In Search Of Excellence - Steve Case: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places are Building the New American Dream | E35

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

If it weren’t for Steve Case, the internet may never have become part of our everyday lives. He is the co-founder of AOL, after all. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Steve��s search for excellence. As one of the most important entrepreneurs in the last hundred years, Steve is driven by a mission to create entrepreneurial opportunities in surprising places as a means to close the opportunity gap. Since 2003, he’s invested in more than 500 companies and his contributions have influenced the lives of hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people around the world. In this episode, Randall and Steve discuss whether someone can learn to be an entrepreneur or does they have to be born with the gene, the importance of failure and our ability to overcome it, the role entrepreneurs play in creating jobs, why innovation is key when starting a company, and so much more.Topics include: -The digital revolution-Raising venture capital-Establishing partnerships-The Attacker/Defender dynamic-Characteristics of great entrepreneurs-Closing the opportunity gap-How to identify promising entrepreneurs-Mistakes to avoid when looking for funding-Philanthropy and The Giving PledgeSteve Case is one of America’s best-known and most accomplished entrepreneurs and a pioneer in making the Internet part of everyday life. Steve’s entrepreneurial career began in 1985 when he co-founded America Online (AOL). Under Steve’s leadership, AOL became the world’s largest and most valuable Internet company, driving the worldwide adoption of a medium that has transformed business and society. At its peak, nearly half of Internet users in the United States used AOL. Steve’s passion for helping entrepreneurs remains his driving force. He was the founding chair of the Startup America Partnership—an effort launched at the White House to accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation. He is also a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship, was the founding co-chair of the National Advisory Council on Innovation & Entrepreneurship and a member of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness where he chaired the subcommittee on entrepreneurship. Books mentioned:The Rise of the Rest, by Steve CaseThe Third Wave, by Steve CaseThe Third Wave, by Alvin TofflerSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

You're listening to part two of my awesome conversation with Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL, who is changing the entrepreneurial landscape of America. If you haven't yet listened to part one, be sure to check that one out first. Without further ado, here's part two of my conversation with Steve. On January 12, 2003, almost three years to the day of the merger, you resigned as chairman of AOL Time Warner. That was a Friday. On the following Monday, you and your long-time colleague Don Davis had lunch at California Pizza Kitchen and DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. You had worked with Don at AOL for five years. And while you were eating a barbecue chicken pizza, which is my favorite dish there, by the way, the two of you were talking about how you'd

been attackers at AOL, which you liked. You came out of that launch wanting to get back to building companies and wanted to open a new venture capital firm to attack old industries where there had been very little change and very little innovation. So you created an investment firm called Revolution. First as a family office using $500 million of your own money, and you later turned it into an investment platform with three venture funds that have since invested in more than 500 companies. Can you tell us about the attackers and defenders in companies like Eastman, Kodak, and Blockbuster Video?

And as part of this, in the search of excellence, how important is innovation when you're starting a company or trying to grow a company? And on the personal side, for us to achieve excellence, how important is it for us to innovate as people to have a plan for self-improvement by doing things like reading publications or book in other industries or reading books about new topics or going to classes or even watching YouTube videos? So the attacker-defender thing, I realized this when I was sitting in a board meeting after AOL and Time Warner merged. And I realized that different people in the room are essentially talking different languages and kind of talking past each other.

The ethos we had at AOL was really around what was possible, what new ideas we should pursue, how do we innovate, how do we disrupt, how do we attack and really challenge the incumbents. But when a company, I think, gets to a certain scale, an old-time order combined at 90,000 employees, $40 billion of revenues, $10 billion of profits, the tendency is to more play defense, try to protect what you have. And of course, you want to create new opportunities, but you mostly don't want to lose what you have. And that was the attacker-defender dynamic. And even when we started Revolution, naming it Revolution sent a signal that we wanted to be

on the side of those attackers. We wanted to back the next generation of entrepreneurs that were attacking, disrupting, reimagining some of the most important industries, healthcare, education, food, and so forth. We wanted to provide not just capital, but also help them with their strategy, help them introduce them to new potential partners, help them kind of tell their story and get a spotlight for it, help them recruit talent. And so that's been the journey I've been on

for the past 15 years or so with a particular bias towards, which ties again with Rise Rest, the bias towards investing outside of Silicon Valley. So as most people invest in Silicon Valley, we thought there was an opportunity to invest outside of Silicon Valley and really help the entrepreneurs and cities all around the country start companies that maybe they otherwise wouldn't have been able to start or scale them in ways that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to scale. You've had tremendous success in Revolution, more than 50

exits from different funds that focus on all stages of a company's growth, from seed stage where you're making small $100,000 investments to series A and B rounds where you're making $5 to $25 million investments, and late stage companies were making $25 to $50 million investments. But I want to focus on your rise of the Red Seed Funds and its mission to make sure that entrepreneurship is happening everywhere in the country, that entrepreneurs everywhere are getting funding for their companies. Can you tell us about the impetus for your mission and these funds? And as part of this, can you talk about the fruit orchards in Silicon Valley, but the great city of Detroit where I grew up used to be, the 50% in California versus the 1.3% in Florida in the cool decked out RV you drive around the country?

Well, there's a lot to talk about there, but it is something I am passionate about. I think the inspiration for The Rise of the Rest was specifically some of the work I was doing 10 years ago with the White House, President Obama. I was asked to chair an initiative called Startup America that opened my eyes to the role entrepreneurs play in not just building businesses, but creating jobs and the disparity between how venture capital is invested, where most of it goes to a few places like Silicon Valley. 75% of venture capital in the last decade has gone to just three states. Three states. So California, New York, and Massachusetts. So you get more capital to the other 47 states. But as I've thought more about it,

some of my passion about that actually comes from my own experience that we talked about starting AOL in Northern Virginia, where there wasn't venture capital. There wasn't a very strong startup community. It was harder to be taken seriously. It was harder to attract people to join the company. It was harder to get attention from partners or from journalists or others. And I think living through that and seeing how challenging it can be, I think that also helped inspire me to back this next generation of entrepreneurs. And the specific question you asked, right now, if you look at where venture capital is going, about half of it in the last decade has gone to one state, California. Other states, including

Florida, Texas, others get 1% or 2%. Most states get less than 1%. So the entrepreneurs in those places do have a tougher time if they have an idea, getting the funding they need to make that ideal real, which then leads many of them to leave where they are to go to some other place like a Silicon Valley, because that's kind of where the other people are and that's where the money is. And that results in sort of a brain drain, almost a hollowing out of some communities. And we're trying to slow that brain drain and create a boomerang of people returning. And the pandemic, frankly, even though it's been terrible in many respects, has been helpful in terms of getting people to rethink where they want to live and

how they want to live and where they want to work and how they want to work and remote work and other kinds of things that I think bode well. And the last point on Detroit specifically, given your own personal connection to it, you know this, but most people probably don't, that 100 years ago, essentially Detroit was Silicon Valley. It was the innovation capital of America when the automobile was the hot technology of the day. And everybody wanted to be part of that car revolution. Everybody wanted to move to Detroit and be part of the excitement of creating this new industry. Detroit was rocking and rolling.

At the time, Silicon Valley was basically just fruit orchards. It was farmland. There was not an infrastructure around startups and technology. What happened since then, particularly in the last half century, sadly, there was a decline in Detroit. The auto business got tougher. Globalization kicked in, a bunch of other things. Because they got larger, they shifted from being an attacker to being a defender, got kind of cocky and complacent, lost market share, kind of lost their way. As a result, Detroit lost 60% of its population over the past half century. And the year before we rolled into town with our rise and rest bus, which was 2014, the

city of Detroit declared bankruptcy. And that was at one point the innovation hub of America. So that should be a reminder to all of us that cities rise and fall, countries rise and fall. We really have to be deliberate and intentional to make sure that we're creating opportunity in more places. We are creating more jobs in more places. We're creating opportunity in more places. We are creating more jobs in more places. We're innovating in more places.

And that drives our work around Rise and Rest. The reason I wrote this new book called The Rise and Rest is I really believe we're at a moment here that could transform America and could result in a much more evenly dispersed innovation economy. So instead of having some people do really well and feeling optimistic about the future and most people not doing so well and feeling frustrated about the future, they feel like they're being left behind, we want to create opportunity in as many cities as possible, which is why we've now invested in 100 different cities. And it's remarkable what's happening in these cities. People who read this book will be surprised how many cities are really on the rise, how many startup communities really are starting to flourish.

And I think it bodes well for those communities, bodes well for those entrepreneurs. I think it also bodes well for the country. Maybe we can start unifying what's a very divided country by closing what has been a rather vexing opportunity gap. What's interesting for me to see being from Detroit, I've lived in LA since I graduated law school, and Detroit has a very bad reputation. They think it's dangerous. No one wants to live there. You talk about the bankruptcy of Detroit, and actually, I think it's the best thing the city could have gone through back at the time. The city since then has completely exploded. I think property values have quintupled, in some cases gone up 10 times. It's a very cool place to live right now.

If you're a startup, you want to go in some places to places where the cost of living is less. You look at Silicon Valley, what a house costs, forget it. Apartment, forget it. You've looked at cities like Sacramento, where you have a lot of people moving there right now. You have a bunch of companies started there. The startup community is thriving there. For those listening in different parts of the country, you're in Chattanooga, or you're in Wichita, Kansas. And you're listening to this podcast. You have no idea about Rise of the Rest. They don't know about your boss. I know you guys do a lot of legwork before you go to a city and there's a whole team. How are you telling people that you're coming?

How are people contacting you? And how are people going to get a meeting with you? Can they get a meeting with you? Are you still personally going in the bus? If I learned that you were coming to town, Steve, what I would do is I'd find out where that bus was parked and I'd camp out outside that bus until you walk down the steps. Tell us what people should be doing. First of all, I want to finish as you started the Detroit story because it is a great rebirth in the last decade. When we were first there on that first

bus tour, things were starting to show some glimmers of hope, but things are really accelerated, particularly in that downtown Detroit area. I remember entrepreneur Dan Gilbert, who's a partner with us and investor in Rise and Rise, founder of Quicken Loans, owns sports teams. He really decided to do what he could to help rebuild downtown Detroit, including moving his Quicken Loan headquarters there. And he also bought over 100 office buildings in downtown Detroit that mostly were vacant and weren't worth much. And now 10 years later, most of them are full occupancies, quite high, rents are higher. So it's actually turned out quite well. And we backed a number of companies, including Shinola and StockX that are in Detroit. So that is a great example of, even though it was strong at one point and then was really, you know,

kind of had some real challenges, it's fighting its way back. In terms of your broader question, as you mentioned, we've been to a lot of different cities. Each city is a little bit different in terms of their story, but it tends to be a bunch of

kind of clusters of fuel. One does tie in, and you mentioned this, with cost of living. It is easier and cheaper to live in a lot of these cities. And as a in, and you mentioned this, with cost of living. It is easier and cheaper to live in a lot of these cities. As a result, it's also easier and cheaper to start companies in those cities because if you raise, call it a million dollars of venture capital, you can go two or three times further in most of these variety of diverse cities than if you were

in San Francisco or New York, which obviously are more expensive. That is one part of it. Another part of it is really trying to figure out what are the places that really connect with people. And there's something about them that really inspire people and they want to live there. They want to raise their family there. And sometimes that's because of family connections. Maybe you grew up there and other times that's because something is happening in that city that makes it a magnet for talent. Like Austin, what they've done around entertainment and even the South by Festival is part of that. Or you see this in a place like Bentonville in Arkansas, in Northwest Arkansas, they've done a lot around placemaking. It's now the mountain

biking capital of the world. So if you're interested in mountain biking, that's a place to be. So there are other factors that result in people making some decisions. And the third, which in some ways is the most important to keep an eye on, is there are certain cities in this country, and a lot of them we've highlighted obviously in the book, that it's actually the perfect place to start that company. I mentioned Northwest Arkansas. There's a company there called AcreTrader. It's basically an investing platform to invest in farmland.

The founder, Carter Malloy, actually was in San Francisco and moved to Arkansas because he said, if I'm building this platform, I need to get farmers to trust me. I'm more likely to do that if I'm close to them in Arkansas as opposed to sitting in an office building in San Francisco. Or you mentioned Chattanooga. When we were there, we invested in a company called Freightwaves. It's essentially built a Bloomberg-like data platform for the trucking and logistics industry. I didn't know this until we visited, but some of the biggest trucking companies in America are in Chattanooga. So if you want to build a trucking logistics Bloomberg-like platform, that is actually the best possible city to be in. So that's the thing to watch over the next decade. And that's why I wrote the book, which has dozens of these stories about entrepreneurs,

certain industries, certain cities that are really capitalizing on what's unique and special and differentiated about particular cities. And so, yes, there'll be some economic, financial reasons to be in these cities. Yes, there'll be some kind of lifestyle, maybe even family reasons to be in some of these cities. But increasingly, there are really some important strategic reasons to be in those cities because you'll have an expertise around that industry. You have credibility to form partnerships in that industry. And that will result in more and more companies starting in the middle of the country and fewer just on the coast.

So my daughter goes to Wisconsin. Brilliant people living there, entrepreneurship culture. I want to come back to my question, how do people know you're coming and what should people be doing if you're in one of those cities, don't know you and want to get in front of you? Well, Rides to Rest is really structured as some programmatic activities, including what we're talking about with bus tours and also an investment fund, a seed fund. And we have, as I said earlier, made 200 investments in 100 cities. And we have more than a dozen people on that team just focused on understanding what's happening in different cities, identifying promising entrepreneurs, partnering with other venture firms in those cities. We've co-invested now with over 400 regional venture firms. So that's a key way we source

opportunities. But when we're on the road, and to your earlier question, yes, when we do these bus tours, I'm on the bus. We're traveling around, and I too am getting the opportunity to firsthand understand what's happening there. And in every city, we do what we call a startup crawl with a bus where we travel around the city and see different parts of the city and meet companies in different parts of the city. We also do a pitch competition. When we're coming to town, we announce it months in advance and we basically ask people to apply to the pitch. In most cases, 100 or so people apply.

We pick the best eight or 10 and we put them on stage and we help coach their presentations and we assemble a team of judges, of which I'm one, but there are always others. Then we have that pitch competition. And we end up investing in at least one of the companies. But in the process, we expose those companies to lots of other people, lots of other potential investors. So that's one way to get connected. The other is, as you said, when people see the bus, we do have people come up to me or other members of their team and make a pitch. And sometimes we have our office here in Washington, D.C., we have people who are

knocking on the door and persevering. And I respect that because I had my own experiences, as we talked about earlier, where in these early days of AOL, we had to really fight to get noticed, fight to get attention, fight to get our foot in the door and fight to get taken seriously. So what we're doing with Rise of the Rest is really trying to make it easier for entrepreneurs with ideas to get noticed and to get capital. So everything we're doing, whether it be on the fun side or on the programmatic side, things like bus tours or summits we host are designed to try to help those entrepreneurs, help those cities, and help the country create a more inclusive innovation economy. So just to note on Dan Gilbert, by the way, so

my mother sold houses, residential homes, and worked with Rock Financial, which was Dan's company. They were a very small mortgage broker at the time. It was Dan, his brother, Gary, who now lives in Los Angeles. And I ran into Gary last summer. We had a very fun conversation about my mom and the growth of Quicken Loans. They sold Rock Financial to Quicken. Quicken was a public company. And then they bought it back when Quicken no longer wanted the mortgage business that he had sold and bought it back, as you know, for a very small amount of money. And the rest is history. But I want to talk about the entrepreneur who's in Detroit. There's Detroit Venture Partners,

which I think is the biggest, most well-known venture firm there. It's backed by Dan. They've had some good successes there. But you're the entrepreneur. You're looking around. You've got Dan, which is a relatively new fund. It's a smaller fund than the billion-dollar funds. And you're sitting there thinking, I'm not going to rely on Detroit Venture Partners because you need sometimes to meet with 80 people before you get funding. So I'm going to go look at some of the Silicon Valley funds that have brand names, more experienced partners, bigger funds. They have corporate development teams or biz dev teams like A16Z. They help you hire, which in today's job market is more important than ever. It's very hard to find tech people. What's your advice to them if they're weighing,

I could get funding locally from Detroit Venture Partners, or I could get funding from Kleiner Perkins. And as you know this, Steve, a lot of these firms right now say, it's me or nothing. I need to invest $10 million. And if I don't, then I'm not in because it's not going to move our fund. Well, I think the venture investment world has different components to it. There's a very early seed stage. There's that somewhat later venture stage and even later growth stage. And you talked about some of that in the introduction. At the earliest stage, when you're trying to raise maybe a few hundred thousand dollars to get started, that usually comes locally. Historically, it's been what's called a friends and family round. People you

know who have some money might think your idea is interesting and want to bet on you and invest in that round. It makes it more challenging in some of these rise-to-the-rest cities and also in some of the communities because not everybody does know friends and family that have money. So how do you create a pathway, an on-ramp for those people? And that's what we're trying to do

in part with Rise to Rest. That tends to be coming mostly from local investors. One of the great things we've seen over the last decade is we, Rise to Rest, partnered with PitchBook just late last year to create a report called Beyond Silicon Valley. Two data points that were interesting and really quite encouraging. One was in the last 10 years, 1,400 new regional venture firms have started, most focused on that earlier stage. There now is more money in those cities than there was 10 years ago. And the other is there's a 600% increase in venture capital going to these rise of the rest cities. So we're seeing where we are making some progress on that front. So for that first step,

if there are people in your community that are making those angel investments or those early stage seed venture investments, that is probably the right way to go. They then likely have connections, networks, as our team does obviously at Revolution, that could introduce you to some of those other firms when you're going to raise a larger amount of money, $10 million, $20 million, so forth, which may be harder to get locally and may lead you to look for some of those coastal investors. But starting with some of that local angel money is the way most companies start. I think that will continue to be the case. Some of those larger firms you mentioned, many have backed away from making those really earlier, smaller check bets because they'd rather focus on later stage opportunities where they can write

larger checks. Are you looking for your next great gift to surprise a friend, colleague, or loved one? Bliss Beaches makes the perfect gift. This best-selling bright and beautiful coffee table book by Randall Kaplan features stunning drone photography from exotic beach locations around the world. It's the perfect housewarming gift, a great addition to any home or office,

and a fun and creative alternative to bringing a bottle of wine to somebody's house for dinner. Bliss Beaches is available for purchase on Amazon, where it has glowing reviews and a five-star rating. Get your next amazing gift and order a copy of Bliss Beaches by clicking the link in our show notes. You've probably met with a thousand people who've pitched you over the years, maybe more. I have no idea how many I've met with. It's well more than 500. Entrepreneurs ask me all the time, are there certain things that I should or must avoid when I'm looking for funding? What are the two or three mistakes or more that someone comes in when pitching you and when the words come right out of their mouth, you immediately say, this is a no-go? There's a mix of things. I think, first of all, keeping things tight,

what some people call the elevator pitch, is important. You've got a relatively short amount of time to try to captivate somebody's interest. And so figuring out why this is a big idea, why this is a battle worth fighting, why this could be a big market, why this could be a valuable company, people tend to, when they're listening, decide for themselves. That meets that test pretty quickly. The second is to make it seem like it's all about you. Entrepreneurship is a team sport. You and your background is important, but we really want to know who else is on your team that really can take this idea and help build it and help scale it and has the credibility, for example, in the sectors you're targeting to establish

the partnerships in that sector so the team is critically important. It goes back to what we talked about, vision without execution. We really want to understand the team so that the idea, if we conclude it is compelling, really can get executed. Another area where we pay attention and sometimes are disappointed is people say, there's no competition. That's a problem for us for a couple of reasons. In most cases, there is competition. And if they don't know about it, that's a problem. Or if they do know about it and aren't telling us, that's a problem because they're not being candid. But conversely, if there really was no competition,

it probably means it's not that big an idea. Because any big idea that's going to transform any big industry and has the potential to be a significant business, there's going to be competition. So we don't want to hear there's no competition. We want to hear why you're better than the competition. What are the one or two, three things you're doing differently from a product standpoint or technology standpoint or a partnership standpoint or whatever it might be, it really will allow you to break through even though there is competition. So those are some of the areas that we focus on. We want to believe in the idea, make sure it is something compelling, has the potential to have real impact, potential to build a valuable company.

We certainly want to understand the background of the entrepreneur, but we also want to understand what the broader team dynamic is. And we want to really understand what the path is to compete against other players, what essentially your go-to-market strategy is, why you are different and better and can be successful. Should people stay in their job or quit their job to start a new company? It depends what they're trying to start. If they have the ability to kind of do something that's a little bit more on evenings, weekends, kind of a moonlighting thing,

and use that as a way to get some market feedback and get a sense whether they're onto something while maintaining their job and continuing to generate that income, that's great. Usually, though, if it's something that is not just about you doing something a little bit on the side, but really requires a more concerted effort, requires building a team because it's not just about you, it's the other people, requires investing in

building a product or some technology that requires some amount of capital, that usually then requires people to make a choice. Investors generally don't want to back somebody who's just doing it as a side hustle, as a moonlighting project. They want to believe that they're all in. So as you start thinking of raising capital, that kind of forces more of a break from what you were doing to really focus fully on what you want to do next. So it certainly depends. As I said, is there some ability to do something on the side? There have been many examples where that's worked out for people. But there is a point in time where you have to really take a stand and say, this is important to me. I know there's some risks in terms of it might not work and I'll

lose my current job and current income and so forth. But I really do believe in this and I'm going to put everything into trying to make it successful. I want to come back for a second. One of the no-goes for me when someone come in and pitches me, you have a bunch of similar questions, you have a bunch of warm-up softball questions, then the harder question comes. But I always throw the 100-mile-an-hour fastball down the middle after someone gets comfortable. How much are you planning on paying yourself? And the right answer is a lower salary so I can take whatever money that we've raised to invest in the business and hire more people. You have the equity, and that's what's going to be worth something,

not taking the salary. But when I started hearing $150,000 or more, and in one case, someone came in and wanted $250,000, they were raising $500,000. I mean, it was a joke. So for me, that one's a total no-go. Yeah, that's fair. You definitely recognize, particularly if people have a family or other things that they have some needs, you don't want to make things too difficult for them, but you also don't want to make it too easy for them. You're taking a risk here. They need to be taking a risk too. So having a salary that's more modest, particularly that early stage when you start generating revenues and certainly when you're on a path to profitability, obviously it should be increased. But in those early days, having some

skin in the game as well, which generally means you were making X at some company and you're taking a salary that's below that. So you too are essentially taking some financial risk on is an important signal to potential investors. I want to talk about philanthropy, which is hugely important to you as it is to me. You created the Case Foundation nearly 20 years ago. And since then, you've supported hundreds of organizations, nonprofit. You also joined the Giving Pledge, which was started by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, which means that you've publicly declared that you intend to give away the majority of your wealth. For you, giving back is not only giving money, but it's also giving your time and reputation to different causes.

Can you tell us about your goals for the next generation of entrepreneurs? We talked about it a little bit, but in terms of the philanthropy you're doing outside of Rise of the Rest and in search of excellence, how important is it to give back to our community? Well, I think it's critical to give back. I think everybody who has the benefit of being successful, whether it be for whatever reasons, kind of a luck, blessing, obviously hard work, bunch of things, I think has an obligation to give back. And for us, my wife, Jean and I, we made a decision relatively early on that we wanted to be part of the giving pledge and commit publicly to giving the majority of our wealth away. And we think that was important. And it was important

in part to send a signal to others, important to also be a network of other givers who can learn from each other, learn from mistakes others made. So maybe we'll make some different mistakes as opposed to the same mistakes. And we also learned, it goes back to the way you framed it, it's not just about giving money away, but also leveraging our reputations, our network, our ability to shine a spotlight on things. In the early days of the foundation, when we first started, which was over 20 years ago,

we did most of our giving quietly. We thought there was a certain humility to that, and we didn't really want to make a big deal of it. At the time, we thought it was the right thing, but several organizations then said to us, we're super grateful for the investment you're making in us, but it would be even more helpful if you would do that publicly, because then that gives us a little momentum, a little bit of credibility that might likely result in us being more able to achieve our mission in terms of attracting other people or attracting other donors or

what have you. We realized there was some truth to that, and we started being more public about some of the commitments we were making. Then, once we make a commitment, trying to figure out ways to leverage that across a broader network. A lot of the focus, particularly over the last decade, has been around promoting entrepreneurship. I mentioned that initiative that we launched at the White House called Startup America

that was funded in part by the Case Foundation. We've done other things to try to do that from a philanthropic standpoint, as well as launching the investment fund, the Rise to Rest seed fund to do it in terms of the prism of investing in companies. What we've learned is that it's important, if you want to change the world, to use every possible tool that you have available to you. Sometimes that is through the prism of business, starting a company or investing in a company that can have significant impact. Sometimes that's through the prism of a nonprofit, the philanthropic sector,

investing or starting in some cases, organizations that can have an impact. Sometimes that's through trying to influence public policy or regulation. So more money gets funded for education or for some other purpose. Each of those three are important, but the real magic, the real power

is the convergence of those. So that's a lot of where we focus on all three. And my wife is doing this predominantly right now through the prism of being the chairman of the National Geographic Society, which has been around for well over a century and is best known for its magazine, but also has cable channel, big digital presence, now a partnership with Disney and does a lot in terms of backing explorers and expeditions all over the world. Some of that, as I said, is business. Some of that is philanthropy. Some of that is in trying to influence government policy. I do that now also as chair of the

Smithsonian, trying to take the idea of these physical museums on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and create more of a virtual Smithsonian so we can reach every home and every classroom. And again, that's a cross-sector mix. So that's our way of trying to have the broadest possible impact. And even the work we're doing specifically around Rise the Rest, even the reason to write this new book on Rise the Rest, is it does feel like leveraging our full array of capabilities to really shine a spotlight on this idea of the rise of the rest, the idea of rising entrepreneurs, the idea of rising startup cities is important, both to those cities and more broadly to the country. And so again, some of that is through the prism of investing, some of that's through the prism of philanthropy, some of that's through the prism of being involved in government

policy related to innovation, entrepreneurship. If we want to change the world, in this case, level the playing field for entrepreneurs everywhere, we need all hands on deck and use every tool in the arsenal to try to maximize our impact. Before we finish today, I want to go ahead and ask some more open-ended questions. I call this part of my podcast, Fill in the Blank to Excellence. You ready to play? Sure. When I started my career, I wish I had known. How long everything takes. The revolutions happen in evolutionary ways and you got to take the long view. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is?

Importance of people, teams. It's not about you. It's about the team. It's not about vision. It's about execution. My number one professional goal is? Level the playing field for entrepreneurs everywhere and create more hope and opportunity for cities everywhere and try to do what I can to help lift up the country to make sure we

remain the most innovative country and are the leader of the free world and have a leading economy in the world. My number one personal goal is? Spend more time with family. We became grandparents over the last several years. The pandemic was terrible in many respects, but it was positive in that respect. Unfortunately, none of those grandkids live where we are, so we're spending more time with them.

And that's been a lot of fun and something I want to do more of in the years ahead. The one thing I've dreamed of doing for a very long time but haven't done is? Living in another country for some period of time, six months. Not necessarily moving there, but it'd be fun to, as we travel around with Rise of the Rest, we experience different communities, just living someplace else, probably in some other country for some period of time is something we've talked about doing, but haven't yet done. If you could fix one thing in the world, what would it be? Yeah, closing this opportunity gap. So people everywhere really have a shot at the American dream. That's obviously what we're trying to do with Rise of the Rest. The one person in the world that I admire the most is?

My wife, Jean, who inspires me and does great things, including around National Geographic. If you could meet one person in the world, who would it be? Good question. I've had the opportunity to meet a lot of people. I'm trying to think of who I have not met that I still want to meet. Probably President Zelensky, who's leading this charge in Ukraine and inspirational. It's amazing what he's done. Most people thought he had no chance, and the momentum they're showing and the leadership he's providing has been extraordinary. I can't wait every day because the news has been good to see the advances they've made on a daily basis. I agree with you. I think it's incredible. The guy was a comedian.

He's one of the great leaders, I think, of our day, and I hope he wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But it builds on one of your questions earlier. An entrepreneur is born or nurtured. He was not born an entrepreneur. I mean, he was not born a president of a country. He was most of his life a comedian, but he pivoted, ran for office, suddenly found himself in what was an existential threat to the nation and arguably the world and stepped up and led. So I think that should inspire all of us that we probably can do more. And if we push come to shove and we have to kind of step up, we probably can. Steve, you've been someone I've admired for a very long time. You're one of the most important entrepreneurs in the last 100 years. And your contributions have influenced the lives of hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people around the world.

You've been a phenomenal role model and have inspired many, many thousands of people with your success, your humility, and your philanthropy. And you've made an immeasurable contribution to the way we live our lives. I'm very grateful for your time today. Thank you very much for sharing your story with us. Thanks for hosting this. It's been amazing to be part of this. And I'm super impressed with the amount of time

you obviously are spent preparing for us. You know more about me than probably some of my kids know. And you ask great questions, which obviously didn't come just by accident. It was hard work to really prepare. Thank you.