Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Mike Schroepfer, Partner, Gigascale Capital

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

In 2023, after departing his role as CTO of Facebook, Mike Schroepfer launched the climate venture capital investment firm Gigascale Capital with the goal of building climate tech companies. Working alongside co-founders Victoria Beasley and Evaline Tsai, Gigascale’s investments are today driving advancements in clean energy, biotech and computing. In this episode, Kevin and Mike discuss Mike’s early childhood and how he got interested in the study of computer science, career experiences in engineering that shaped him, and what ultimately led to his decision to focus on climate change and philanthropic endeavors through his work at Gigascale and his organization Additional Ventures, respectively.   Mike Schroepfer | Gigascale  Kevin Scott    Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott    Discover and listen to other Microsoft podcasts at news.microsoft.com/podcasts.

. Show me something, give me data, talk to me a customer, give me a prototype. The more you can actually touch and feel it or talk to a customer, the more you are actually burning down the question of, can we do this and do people want it? That's the two questions. Hi everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech.

I'm Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer and EVP of AI at Microsoft. Today, tech is a part of nearly every aspect of our lives. We're in the early days of an AI revolution promising to transform our lived experiences as much as any technology ever has. On this podcast, we'll talk with the folks behind the technology and explore the motivations, passion, and curiosity driving them to create the tech shaping our world. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm co-host Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub. And I'm Kevin Scott.

And today we are bringing you an interview with Mike Schreffer, who spent many years at Meta, but is now working on some really exciting projects through his investment firm, GigaScale Capital, as well as some super interesting philanthropic work with Additional Ventures and the Carbon to Sea Initiative. Yeah, I have wanted to have Mike on the podcast for a while now because every time he and I chat about what he's doing now, I am incredibly enthused to have someone with the platform building and technical experience that Mike has applying that same bag of tricks to some of these really gnarly problems that we have related to climate change. So I hope in our conversation with him, we're going to hear about some of those super fun things. But he can go on for hours and hours and hours

about both the entrepreneurs and the tech that they're working on that seem like they have a real and huge potential to help us solve some of these really gnarly climate problems. Which we need. I'm glad we have people like him taking those things on. So I'm really looking forward to hearing this conversation. All right, let's get into it. Mike Shepfer is the founder of and a partner at GigaScale Capital, an early-stage climate tech investment firm.

In addition to his work with GigaScale, Mike started and serves on the board of the Carbon to Sea Initiative, is the founder of the philanthropic organization Additional Ventures, and is a senior fellow at Meta, focused on artificial intelligence and the development of technical talent. Mike led Meta's engineering teams from 2008 to 2022 and served as Chief Technology Officer from 2013 to 2022. He led the development of eight gigawatts of clean energy infrastructure and technology in teams that enable Meta to scale to billions of people around the world and make breakthroughs in fields like

artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Mike holds a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from Stanford University. Mike, thanks so much for being on the show today. Glad to be here, Kevin. Thanks for having me. So you have had one of those legendary Silicon Valley careers. And I am going to ask you the same first question that I ask for everybody who's on the show, which is how did you get interested in technology in the first place? You know, I don't know that there was a singular origin story. I mean, in a funny twist of fate, I grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, which, you know, people may know from two very different worlds. One is Seinfeld, who lampooned it with Del Boca Vista.

And the other is, obviously, that was the birth of the IBM PC. And so if you read the origin stories of Microsoft, which you know well, you hear the stories of Bill, you know, flying into Miami Airport and driving up to Boca Raton in the eighties to convince IBM to use DOS for their IBM PC. That was my hometown. I was there at that time, you know, as a kid. And so, you know, we had the, in the career days at school, you know, someone from IBM would always show up and talk about computers and my neighbor's dad worked at IBM. And so they had a PC junior. I remember cause it had the amazing 16 color graphics. I think we'd like King's Quest on that. So like, we, I think a lot of it was just

like exposure plus video games, you know, my neighbor had the IBM PC, we can afford that. But we had a Commodore, you know, Vic 20, and then a Commodore 64, which was the bomb. And, you know, so kind of had just like earlier exposure to that. And that was as a, as a young kid. And then as I got further on in school, you know, science and math was always really fun for me. And I think the real aha was in high school. I had a chance to take a physics class and like, this was just a, like, there was something about like, wait, what were these five equations?

I can explain how like objects move around in the world. And I can understand how light bends through a small pinhole. It was really fun. And I think that probably was the censure on when I go to college, I want to do something in science or engineering. But I wasn't exactly sure yet until I got to college what I wanted to do. And were your parents in science and technology? They were not. They were in the radio business. They ran a really small little AM radio station. I actually had a FCC license to broadcast as soon as I was, you know, old enough to do it because I would help them on nights and weekends, run the radio station. So there was like some technology and like we had early CDs and things like that to kind of like help upgrade the radio station. My dad was like very tech curious,

like liked gadgets and stuff but neither of them had an engineering or science background yeah i mean it's really interesting a lot of people that are uh in our age range had a somewhat similar story so like they came of age like right around the time the personal computing revolution was starting um And they also were teenagers or kids as video games were on their ascendancy. And those two things got many a computer science career underway. But I'm sort of wondering, did you have role models in your schools like was there any one person who was because this is interesting like i i don't think i did like i i grew up in rural central virginia like i can't point to one person no one i knew so it would be people i saw on tv or read about

in books or things like that um but i'm trying to think, and that is not to say like, I did this all myself. It's more like there wasn't a person I was like, oh, I want to be like them when I grew up that I knew in person. So, so no. How did you, how did you get from Boca Raton to Palo Alto? Like, how did you choose Stanford? Well, I knew I wanted to do engineering or I thought I wanted to do engineering, but I i wanted to do engineering but i wasn't sure exactly you know when you're in high school like what does engineering mean um and i liked computers and so you know it was kind of basically just stanford was kind of good at everything they weren't as well known but they're like all the engineering disciplines were good they're actually

good at most of the humanities too so i was kind of like and they didn't make you choose before you got there it was like oh this would be a great place for me to like really understand which of these different disciplines. I looked at a couple like all engineering schools and I was just like, I just, I don't know what if I decide I want to do philosophy or something else. Um, you know, and so that was really the drive. And I also just, when I visited it, I did the little, like they have the, you know, after you get accepted, you do the like overnight visit where you get to stay on campus then i did it there and at princeton which was the other place i was considering and they got me right they got me like in a dorm with a bunch of nerds and i was like oh this is awesome they're all nerds they have macs we're talking my

computers like and it's sunny out like this is amazing this is clearly if i had this opportunity i'd be a dummy not to take it and so what was it like once you got to Stanford? So when was this? This was... It would be 93, 1993. Gotcha. And so that was a super interesting time at Stanford. So just a bunch of stuff going on in Silicon Valley and a bunch of interesting people at

Stanford. So what was that like? I mean, I distinctly remember my freshman dorm. It's like one person down the hallway for me had an Apple Newton. Do you remember the Newton? Yeah, like 10 base computer. I love that device. You have a Newton like and it was just and I for whatever reason, like the computers were backordered, but I like brought my computer with me. So I had the first computer there. No, we didn't have internet in the dorms. We had dial up. There was like a little computer room in the basement that actually had internet with a, among other things had a next cube in it. So if you remember the old next,

cause I think next basically donated a bunch of computers to Stanford to try to get people to actually buy them. And, and so it was just like, it was like, whoa, this is so cool. There's just like so much stuff to do here. And then I was like, I kind of went through and you'll hear this theme throughout my life. Like, how do I run experiments to figure out? It's like I want to do engineering. What does that mean? Like, let me just start taking what's the closest proxy to this. And so I took the intro to computer science class, the intro to double E class at the same quarter, you know, cause I'm like, maybe I want to do electrical engineering and build computers and chips, or maybe I want to do the CS thing. And I kind of took them in parallel and, and, um,

both amazing classes, CS 106A and E80, I think it was in double E. But I was like, by the end of E80, we were like, we built like a counter, you know, um, or this, like we spent all this time cause it's like hard to build circuits. And like every week in computer science, we're building new it's like oh here's a basically google maps directions thing here's like a blackjack game like here's i was like this is amazing this is a very high leverage tool like yeah this is amazing i sit in front of my computer and then three days later this new thing pops out the other end that like it's a fully useful piece of

software i was like i i basically i was hooked at that point and like that's what's kept me in the industry for like 25 years it's just like that feeling of like whoa nothing to like we made this thing like you know that's a lot more fun than any other hobby i can think of yeah although i'm gonna want to get back to this in a minute but i think when you were at Meta, and I suspect even with what you're doing right now, certainly everything benefits from being able to operate at software speed, but it also, at a certain level of scale, you actually do have to think about the hardware again, because you just can't pick off the shelf a quantity or form factor computer networking or storage that meets the needs of the thing that you're trying to build.

And so, like, I totally understand why. I mean, like, I kind of made the same decision myself, but then, you know, found myself much later in my career caring a lot about hardware again. Yeah, me too and i like and we can talk because you know again i was just such a fortunate time because like the internet you know the worldwide web we already had gopher and a bunch of other things but intel net and and um uh what was it news news net nntp um when i got there but then you know the web obviously came out while i was at stanford and so that was just like amazing but But on the hardware side, I agree with you. I mean that, you know, when I joined Facebook now Meta in 2008, you know, those first couple of years, everyone thinks of Meta as a software company.

And I was like, those first couple of years, like our biggest problem was the site was just growing so quickly that we, we had all these emergency fire drills, like we're literally going to run out of capacity and everything's going to crash. And so a combination of like software optimization and like, how do we uncork the like hardware growth rate thing? And as you well know, as well as I do, it's like, you can't just like order a new data center and have it next week. You're like, Oh crap. We got it. And like,

I remember in these conversations is like, okay, we're gonna build a data center. Like we have a two to four year, like lead time between like go and like it's operational like how much capacity do you need and i was like i don't know like it's so hard to predict that far in advance so like we literally have to order steel now and like buy some land so like you can't you can't tell me this in nine months you need to tell me now how much how much you're building and so like that was just a like and then we we built, you know, lots of data centers. And then we made another move into consumer hardware. And so I joke, I made two transitions, one from software to hardware. And then when we got into consumer,

I was like, Oh, we've been building data centers. I know this hardware thing. This is easy. And it's like, Oh, no, no, no, no. It's a totally different game when like, if the consumer returns the thing, you've now lost a ton of money because like you just ate everything. And so making sure that they like it and there's customer support and your price, like there's a whole different ballgame in consumer hardware. So it's like software, enterprise hardware, consumer hardware in terms of like difficulty, I would say. And so that has been really fun and has actually informed a lot of like, in my climate tech investing, we're investing mostly in hardware and a lot of like in my climate tech investing we're investing mostly in

hardware and a lot of it is enterprise but some of it's consumer um you know we're selling products that your average person's going to buy and so so anyway so we can talk a lot about that it is definitely a shift and a lot of fun well there's there's sort of an interesting philosophical thing here like i think one of the things that has made you so successful and the companies that you work for so successful is there is this underlying assumption that no matter what the problem is or the thing that you're going to go tackle next, that you're going to be able to figure it out. But but sometimes, like, you can let yourself be overconfident and, you know, managing that balance between confidence and overconfidence. Like you do have to be fearless. Like if you are fearful, like you will never get anything done. And it's like one of the things I'm most impressed by what you're doing right now, because some people look at this bundle of climate change issues and think that the problem is completely intractable. And yet you are just with great enthusiasm trying to leverage the best of this technological

entrepreneurial mindset to try to fix things. But so how have you thought about this tension? How do you temper your optimism with pragmatism yeah i mean i often describe myself as a as a grounded optimist or a practical optimist i think you know the the extreme of optimism is naivete is just like it actually doesn't work um and and i think so much of what you say is true and i i think, you know, there's this phrase stop energy, which is like, you're like, oh, Shrepp, I have this idea. And you're like, ah, here's all the reasons you can't do that or that's not going to work. Right.

Stop energy is so easy. It's so easy to be a critic and say, I've thought of 30 reasons this doesn't work. It's so much harder to basically say, well, wait a second. Let's think about this. Why would this work? And like, and let's talk about the like the physical constraints that means that this is not possible like do those exist are you positioned well in the market are you leveraging your strengths like all those things it's much more constructive

conversation um and so you know the good news and getting back to this hardware software thing is the fun thing about hardware is like you can model a lot of things out on paper you know if i told you i wanted to build a you know a chip with this much memory bandwidth and this many transistors you can do some back of the mat on them they're like yeah you can't fab that right now yeah so you can you can try to convince me all you want but like tsmc can't make it yep so you know or you know in ar vr you know, you have these headsets and a big challenge is you need to get the field of view to be big. So I have a big screen in front of me. Well, you can model like, all right, I got to get a photon from back here from some slight light engine.

It's got to kind of bend around and hit my eye. There's like only so many ways to get that photon to bend around. And optics is really well understood in physics. So you can do like index of refraction. You can model given the material we're using, the maximum field of view you can get is X, right? And I can't tell you how many startup pitches I went through where they're like, well, we're going to build it with this,

using this thing. And we'd sit there and we'd be like, yeah, you can't. Like it doesn't, you violated laws of physics at this point. So I think you're like, are you violating laws of physics as like the starting point? You know, but there are plenty of products that don't violate the laws of physics at this point. So I think you're like, are you violating laws of physics is like the starting point, you know, but there are plenty of products that don't violate the laws of physics, but you just like, you don't understand your customer or your, like, I think a lot of business try to go way too far out of their comfort zone. You know, when Intel tried to make microscopes, like that didn't work out well, right. It's like very far from chips. And so you kind of always

want to take one step. Like I know part of this this business i'm just moving a little bit to the left as opposed to you know i'm i'm switching industries entirely so there's a lot of questions like that you try to ask yourself to do it and then the other thing i'd say is like the constant question i ask is like what's the cheapest fastest easiest experiment to learn more. Yeah. Can I mock it up in cardboard? Can I like go ask 30 people whether they want this thing? Can I build one in my garage? Like this is the place where I think smart people really get themselves in trouble. It's like, yeah, you try to spend too much time imagining and she's like, stop imagining, go do like, show me something, give me data, talk to me a customer, like give me a prototype. Like the more you can actually touch and feel it

or talk to a customer, the more you are actually burning down the question of like can we do this and do people want it and that's like the two questions yeah yeah it's really interesting i think there's a related thing with smart people where sometimes it's very enjoyable to wallow in complexity to like take a very hard thing and and even to make it harder. There's this joy you can get from spinning cycles there. But those overly complicated things are almost never really useful. 100%. I think I often describe when I'm working with people, this took me a long time to figure

out, is I think there's complexifiers and there's simplifiers. There's someone you give a big hard problem, they go like, here's 30 pages, but you really only need to understand three things. Like here's the three biggest things that matter here. And if you want to get in the details, I got it. But like, here's the thing. There's other people that come up with it. Here's 26 pages of detail.

I've covered every base on this thing. And you're like, that's not actually helpful. That's actually much worse. And I find simplifiers are a secret weapon of a lot of organizations. It's what we sought in our PMs at Meta. It's what I look for in the founders I back. And it repeatedly has been successful for me in finding people. Take a big, complex, gnarly thing and say, but these are the only things that matter.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like you're giving the, giving the listeners sage advice here. So like you compound these things and they get very interesting. So folks who have high learning rate, who know how to like experiment quickly, who are simplifiers, like you just sort of stack these together and like those like really, really the union of those things are just superpowers.

Yeah. A 100 percent. So let's go back to Stanford. So, you know, you're there in 93. You decide to take computer science over over double E. Yeah. What was the most interesting thing that you learned at Stanford? Like whether class or something you learn from a friend or an internship? Yeah, I mean, I think it gets back to your question on like, how do you have no fear about having to solve a problem, which is like, I think the best of computer science is like learning how to organize and decompose complicated things. You go back to like, what is a data structure? What is an API? How do I layer things? How do I like, okay, I can program in Python, I don't need to know what the machine is doing. But then I can like start to learn C, I can learn assembly language, I can like look at

the transistors on the chip, there's this very clean layering that allows me to abstract out complexity. And I think that that sort of that is probably by far and above the best skill because it gets back to that simplified complex fire thing is like in everything in life you have to be able to figure out how to how to do that you know we're doing a climate tech investment someone shows up with this magic box this magic box with air water and electricity comes inside and jet fuel comes out the other side it's like okay i'm gonna pretend for a second i don't even know how this box works i just trust you it does It does. If it costs you a, you know, a thousand dollars a gallon to make that jet fuel, you do not have a business. Right. So I don't even care

how the box works, but if you come and say, I can make it for five bucks a gallon, you're like, oh, now I have a bunch of questions about how that box works. And let's like tear apart whether that box works and it scales and it's going to reliable and so like being able to sort of move at multiple levels of detail and move up and down is by far and above the best um i think cs also in a weird way teaches you like i had this feeling even in the 90s i was like wow this field's moving so fast like languages were showing up all the time chips were moving and so it was like the idea that you just like learn your thing. And then I spend the next 30 years applying my thing was not the lesson I got. Lesson I got was like, you need to learn how to learn stuff because the thing you just

learn is going to be obsolete in like a year. And so if you want to have any longevity in this field, like you got to be constantly got to know the new language, the new the new this the new that and so that kind of sense of like all right i just like it's a meta process i got to get good at learning i got a good at decomposing problems and like understanding what's important and i feel like those skills you know i wish ever like i think everyone can do that regardless of their talent and their and their background and like um the profession i mean um and like i think those have served me incredibly well through throughout my I think everyone can do that regardless of their talent and their background and their profession, I mean. And I think those have served me incredibly well throughout my career.

Yeah, I have another question I want to ask you. But I think the other thing that people underappreciate is practicing learning makes it easier to learn. And so I feel like it's one of the unfair advantages that I got as a computer scientist, because yeah, I've always assumed the half-life of the technical stuff that's going into my head is very short. And so I'm always, but it lets you learn a whole bunch of other stuff.

And I'm guessing in your case, it let you be fearless about going into climate investing, even though though uh like you're just like okay well i know how to learn like i can go learn this stuff uh obviously with humility right uh because it's very complicated but i see it even with my children uh once they figure out that learning is uh fun and useful uh then they're in the learning loop and it just sort of snowballs into something very interesting. Yeah, exactly right. The other question I have for you about Stanford is,

was there a course that brought everything together into like, oh my God, I didn't realize uh like i had this superpower to build something very complicated uh before you know because some schools do it mr miyagi style you know like you're wax on wax off and then one day you're fighting in a karate tournament and um and you didn't even know you were going to be able to do this thing and it's like maybe a compiler course or an operating system course or a robotics course or something. I mean, it's honestly, this is a crap answer, but it's like I loved so many of the classes in the curriculum. It's like hard to pick one.

So I'm going to pick several for different reasons. I think the thing that probably stands out is the introductory computer science curriculum at stanford which is cs106 a and b or if you knew how to program when you got there cs106x is phenomenal and it's phenomenal because it does this layered approach where they sort of give you progressive revealing of more details they also make you do real projects but the real secret sauce is they had undergrads as basically tas and it's this thing called the section leader program. So you have undergrads grading the assignments and like grading the tests. Once you get through CS106 A and B, you can become what's called a section leader, which I did very quickly. And this was just a,

like, cause it's one thing to learn something. It's another thing to have to teach it to other people. Holy cow. And they're like asking questions. You're like, Oh gosh, I guess I didn't understand that. You know? And then I eventually became a TA when I was a grad student and, and then had to make assignments and like, that's a whole nother ball. I got it from scratch. Like, how do I make an assignment that teaches people about, you know, data structures? Um, so like that whole process of like leading, teaching, working with others was like, again, I think the fusion of the, the thing, like, cause I, you know, I'm, I'm an engineer, I'm a technologist by background, but like my career ended up being a lot more about people, actually people plus technology.

Yeah. And then that was the very beginning of the, like, huh, like this is magic because of all these people and you get all these really great motivated undergrads and they're excited to teach it to other undergrads. And like, sort of just magic um and so that that was probably formative and then there's you know a bunch of just the like it was just fun to like you just peeling layers in the onion bags like oh that's how that works oh that's you know networking compilers computer graphics operating systems like um even i you know i, they stopped doing assembly. It was no longer required, but I took it anyway. And we made this like multitasker, you know, on, uh, it was a 68 K assembly, not all a 68 K. Um, and that was really fun too. And like, and there was

a contest of how, how few instructions you could make one thing happen. And I spent a lot of time trying to win that contest. Um, so, uh, you know, I don't know, there's a, there was a lot of time trying to win that contest. So, you know, I don't know. There was a lot there that was just fun. You wrap up your time at Stanford and, you know, then it's off to industry. How did you choose? Because, again, I'm sure there were so many options, like all these startups, all these big companies. Like there was so much going on in the industry. You know, Stanford students like have this like crazy, you know, crazy privilege of being very highly sought after. So like, I'm guessing you had the opportunity to do a gazillion

different things. Like, how did you pick? Again, back to experiments, I definitely treated my internships, my summers as like a chance to run high-frequency experiments. So I was like, let me try lots of different things, just kind of dial in what it is I want. So first summer was honestly whatever I can get. As a freshman, as a sophomore, it's like, it's really hard to get internships. It's like, whoever will give me a job in tech, I'll do it. I ended up working at Motorola back in Florida, amusingly in the factory where they made beepers. But I was on the software team helping them with compilers and stuff. And then the next summer I was like,

I want a startup experience. So I went to Austin to work for a company called Trilogy Software. That was about a hundred people, you know, enterprise software, sort of boring software, but an exciting startup. And then as I got further in my studies, I kind of hit my first love of in computer science which was computer graphics i was just like human graphics is so cool you just like again can make beautiful things and we were like ray tracing was a thing and how do you make it look beautiful so my next job was at a computer graphics startup in los angeles working on movies um and then that's somewhere after that i was like that was really fun let me try doing

computer graphics at big company so i actually interned at apple um on their quick draw 3d team which and this was the 90s of apple which was not a good time um at apple and uh actually my whole team got my whole project got canceled while i was there that summer and so that's a that's a very funny story that we can talk about. And then I was really into computer graphics. So the big industry conference is called SIGGRAPH. And so I went to SIGGRAPH that summer, and this is going to date me. But because we were still kind of in the early days of the internet,

there was literally a resume board where you put your resume up and you tack it up there. And so I was like, oh, I'll put my resume up for when I graduate because I was going to stay for an extra year and do my master's so when i graduate next summer i can get a job and i got a call from a recruiter who was working on a small company that was doing computer graphics for movies it was uh one of the main people in industrial light magic and they were using kind of max to like do real-time special effects and i was like well that sounds interesting so i went and I talked to them and I thought I was going to be interviewing for

job, you know, in the next summer and they're like, no, no, no, no. We want you to start right now. We're a startup. We can't wait a year. And so I decided to defer my, um, my master's degree because I was like, this is a fun, I was engineer number two at this little startup working on, you know, software for digital effects, which was kind of felt like just the most amazing thing to me. So that's that's sort of how I started. Well, we'll talk about that a little bit. So, like, I think both of those things are sort of fascinating experiences for someone in college to have. So like both, you know, getting your, you know, getting your project canceled while you're an intern and like

being employee number two at a startup, like they're just fascinating learning experiences for different things. And I'm sure like valuable stuff for everything that you did after. You know, my recollection is this was 90, I think it was 96 or 97 at Apple and Apple was going through tough times. So they were sort of cutting projects here or there. And like about halfway through the summer, my, my manager, who was amazing calls me in his office and it's like, Hey, I want to talk to you. And it was my recollection of this conversation, of something along the lines of, you know, Hey,

so this whole project is going to get canceled and everyone's going to get like reassigned or laid off. But don't worry. Like your internship basically is funded through the summer so it's like i need you to come into the office and like do some stuff but none of the code we're going to throw away the projects or none of the code you've written is going to be used for anything um and like you would think as a you know 21 or whatever you're old it's like come in for a couple of hours and like have the rest of the time off would be great that sounds miserable i was it was i was like probably the saddest uh you know had been in

any work context that i can remember you know because i was like none of this matters it's like i'm kind of like i really wanted to build i was like i want to build stuff that people are using i like i was just told like it's impossible at this point and so that like was a kind of just a linchpin of my mind of both like really matters where you are the macro really matters economic conditions how good the company's doing and like wow i like you know i don't like sitting around i like building stuff that people use so so that was one and then the startup was a lot of fun because it was you know you know i joke i kind of like constantly got handed tasks that i wasn't qualified for because there wasn't anyone else to do it or i was stupid enough to like volunteer and so and and so it was just a chance to try a lot of different things and you know write a lot

of code and i think it also created this moment that is like seared in my brain which is okay it was used for a terrible movie so i'm just gonna just gonna caveat that i don't think this is a great movie i'm gonna offend a lot of star wars fans but it was so our software was used on the phantom menace and they were making it at the time and um sky what we were in sausalito which is up in marin county just north of the gold gate bridge ilm at the time was up in up in the corner like lucas ranch is whatever where they were doing a bunch of this fix work and so the founder of the company came up to me he's like hey the folks over lucas ranch are like using the thing you've been working on and they need some help can you go over there and help them and so here's me as like a 22 year old

like driving my honda accord or whatever it is you know over to lucas valley ranch like signing this nda which like i always joke was like somewhere in there was embedded like if you reveal anything we have jedis who will come get you you know and so you sign this thing and then like open the door and there's like figurines from the movie on a giant table in front of you and a bunch of people in front of their computers. And they were working on the one of the palace scenes with Padme and they're using literally the code I'd written, which was this system around motion tracking. How do you find that object in the scene and then apply effects to it? And it was just one of these like, holy crap, like they're using my thing for this. Like, this is amazing. It was just like, again, back to like, there's nothing better than this.

There's no like hobby I can think of that's more fun than we're building this thing. And then someone else is using it to do something awesome. That more than anything was a formative experience. And I think that the next lesson I learned, you know, the unfortunate thing is this was an amazing company with great people. Our software was like revolutionary. We were in a limited market. We like kind of sold it to everyone doing special effects, which was, you know, 10, 20,000 people. And we kind of had this like now what moment, you know, it's like, and so we struggled to try a bunch of different things.

And again, back to the macro is like the macro conditions really matter. It's like great team, great company, great this, but like we're selling a product that there aren't enough customers for and like that eventually sort of you know made things hard um and the company eventually sold and i i decided to go off and do something else yeah so um we don't have uh we don't have infinite amounts of time like you've done so much interesting stuff, so I'm going to fast forward past a bunch of things, including what you probably are most well known for, which is time to be at one place. And you still are there as a senior fellow. So what is it about Facebook slash meta that held your attention for as long as it has? Yeah, I think it basically boils down to three things. One is, it was never the same thing the time I was there. When I joined, it was

Facebook.com, fewer users than MySpace, web only, 100-ish engineers. 15 years later, it's billions of people using our product. It's Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus VR systems. It's an AI research lab. And it's a much bigger organization. So you can imagine all the steps along the journey there. There was a lot like, as we talked about earlier, how do I build a data center? How do I build four of them in parallel? How do I build 20 of them in parallel? How do we build a research lab? How do we sell consumer hardware? Like all of these things were like, whoa, this is, you know, this is like my graduate school. I get to like learn a bunch of things. So it was constantly

and is constantly changing now, you know, even now, why am I still there? It's like, well, AI, you know, you know, we built PyTorch, which is the leading open source, you know, framework with a great cooperation with Microsoft, huge partners in that, you know, and then Lama is sort of the leading open source model out there, you know, I think it's been downloaded like a hundred million times or something, and there's 19,000 forks of it. And so it's like, hey, you know, if I can spend a little bit of my time and help build a technology, AI, launch language models that can be leveraged by a lot of people because it's open source, like that seems like a worthy use of my time. So and it's different than what we were doing five years ago. So it constantly changed is number one.

You know, number two is love the people, you know, just continue to be in, you know, Mark is just, just unbelievable. And there's a lot of lessons from, from him, but it's, it's not just Mark, there's tons of brilliant people there. And then the third is, you know, this impact, how do I make so great? I work on this AI model, but it's used by so many people. Like that is a great way for me to, again, get back to that. I do some work, we build something, a lot of people do awesome stuff with it. Like that, that is like great way for me to again get back to that i do some work we build something a lot of people do awesome stuff with it like that that is like a through line through my whole whole career and so yeah so that's why i'm still spending time you know and i think there's this other interesting thing too about your work um and and even if we like you were you were CTO at Mozilla before, you know, before you went to Facebook.

And so so much of what you have done has been platform building. Like you're you're building like apparatus for other people to build on top of, whether it's like Facebook's internal infrastructure, Facebook itself, web infrastructure, like you, you chose, like I hadn't heard this anecdote about your computer graphics, inter startup experience before, but like even that's like a piece of infrastructure that other people are using to build things. What is it that has attracted you to

making tools and infrastructure and systems and platforms? Yeah, I mean, just one small clarification. I was VP of engineering at Mozilla. We had two amazing CTOs while I was there, so I would hate for them to think I was them because they're amazing. But it's a really good question. I think there's just something about it that intuitively, like, I just, I love the idea of leverage. I mean, technology is

leverage. You know, I'd always say that technology is one of those few things that, that, that removes constraints. So many problems in life, you know, if you've ever like the economics 101, you take in high school where it's like, all right, you have $100 city budget. You know, you can either fund the libraries or the police or the fire department, but you can't fund all three fully. Like a lot of people live in a world every day where our problems are tradeoffs. I can do this or I can do that. And technology is one of the only things that's like, oh, hey hey it's now half the price like these these lithium-ion batteries are actually 99 the price they were when they were like introduced on the market in 1991

99 cheaper like one percent of the price um and they're still getting cheaper and so just like huh i show up with this thing it's just like better that is is like is awesome and i think that there's for whatever reason i have, I think I have a decent intuition. Platforms are hard because people like to think concretely, like, okay, what exactly am I going to use this for? What's the product? Who's the customer? And so when you're building a platform, you have to have a little bit of a leap of faith or an ability to believe, like, okay, here's what this is going to be used for. And for whatever reason, I think I'm just pretty good at spotting. I think this is the need i think if we build this people use it and i think

you know if you look at my time at meta it's react it's pie torch like those are the things that i'm probably most proud of because they're things used by millions of people around the world that like fit a need better than anything else out there. And so it just, I don't know what it is. I think I just have like a natural attraction to these lever points that just provide tremendous value for people. So, so maybe this is the perfect segue to what you're doing now. So in 2023, you co-founded a gigascale with Victoria and Eveline to invest in, and I'm guessing accelerate the development of technologies that will help with climate change. And like, I got to tell you, man, I'm every time I talk to

you about what you're doing, like I am so much more hopeful and optimistic about things than than I was like the five seconds before I was talking to you. And so, I mean, I guess why focus your attention on this, which may be an obvious question, and what makes you think you can have leverage there? Yeah, that's the, yeah, got to have some humility. Let's have some real humility on this. So, so I think, you know, it starts with why, and I think I bet you a bunch of people watching this are sort of maybe thinking about this or struggling about this. So I think it's, it's an important point. And like, it took me a while to figure out exactly what happened, but it was, it was

honestly during COVID it was 2020, you know, the whole world was shut down, no cars on Alma Street here in Palo Alto, which is usually really busy. I had a weirdly, like I work lots of hours. I had a weirdly all of a sudden extra time because not driving the kids around activities, you know, everything's on Zoom. So we just like had a couple extra hours in the day. And like, it also just gave me this moment to reflect as the world was sort of in this crisis moment about like, what is my role in this world? Given everything we just talked

about, like tremendous opportunity and fortune, what am I going to do with it? And we'd already been doing a bunch as you do philanthropic work in a variety of areas. But I was like, man, climate is this thing that's going, it's a platform problem. It's going to impact tens or hundreds of millions of people. And the people most impacted are the least equipped to deal with the impacts. And so it's like, here I am with a bunch of resources. Like, isn't it just an obligation for me to go off and do this? That's kind of where it started. And I started thinking it was going to be philanthropy. I was like, great, I'm going to direct more of my time and attention to philanthropy. I spent a lot of nights and weekends. And again, I got to have a learner's mind. It's like, I don't know anything about this. So I'm just going to learn really quickly about all of it. And that was a huge advantage because

I just didn't have all of the baggage from, from before. And that's where we, you know, I started doing a bunch of philanthropic thing, spinning out a nonprofit last year, that's working on a form of ocean carbon capture and funding a bunch of early stage science there. And then it was again, back to high frequency experiments. It was like, okay, we're doing that. And then I kind of bumped into some entrepreneurs, like you're doing some really interesting stuff. And as I just went through it, it was like, look, we need to be spending trillions of dollars a year to rebuild our physical infrastructure, how we make energy, how we consume it, how we transport things, how we make food, how we live in buildings. That is not a problem that a government or philanthropy can tackle with direct investment.

Like you need the markets to basically markets can do that. Markets can spend trillions of dollars a year. We spend about that in, you know, in oil and gas right now. And markets do that when there's money to be made. So I think that it's like, okay, great. Where's the money to be made? And how do we take technological disruption back to my home? This thing's now half the price it used to be. I can now disrupt an incumbent and they don't know it yet. I was

like, that's where I get excited. It's like, cool. We have new technology with these curves of batteries. We've got genome sequencing. So we're working on a vaccine for, for cattle to, to reduce their, their, um, their methane emissions. We've got, um, you know, uh, we've got solar cells, all of these things on a massive cost down curve. And then you start asking your questions like, where are the disruptions there and who are the people that are going to do it? And so that's really the foundation of it. And then taking all of this experience of building hardware teams, technology, and using it to help, you know, when I find a great entrepreneur, who's got,

you know, Sarah Labenson, who's building an electrochemical cell to make ethylene. So when I'm making the pipes in your building, instead of doing all this dirty, nasty stuff with fossil fuels and emitting all these things, I have this nice little cell that just has electricity coming in. And then I make the chemical. And that's really cool. But the cooler part is we think we can do it cheaper. And so the pitch to the customer is like, yeah, our thing's cheaper. And oh, yeah, it's also really good for the environment. And like that, I just get so excited about. And like, I just want to spend my nights and weekends helping Sarah, you know, crush it, because I think we have tons of things like that. And that is leveraging

a bunch of technological curves that are happening very quickly. And so I think this thing that you said about capital investment in markets is very interesting. And I wonder a lot about how you make sure that you have the right incentives set up inside of the market where the market is playing the right game. Because like, look, you can spend trillions of dollars a year. And if you are not spending it efficiently, like getting it in the hands of the people who are most likely to make the big disruptive breakthroughs to sort of encourage the right set of things,

which is not inventing stuff, it's like inventing stuff and then deploying it at scale and like making the unit economics of everything work. Like I'm, I'm a big believer in markets and I think markets can help. Like maybe, maybe it's the best, you know, top level mechanism for making sure that the capital gets allocated efficiently. But is that a thing that you worry about? Yeah. And I think we're, we're different levels of maturity at different sort of technological stacks here and so i think you got to kind of attack the problem from both sides meaning i i can i can disrupt the market because my technology innovation is now half the price

of the incumbents and so my low carbon thing is just cheaper than the high carbon thing because of technological advancement yep like that's that's the easy button in. Right. And then there are other places where you need to bootstrap it a bit. Like maybe I'm not cheaper yet, but when I 10 X my scale, I am cheaper. And so that's where you see incentives, you know, government incentives, whether it be an EV tax credit or getting charging capabilities set up or, you know, carbon emission taxes for, you know, whether it's transport or aircraft or concrete or cement, I'm sorry, steel, you know, carbon emission taxes for, you know, whether it's transport or aircraft or concrete or cement, I'm sorry, steel, you know, I think there are places where the governments can accelerate those things, you know, and get them there. I think that the useful thing about,

you know, I basically am doing both philanthropy and investing, and I very clearly separate them. And philanthropy is like, great, we're going to fund early stage science, we're going to fund policy work, the output of that is a public good. It's something that everyone can see and use. There's no money to be made here. And then in the investing hat, I'm like, I'm only going to invest in this company because I think you have a business, right? You have a technology that at scale is fundamentally better or cheaper than the other alternatives out there. And what's surprising to me is like, there was a question in my mind of like, is there a lot of those or not? And the answer is there's a lot because there's of, is there a lot of those or not? And the answer is, there's a lot.

Because there's so much inefficiency in the current market. I talked about DiagCycle, which is making ethylene cheaper than high-carbon alternatives. I'll give you two other really quick ones. Arbor Energy, a bunch of SpaceX engineers know how to make rocket engines and gas turbines. They're like, huh, all this forestry waste we're pulling out of the california forest because we're going to try to prevent forest fires like all that stuff like either piles up and sits and rots which makes methane which is bad or you put it into an old school bio fuel plant which is kind of like a big huge wood fire terrible particulate you know pollution they're like we spent all this time doing these high pressure high oxygen burn things if we can build a high pressure high oxygen burn we can basically take

that same fuel source and like out of it is water and a fairly pure stream of co2 water we can actually do something with that co2 we can inject in the ground or use as an input to another chemical process and by the way we're making energy's like, it's, you can think of it as like energy producing carbon capture. We capture carbon and we make energy. And like, that's kind of cool. You know, and then you go to another direction with like a company, we just invested in arch and you say, look, we've got heat pumps. I'm trying to heat and cool my home air conditioning, heating. This magic heat pump technology is just like strictly more efficient than everything else out there. For most consumers you do the math you're like it's a little bit more money up front

but in a certain but you're like your bills go down every month and so you ask yourself was like why isn't everyone installing these and you start going out and you talk to installers and they can't answer simple questions the consumer's like okay this thing is five thousand dollars this thing is ten thousand dollars you say it's cheaper How long does it take to pay back? And they go, so of course everyone goes, I'll buy the cheap one. And so now you have a software solution that can do all this for you. It's like, oh, your payback period is 37 months. Do you want to do this? Like, hell yeah, I want to do that. So it's a massive inefficiency in the market. You're attacking with technology.

And at the other end of it, a whole bunch of people are going to make a bunch of money. Installers are installing more heat pumps. Consumers save money. It's just good. That's what gets me excited. Every time I look at this, it's like, oh, that's a pretty good opportunity right there. And we haven't even talked about the grid, which is a whole other thing which you can spend another hour talking about. Well, let's talk about the grid, actually, because I'm sure on multiple dimensions,

the grid is a source of concern for both of us. Yeah, if you look forward a handful of years, the amount of energy that the world will need is just much higher than it is right now. And you can even imagine worlds where if you had abundant, cheap, sustainable sources of energy, you really could change a whole bunch of things about the world. You wouldn't have water scarcity anymore, drinking water scarcity. But the grid is this interesting thing.

Given the current momentum, you're only going to have the electric power industry build this amount of capacity in a particular way. Very few electric power companies like the operators like have R&D functions. So like there's nobody really doing a ton of R&D about changing like how it is that you're actually doing generation. So like talk about that. I mean, you must have thought about this way more deeply than I have. Yeah. So this is both a deep concern and a massive opportunity. So I think that the short way to think about it is like electrical demand in the United States has been relatively flat, you know, over the last like two decades-ish or decade or so. And that's like good news because it basically means it's actually decoupled from GDP.

So we've been using about the same amount of energy and growing our GDP, mostly because of technological efficiency, LED light bulbs, things like that, which is awesome. But it also means we've like lost the muscle on building lots of generation and distribution capacity. If you look at other countries like China, they're like growing their grid capacity at a massive rate, much faster than the US is. So you start with like, are there physical laws and limits? It's like, nope, humanity can build this stuff really quickly. We just, for a variety of historical reasons, plus choices, plus regulations, aren't currently. So it's like, okay, good news, not violating laws of physics. And then you say, okay, increasing demand, that's one side. We're building a lot more factories in the US now. We have data centers

working on AI. So that's creating increased demand. There's also this new set of supply that's very different than the old set, which is like wind and solar. So if you look at ERCOT, Texas's grid, on noon, about 50% of their power is wind and solar. Wind and solar is amazing. It is the cheapest form of energy generation we have ever had as humanity, but it doesn't work 24-7. Everyone knows that. So now I have this new variable production and this increasing in demand, which are both new to the grid, right, which creates disruption. Disruption equals startup opportunity. And there are so many different ways to attack this problem. And they're hard, but I'm excited about it.

On one level, grid storage is huge. commercial grid solar array is the cheapest form of energy generation and the most likely to be delivered on time, on budget of any project we know how to build because they're so simple. So people are building these at massive scales. We're getting close to a trillion dollars of investment in this a year. And if I can then show up and say, oh, hey, I have this thing I can put right next to your solar array that allows you to dispatch energy 24-7. And by the way, people will pay you more money. They do this in Texas at 8 PM when it's peak power load. So go ahead and charge the battery when energy is cheap and then discharge it when energy is really expensive. That's a really good business. And so now there's a huge incentive for me to build grid storage in a way that 10 years ago

nobody cared nobody cares about grid storage and batteries but like so now we have companies like form energy it's like huh instead of using lithium-ion batteries i'm going to use this iron oxide battery it's really cheap to make it's bigger it's heavier which doesn't really work for a car but who cares it's on a big concrete pad it's super cheap like that's going to be a great business. You have a bunch of other people saying, huh, power lines are like rated statically, which means you rate them how much power you think they can hold. But like, depending on how cool it is outside, you can probably put 30% more power safely through that. So maybe let's just put sensors on the power line and say like, it's cool to go 30% more power. It's fine. Like magically,

now I have more power. There's other companies saying like superconductors now work. We can like five X the amount of power through this line via superconductor. So there's so many different ways to attack that problem. And I think the disruption causes the opening for these business models to exist. If I had superconducting power lines 10 years ago, nobody would care about a grid battery. Nobody would care. They're now trillion dollar businesses, business opportunities waiting for people. And there's a lot other, and then we didn't even talk about fusion, which is, I'm really excited about, we're going to do multiple bets in fusion. But that, when you talk about AI data centers, you're building your latest, greatest new data center. If I tell you, I can put a 250 megawatt facility right next to your data center on 20 acres that requires no

inputs or outputs, literally don't need a fuel line or anything like one tanker truck will fuel this thing for a year you're like yeah i'll take that yes so you know there's a lot to do that's really hard i don't want to overstate i don't want to overstate my role but like part of my job is like get behind and push like can we get these things more and faster and more people thinking about this? And like, that's the way forward. Yeah. So I think that is that's an excellent place to end here with with one last question. So I ask everybody who comes on the podcast what it is that they do in their spare time for fun.

You've said several times now that like what you do is like better than any hobby that you could possibly have. But like I'm going to ask ask anyway, like what do you do when you're not doing climate investing and senior technical fellowing at Meta? My my favorite three thing, number one number one by far is anything my kids will do with me so i you know that spending time with the kids is number one i'm like i i'm a i'm a decent skier and a mediocre surfer so i'd love to go skiing i'll never be great at them but they're a lot of fun um but those are my three things family and then a couple of like being in the outdoors doing silly things awesome well it was was it was amazing chatting with you. And as always, I'm feeling more hopeful about our future, hearing your high degree of enthusiasm for all of this climate tech stuff that you're investing in.

So whatever I can ever do to help you out, like I just want you to feel free to deputize me. And like, I'm just glad you're doing what you're doing. So thank you very much. Keep pushing AI. We need it. Like it's going to be a really helpful infrastructure platform for, for a lot of stuff here, Kevin. So I think, and keep, keep telling the stories of technologists.

And like, I think we have this shot at producing a much better future for everyone you know and that that you know that is worth getting up every morning and putting the shoes on and going to work for yeah i absolutely agree with you all right man thank you nice to see you what a great conversation with mike schrepper. So as you were kind of mentioning while you were talking with him and even at the top of the show, Kevin, like what's so striking to me is that what Mike is doing now, he was taking on challenging problems at Meta, don't get me wrong. But what he's doing now is really challenging, but also really fascinating. And I'm really glad that someone like him with his experience is able to kind of bring that lens towards the investment approach and kind of the mentorship approach to solve these very big and very important challenges. Yeah. I mean, Mike and

I've known each other for a really long time, and I have always been impressed not just with Mike's technical expertise, which is tremendous, but the way that he tackles problems is so great. He dives into things, he's got a learner's mindset, he wants to learn as much as he possibly can, he's just a really great first principles thinker. But he's led so many complicated things

and done things with such big groups of people that he understands just the complexity of just how to get a large number of very bright people aligned on a mission and how to go tackle really tough problems. That's exactly what we've got here. If anything, I think the bagger problems that he's tackling are the toughest in the world

because you have a problem that is very big and very imminent. It will not wait on any of us. It's come whether we like it or not. You have even worse than we have some cases in software where you're trying to go fix something where you've got decades worth of prior investment and you you've got to solve these problems of, you know, like what can I reform versus what do I have to like just tear down to the ground

and like rebuild from scratch in order to solve the problem the way it needs to be solved. So here we've got centuries in some cases of things that are, you know, sort of been institutionalized and lots of investment that we've made in them that you have to understand how the new fits into that. And then you have a complicated regulatory environment

that sits on top of all of that. And so it's just great to have someone like Mike trying to push really hard to empower entrepreneurs to go help us find some solutions to these tough problems. No, I couldn't agree more. And I feel like he is really uniquely positioned to kind of do that because of his experience. And I think it's notable, like his investment firm is called GigaScale. And that's certainly something that he's done in his career, building platforms, as you two were discussing. And that's such an interesting thing to me, too. You've also worked a lot on building platforms, and you know what it's like to make things have to scale. And I feel like with these problems that Mike is investing in now, scale is really what's necessary.

What's your experience, I guess, kind of, you know, Mike alluded to this, talking about kind of needing to understand, you know, the amount of momentum you need for something. But what's your experience with, I guess, kind of figuring out when you need to take something from maybe being, all right, this is this size. But if we want this to actually be impactful and actually work, we need to go, you know, we can't just build one data center. We need to build, you know, 40 of them at the same time. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Yeah, for sure. I mean, and look, it's no accident that Mike and I are friends and that we've always got along because he and I share many of the same guiding principles for how you go tackle problems. You know, I think the very best way that you can get change made at scale is to sort of use systems that are already in place to assist you.

So like the thing that Mike talked about a bunch, which is like just letting the markets time we apply it anywhere. So it makes the incumbents better and it presents an option to the incumbent that, you know, even if the incumbents being especially intransigent, like, you know, everybody's just going to adopt the alternative. And so like that, using that market mechanism and that competition is, I think, a really, really effective thing. He mentioned another thing, which is really interesting, which is this heat pump anecdote that he gave, where there's a new heat pump technology that might be twice as expensive as the existing technology. And if you just knew that 2x upfront costs meant that your long-term operating costs are going to be much less over the lifetime of the system, it's easy to choose the 10k upfront. And so there, the market-making thing is just making sure that

the consumer understands what the trade-off is. And maybe you also need a policy thing up front, which is how do you subsidize or allow the consumer to make that up-front investment? I mean, we just sort of take for granted a bunch of things about our financial markets right now. But we don't give loans out to people just for grins. You loan people money because it lets them invest upfront in things that are long-term efficient. If that weren't the case, the financial industry would be loan sharking like none of it would make any sense.

And so, yeah, letting the market efficiently allocate capital where it can and like where it's not like changing the rules of the marketplace so that like that efficient allocation of long-term efficient allocation of capital can happen is super, super important, I think. No, I totally agree. And I also think what you were saying and what Mike was talking about, too, you know, making sure that people can understand, as you said, that trade-off, understand how that market allocation is going to work and why it might be worth, you know, the initial outlay is great, too. But no, I think those are fantastic points. And I'm really glad that Mike is taking his expertise from building platforms and applying them towards these other problems too.

Yeah. And look, in addition to the client investing he's doing, I think part of our conversation was just sort of super interesting because Mike, again, has had one of the legendary Silicon Valley careers. Not everybody gets to go from Boca Raton, Florida, to, you know, being, you know, CTO, you know, for as many years as Mike was of like, one of the iconic, like big platform companies in technology. And I think Mike shared a whole bunch of like, super interesting stuff from how he even approached his career that like, even if you're not going to go be the CTO of a big tech company is going to serve you

incredibly well as you, you know, progress through life and try to figure out how to do valuable and rewarding things. No, I totally agree. And his run, you know, he was at Facebook for more than 15 years, but his run, you know, as CTO is, you know, aligns with, you know, one of the greatest I think you mentioned, you know, PyTorch and React that can touch so many people has been incredibly influential and I think is incredibly inspiring. And, you know, and the techniques for how he manages his career, like run experiments with your career, like what can you learn? Like, you know, how can I go line my activity up with, you know, I'm going to go learn a thing that's going to help me make better decisions about my career in the future. You know, like thinking about leverage, thinking about

markets, like, you know, making sure that you're landing in places where your effort and activity is going to be, you know, for macroeconomic reasons, is going to be aligned with the potential for high impact. And taking risks too, right? Like, you know, deferring your master's to go, you know, do something for, you know, working at a startup and having that experience, sometimes taking those bets, which is also what he's doing now as an investor. Yeah. And like, it's a Warren Buffett quote, but it's a good one. Like the best investment anybody can make is in themselves. And so just, you know, really, really thinking about like, how am I getting better? Like, how do I improve? How am I learning more? Like, how am I putting myself in situations where, you know, my, my growth is, you know,

increasing or has the option to increase? Like, I think those are all good questions for all of us to be asking ourselves all the time. I totally agree. I totally agree. Everybody keep learning. All right. Well, that is all of our time that we've got for today. Huge thanks to Mike Schreffer for joining us.

If you have anything that you would like to share with us, please email us anytime at behindthetech at microsoft.com. You can follow Behind the Tech on your favorite podcast platform or you can check out our full video episodes on YouTube. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.