to worry about her

and my feelings, he could just say what he really thought, and we could have an open conversation about what we need to do as a company, even if it meant yelling. So what was it, a culture of brutal honesty? Yes, absolutely. That's what the no talks about a lot, right? Yeah, can I ask you guys a question, Maureen, David?

You used rap, so the last time I was here in Miami was to meet the rap founders, and I spent a couple of days with them. And I came away stunned, kind of like what you said. I didn't realize it was that extensive, but there's a really special culture there. Yes. PayPal obviously had that as well. But do you guys, and don't take this wrong way, but do you have to have somewhat more

of a bounded outcome for then these networks to really explode. Meaning, if you look at a Google or a Facebook or even a Microsoft, when companies become almost too successful, it almost just locks these folks in and the incentive to go off with that toolkit, the peer network, goes to zero because you're just too incentivized. It's an interesting, evolutionary trait, right? Or people make so much money that they just retire. I have a thing you're totally right. The companies that they come from have to be a little hard. I don't think PayPal was easy, right?

No, it's super hard, yeah. And when it's hard, you learn to overcome hard things and the whole company learns if there's brutal honesty. If it's hidden at the top and you think it's all right, nobody learns. But if you do, you do. And actually, I think the rate of success of people that came out of founder of Google relatively speaking,

is not that high. Not that high. It's not that high, because everything works. And everything needs for it. Everything is easy. But no freeberg, you run. Well, he's a good guy. Oh, yeah, you're right.

Sorry. But you're saying the Google people more to be clear got very soft. Because it was easy. Never learn. They never learned anything. Like I've heard. I can overcome. Right. There are more. This is actually interesting. There are more unicorns founded by X PayPal people than X Google people, even though at the PayPal Mofi, if you define it as the pre-IPO group of people

who worked at PayPal, there were only a couple of hundred in the Bay Area, whereas Google had like 1,000. So my theory on this having observed it, the early days of Google, the organization grew, the success of the company was exponential out of the fucking gate. I mean, like, more than most companies we talk about nowadays. And as a result, all of the success was baked in.

The monopoly machine started rolling right away. So then the hire started being safer hires, people that could be more analytical, people that could be more execution oriented, not risk takers. And so a lot of people were hired, and I forgive, I want to tell, but forgive me for saying, but all the Stanford people who basically had always done really well on their SATs, got great grades, they'd always been successful. They'd always kind of been given that thumbs up.

You're awesome. You're smart, come here and do this job. They weren't the risk takers. They weren't the people who were willing to take risk to fail. And so the orientation was build a culture of people that just didn't take a lot of risk, executed. And then those people, they had this false sense of

entrepreneurial success by working at Google, because they were already on a rocket ship. Then a bunch of them left and tried to start companies. And they're like, oh, yeah, you just build an app and 100 million people use it. It's like, dude, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure. And by the way, if you make it to 87 failures,

then you'll have your moment of success. And not only would I make it past 0.30. Right? And so I think, like in our observation with so many Google people I knew that left and started companies, they either weren't risk takers or they didn't have the grit and persistence needed to go through the failure to get there. And it was because that culture was defined by early success and then everyone that joined was just execution operations, or yeah. 100%. You mentioned something.

Maybe you can just speak a little bit more about it, but we used to do these things, which you talked about, where every week you would force people basically to present. And what you're almost doing, and I think what we learned was you're desensitizing people to failure itself. And it just becomes a nothing burger, because you're just seeing this litany

of just randomly bad ideas almost. But that's what becomes so powerful because then these random little things just become enormous. They shape you. They shape you and you get very very lucky. I remember like when you know at Facebook we created I created a thing called growth circle. We used to run thousands of experiments a week and we used to have folks present every week and it was just three hours of monotmyst failure. Right? It was just after another, after another.

But I think what it really did was allow people to feel okay trying the crazy idea. Yeah. Because they would see the 15 people in front of them. Would do it so. Is that the key? Is that the key? That is the key. That is actually the key? Is that the key?

That is actually the key. And actually, it makes a huge difference, right? If you hear every, and they also inspire you. Whoever is actually doing great, you're like, I don't want to be the last person, you know, the next week when I have to present. I want to be better than the person that present the last week and that great.

But how do you motivate you? But Mark, how do you get people that are those high SAT over-achiever types to be OK? Yeah, you have to put them in opposition. So I'll tell you, like, one, for example, in the class, when I exercise, you can tell people towards the end. It's like, you know, they're all having some startup

or have some users or whatever. They're now startup. They have a project. I'll say, OK, your homework for next week is to 10x your sales. You have one week to do it. And people get really, really creative when you actually tell them that. And maybe they don't get to 10, but they'll get to 2 or 3 in a week. And I think that inspiration is enough for people to make the best of themselves.

I think great leaders do that, right? They ask for more than you think is capable. People are capable. What about learning failure, right? We were talking about this on the yesterday we were having a conversation about, how do we make sure that our kids grow up and learn failure like we all learned?

And failure ultimately I think, and persistent failure, I think really caught me a lot about, you know, putting up with failure and knowing that there's, as long as you're doing the right thing, you'll get there, probably, holistically. How do you teach that? Because, you know, folks, especially in an environment where they've always been successful, and how do you keep them from saying, you know, what, I don't want to fail, I want to succeed because my orientation is to succeed. So when they start to fail, they run and they go do something easy, I don't want to fail, I want to succeed because my orientation is to succeed. So when they start to fail, they run and they go to do something easy, which is going to be six years.

So actually at Stanford specifically, right? Yeah, exactly. If you made it to Stanford, you know what I'm saying? Not to keep that to Stanford, but yeah. No, yeah. I'm just, I want to count on the same thing. But you are very, I mean, you've been an incredible student. I mean, you probably cure cancer or something.

If you had to, if you got into Stanford today, right? So you're, they've never really failed at life. It's an 18 year old who's never suffered failure. At least as we understand it. You have to put them, you have to learn each of the students. What is their weak point and make them actually do that? So one of the things I will do. You do failure.

Yeah, you provoke failures quickly as you can. So, you know, if you're a typical, you know, computer science student, you probably can create an app, well, this day is within an hour, you'll have something great, right? Try to get 1,000 users without spending a single dollar. What I'm fail.

Can you do it? It's hard. Yeah. And then do it again. And some of them, the mental health problem is very high, right? I think a lot of this people, the first time they fail, they can't take it.

Let me ask you one more, because my big three predictors of entrepreneurial success are grit, persisting through failure, bias to action. Like you don't have an orientation being analyt analytical, you have an orientation to taking action, and narrative. Because I think that the greatest entrepreneurs that we all know, Elon's obviously the penultimate example. Someone tell me I use that word wrong, so I want you to. Penultimate means second. Ultimate is what you're going for. I feel like you're wrong on that, but I'll accept it.

It may be the keen log getting to your brain. Yeah, go ahead. You may want to prove it. You have the ultimate definition. You have the penultimate definition. You have more like make stakes. So how does narrative get learned? Because we've seen that the best entrepreneurs

are incredible storytellers. Yeah. They tell the story and they tell the vision before it's built as a way of attracting the best talent and then as a way of attracting the capital and then as a way of attracting customers. And that ability is key to success and how do you actually, is there a way to develop?

It's really important. You know, and I'm gonna even elevate it one more. Sales, you have to be a great salesperson. Your narrative, you're selling the story of your company but you may be selling to a fount, to an employee, to an investor, or whatever. You know what I've got, salesperson? Unfortunately, teaching sales at a higher educational

institution is considered dirty work, so we don't even teach it, right? But it's the most important thing. So I run a little accelerator, and we just like Jason, and we spend the last few weeks just teaching people how to talk You know, how do you explain what you do and You know, I'd tell people there's nothing like practice. You have to practice practice get coach etc Some people are born with that some people you actually have to learn you think it is learning though

It is you can definitely get better. Yeah, right? Not the world would be a better, a sad place. Mars, we wrap here. We have 10 daughters between the four of us. I love that. We're all of that. Yeah. Three, two, two, three.

Three. Whatever. You can remind David of the names of his daughters. They're on your watch. I look them up. Mark, what he's got a little card in here. I'd like to ask. My life's name is...

It's got a picture, a little picture. Mark, what have you learned about women in terms of entrepreneurship? What do we need to know about encouraging them to become entrepreneurs and to create companies? I think the most important is for women to believe in themselves. I think a lot of us don't. I think you Google Imposter Syndrome and we all have it. Even myself coming here today, I was probably the person that practiced the most because

I have that imposter syndrome. That is the most important. You have to overcome that because for most men, it comes naturally. And as we have to work a little harder to do that. But with confidence, we make amazing founders. I would say, I am fortunate to work with many of them. This year, our accelerator, this session,

the Web did present on Wednesday, will have two thirds of the founders are women. That's very impressive. And they're amazing. I know they're not, there's no cutting corners that were the best people. But we as a society have to do a better job of- Stop clicking on those clicks, you know, chicks for clicks.

Exactly. Stop clicking on those clicks, you know, chicks for clicks. Exactly. Stop clicking. Well, I think maybe, you know, them seeing more role models like you. And I think very specifically, you know, we as all girl dads appreciate the work you're doing. Oh, thank you. Let's give it up for We're like your winners ride. Rainman David Saunders. And it said we open stores set to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm U.S. I just queen of kilowatt. I'm going on a beach. What, what, your winners ride?

Besties are gone. What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? You just need to release that album What, you're the beef, what, you're the beef Beef, what, you're the beef Where did you get merch these are? I'm doing all this you