The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Investing in (Business and Career) Change

Episode Date: March 25, 2016

Most investors try to invest in things that don't change and last forever -- Warren Buffett for example loves Heinz ketchup! But VC is about investing in things that do change... a lot. How does this basic mindset challenge much of what people learn in business school or classic leadership training? Do software-led businesses require different mindsets? What are some of the most common things first-time vs. serial entrepreneurs do? This Q&A -- with Marc Andreessen interviewed by Don Faul (former U.S. Marine platoon commander and head of operations at Google, Facebook, Pinterest, and now COO at Athos) -- covers these topics, as well as what to consider when working for a big- v. small- (and especially intermediate-) -sized company, what it takes to make a career transition, and how to "go back to kindergarten". The conversation took place before a group of 25 veterans who participated in the Breakline education and hiring program (one week of which was hosted at Andreessen Horowitz) for veterans shifting into careers in the tech industry. photo credit: Rene Tate for Breakline Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi, everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. Today's episode is based on a Q&A with Mark Andreessen interviewed by Don Fall, a former U.S. Marine platoon commander who then worked at Google, then headed up online operations at Facebook, and then most recently led operations at Pinterest, and now is the C.O. at Athos. The conversation took place as part of the breakline education hiring program for transitioning veterans into careers in tech, which was hosted one week recently at Andreessen Horowitz. Don and Mark cover everything in this conversation from what means to invest in the business of change to what it means to consider a career transition. Over to Mark and Don.

Good morning. Hello again. You guys get me again. It's nice to see you guys. So first off, just wanted to start off by saying thank you to Mark for his time and for the time of the firm. Mark has been an incredible supporter of that. I think this is the third or fourth time that he's dedicated his time to having a conversation like this.

So if I got a few questions, we'll spend maybe 34. minutes on questions, and then we'll open it up to you guys for Q&A. Sure. So I wanted to start with, I think that this industry is new for a lot of us in the audience, software. Warren Buffett once famously said that he didn't invest in software or technology businesses because he didn't understand or get them. What makes this industry different? So the big difference, and for those you haven't read, Warren Buffett's his, he writes this annual

letter where he kind of goes through a lot of stuff, and there have been various books written over the years that kind of sum up everything. Or you can just actually download and read all the letters. It's kind of an education in business. And he's kind of somebody that his philosophy is somebody that a lot of people index against. And we kind of index against it by trying to do the exact opposite. And the reason I say that is because the core foundation behind what he does and what a lot of the world's best investors do is they try to invest in things that aren't going to change.

And so if you look at the things that Warren Buffett and invests in, he invests in things like Heinz ketchup. He bought Heinz ketchup. He's been eating Heinz ketchup his entire life. You know, everybody else eats Heinz ketchup. I don't know where I grew up, if somebody brought your ketchup other than Heinz, it was like offensive. And, you know, so you kind of invest, you know, Coca-Cola's, you know, these sort of iconic things that will kind of last forever. We try to invest on the other side of that. We try to invest in the change. And so nothing makes us happier as when something has been going

for 30, 40, 50 years. And then we find the breakthrough technology that's going to make that obsolete. And then the new thing captures all the value. Back in the old days, there used to be these things called encyclopedias. And if in the, you know, 50s, 50s, 60s, they actually used to be traveling encyclopedias salesmen, who had literally, go to door-door-door selling encyclopedias, and then there'd be payment plans where you pay by the month, and on month one, you get the volume that says A, right? And so, if you had homework that involved, you know, something involved in the letter R, you had to wait like 18 months for your parents to make the payment plan. And it was this annuity business that just sold over and over

and over again, and it worked all great and wonderful up until the internet, and then all of a sudden, it went straight to zero. Actually, first it was encyclopedias on CD-ROM at a fraction of the price. And now it's just Wikipedia. Why would you possibly pay money for an encyclopedia when you can on Wikipedia. And so we try very deliberately to invest on the side of change. A great case study of actually how that's playing out today is Warren, after decades, saying he didn't understand tech. He took a big position in IBM. And I was actually at a conference where, after he made that investment several years ago, and he was asked, he was asked the question, like, why did you finally break your pattern and invest in a technology company after all these years and why IBM? And he said,

basically, he said, IBM is the company that never dies. Basically, there are a certain set of Fortune 500 customers where they just use IBM for everything, and they've been using IBM for everything for 50 years, and they're going to use IBM for everything for another 50 years. And I view our company's challenge and opportunity is to prove that untrue. I would hope that we're on the right side of that. Although he is so smart you never know. Yeah. So given those differences that exist between software businesses and traditional businesses,

can you talk a little bit about leadership? Are there kind of principles and experiences that are universal across industries, and are there specific mindsets that are required in this industry, given the dynamic? Yeah, so there's a lot of fundamentals of leadership that are, of course, the same, right? It's a lot of the stuff that you guys already know from your careers. But it's, you know, a lot of it is around organizing people. It's a shared mission, shared purpose, shared values, you know, being able to have plans, being able to have the right relationship between plans and action, you know, there's a lot of commonalities in any situation. There is, however, though, a very, very fundamental difference in running a company where the goal is, nothing changes versus running a company where the goal is change everything. And this we see play out every day. in the real world and in all these different industries. We even see it in the tech industry. So Microsoft Windows, for example, will do well, right, as long as the iPhone doesn't get too popular, right?

Or Intel chips will do continue to sell well as long as arm chips don't get to be too good. Or Google Search will do great as long as, you know, people don't, instead of searching people just like ask Siri instead. Right. So even in the tech industry, you have, are you trying to change or are you trying to prevent change? Are you trying to lead change? Are you trying to lead stability? And so, and that's a fundamental, right? That's a fundamental leadership thing.

And predominantly what's taught in business school is how to run a stable business, right? And so, you know, the basic management rhythm, right? It's like, okay, we're going to have, we're going to, we're the business perform this quarter, next quarter to the quarter after. Our products will get better over time, but they'll kind of get better in a continuous way without anything really changing. The tech companies, when they run that way, it's generally disastrous. And so in contrast, the core thing that a tech leader has to do is say, okay, what I'm selling today is probably obsolete. We need to now invent the future. And we need to invent the future now. And then three months, six months, nine months, months, 12 months later, we need to invent more future.

And our ability to succeed is based on coming up with things that nobody else is thought of. And that's a very different rhythm. In fact, you see this really interesting thing happen. Even in the big tech companies, they'll get these, at a certain point, they'll get these really polished, high-end professional CEOs. And then they'll miss a product cycle. And all of a sudden, their product isn't as relevant anymore. In business school, what they teach you is that's when you,

you do a turnaround. And so then they have this plan that basically says, okay, now we need to do all these things to fix. But the whole thing with turnaround is like a turnaround is a turnaround is a finite period of time and then you kind of go back to normal. And the problem in tech is there is no normal in tech, right? So Jeff Bezos never does a turnaround at Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg never does a turnaround at Facebook. If the company gets in trouble, the answer is what's the next big breakthrough product. And so it's this willingness to invent the future as kind of the core operating principle of how you lead that's just incredibly different. So a lot of folks in the room are thinking about a transition and about looking for an opportunity in technology

and looking at companies that may be very early stage, very small, companies that are a little bit further along in terms of their size and stage. You've had throughout your career great perspective across that spectrum. What advice would you offer in terms of that choice and how they might think about different companies at different sizes and stages? Yeah, so I would think about, we'll just talk about big versus small and then there's this very interesting kind of intermediate size. You'll hear a lot from people in the valley that big companies are all kind of lumbering giants and kind of goes consistent with what I was just talking about. Like if they're not obsolete today, they're going to be. And I don't quite fully believe that. We have big companies in tech that

are very innovative. And so I look at it a little bit differently, which is at best, the thing that a big company can do that a small company can is that it can operate at scale. And in fact, we actually see this. I was on the board of a startup as a great Silicon Valley founder named Diane Green. And we invested in her company, which was a new kind of business software company. And then she turned around and sold the company to Google, which was a bit of a surprise. And basically what she said, was, you know, it's sort of this classic thing. At my startup, we can build this new software, and if it works, we can scale up over 10 or 15 or 20 years to get to the scope, scope and size and scale that Google's at today. She said, if Google buys me, I immediately

am at that scope and scale, right? And so the work that my team does is going to be able to be accessible to a much larger number of people much more quickly. And by the way, there's a lot of logic to that. So at best, the big companies can operate at scale. Then what, you know, what can the startups do? At best, the thing that a startup can do that a big company can is they can just be fast. As you guys have seen in the middle. military, you know, a big organization is able to operate a scale, but decision-making, a big organization necessarily takes a long time because everything has to travel up and down the hierarchy and information gets, you know, attenuated as it travels. Whereas in a startup, you know, you could just

move. Big companies at their worst completely stall out. They just, they spend all their time internally in meetings, just grinding away trying to build internal consensus. And then the world moves too fast and they, and they just lose the plot. Similarly, at their worst, startups just vanish and nobody ever knew they existed. So I view it very much as pros and cons. There are big advantages on both sides and there are big risks on both sides. From a career standpoint, I think it's really important to think about which side of those both opportunities and risks you want to be on. A lot of people who have big ambitions in their careers get frustrated at startups because of this lack of scale. On the other hand, a lot of people with entrepreneurial personalities get very frustrated at big companies because of the slower pace.

And so it's very important to think about it in your own psychology. there is this interesting middle ground that we like a lot and that I would recommend you think hard about, which is there is a middle ground, which is sort of high growth medium size. Right, by the way, there are many medium-sized companies that are not high growth. I would not go to those. But every once in a while you get the startup. At one point, it was 15 people in a garage somewhere. It's not anymore.

Now it's 100 or 200 or 300 or 500 or 500 people. What it's doing is working, but it's still a, it's still not a big company. It's still a smaller medium-sized company. it's on its way. And in five or 10 years, there are good odds that it's going to be a big company because the thing that it's doing is something that a lot of people are going to want. With your backgrounds, I would encourage a lot of you to kind of think in those terms. Because the advantage of that is you don't have to take the raw startup risk that it may not pan out at all, but you also don't have to be employee number 147,638, right?

You get to play a fundamental role in the creation of the company. And I think there's a sweet spot in there that is a really good place for a lot of folks with your backgrounds. I was really lucky to stumble into a couple of those companies at the right moment in time, Google, Facebook, Pinterest. So part of this decision is, I think, evaluating the leader of that company, the entrepreneur. In some respects, you are betting on this person, their vision, their conviction, their ability to get this done, which is very similar to what you do here, evaluating and making bets on entrepreneurs. What advice would you share on that perspective? What makes for a great entrepreneur? How do you evaluate it? So this is the $64 billion question when we talk about it endlessly. And it's a very difficult question because the successes are, are so idiosyncratic. So I would say there are many, many different kinds of successful

entrepreneurs. They were all MBAs, or like if they were all computer nerds, or if they were all, you know, 14 or 28 or whatever it is, or 56, it would be so much easier. But in reality, you just see all these, it's just, it's a game of exceptions. And you get all these stereotypes, you know, in 2004 in the same year, I'll just give you two examples, diametrically opposed. Mark Zuckerberg drops out of Harvard, starts Facebook age 20, with so little experience, not only has he not run a company before, he's never had a job. On the other extreme, you had another, which is now a great software company called Workday, that was founded by a famous legendary Valley entrepreneur named Dave Duffield, who had just turned 68, and it was his seventh

startup and has gone on to become a giant success. And so just even in that one year, you saw this full spectrum of aging experience. And so it's heavily idiosyncratic. And there's various kind of models or templates that we can talk about when we get into the details. But I would abstract a couple really important things. So one, and this is the big that we talk about a lot, and Ben talks about in particular a lot, which is this concept of courage. You all know a lot about it, but it's this general concept of having the willingness to go hard against the grain for a long period of time. And in particular for entrepreneurs, it's the willingness to be told no over and over and over and over again. And this is the thing

that people really miss, I think, when entrepreneurship gets overly romanticized, this is the part that everybody misses. It's just sort of continuous soul-crushing misery of being shot down. And so the willingness to be able to go out into the world and be able to to be able to go appeal to people and go try to get people to do things and be shot down all the time. And nevertheless, to stay at it and power through it. By the way, even once you get some people to say yes, and once you get the company up and running, then things just go wrong all the time. And so even at scale, it's just crisis after crisis after crisis.

And so courage is important. I think the other thing is curiosity. Some people are just deeply engaged in the world and deeply engaged in trying to learn all the time. And so at least I've found that to be a very big correlation. Like, for example, one of the ways to convince us not to fund a startup is for people to 10 minute basically say, I wanted to start a company and I had 14 ideas and I think this is the best idea and then I did two months of work on it and I'm ready to go. And like, we'd rather have somebody who's been obsessed with the idea for five or 10 years and it's just been working hard to

try to figure out how to actually turn it into a company. So, Mark, do you spend time with the entrepreneurs in your portfolios? You coach and mentor them. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see that make? And how much of that learning process can they learn ahead of time by talking to people and how much do they just have to experience by going through it? So I would say we back two kinds of founders. It's kind of those two models. So the first-time founder, not always very young, but is often very young and may not have very much experience and probably has not run a company before. But the other half are what are called now serial founders or serial entrepreneurs, which are people who have started companies before this one. The conventional view of a startup entrepreneur starting a small company is I invent a great new product and then everybody's just going to buy it, right? Like the world, I'm going to build a better mous strap. The world's going to beat a path to my door. What the startup founders don't understand is how big the world is and how busy people are.

And all the existing investments people have made and all the existing time people are spending on things. So in a world of seven billion people, if you really want to have an impact on the world, at some point you have to get to scale. And a lot of that has to do with some of it's in the product, but a lot of that has to do with sales marketing, right, go to market and then international operations. You have to build a company with scale and size and heft to be able to go actually get all the customers. The first-time founders, they don't know the sort of science part of like how you actually construct these companies and how you run a company and how you manage. and how you sell and like, why do we need customer service people? Like, can't the customers just figure everything out themselves? Why do we need a CFO?

Like, we've got QuickBooks. I don't understand the difference. There's a lot of fundamental basics of business. And in particular, the kinds of founders way back tend to be original thinkers. Elon Musk talks a lot about how founders should operate from first principles. And if you tell a founder, you need a sales force. Like, they'll come up, they'll try to rethink the entire art and science of sales from scratch. They'll be like, well, the customers shouldn't need to be sold to because they should just buy the best product.

And then you have this long explanation as to why that doesn't have. And so we try to say, you know, just because you're like a master engineer and you know how to rebuild all of computing does not necessarily mean that you know how to rebuild how to run companies from scratch. And so we try to shortcut them through that. They do fight us on it. And by the way, sometimes they're right and they come up with really original approaches to business. A lot of times they're just delaying, you know, their success. At a certain point, we just asked them, like, would you rather be right or successful? Because on your current path, you'll be right and you'll fail.

So that's the struggle there. The struggle on the other side, the serial entrepreneur, what often happens is it becomes basically all. all science, no art. Often, the desire to start another company kind of overwhelms the process of coming up with a really great idea. And so there, what you try to do is you try to get them to, you try to get them, ideally early on, you try to get them to say, okay, you don't just want to start a company. You want to start a company that actually is going to do something, you know, significant and important and something that's a breakthrough. And don't, by the way, don't start the company until you actually have that idea figured out. And by the way, I think as you guys look

at startups, I would look at it through through that lens. It's usually going to fall into one category or the other. So let's talk a little bit about transitions, career transition. You've worked with a ton of leaders that have made transitions at some point in their career. You made the transition from an entrepreneur to an investor. What have you seen, what traits characteristics have you seen that really set certain leaders up to transition more effectively than others? Yeah. So I think the big thing is really willingness to learn. When Ben and I were raising our, we were raising our first, we actually went and pitched one of our early investors of Jeff Bezos. And he actually asked, stuff. Do you guys really want to go back to kindergarten? And so we said, you know, what do you mean?

He's like, well, you know, it's like you guys, you know, at a certain point, you get successful in your life and you've actually built yourself up and you have some expertise in doing something, and then you want to do something new. And it basically described as going back to kindergarten. Because, right, every field is complex, right? Every topic is complex. Every business is complex. Every industry is complex. Try to figure out, like, from scratch, what would they have known had they spent the last 10 years in that field instead, right? And to kind of absorb. that information and kind of get all the context, you know, as if they had been there from the beginning is a really, really big deal. I think it can be done. I think the level of curiosity it requires

is something that a lot of people don't have. Some people have it very naturally because some people just love learning and some people are just endlessly reading and talking to people about all kinds of stuff. But at a certain point in their life, some people just don't want to do it. It's nine o'clock at night. I don't want to have to go back and figure out how to do some basic thing, you know, that any 23-year-old in the field would have known how to do because, like, I'm beyond that now. And so it's the willingness to go back to kindergarten. It's a willingness to kind of learn from scratch. In my mind, I've always taken kind of two key approaches.

One is I just try to read. I try to come out stuff through a historical lens. So I just try to read as much as I can about all the other people who have done the thing that I'm about to do. You can learn a lot of this by really deeply understanding history. And then the other is talking to people. And I think this is one of the things in the Valley that I think is really great, which is, you know, there are industries in which information is very carefully guarded, and people really don't like to share the secrets.

Because information is power and people like information control. In the Valley, at least my experience has always been people are incredibly open. And so I would really encourage everybody as you kind of do this, to build the networks of people you meet. I think generally what you find is people who have been in the industry for a long time. Number one, I tend to love to talk about it, but also we'll be willing to share a lot. I had the opportunity to work with, work for Ben Silverman, the founder of Pinterest, and Ben is a voracious learner. He talks to everyone he reads.

And I remember we used to come in on Monday. mornings for our staff meeting. Ben would come in with this idea at a left field and be like, where did he come up with this? And we got to learning that it would be his latest Amazon purchase of this book he read. And so we had an end and we figured out how to get a notification when he ordered a new book so that we could prepare ourselves for what ideas we were going to show up on the following Monday. And you can often lift, you can lift ideas out of other fields.

I won't go into detail. But like a lot of the ideas we have in our firm, we borrowed from other industries. And so we pulled ideas over from what had happened in the entertainment talent agency business or in the advertising industry or in other kinds of investment. You can even go, it's a favorite example. So the way that VCs and private equity firms, the way compensation works,

a lot of it's based on this concept of carried interest, which is sort of used 20 to 30% of the gains from the profitable investments go to the people in the firm. And it actually turns out the origin of the term carried interest actually is from Whalers in the 12th century, is where it first originated. You'd have a ship, and you'd gather and scrape together the money to get a ship,

and you'd go out and you'd try to go get a ship, whale. And the deal was basically the deal with your investors who put up money for the ship was the crew could keep 20% of the whale. It was literally called carried interest because it was literally 20% of what the ship could carry, like physically carry. Wow. Right. It's where that term actually came from. And it's interesting that that model has translated all the way forward. By the way, it was the same scheme that Christopher Columbus had when he mounted his expedition. You just see it over and over again kind of in history and it's persisted this long. So even understanding the really basic mechanics of how these businesses work, there's often a very

interesting history of how it happened, which helps kind of fill in the logic. So I think we can open up to you guys. Hi, Mark. I have a question for you about political correctness in Silicon Valley. Ben actually wrote in his book about a pretty interesting exchange between you and him

via email. When he disagreed with you and you told him, you know, you were just very, very clear about what you thought. But it's something that everyone talks about Silicon Valley about how, you know, we just want to know what you think, be open and honest with me. If you don't want me to work for your, you know, you don't want me to be you're seeing it anymore. Let me know and I'll just leave because it's better for everyone else.

Why is it so different here than everywhere else, every other business, and why is that a good thing? I think it's aspirationally different here. I think we would like to believe that it's different. I honestly think it's a struggle. Like CEOs say, oh, no, bring me the bad news. And then, you know, somebody brings the bad news and it's like, off with your head, you know. And so it's a real struggle. It's a real struggle for any leader, I think, to get the actual facts. It's a real struggle. for anybody who's not the leader to be willing to actually speak truth to power. It's a huge advantage when you can do it. Andy Grove, you know, sort of one of our management heroes wrote this book called high output

management. The Ben talks about a lot. And he talks a lot about Intel had a thing they called constructive confrontation. And so they had this model where basically it was get all the issues and facts on the table. But he called it a constructive confrontation because the idea was be able to argue everything out at full volume all day long and then still go get a beer at the end of the day. And then they also had this. They also had this concept of disagree and commit, right?

So you make the decision. Everybody signs up to it, which is something we try to do here. So you try. I will tell you, though, like, I don't think the Valley hasn't figured out. I think it's very spotty. And I think it's because it's just, it's all people issues. And I think, frankly, it's all the same people issues you see in any organization. And I think our companies probably struggle with them just as much as anybody else's.

Totally great. So I was just sort of wondering a lot of things. A lot of the technologies you're funding sort of, fundamentally challenge Western rights frameworks. So, like, if George's car goes for a joyride someday, you know, how does that work? And how do you think about that and sort of balancing, you know, the incredible clarity of, on the one hand, we want to see our companies succeed. On the other hand, there's also all of this sort of cultural, political, legal, you know, unintended consequences.

How do you work through that as a venture capitalist? Yeah, so we try to think through it. And by the way, one of the things we have in our firm is we have an ethical veto. And so the way our firm works is we actually don't need unanimity. We don't vote on investments. The person sponsoring the investment can pull the trigger even if everybody else is opposed to the deal. And those are many of our best investments. And so we want to back controversial things.

We do have an ethical veto. I want to be very clear. Somebody around the table is like, no, no, this is ethically or morally bad. They can veto it. And the firm won't fund it. And so we do try to draw a line on ethics. What I would say, and I think your example is a great one to talk about, what I would say is, notwithstanding that there are certain things that are just over the line. There's this big zone somewhere in the middle.

And the way I described the big zone somewhere in the middle is it's often the case that a set of practices and beliefs and mores and values have been built up over time in our culture and society and business and legal framework that we kind of view as right and normal because it's just the way things have always been. And then the new thing comes along and it appears that it's going to be disrupted to that. And so like your great example, like self-driving cars, what if they go crazy? what we often try to do is we try to say, okay, well, what's the actual reality of the way the world's actually working today? And how good is that actually? And so, for example, the car case, interesting thing about cars, every year in the world today, 1.25 million people are killed in road accidents caused by human drivers, right? So over 10 million people a decade, right, are being killed in road accidents. And so just as an example, right, contrast, terrorism deaths, which are terrible, but contrasts the number of terrorism deaths to the number of car accident deaths, right? And it is a gigantic. Multiplier. And so like, we got the war on terror. Where's the war on cars? You know, an airplane goes down. It's like three months of coverage. You know, but when there's six car crashes that kill the

same number of people, you know, it never even makes the news. And then you say, okay, well, the self-driving car, like, if the self-driving car works the way that it does, you could take that number very close to zero. Self-driving cars really should never get into accidents because they just know so much more about what's happening around them. And by the way, they don't, they don't get sleepy, they don't drink, they don't text. They don't do all this stuff, at least a car accidents. And so that's an example. Another example, you know, taxisies, transportation, another example, taxis. In Paris, the taxi cab riders are rioting. And the claim is that Uber and Lyft are doing all these immoral things by letting people take rides at other people's cars. And the way that argument is often made is with the safety argument, which is taxicab drivers are licensed and Uber drivers or Lyft are licensed. The counter argument with Uber and Lyft is we have all the smartphone data. We have all the location data. And so we know exactly who's in every car at all times, right, at Uber or Lyft. We know exactly when the passenger gets in the car. We know. who they are. We know who the driver is. We have complete location data. And so like the dumbest thing in

the world driver could ever do is actually kidnap anybody, right? Because you'd have, you'd have digital fingerprints of literally every step along the way. You would know exactly where they are. And so we think it's crystal clear that Uber and Lyft are going to be a much safer way to do transportation than taxis, which have all kinds of historical issues that we just got used to. And then I'll just give you one final example on that coming from history. So we now take the car for granted. There was a time in history when the car was a brand new thing. about 100 years ago. And at that time, you know, the predominant form of transportation was either walking or horses.

When the car came out, it was viewed as a giant threat to the status quo, and in particular it was viewed as a giant threat to horses because cars were big and noisy, and they would scare the horses. And so there was a law passed in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, as part of a whole series of laws that were passed all around the world around cars at this time. There's a law pass that if you're on a road driving a car and you saw a horse in the distance, you were legally required to dismount from the car, disassemble the car, and hide the pieces behind the nearest hay bale so that the horse could go by and not get spooked. Right.

And so we worked our way through that. We got to the other side of that. I tend to think we'll get to the inside of these issues. But to your point, like, we develop a theory on this, and then we have that theory. It may be self-justification. It may be correct. It may not be. We rolled that theory out to the public.

They usually laugh at us. right? And then we kind of go through that process. And so it is, it is a tension that we see all the time. Maybe one more. Yeah. Yeah, Mark, so the other day we're standing in your lobby. We're standing in the lobby and someone on your, I was looking through the books out there. So one of the team said, this is Mark's, Mark's library. Clearly reflects what you talked about, intellectual curiosity. Would you mind just talking through this is almost tactical? But what is your approach to learning on it?

Do you set a time every day to read a certain amount? And how do you sort of time? And how do you select what you're reading and go through that? Yeah, so I kind of go from obsession to obsession. My big breakthrough, actually, over the holidays was, it's in my pocket. The wireless Bluetooth headsets now have gotten so good. They're so small, and they sound great, and the battery lasts forever. And so now I just load up audiobooks and podcasts on my iPhone. And literally, if I'm just walking around the house or driving to work, it's just nonstop.

And so almost all the nonfiction at this point, I'm actually having things read to me. Another big thing I figured out, a friend of mine told me this trick. So like Wikipedia is like this huge archive of information. There's all these interesting articles, but nobody ever sits down just to read Wikipedia. And so it actually turns out the iPhone has this new feature. You can turn on where it will read the screen to you. It's a feature designed for sight impaired people where it'll do text to speech. But it's gotten really good.

And the voice has gotten really good. And there's this feature you can turn on where you do a two-fingered swipe from the top of the screen. And it will read you the page. and it's really well done. And so you just literally go to Wikipedia, you load up whatever you're interested in, you do a two-finger swipe, and then for the next half hour,

it tells you all about the topic. And so, like, to me, that's, I think that's absolutely fantastic. So I love that. Lots of books, and then also research papers, I tend to find are under-exploited. You know, for interesting topics,

there tends to be a lot of academic research that's actually been done that historically people just haven't had access to, but now it's all on the internet. You can download PDFs, or you find, like, the professor in the field who's the best at whatever, and they'll have written 40 papers over their career, and if you read all 40 papers, you'll basically learn everything about the

field. And so I like that a lot. And then frankly, a lot of us talking to people, and a lot of it is, you know, this actually, I think it would be certainly how I've thought about my career, but, you know, to be able to be in a place, it doesn't have to be a firm, an investment firm, but to be in a place with people who are intellectually curious and to be with people who like to talk about things, talk about interesting things is, I think, a big deal. And some environments are more like that than others. And so I just, I learn a lot from all of the, all the people around here because we just, we argue all day long. Awesome. Mark, thank you so much. This was fantastic.

Thanks, everybody. I appreciate it. Good. Thanks again. I appreciate it.