The Pomp Podcast - Sriram Krishnan, Angel Investor: Lessons From Silicon Valley's Top Thought Leaders

Episode Date: January 29, 2020

Sriram Krishnan is an Angel Investor currently focused on writing and investing in early-stage companies. Previously, he was Senior Product Lead at Facebook, Snapchat, & Twitter. In this conversation, Anthony and Sriram discuss his time growing up in India, how he met his wife on Yahoo Messenger, what he learned from Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel and Jack Dorsey, why organizations are systems, where his obsession with memos came from, and who the greatest basketball player of all time is. CRYPTO.COM-----The only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users and download the Crypto.com app today to earn $50 USD using the code ‘pomp2020’ when you sign up for one of their MCO Visa Cards.  TAXBIT-----Refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Sriram Krishnan is a longtime friend and currently focused on more writing and investing in early stage companies. We previously worked together at Facebook, where we both led product teams, and Sriram later went on to be a senior product lead at both Snapchat and Twitter. In this conversation, we discussed his time growing up in India, how he met his wife on Yahoo Messenger, what he learned from Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel, and Jack Dorsey, why organizations are systems, where his obsession with memos came from, and who the greatest

basketball player of all time is. This conversation was a lot of fun, and we dug deep into a number of fascinating topics that I think you will enjoy. But before we get into the episode, I want to talk about the three sponsors for today. The first is Crypto.com. As you guys know, they're a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. They have a vision to put cryptocurrency in every wallet, which is frankly why we are all here. Crypto.com also happens to have the best URL,

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Here's the little known secret. eToro is actually larger than Robinhood. Just don't tell anyone in the US. They don't like to hear that. So head on over to eToro.com and sign up for an account. Let me know what you think about social trading and copy trading. And when you hit etoro.com, let them know that POM sent you. Now, finally, don't forget, Off The Chain is not only a podcast. I really enjoy recording all of these episodes, but I also write a daily

letter to our investors. Most people would keep these letters confidential and private, but I allow anyone to subscribe to read the letters every morning. You can simply go to offthechain.substack.com and sign up today. Again, that's offthechain.substack.com. Go sign up today. Now, let's get into this episode with Sriram. He absolutely had a fascinating perspective on the world. I really enjoyed this one and I hope you do too. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular

investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I have a special treat for you today. Sriram is here. We were just joking about he is the only person that has worked at two companies that I've worked at. And I think he's the only person that I directly worked with

that Facebook has been on a podcast. Those were very fun days. So we got a lot to talk about. Thanks for coming to do this. Thanks for having me. And I hope your audience is prepared for all the embarrassing pomp stories. I don't know if there's any of those, but we'll see. All right.

You've got probably one of the most fascinating stories in technology that I know of. You were born in India, and then you end up working at Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter, all in pretty important leadership roles. How do we get from India to Silicon Valley? other than to get him on a plane at some point i just got lucky a bunch of times uh you know it's really i think sometimes when you look at this app post fact you you build a narrative for it yourself and you try and connect the dots but each of those was random and serendipitous uh like a lot of people i was born in in chennai in india it's a sleepy little city in the south of india uh which no surprisingly has a lot of tech people coming from it like

sundars from there there are many other folks from there i convinced my dad when i was in high school to buy me a computer uh which was a fairly big deal for him um it was expensive and i had to convince him that it would be productive uh and i taught myself how to code uh i was not very social uh i just kind of sat at home every single night and there was we couldn't really afford dial-up internet most days so i would just you know open up like a visual basic book or a c plus where i just taught myself how to go really liked it and once you know i went to college i would start writing things online and i think i was lucky to be the recipient of multiple uh big breaks uh which just happened to me simultaneously and in college i had my first big one where well i think

the biggest one was i met my now wife uh um back all the way back in college we have known each other for like you know 17 18 years now and i want to tell you a sentence which doesn't mean what you think it means we met online uh and the story is and it's not because we swiped on each other we back in 2002 we had a friend who wanted to build a website he did not know how to write code he added the two nerdiest friends he knew on yahoo chat room so this really tells you how old the story is back when yahoo chat rooms are a thing and we're supposed to build a site uh the site never got built but we would chat with each other every night from like 11 p.m to like 5 a.m and we just chat we didn't even know how we each other looked like and you guys had never met each

other in person no never you need to have a photo and the two people were you and your wife yes and we just chatted every night and after a year we met in person and that's how we became friends so and where she was at the same school or she was in a different school she was a different city uh we are from the same city but she was going to school in a different city and so we would just like only for a year we had the outmatch so but back then you know i was starting to write blog online i would write about microsoft technologies and this is my first big break where at the time you know microsoft was launching visual studio uh express which was meant to be an addition meant for students and what they would do is they would do this conference and they'd send an exec and

they would do a keynote demo and they would get a local student to come on stage and to compile hello world and to be like tada and now you as a student can use it too but the microsoft india team didn't really know many students at the time and because of some stuff i had written online somebody sent me a cold email from microsoft saying hey would you like to come over to bangalore and then do this thing and at the time you know i was you know sitting in my bedroom in chennai i've never been on a flight before i was like this sounds great of course uh and i went in it did this demo uh for this vp um and at the end of it and my my now wife arthy but she was also there and he said you kids should come work at microsoft i was like well great but we live in

like nowhere land and you might as well be in a different galaxy yeah and long story short he put us in touch with recruiting at microsoft and we became like product managers there so okay so when you first get introduced to the uh recruiters at microsoft are they immediately vetting you as potential employees or is there like a you guys are like hey how does this work like we we had a weird experience because you know the exec we met uh who's so much sacred was now a fantastic vc at madrona ventures he actually invested it he actually put in money in my wife's company 10 years later so it kind of brings this great full circle um he he didn't know who to send a couple of random kids to um it was not his purview so he put us in touch with uh you know the folks who do

kind of do a lot of these sort of senior people recruiting or exec recruiting at uh microsoft and so we kind of had this weird alternate interview look i think at the time they were not really hiring a many product managers or program managers microsoft called out of college So we kind of had this bizarre loop where they went like, oh, we don't really know what to do with these two. Let's get them in. And then they hired us. And so that is kind of our big break into tech. So we got into Microsoft.

And in India or coming to Seattle? In India for a short time, but flew to Seattle a couple of years in and have been in the U.S. ever since. And for the first five years of Microsoft, I worked mostly on cloud computing. So before Windows Azure was named Windows Azure, It was this side little skunkworks project for Microsoft, which was kind of a bunch of crazy data center distributed computing people. And at the time, I was really interested in distributed computing. I had written my own version of Paxos and, you know, the Byzantine general problem solutions. And I was really into this space.

So I basically knocked on the door and I said, hey, I would love to work on this, you know, whatever you want me to do. So I was very lucky to be there at the right time, right place. joined as a pm spent five years there on windows azure through the launch was a fantastic experience because you got to see this company you'd be like okay how do we compete at amazon how to build a cloud platform microsoft is fantastic um yeah but both arty and my wife arty and i we loved silicon valley you know our first date was to watch a i hope i'm not getting in trouble a bit torrented copy of pirates of silicon valley back in like you know uh 2002 by the way still the best steve jobs movie of all time um and we were just these random kids you know being like someday we want

to be that i know it sounds like a cliche but it was really true uh and in 2011 we got our green cards and became permanent as a united states which was a big deal because this meant that you know we could actually leave microsoft and go do other things start companies without a whole amount of paperwork uh which is it was really hard if you were not a permanent citizen and so week left microsoft had a long chat with like satya you know who i was working for at the time and said we're going to go do this thing came down to the bay area and we looked at each other and we said look there are two of us one of us should do the crazy startup you know and one of us should get a job which pays a paycheck so our team of our wife you know is still the amazing founder

and entrepreneur in the family you know she went off to launch two startups one of which you know she went to y combinator i believe she was either summer or winter 13 she launches e-commerce company called lumoid they did a fantastic five-year run they sold a couple of years ago and she now by the way works at facebook um but me back in 2012 i was like well one of us she's doing off there building a company but she was kind of shipping box out of bedroom and being really scrappy and i should get a regular job and i had a lot of friends who had gone from microsoft to facebook at the time and this is a very interesting time for facebook because facebook had just gone public and if you remember the stock was getting crushed i think they had

IPO at around 50 down like 22 or something 25 it was a disaster like I mean it didn't even trade for the first few hours and because I think but the deeper question was people are asking where look all of your traffic uh is switching over to mobile you know you could see the numbers you could see the writing on the wall uh actually the wall was already here um but all of your monetization was still dominantly on web right you know this I mean you were there uh and so the big question that market had for facebook was like can you monetize mobile can anyone monetize mobile now of course but now when sitting here in 2020 this all sounds crazy and silly but that was the big question then and at the time you know i told myself you know look facebook i want to work on

consumer apps i work on data centers but i want to work on regular consumer apps and facebook knew felt like they knew something which rest of the world didn't uh and i wanted to go learn that and once i joined facebook as a pm i told myself i know nothing about mobile i know nothing about advertising so let me go work in this space so this was probably the second like luckiest thing i ever did uh outside of the microsoft uh job because it was absolutely you know early 2013 working on mobile ads inside facebook was the perfect right time right place you know i just got very very lucky you know that you were there well and so a lot of people don't know the story because this isn't like the sexy story of facebook through those years but uh you joined in beginning

of 13, give or take. I joined the beginning of 14 and we both worked on the ads team doing different things. But I remember going to meetings and the people that I remember being in the room specifically are you, Michael Sharon, Mike Kudak, Boz, all these people who now have gone on to either do different things or continue to do great things at Facebook. And I remember looking around the room sometimes and being like, holy shit, right? Like there's a lot of smart people in this room who are the best in the world at what they're working on. And the story that I always tell people is the first time I ever saw an ads is going bananas sign in inside. And so for those that don't know what that means, if you think of the shape of a banana, it looks like every startup

graph, right? It just goes up into the right. Well, the thing at Facebook was it was literally growing so fast in terms of ad revenue the um the mobile ads etc that literally it looked like it was bending backwards on itself right it was just explosive growth um and so it's just a really cool thing to live through and kind of experience alongside so many great people it was and honestly it was each of these things you can only look back in retrospect and be like well i was very lucky i could have joined a different company i could have picked a different team and i would have missed out so you know i can't claim i was you know somehow smart i just was in the right time right place but i think if you look back then you know today facebook ads seem like you

know this huge dominant you know uh amazing platform but back then you know on mobile ads and facebook we we look at google and we were like wow we have this huge mountain to climb and we were still building the basics we were still building the basics of targeting the basics of measurement the basic of how you know the ad auctions work uh we couldn't even get ads to show up on mobile feed properly for a while so uh it's interesting because i think now you know facebook is such a it seems as incumbent in power um but back then it wasn't a given you know we were just like a bunch of people and we knew everyone a small group of people um who we all fit in a conference room yes for the most part like mike kudak sat in the corner i'm gonna call him out

right now and he would sit up on the filing cabinet right with his microphone and and the other 25 30 people would sit in the room and everyone that that was it it was and you know and i think i still think i probably learned the most interesting lessons in those few years at facebook uh what were the lessons that you learned or took away um it's interesting so i have this you know this weird trajectory because i've been in like you know facebook snap and twitter which a lot of people think of as like you know being similar in some way and so i have this interesting trajectory where i've often seen the same decisions happen and see how they are discussed or talked about in three different companies and you may not say this but i'll say this you also have had

the opportunity to work pretty closely in most cases with satya at microsoft zuck at facebook evan spiegel at snapchat and then jack at twitter so it's not just oh i worked at this company it's these decisions are being uh debated at the highest levels of each one of those businesses and you've been there to kind of see how those yeah so you know if you want to jump into that i think you know one thing i found is you know when i was at satya i was like way junior you know in the stack i would but with these three uh one thing you realize is each of them are incredibly smart uh you know in the top if you talk to them you it just you quickly realize why they are in the position they are but they're also incredibly different and uh if you look at

these three companies uh one thing i've realized is one there are many many ways to build a fantastic great company uh and each each company is a reflection of the founder and some of the core values that the founder holds dear so let's look at facebook i think as you know if you look at lessons from facebook i think there are many but i think off the top of my head and i would and i think this i would love to get your take on it is one is optimizing for impact you know facebook or many or probably over everything else will pick impact so what does that mean it means that in any decision you make uh in any product decision or hiring decision or anything you do you ask yourself like what is the most impactful way to go about this for example back in 2007 2008 when

facebook was thinking of growing there were many paths for them to grow they had grown in the u.s you know they could have picked the next country and grown gone after and gone after them but at the time you know the growth team looked at it and said well the most impactful thing for us to do would be to go after everyone who doesn't speak english and that led to the creation of you know the translation project that existed then so it's just definitely a mindset of always asking yourself what is the most impactful thing that you can do i think that is one and that story was always interesting to me when we were there because uh they didn't start out with like what most companies would do. What would most companies do? They'd go hire a bunch of people who speak

Russian, Chinese, whatever languages. Instead, they just said, hey, we've got tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people using this site. Anybody who speaks Russian who would like to help translate our site from English to Russian, here's some tools to do that, right? And to go back to the impact, it was like, if you go and you hire Russian translators, and it's very kind of centralized and methodical, it's going to take a long time to get to the impact. In terms of just kind of open sourcing to some degree tools that then allow people to help quickly translate the website now you get a bunch of different languages all at the same time and much quicker and so it's not only just like where is the most impact it's also like what's the straightest line to that

input which i think is the second part of what makes fix so effective is a focus on speed and iteration um you know somebody at facebook who's very senior once told me that he's never sure facebook will get it right at first but they're going to it probably going to be the fastest at iterating and getting to the right answer the quickest and i think you see this all the time where facebook builds both technological and cultural missionary to focus on speed so you know when they launch this translation product they it probably wasn't perfect but they knew they could make it better very very quickly like we saw this when we did ads when we launched you know the original version of the facebook ad products it didn't have a lot of features that

google had or the competition had but facebook got so much better so quickly and i think one of the lessons i learned there is i think it's very easy often to psych yourself out of launching something or to say i'm going to wait until i get everything right i i understand uh every single like i and t but facebook was like let's just go get something out the door build the muscle to go execute and iterate very quickly and you will wind up beating the competition so i think it's a very particular mindset now it has its downsides which you know i think we now sort of famously know but i think that was like such a key cultural attribute for them tell the story of the mobile ad network because what you guys uh when you guys built and launched that it went from zero to a billion

dollars in revenue in 18 months i think yes right yeah thanks yeah so so the backstory then is you know facebook at the time uh was trying to figure out they had an interesting problem um they had They were, in the ad tech world, these phrases that we use called being supply constrained and being demand constrained. And what this means when you're supply constrained is, you know, you have a lot of people giving you money, but you don't have enough space to show them. And if you're demand constrained, you have a lot of place to show these ads, but you don't have enough people giving you money. And Facebook went through this very interesting transition. In around 2011, 2012, you know, they had a lot of, you know, space to show ads in, but they didn't have enough people giving the money. They were demand constrained.

So that's why they launched the Bitter, Facebook Exchange. This is probably only interesting to the ad tech population. They launched a lot of products to try to drive more demand, right? Hey, we have all this space, but no one wants to advertise yet. Let's do things to get a lot of people who want to advertise. Exactly. But things change very quickly. They were very good at getting demand.

We were like, oh my gosh, we have a lot of demand, and we don't know where to put the ads. And I remember, I'm just like, you know, probably seven, eight years later, so I'm probably not getting in trouble. at one time we looked at some numbers we're like wow we're spending less than 10 percent of the money that advertisers want to spend on us like people are basically like spend i want to spend a hundred dollars with you facebook would only spend like eight or nine dollars or a hundred dollars and so there's this question of well how do you actually go show these ads and you have to be smart about it because you know the easiest answer would be to say why don't you just show more ads to everyone but you know as we all know like you know the more ads you show the more you

risk annoying people the more you risk you know losing your best uh you know most valuable customers off the platform and so you have to figure out well and if you want to show an ad let us say for nike and i'm a big sneaker person so you want to show me an ad for nike you have to know that i'm really interested in sneakers that it is a fantastic ad and make that match the exact right time and space so circa 2013 we had run out of space you know we had shown all the ads we could uh in feed at the time and we're trying to figure out what to do i remember literally being in those uh meetings and uh rob would say uh winter is coming yes right i remember that was the big mantra which was essentially saying um all of the ads were going into news feed but there

was only you know every feed load basically every time you refresh it was like six or seven ads and they were sold out every time and there was still more demand there was like it's like having a business with a line around the corner and you're like we got to have more supply because we got to feed all these people who want the food right yes and um and so there was kind of this hunt to go figure out like where do we show these ads um and you know one obvious answer was like well why don't we show these ads outside facebook uh and this was not a novel idea like google had you know ad networks have been around for a very long period of time google obviously had at the time the dominant market leader with uh google adsense uh but we said well we should take a stab

at it and in the past facebook could not take a stab at it because they didn't have a line on the door but now they did so you know um and me and a few others we kind of put this effort together it's called the facebook audience network where we said look where is facebook really strong like we are strong on mobile uh we are strong inside apps and we're also really good at showing ads which look and feel like they should fit within the app you know because ads the time where these big banners which would kind of like you know slide up or they would slide in and they were annoying they were not fun um and facebook had really discovered like how to show ads in feed natively which felt a part of the experience and we said what if we can do that

for everyone so we built a steam and you know it was again like right time right place no we were able to scale it up very quickly because it turned out that there were a lot of people on mobile you know um publishers like for example media companies who had switched over to mobile but they were not making a lot of money um or there were gaming companies who had some paying customers but that wasn't enough to uh for the large amount of people who never pay and we came in and we said look uh we have you know authentic people because we know who these people actually are and we have a great set of advertisers and these are ads which are not annoying to the people who use you every day and so it's kind of this trifecta which worked really well and you know again it was one of

the things where after six to eight months it really took off uh and and i think you know at the time it and it still is like really a market leader so but but on day one when you guys launched it wasn't like hey this is called a billion dollars it was terrible uh it's like for months i think we didn't make any money at all uh and at the time we were wondering is this ever going to be a thing and so that's i think one other lesson from facebook where these things never work on day one you know you get the big press launch you you know you get the big announcement you're literally facebook you call up anybody and they write about it yeah and you can get any partner but they never work you know because you've never seen it action you don't know how the machine learning is going

to work or all the zillion bugs you hit and you got to make it matter and i think that's another lesson i learned from facebook which is you have to grind it out you you know and it's a little things uh one story i always keep thinking about is in every earnings call that facebook would have uh they would always ask like what really you know draw revenue and these analysts would always be looking for an answer of well we launched project x or product x and that made all this money but the answer is never really that the real answer is more like well we had like 2500 different machine learning model changes which each added like 0.1 percent and they all compounded but that's really hard to go explain and i think that's kind of where i learned like the hard work is never really

in these flashy launches it's like looking at the data launching something and building the cultural missionary where it's okay to fail okay to kind of experiment and doing it again and again and again i think that's one of the best things i learned from facebook in that era yeah uh alex schultz uh when i first got there i i could tell the story now because uh he would probably laugh all the stories now i'm hoping like yeah i hope they all listen and they and they i'm hoping you laugh and enjoy this. So Alex sent me an email. I joined, I was taking over as a product manager of the growth team for Facebook pages. And Alex is kind of one of three people who kind of really runs the growth team at Facebook. And so to most people in the growth organization, he was, you

know, this guy up on this thing, but I was gone. Yeah. And you said it, not me. And I didn't know who he was. Right. And so I guess he had sent an email and I just missed the email. And so my boss of the time walks over and he goes, Hey, did Alex Schultz email you? And I was like, who's Alex Schultz? And he was like, can you check your email search? Like, Hey, he goes, you should probably respond to that one. So I responded and he was so gracious. And he said, well, why don't you come in and meet me? And I think we met for like 30 minutes or something. And one of the things that he said to me in that very first meeting, which you're talking about kind of grinding it out. He goes, look, most people don't realize, but growth is just a continuation of compounding

wins. Right. And it was this idea of like, don't go try to find a 10%, you know, increase in click-throughs or any of this stuff. He's like every, you know, 50 basis points, every a hundred basis points, like it counts. Right. And it adds up. And, uh, I remember, um, one time, uh, on the, uh, Facebook mobile. So it was like the mobile interfaces on, um, like really bad phone connections. Uh, they, people who are using kind of like the T nine, right. So they would kind of click through uh we drastically increased the page creation so kind of the top of the funnel for advertisers by simply moving page create page further up in the stack so people had to click less times on the button to get to it like not a groundbreaking idea right some engineer who's like

hey what if we just move it up faster or whatever well nobody knew how much demand was there for people who wanted to create pages and you know indonesia and these other countries uh and all sudden there was this big jump in revenue uh that kind of trickled down and uh i remember alex being so excited about it and to me it was like man i would have never thought you know if you said hey what's the two things that we're going to do this quarter or whatever to you know get growth i would never be like well we should go to the people who are using you know like the t9 mobile devices and move the no way it's just testing yeah i think growth you know has a bad reputation now as a word uh and sometimes maybe deservedly so but i think good growth at the heart of it is looking

at the data and experimenting and then letting the data tell you where to go so i think really well-run growth teams are fantastic at trying to feel like what is stopping a customer from doing something for example facebook and i think this was before our era had this famous quote of 10 friends in seven days uh or seven friends in like seven days and the idea was unless you have the certain number of friends in the first week or so you were probably going to be lonely you were probably not going to have a fantastic experience because end up in a facebook social network so they tried really hard in the first week to make sure that you had friends that somebody was leaving a comment that you know that they would somebody would see your photo or they

would tag you and i think that's where good growth thinking comes from which is really looking at the numbers trying to deeply understand what these people want and then experimenting very quickly and learning from the data and they didn't make that up right it was it wasn't like somebody was just sit in there like oh i think that you should have 10 friends in seven days or whatever it was yeah no they looked at the data and the data is highly suggested that there was a massive increase in retention if you had this number of users in this many days on the service so let's optimize for making people hit that metric so that then they will set it is and i think so the interesting question you know and kind of tying these three companies together is uh you know if you come

back say facebook and say snap uh one thing i think is very interesting and i have a pet theory is i think snap is a uh counterculture reaction to facebook in many ways i have this sort of phrase i use which is uh you know i'm a big comic book nerd uh and the dc universe there is a bizarro universe where everything is the exact opposite of what it you know what what is the real in ours so for example in dc universe uh in bizarre universe lex luther is a good guy bizarro superman is a is a bad guy you know the earth is like i think a cube everything the exact opposite and i think of snap and facebook at many levels as the exact opposites of one another so for example um and i'm going to tie this back into what we're talking about in culture so if you think

about snap you know facebook was always about let's look at the data and let's look at where where the data is going to lead us to answers and they were really good at that um but i think one of the challenges with that approach and i actually think they have done a fantastic job in recent handling this is you can sometimes get locked into a local maxima of optimization yeah what are you optimizing for yes yeah um so for example it's very easy to find yourself like optimizing uh the hundred different shade of green where there might be a much better way of helping people create content somewhere else and i think of snap as the exact mirror image where snap really focused on creativity and helping people express themselves as their higher order bit as the thing

that they really wanted people to do where facebook is often led with data and impact so one i think these are kind of mirror images of each other the other way i think they're kind of different was at the time you know facebook was believed in um if you remember back in 2009 or 2008 when facebook did the first f8 you had chris cox you know chief product officer show up on stage and talk about how facebook should be the story of your life you know everything from birth all the way to your time in school to your marriage your first baby is going to be on the facebook timeline snap said the exact opposite it said the only thing which matters is this moment right now and who you're with right now so nothing matters so it was the exact opposite of what

facebook was going for uh facebook has always had a very neutral voice if you remember they famously ran a ad where they compared themselves to a bunch of chairs because they were like we are a platform um you know we are here to help people make the world more open and connected where snap has always believed in having an irreverent goofy voice so i think in many ways they were the exact opposites of one another which i think sometimes led snap to find product answers which uh which a lot of other people are struggling i'll give an example so um you know now face filters and filters or you know everyone has it every single platform has it but when snap first built lenses it was pretty unique you know i think they had bought a company but it was really the first

company to kind of build at scale there was luxury i think was the name yes you know i think they were based out of ukraine if i remember yeah and the question you know uh so i left facebook in uh i believe like in 2015 uh or early 2016 to go work at snap where i headed up a bunch of revenue and add products and one of the reasons i wanted to go there was i wanted to understand like why does this company know why does this company operate differently because when you open the app it was very apparent they were doing something different they operated differently than every other tech company in the bay area and so one way to kind of think about this is let's look at why do lenses work um and the easy pithy answer to say well they just help you express yourself you know uh

and you know it's fun it's weird it's goofy but if you unpack that there are many reasons why lenses work number one and this i think a lot of people would assume this uh it it's only to your close friends and family and it disappears after uh 24 hours so the downside of me posting something embarrassing and it's staying forever a future job prospect or a future spouse finding it are negligible right or when i run for president you know getting embarrassed by that are low so one you're more open to just chatting yourself that's one um second uh you know like we're doing this you know interview right now you follow me on twitter if i go on twitter right now and post a selfie you're like that's why i'm posting selfie if i post 20 selfies on twitter in the next few

minutes you're gonna be like that's weird like what's up with street i'm like what's up are you good man yeah because it breaks the etiquette that we have on the internet and um but turns out a lot of people really want to post selfies and what snapped at lenses is have you ever been to a wedding where they have photo booth and you have these big gloves and the goofy glasses a lens is digital version of that so they give you uh a social license to post a selfie because now you're like this is part of the product and you have these raw materials to be creative and to be fun so once you know you're just not posting a selfie you're like doing creating a character you're telling a story um which brings you to uh number three which is before lenses and stories you could

not tell a story linearly uh so i'm i write screenplays and novels on the side i'm terrible at it and and so there's this theme called the joseph campbell's uh hero's journey where every story kind of goes a particular way you know hero wakes up he's happy he gets a challenge he sets off on a journey you know he accomplished his mission and so it's kind of like you know think of a lot of things every story follows his art with stories for the in snap for the very first time you could tell your own story you could say i woke up in the morning i did this thing oh my gosh and then i went to bed you could not do this on feed because in feed everything is reverse chronological and finally and most importantly i think stories didn't have numbers on the screen

so you had nothing which i think let people judge you or for you to judge yourself so for example even me when i tweet and there's zero reactions you know i'm you know i'm a big boy i shouldn't need that affirmation but i kind of feel bad did i say something wrong do you not find me entertaining anymore right like i and but with stories nobody knows whether you have zero fans or millions of them which lets you to be more open now snap was able to combine i think all of these and this is my own deconstruction of why these work all of these together and build a fantastic product now there is no way you can optimize your way to this you know it requires some thinking outside the box or kind of original thought yeah and i think you can't optimize the

way to this so i think snap was very very good at those things where they were able to like intuitively form uh perform these products which really work for a set of people often like young people um in a way which i think was hard for the silicon valley to compete and of course like now i think with instagram and with tiktok a lot of other folks have found their own ways of doing this but at the time it was like very different yeah uh you want to know an interesting fact that i found out uh earlier this week the entrepreneur i believe this is correct this is what i read online uh which now we have to question whether it's real or not because i read it online but everything is true online um the entrepreneur who sold luxury to snap uh created a second company

has something to do with like more like ai but still around content creation uh and just sold that to snap as well for like 150 million bucks wow so two for two uh same entrepreneur somewhere in europe i think um and uh both kind of creative products but out of the box oh yeah kind of creation tools so one thing i was very impressed me about that team is um you know i really had no exposure to ukraine um before that it's how amazing a lot of like you know engineers there are i saw this at facebook too uh when i was at facebook you remember this we bought this company called live rail uh and killed it kill it yeah was it a video ad management basically yeah and they had some fantastic talent and i know and they were based out of uh kludge uh yeah if you

remember which honestly was not a city i really knew a lot about before uh but i was just amazed at the talent they had and i think only now are you seeing like with the focus on remote work distributed teams the rise in costs in like san francisco and new york you're seeing much more tech companies leverage that but one of the things i think facebook and snapback i had at the curve around then is finding these pockets of talent in parts of the world other people weren't looking for like nobody was going out and trying to find a company like kluge right yeah uh and they were really good at spotting the talent well i think live rail uh again people will correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure live rail was the first profitable company that facebook ever bought

and and if i remember correctly like there was a hiccup in the acquisition because they were like well how do we value this thing because they were so used to buying products that had either no revenue or or they were burning you know venture money and live real came along was like no like we actually make money like we can go forever that is true i think facebook at the time i think the big acquisition they're done was i think they're done instagram they were about to do uh whatsapp yeah uh they're in 14 my second day at facebook they announced whatsapp for 18 billion dollars ever been like whoa yeah like this is big by the way that's another example of something i think i learned from facebook where facebook is very good at not letting ego or not invented here syndrome

get in the way so a lot of other companies would have looked at something like whatsapp and said look we have our own team we have really smart people here we should just go compete with my in fact you've been competing for many many years uh but mark looked at that and was like look either We want to make the world more open and connected. That's the mission. WhatsApp at the time had close to, on the path to getting to a billion users. It was clear they were going to get there.

I don't remember the number, but it was clear they were going to get there for sure. And if we believe in having impact, this is the most impactful thing to do. And if that's worth, say, like 10% or so of my market cap, it seems like a fair trade-off. So there's so much in there, which I think a lot of other CEOs would not do.

uh you know having being able to set aside your ego and saying i know we competed hard with these guys but you know you know i think you know i should look past it and bring them in you know focusing on impact i think mark has done that time and time again he did that whatsapp he was doing that with the original instagram acquisition and also later for example building stories into instagram um which is very controversial i think mark has been very good at reasoning from first principles and focusing on impact in a way i think a lot of other people find hard yeah my uh my favorite part of the whatsapp acquisition is uh jan uh had applied for a job at facebook obviously gotten turned down which people know but uh a lot of people don't remember the part of the story

where he took the acquisition papers and he actually signed them by going to i think it was the where he used to pick up the welfare checks with his family uh in silicon valley i forget which uh town and uh he literally there's a photo of him uh he's got the papers pressed up against the door and he's signing it right on the front door of the building and it's just it's cool to see um how meaningful stuff like that is to people uh but i think also it's a testament to market the executive team that like that's somebody who's pretty missionary driven right they're not just building a company to build a company to make money or anything like that uh to get them to kind of see a vision uh with facebook etc uh and to pull off an acquisition

like that's very rare so two things there one is yarn story is super interesting so there is a cliche about who a silicon valley founder is you know you're below 30 you're wearing a hoodie you went to start stanford uh you know you look a certain type jan doesn't fit any of that uh jan's an immigrant uh came from a very humble background you know his family was on food stamps uh growing up uh was it had a stint at yahoo before was i think close to 40 or already over 40 when he started whatsapp which in the silicon valley scheme of things is like old pretty old yeah uh and and also he didn't have he wasn't at stanford any of the ivy league schools he had gone to like community college so in pretty much every respect you know he was the opposite of what a silicon

valley founder uh should be and then in the way he built his company whatsapp famously hadn't raised money for many many years until sequoia came along they just funded themselves using the i think the dollar a year subscription fee they had for many many years uh kept the team really small um really focused on performance so i like to point at whatsapp whenever you know people say you know kind of stereotype certain silicon valley behaviors i like to point to whatsapp and as being the exact opposite of you know the behaviors but second to your point on mark you know it takes a certain executive team to set aside like that ego and be like well if you believe in the mission this is the most impactful thing we can do and i think they negotiated that like on

a friday night at his house yes right like it wasn't like lawyers were involved right i i think the story that came out was just like hey they had dinner together and they said let you know we're gonna do this right i think so i think if i remember uh mark had built a relationship with yarn over time and uh and he had said something like look if you ever you know if you're ever thinking of doing something you know you should give me a call and we should think about this and uh one holiday season you know they were like well we should go build a trigger and how is this thing going to work and uh i think you know history show is going to work out really well for like all parties involved yeah absolutely what about uh twitter you uh twitter's the one

that people probably uh today uh people listening to this podcast are probably most using right so uh some of them might use facebook some of them might use snap but twitter for sure uh but nobody really knows what's going on inside the company but first as a stockholder i'm really happy your audience is using twitter please use more of it i couldn't say these things when i was employed by the company you know but i have no fiduciary duty listen you're free you can tell us all the secrets i'm going to tell me i'm going to tell you everything um so i left snap and you know i was very fortunate to be at facebook and snap and i was trying to figure out what i want to do next i started started to do some investing which i'm doing a lot more now but i just started

doing some investing and honestly i was just goofing around like this was the summer by the way when you know a bit um bitcoin which never sleeps as you remind me so often on twitter uh uh you know when it exploded i think it gone to like you know it did the curve before above fifteen thousand dollars and i was out like i was writing a solidity app i was just kind of goofing around and i knew jack for a long time because i had been very active on twitter i have a little bit of a following and jack knew me and jack had just come back to twitter i think the year before and at the time twitter was not in a great spot uh because they had multiple rounds of layoffs um jack had just come back but it's not been a long time since he had come back uh there

were all these rumors because i think you know benioff and salesforce had wanted to buy the company but the deal had fallen apart which we now know because uh benioff's board had disagreed and vetoed it at the last moment i think somebody reported that recently and what i think also almost happened was disney almost bought twitter uh and uh the deal fell apart which we now know thanks to bob eiger's excellent uh autobiography that he basically had a change of heart at the very last moment so there were all these swirls and the company had these you know big hard questions to deal with so jack and i had dinner a couple of times and jack said look you know like you you know you seem to have an understanding of the product you use it a lot uh and you know

We have these really hard challenges, but more than that, you know, we have like a really important mission. So one thing I think connects all these founders and definitely, you know, Jack and Mark is yet extremely mission driven. I've gotten to know Jack somewhat well over the last few years. I will tell you that anything that Jack says in public is pretty much the exact same thing he says in private. In fact, he has very few secrets and Twitter as a whole has very few secrets.

And I always tell people, you just have to read between the lines of what he's saying. so jack you know in this dinner he would convince it he had how much he believes in the public conversation you know and what he means by the public condition what he believes in it and why it's important for twitter to serve the public conversation and he really convinced me like you know he was like look you know the elections had just happened so the country was going through this really interesting polarizing time obviously um and you know the um and twitter was just playing a big part in world culture like aura you know i think i think black lives matter had just happened the year before uh uh and he's like this is good this company is going to be really important we

are going through such a rough time you can come and help us you know uh help us basically and i was convinced you know uh and at the for a while i was a little bit queasy because i had done two of these social media companies before like i tell people like am i like a thanos a nerdy thanos collecting the infinity gauntlet of social media companies right uh but ultimately it came down to jack and he really won me over with his sincerity uh his focus on the mission and i was like i said okay i'm in uh so uh i said yes i think you know like almost like three years ago now and in the next one's like what do i do so uh i had spent enough time doing tours of duty and advertising and twitter had a fantastic team who was already working on ads and they didn't need any help there

and the question was well we need help with consumer product so uh you know and uh jack said look we need help you know helping people stay informed using twitter so everything from user growth to onboarding to the home timeline or how it ranks how it looks all of it search explore moments uh uh trends we need somebody to kind of come in you know take over the teams and help shape the products and i said well this thing this is obviously such an interesting opportunity because it was so meaningful i was like i meant so that was twitter and it's been a fantastic uh few years there uh because we've one is i like to joke that twitter is the most public of public companies because one you're obviously a public company in the you know in the wall street sense

of the word you have an earnings report you have investors and you know you're you're on that cycle but you're also public companies and you're serving this public conversation and you have some of the most interesting influential communities and people using twitter every single day like crypto twitter is a perfect example because i think you know without twitter you know the crypto community would not be what it is yeah for sure yeah and you know everything from uh vitalik to nawal to so many interesting people you obviously on twitter every single day so you're such a public company and it's so public in sense like it's the only company where the most important people in the world tell you how much you suck using your own product too yeah so you

definitely get that so it was an intense few years i uh i always laugh when i see some some big account tweet at jack right they always add them and they say uh i wish there was a damn edit button right and it's always like you know iced tea or you know like like some random account who they they don't think of it's like a technology product that they use every day and then they make some mistake and i always want jack to go be like well you know i thought of that before thank you you know it's interesting so jack actually covered this in the recent interview so i think the history behind this is that twitter was designed to be text messaging you know and when you send somebody an iMessage you don't think of editing it and that's how they they wanted to be

the short uh easy to send messaging that's kind of the heart and soul of Twitter it still is the heart and soul of Twitter in many ways so edit was not a functionality that was needed so one was there was this historical component second there was this concern about for example let's say I say something and you retweeted you point out something I said was wrong or you correct me then I change what I said you know it could change the meaning of the conversation that you've been having so So it's kind of these meaningful questions about, you know, how do we sort of preserve these conversations and maybe stop bad actors? I think that's the second one. And the third one, you know, was how important it is in terms of how many people really need it versus they can just fix a typo later.

So I always laugh because I think whenever Jack tweets, I see like a million people be like, yes, Jack, but like ship edit. And I always laugh, you know, but Jack's very patient. what is um what is it like having a ceo uh because mark and evan both were 100 focused on the businesses meaning that they were there every single day all day long etc jack is fascinated to me because he's got twitter and square both that are uh successful businesses that um you could look at it and any entrepreneur would hang their hat on just one of them right and say look what i built he seems to now with cash app and bitcoin and a lot of stuff like he has this appetite for more right and so kind of what was it like working with somebody who um was spending a

lot of time it was obviously paying attention to twitter and and really cared about that public conversation but also you knew didn't have just one single focus right he had these other interests as well and we're spending time there so the so jack evan and zach are so different you know we spoke about like you know mark being focused on impact uh and speed evan being focused on creativity jack is uh very different uh i think he is obsessed with thinking from first principles and simplicity uh i like to joke with people that twitter has no secrets you just have to listen to jack on any of his podcasts you know you listen to him on rogan you listen to any of his things he's basically laying out you know you know what he thinks for what twitter should do what square

should do it's all there um and one thing i've really come to appreciate about jack is his rigorous focus on being focused on principles uh having very simple principles and then building your life your company every single decision from those principles that's one second is obsession with simplicity so he's obsessed with keeping things as simple as possible is it you know 140 or 280 characters to a tweet to how square works so if i had to take away like the top two things i've learned from jack i think those would be right at the top um outside of that i think one of jack's you know you know i always tell people you know um and jack's you know is so different you know he looks different you know uh uh i like he walks to work he doesn't own a laptop i think

right oh yeah he's focused on his ipad you know i like to you know make fun of him for uh his you know his fashion choices you know and you know and one of the things i think then you look at And you're like, well, here's a person who has founded not one, but two 20 plus billion dollar public companies and also in two completely different domains. So if you knew nothing about, say, Jack or how he looks or what he says, you're like, how does somebody do that? I'm guessing the number of people who fit that pattern are probably really small. I think Elon is up there, a few of us, but not a lot of people do that. I think one of the things that Jack does really well is he finds great people, you know, and he really empowers them. So, for example, at Square, you know, he had Sarah for many years, he had Gokul Rajaram for many years. At Twitter, one of the things I think he's been very good at is building what he thinks is an enduring team. So, you know, and that he is not needed in every single decision. So you have fantastic people, you have K1 running product, you have, you know, Ned Siegel, you know, who's probably my favorite CFO among any CFOs.

and jack was like look i'm going to build this fantastic team i'm going to really trust them so that i am not a bottleneck in any single decision now of course when something needs to see it away and jack's going to weigh in but he really trusts his team and for me you know that was so liberating because you you know you know in the first place i was like well i'm kind of running this you know meaningful part of twitter in this very you know which is something which by the way everyone in tech has an opinion on uh and definitely everyone crypto has an opinion on but also yeah after a few months it's kind of cool because you know jack would say you know you're you're in charge you know you should feel free to go do what you think is right and that's

very liberating i think for a lot of people you don't get a lot of that freedom and i think that's kind of the key to how he's able to run all these companies um both square and twitter but also be also be looking further out right he's looking further out at you know bitcoin and both for square and for twitter you know uh uh you know uh and also like different countries so i've i think if i think the lesson from jack is principles simplicity and get great people and you go trust them yeah uh you mentioned 140 characters to 280 um i was in the uh anti uh character uh camp and not for anything other than like hey i like twitter and like don't screw it up right just like for no other reason than just like it works pretty good and like why change it if not uh i

gotta say though in hindsight probably one of the best moves that could have happened and it was so exponentially better experience there's a fantastic story there so i remember so i can take no credit for that because that team was already working on it way before i showed up and they were fantastic smart set of people when i was having dinners with jack about joining twitter he said look i'm gonna share something with you we're gonna gonna double the character number i was like whoa you know because 140 characters is the heart and soul of twitter uh uh and i think it's a big deal and i remember telling him jack well regardless of what happens right i think it's a fantastic move number one if it doesn't work you can always revert it back right uh but number two uh and

i'm gonna tell you why they did it but number two i think it was a big symbolic move that nothing is sacred uh that you and jack you know as a new kind of coming back as ceo was like nothing is sacred we should look at any sacred cow examine everything for from first principles so and i think that's why i was against it was because in my mind it was sacred right like which which is a great kind of contrast to even better for them to look at it and change it so so the question was like why change it right and so what twitter was finding was it decided all started with japan so something which is actually uh not a lot of people know is twitter is huge in japan uh um in fact for reasons which i think kind of exactly the opposite of why facebook has

you know not been really huge because you know in japan twitter has all these amazing communities where you know be it manga or be it following pop culture twitter has kind of found this great product market fit uh for japan for many many years um and the japanese language and i'm not an expert so i could be getting the details wrong um is much more dense from an information content than than the english language so with 140 characters in japanese you are able to communicate a lot more than you're able to do with 140 characters in english just because the density of the the characters involved and there was this uh i think this engineer or data scientist who saw that and he was like huh this is interesting so what if we brought that exact same behavior

onto english twitter so they did the math they were like what is the length of you know the japanese actual length because not 140 characters you're able to transfer more information what is the actual length it's in english it came to 279 which is really um i remember very well they were like you know 279 characters in english kind of matches 140 characters in japanese and we were like huh and so that was one data point the other data point was they twitter graph the amount of tweets with uh characters and you saw this curve where you know you saw a very pretty normal distribution but there's this huge spike at 139 and 140 basically people are right at the limit and they were cut off where in japan you saw a much smoother curve right and they were like huh

maybe people want to say more but they are stuck now there's this question of like but that's that's the magic of twitter you don't want people to kind of drone on and on you have like a blog it's not medium right it's not medium you know if you want to announce your job change go to a medium uh um but in twitter's were meant for conciseness but what if you could have both right and and we almost had japan as an evidence point of you could have shot succinct the creativity the magic you know the sort of the the creative choices you have to make to be funny or funny or engage on twitter but also get people to say more and so well 279 characters just seems like a bizarre number to go pick and uh you know the team decided let's make it 280 they launched that and this was i would say

a very scary launch because of most tech companies when they launch something you can you know you can a b test it in a small audience you can test it out but this is you can't test how a large community is going to react to such a change so twitter was like okay we're going to really go in for this and this is i think a lot rod rod fred goes to jack because jack had just come back as ceo he had been there for a year and he was like you know what i believe in this i'm going to go for it and we're going to question the most sacred of sacred cows uh and i would if you remember this like that was not a popular opinion right it was not you know it's interesting when you work at twitter you have to very quickly grow thick skin because everyone are using the product is going

to tell you how wrong you are and and and so but we launched it and the funny part is uh and i think there's a great post uh about they did a year after launch the graph matched exactly what twitter predicted was going to be it turns out that you know one was it didn't change the magic you know people are using twitter more engaging more but it that sort of spike where people are stopping at 140 characters smoothed out smoothed out and people able to communicate more so it was kind of this you know i i really like that because one is such a bold decision for jack to make but also very data-driven one you had this power so i love this story uh but i would say like for a couple of weeks it was not fun all right uh the million dollar question for twitter before we move on

everyone wants to know how to get verified and for uh for quite a while you were the uh you were the victim of whenever that question was asked of as an executive you were uh you were the guy doing verifications what uh what's going on there so first off that that part is not true i never worked on verifications uh there adam bain who used to be coo of twitter uh when he left played this joke where in his bio he pointed people to me and he said cdm is now chief verification officer and they should come to me and i swear like every single day i got uh and by the way i'm sure even just mentioning this is going to get me more emails now i would get like dozens of emails from all sorts of like nice people well-intentioned people to some really bizarre ones i got all

sorts of emails and tweets i did not work on verification uh uh and so i will you know what i'm gonna for the first time i'm gonna copy and answer jack gave jack was asked this last week and he said uh k1 uh bevpur is the uh current head of product at twitter uh he said just go at tweet him he's at k-a-y-b-z he's got you you know you know just tweet at him and he's going to get you verified so he's not he's not he's going to hate me for this at k-a-y-z v-z v-z yeah get that right so you know you want you want to make sure he sees yeah because if he doesn't see you then he can't verify you yeah he's going to verify every single every single person who sees and tweets at him he's going to verify and if he if he doesn't see you at first just tweet him a

few more times just to make it make sure make sure yeah maybe i can give your audience's phone number two this is my favorite uh joke in all of uh silicon valley of all the inside jokes i'm aware of this is my favorite one because everyone wants to know how they get verified on twitter okay so there are two funny stories one is i used to get i i got a lot of interesting people reach out to me uh like like serious people as well as like for example once i get a cold email and i'm just gonna sound name dropping but like i got like post malone like send me a cold email about verification i was like i was not sure it was him you know but then he followed me on twitter so that was very interesting but i also got something really weird how does post malone

start an email is he like yo dog or is it more of like a hello hello i would like a verification he had a friend i think who needed verifying okay so not him not him he was verified he has like a huge following he basically like you know i have a friend who needs help it's post and it's like post yeah and i was like yeah i'm pretty sure it's fake until i saw his account had just followed me yeah and i then asked somebody else who knew them and they were like it's actually legit i was like okay then i was able to kind of get him point him to some people the other that means that sriram knows who does the verification uh uh the other part of it i think sometimes you get some scary people like you know i once got uh what i'll just kind of

roughly say as somebody high in the armed forces of a country which is not friendly to the united states sent me an email saying their boss who was a very senior figure had just created a twitter account and they wanted to get verified and when i didn't reply they kind of sent me more and more aggressive emails and i had to send her twitter security because i was like i i don't know like this is like this is real this person has some real resources so i don't want to piss them off uh so and yeah they were capable of some really bad things you get these really fun uh interesting things the challenge with verification by the way i think this is why like blue sky and all these efforts really interesting is verification is many things in once so one is i think it is

and this is not i'm not talking about twitter here i think it's true for any platform like instagram facebook tiktok when you verify someone you're giving a blue check or the green check it means one you are who you say you are so you are actually authenticity authenticity second it's also some form of social capital so uh where it means that you're somehow meaningful yeah you're quote unquote important you're in quote unquote important and these things get conflated and uh by the way i think i have this theory which like social capital and social currency is one of the best ways to both understand social media and to kind of how to compete with them but in this example so uh you can often have somebody who we think of as a really bad person

uh you know who's coming at a crime or is runs an organization which is like any reason people think this is terrible but they have a lot of people impersonating them on say instagram or tiktok or twitter and they need to verify them because they are actually who they say they are and these things get very uh conflated you also have all these interesting questions like for example let's say somebody's running for office you know and you know they get verified because you want to make sure you know who the actual candidates are but then after a while you know they maybe lose and they go back to being a normal citizen do you unverify them or do you keep them in so there are all these interesting questions so i have a lot of sympathy for there are some

really smart folks working on all of these platforms it's a very very hard problem which is why by the way so i really like blue sky because i think you're off an alternative approach okay explain so for context blue sky is this new effort from jack and twitter to basically build a decentralized version of twitter and my you know the mental picture like to paint people is think of gmail today you open up gmail you open up your browser you see a list of emails some algorithm has sorted the spam away stuck it in a trash spam folder some algorithm has tried to figure out like what is social what is promotion sort those in their inboxes there is a fantastic ui experience and at the bottom of it there is some smtp happening and some imap happening maybe when

these mail servers talk to each other uh the mx protocol but you don't really know it because you're so abstract away and what my mental model for this is so jack basically announced on twitter a few weeks ago that he and twitter are going to sponsor uh something called blue sky which is an effort to build an open source decentralized social network protocol from the ground up which twitter is then going to support it's very early stages you know i think right now they're basically looking for somebody to come in and run it i think it's you know it's very likely it's going to have strong ties to crypto uh for all the obvious reasons and my analogy was in this gmail example think you know you now have gmail but you never had smtp you never had alternative

clients right and that's what social media is today when you have facebook you have a stack you have the ui of like how does these things look how do i post things you have this incredibly complicated ranking algorithm which you are familiar with like one of the most sophisticated piece of software ever built by mankind you have all sorts of policies you have policies on moderation what kind of content is allowed to stay up or not allowed to stay up your policies on verification and so you basically get this in a box there's no way you can tell facebook hey i want all of this but i want to plug in my own ranking algorithm you can do this on email like you can write a client right now and do your own email hosting and be like i'm going to pick my own

spam email you don't need gmail you can't do that on facebook you can't do that twitter and one of things really exciting for me is is what if we could now using my analogy split out smtp and email and then a lot of people can innovate on top of it for example like you know you want you you don't like how twitter is verifying people but they want verification policy uh the the crypto community could say we're only going to verify people with you know some proof of stake or proof of work or we could have pump twitter where only people who pump likes will get verified and no one else so uh you got to come kiss the ring so you could imagine sort of this you know and you can imagine for algorithms so if you don't like how any social media platform is

prioritizing who gets reach who what gets prioritized you want to pick something else like for example you say i don't want algorithms which only prioritize things which get liked or retweeted i want the algorithm which prioritize things it has the most information things that are the most helpful content and your way to figure this out you could build that algorithm you can plug that in so you i think you can really open up a wave of innovation and just people building on top of social media in a way which hasn't happened for now there's a long way to go right there are all these unexplored questions around how does you know how will this work um you know how will other platforms support it uh how will like cryptocurrency plug

in it's super early days but i'm really excited for this yeah and to me uh we've seen this in crypto where people have to uh they want to get to a decentralized end state and so you can just start out trying to be decentralized or you can start out centralized and decentralized over time i don't know if there's a like an agreement yet on every single way to do this what's the best one um we know with bitcoin obviously just decentralized from day one but one person was the first right and then it kind of decentralized very quickly um and i think twitter exploring this uh the thing that i appreciate about jackie uh he just announced with the square they released the lightning network development kit like uh with

blue sky it's tools right it's look i don't want to be the guy in the position of making all the decisions i actually think that there's many different answers for many different people like here's a bunch of tools do what you want to do right and which i think is pretty powerful and i think you can sort of construct this from jack's first principles in some way so jack believes a couple of things right he believes that uh on the internet everything's going to live forever in a blockchain and two that relevance algorithms are what really matters um and sometimes i don't think people often pay deep attention to what he says when he says i think you can sort of construct everything he has done from just those two uh sentences so

for example if everything's going to live far on the internet uh it doesn't really matter as much what gets taken down or what stays up what really matters is what gets reached and what gets amplification so for example like you know if we do this podcast and no one listens to it does it really matter if youtube puts it up takes it down or spotify puts it up it takes it on it doesn't matter but what really matters is like if spotify features it or apple is going to feature it somehow or their rank algorithm that really matters more so jack really believes in this and i think you know one of the things he's talked about is like he someday he wants twitter to just be a set of relevance algorithms working on this corpus of content so then you know for

example if you disagree with you know some moderation policy or who's getting verified it's all there you can build your own implementation and twitter could maybe have an alternative implementation of that but you're free to go do your own thing so that's one of the things i really like about jack where every one of his decisions or which i think the company you can sort of build on top of his principles and really kind of layer them on and they're all intellectually consistent which i think is really liberating because when you're a company um you know you it gives you a framework of what is important how are you supposed to work how do you make prior decisions which is often really hard so that's kind of one of my key lessons from

jack yeah um you write a lot uh yes and uh no but it's very good um where can people read the writing first uh well thank you so i think there are two places where i'm very active uh one is on twitter itself uh i'm at sriramk s-r-i-r-a-m-k at twitter and the other is on my own site where i I have a blog and a newsletter at Sriramk.com where I try and kind of collect some of the things that I've been writing every once in a while. So you've written on a variety of things, everything from how – I have an opinion on everything. No, but it's great because everything from like super operational things like how do you – how are you successful as an executive when you join a company in the first 30 days, right? Like that's really actionable to, um, this idea, uh, that I want to explore a little

bit of like organizations, uh, being systems, right. And kind of Apollo and all this stuff. So maybe talk a little bit about like how you think about the organizations as systems and like, where does that really come from? So, so by the way, my motivation for writing is very simple. It's very selfish. I think, um, I really think writing online is a superpower. Uh, I highly encourage everyone to do it because it's the best way to put up a portfolio of

who you are and how you think to the world. um and uh and you know it has opened so many doors for me um i've met so many great people both for work and not work i highly highly recommend everyone doing it for example you had a previous guest uh david perl on here i i met him through his writing i i loved what he was writing and i met him and you know he's one of the smartest people uh i've met purely from his just from his writing alone so i think it's a real superpower and i had i would say two ulterior motives for writing you know one was i love meeting interesting people when you write something you when you write something and it's hopefully good uh interesting people seek you out

because you find they're often trying to find great things also so i often you know it's a good way to be like here's a bad signal when you write on a topic you often get the best people in the world reaching out to you so i talked to example when i started writing on like companies and you know collecting some of the emails from these companies i got so many interesting people just email me and talk to me about it so it's a great you know it's kind of like having a homing beacon where you get really smart people to come to you instead of you having to go to them so that's one and the second thing honestly it's for myself because you know a lot of these things i'm writing on something where i had no idea what i was doing and kind of through painful trial and

error i learned something over a period of time and uh and kind of helped me work through my thoughts and then after some time i can kind of go back and refer to it so for example i have this post which is referred to on the first 30 days in executive so um you know when i when i kind of took on sort of these more and more meaningful roles i really struggled with like how do i do this job you know and and a lot of people i think struggle with imposter syndrome and i was one of them i was like i'm too young i haven't done this before why should i be running you know why should be telling like you know a few hundred people what to do and i built a playbook over time you know asking a lot of people so for example you know i think a lot of people hit this thing where they

get a new job you know either you join a new company in a senior role or you get a promotion where you're now an executive running a really large organization or maybe you're just taking on a different role and you are say a general counsel and you're now like a ceo or a cfo moving to ceo i think all of these are new jobs and you it's really hard to figure out what you should do because the people don't know you they don't trust you it's a new job so you don't know what you're doing you don't have all the answers at your fingertips yet but people already look to you for the answers and by the way the clock is running because unless you show impact and results they're going to be like yeah somebody's just being paid a lot of money but like why is he or

she even here so and i struggled a lot myself so i built this playbook where and by the way andrew bosworth you know boss at facebook was you know one of the folks who has really helped me with this was first was in the first three days you follow this number one is you go meet everyone right you literally meet any every single you do nothing else but just meeting people all day you do you do no active decisions you uh you you take part in like really no active work you meet every peer every you know mid-level manager every skip level report everyone you can think of in every meeting you do the same thing you know one you figure out what they're working on but you ask them two questions right at the very end you ask them what are the sort of the few things that you

want to see improved in this org and who are the two smart people i should go talk to and very quickly we just within two three weeks you're going to build a map you're going to build a map of these are repeating themes that show up two is you're going to figure out like who are all the smart people that who act as information source and you should keep an eye on so you it's going to kind of act as this like huge accelerated education path in a very short period of time so that's step a um i think step b is to just communicate all the time so when you're new i have this place called like you you have to be elected elected not selected when you get a new job i think and often i think execs you know who fail think that they now have power uh but you

don't right you have hundreds of people thousands of people you know who now have to believe that they are in the best job possible for them that you are someone worth listening to and you might be but you haven't proven it to them yet they don't know you they you may have just seen a press release on you or they might have seen you as a different organization but not running this so what do you do so and i think you have to communicate you have to talk about who you are what you're doing all the time so they hear from you they get to know you and this can be as simple as like an email a week with like here are my top priorities in terms of who am i meeting right so they get to know who you are as a person a little bit more because as an executive you often like

have so many people and they don't get face time and they're going to make snap judgments of you based on seeing in the hallway or some offhand comment so the more you can talk to them and hear from you directly i think it's super powerful when they're getting to know you that second third i think is you have a very limited time window to make changes so i would say you have about a month and i think any team when you come in you're going to find out that there are certain things that are not working you know either organizational structures or often just people and it's not their fault you know it could be that they were in the wrong role or uh you know or it's some reason it's not working out now the team is going to look to you to make those changes

very quickly because i and i've seen this every organization you know there's always some like well-known thing which is going wrong and the team's gonna almost judge you it's a test it's a test of like can you actually fix it for us quickly because the other person the predecessor you know he or she could not so you have a limited window to do the obvious thing um and i think you know and i think so and finally and i think this is super important they have to see you roll up your sleeves and be in action so uh ram emmanuel he used to be mayor of chicago and then you know worked with the Obama administration, had a great quote, which is never waste a good crisis. And I believe that in the first two months, if there is some way for you to dig into the details

and not something super abstract, like, you know, here's a strategy for the next five years. Not that that's not important, but that's often more upside going to take more time. Something as simple as, hey, you know what, you know, this, you know, customer, you're going to lose this customer, right? Or this product launch is not going well. And for you to figure out how to add value right um and roll a piece and this is very important because adding value is very different like sometimes you swooping in can be the worst thing because you don't know anything you don't know you but for you to be useful and for them to see you in action and for them to go this person's actually not so bad you know they're up rolling their sleeves and they're doing something so i

was very lucky at twitter like you know my first uh you know a couple of months we had this big product launch that we had to go through you know mostly we already built it but it kind of the big end stages of it so i got a chance to be like okay this is great because now i get to meet everyone they get to see me in action i get to learn a lot and they get kind of an accelerated version of knowing what it is to work with me and i think that goes a long way in helping you build credibility so now i kind of built this playbook over a period of time most of the trial and error you know um and i wrote this just as a reference to myself and you'd be amazed how often like people they come to me like oh i just because i love this and this is what i've learned and now i

learned something from them so that's one now in organization systems one of the things you know i being in Facebook Snap and Twitter is you realize there are many ways to do the same thing build the same product in fact I joke that I've been in the exact same position in three different companies and you get to really see how different teams and organizations structure things very differently so just for honestly for my own education I started really diving into this what makes a good organization and you have so much literature on this right like you know I'm sure that like a zillion harvard business school case studies you can go to a billion business books but for me i think i looked at a couple of places right i looked at what are some of the most

quickest most impactful projects that have ever been done you know and it turns out like when i'm sending someone to the moon ranks you know right at the top uh you know and and and also where can i really understand and not just by reading books how the insides of great organizations work right and that's when i really started collecting my memos because i found out like that's actually a great way is when you kind of look at how they communicate on the inside you understand how they work and then you can build a sort of a system or a playbook so for example you know when you look at like muller and what they did with apollo you learn there's some very basic things it got very right for example things which sound very obvious but small teams uh everyone knows what the goal

is everyone knows what the steps to the goal are there is super open communication which was not a given um super crisp sort of like intermediate steps and metrics they need to go ahead because you can just somebody to send somebody to moon you need to kind of launch something into space and have it come back quickly and you had all these other things you need to go verify and this one's very braindead but it actually turns out to be really hard and most people don't even get it right and i just started collecting these examples because for me you know one thing i was trying to figure out at twitter is how do i make you know my you know part of twitter better functioning well-run delivering fantastic product experiences and i was like how do i go learn this

so i was just looking well let's look at all the classics let's look at some of the best products that ever been ever been built so that's kind of what started started my curiosity where did that curiosity converge with uh memos right so we're talking before that uh i think you and i both like these memos which are usually a little bit longer uh kind of writings from well-known figures I've taken more of a liking to what I call financial memos. So these are Wall Street investors who write quarterly or annually. The Warren Buffett annual letter is probably the most famous of that type. You have spent more time reading and really liking what I call the operator memos, right?

So this is Mark Zuckerberg. This is Katzenberg. All these folks who are writing. Where did that fascination or curiosity come from? honestly out of purely selfish motivation where you know when i for example joined twitter i was like i don't know how to do this job you know i never done an organization of this size before this complexity before in such a public way and i and how do you even communicate right like how do you write a fantastic strategy doc but the word memo is overloaded with just an email or you know

just a doc you know how to get a great strategy doc how do you send a an email to the team which motivates them when times are hard and i just started collecting examples um one of the things you quickly realize and i think even on the inside of these companies is the inside of these large tech companies are chaotic very personality driven you know whenever some press pieces like oh this company has this conspiracy theory i'm like are you kidding we can't even get like five people to meet together in the same room at the same time and um and often i think it's really hard to form an accurate impression of what is happening on the inside from just reading press releases or even reading books after the fact you just don't get the insight but that is one way to

figure out what is actually happening inside to go read the actual words these people have written the executives you know the ceos the founders you know the presidents and these are often really hard to find you know one because they're on the inside they're often protected uh they're not not often made public so over the years you know whenever one of these would pop up um i just kind of stuck them in a little dropbox folder so what for example and they would often pop in a few ways right you know one some of these are historical i have a lot of historical ones i have one from like an ex-white house chief of staff i have one from like you know uh dupont about like i have some of these historic ones that have now made their way into the public domain a lot of them

are through leaks so for example when the sony leak happened uh i think the press really looked at the salacious details you know i looked at like how does sony run as a company you know what are all the great smart executives writing and how do they motivate their team how are they writing an all-hands memo how are they writing delivering bad news i kind of looked at that just you could learn from uh that's two uh third it comes from press leaks for example you know uh you know facebook recently had a bunch of emails uh which by the i'm actually one of my emails is in them um released by the uk government and um and again the press i think is going to focus on you know like certain like sriram said what yeah i actually turned so that i actually came out

looking pretty good so i was i did have a moment of nervous i was like you know did i say something really embarrassing so i actually i came out looking pretty good but you know but i looked at like okay what all these folks who i really respected what did they doing so and then i over the years i just kind of collected them and uh about four or five months ago i put it up on my site uh it's a freedomk.com slash memos uh and it was amazing so one is i think the memo is kind of it's a great teaching tool to help you understand how different leaders handle situations a couple of my favorite ones uh one is uh let's use one from facebook mark zuckerberg is one of the most uh strategic thinkers you will ever meet uh but hands hands down hands down yeah you know and

you know and you whenever you're in a meeting with him you're like you're just blown away by the sheer force of its intellect and i think you and i have been these things so you you know how real that sentence is but and to me the intellect isn't like oh he's a big thinker uh i remember there was a meeting once uh and i won't go into all the details but basically um there was a new product that was being presented to him that hadn't yet been rolled out uh and he was having to think very strategically about the resources that were being used where does this fit inside of our kind of our plans the impact it could have you know a whole bunch of like really big things and literally in the middle of presentation he drilled then it was like that that what's wrong

with that and it was like pixel level attention to detail and it was just like holy shit like 10 000 foot view down to you know feet on the ground back to 10 000 view all in seconds and it was just incredible it's kind of humbling because you're looking to be like i have the same data that he has i'm looking at the same thing in fact you're sometimes closer to it but he's able to see a pattern or he's able to kind of play out a set of like chess moves into the future of how something would play out and look further ahead and it is amazing and it's really hard to talk about this in public because well you're just saying that because like mark zuckerberg you work for mark or something but it is really true and also it's never exposed to the

public because all of it is internal to facebook which is why every facebook employee often talks about this but you know you don't really see in the press except a bunch of his emails over time have kind of shown up in the public domain because of you know leaks or because of you know the A FOIA request or whatever. Yeah, because of like these various sort of legal processes. So I found, you know, a couple of these memos, which I was like, great. You know, now I have an example which, you know, I can showcase to the world, which won't get me like sued by, you know, Facebook legal of like how Mark writes. So one of my favorite ones is on the site, which is Mark, about a couple of years ago, he makes a case for why Facebook should buy Unity, right?

And it is like a seven to, it's like almost like a seven to eight page memo. now you should think about you can think about like a lot of companies where this conversation would have played out of course the deal never happened but a lot of conversations have been like about the math the numbers the valuations and other teams would have been doing it for mark as you know ceo of like a phone or business or a company but mark writes a memo himself and he lays out the strategic rationale about how he sees facebook changing how he sees the face world changing and adopting gaming more and he says look we are a communication platform we're all about you know making the world open and connected but essentially we always run on

someone else's platform we run on apple we run google but for long term for us to be uh you know not at sort of you know uh at the whim and fancy of someone else we need to own our own platform and you know kind of makes this case where we are in ar and unity as a part of it and then he says well if we do unity what's it going to mean how do we get like you know different companies to work with us will they stop working with us and this is like there are so many things going on in here one is at a 10 000 foot level he's thinking about how the world is going to change and how technology is going to change second he's thinking about facebook's strategic position in that world and how you know what it needs to do to compete to stay ahead of things third he's

thinking about if this happens what game tiering out various situations and he's writing this really i don't remember what to say exactly by the way he doesn't need to he can just basically say the word and they can do it but he's and it's just a fantastic way of writing and i look at it Whenever I need to, like, write something really strategic of how to break down an argument and be really thoughtful. So that's one example. Look at a very different kind of example. Like Jeffrey Katzenberg, you know, writes this famous memo, you know, and Katzenberg, of course, you know, now works on Queeby. But, you know, he's obviously a Hollywood legend for his time at, like, you know, Disney and DreamWorks.

And he writes this great memo in the early 90s about how the current Hollywood studio model is broken. and it's such an interesting look at sort of an insider opining on movie studios which you never see because you're talking to a peer so you want you understand the space you understand the vocabulary space and you're such fantastic strategic thinking in action but my favorite memo and i think this is one which not a lot of people notice because it's not like a well-known name is uh dave goldberg right and so dave goldberg uh you know um who i think we all knew very well was Shell's husband. He sadly, sadly passed away a few years ago.

He was CEO of SurveyMonkey. And there's an email between him to Michael Linton, who was running Sony here in the US at the time, where I think Michael had asked him, help me understand the music business. And this is an email sent from one person to another person. Nobody else is going to see this ever. And I'm pretty sure if I hadn't put up on the site,

it would have never gotten shown. but it's by the way it's the ceo of sony asking dave goldberg about the music industry like pretty crazy it's pretty crazy and you know and he basically breaks down you know how does this industry work you know how who makes money you know how should sony position itself strategically it's one of the best written emails i've seen and it blew my mind because what as to my knowledge before the sony emails got hacked only one other human being had ever ever seen that email so i think you know what this helps me with all these emails is in the finance world when you're an investor writing a letter you have a bunch of objectives you are here to you know talk your

portfolio yeah you're talking publicly for sure yeah you're talking and you're basically saying look i'm a great person to be a custodian of your money in some shape or form but when you're an operator you have multiple agendas right you are trying to make a case to management you're trying to make a case often to people who work for you but you still need to make a case to them you're trying to rally the troops you're trying to bring morale up you are trying to help simplify a really complicated topic with multiple different incentives there are so many different things going on and for me the memos kind of act as like kind of this educational aid where i'm like okay this is how the greats have really done it and you know if you know if you have like a white house

chief of staff writing a memo to his successor like whatever problem you're solving is like much less important than what they were dealing with so and how did they deal with that so it's a fantastic education and so i put this up a few months ago on the site what has blown me away since then and this writing by writing online super power is every day i get an email about it and you get some of the most thoughtful beautiful emails and i get people sending me new memos i get new memos all the time and sometimes i'll be like whoa you can't send me that because your company's like legal department is going to either sue me or sue you uh but sometimes you get these fantastic people who just send me their own memos or memos they know of and it is beautiful so

i've gotten to add so many fantastic memos and just kind of it's not this machine which keeps going so i it's one of the been one of my favorite things to do when you put the uh the light up right and people are attracted to it it's like uh it really is a magnet it is and you know my one of my goals is to someday maybe like interview uh the people in the memos uh and think about like okay what is going on when you're writing the memo right like and some of them are still alive some of them are very active for example i have like you know brian armstrong of coinbase you know doing a memo on how to be a good product manager right he wrote his pms at coinbase but you know now a lot of pms i'm like what are you thinking or even some go back to zuck or go back

to uh you know somebody at google or somebody historically i would maybe somebody do a book on these yeah but for now i just love it it's a treat uh and i use it all the time so another thing that i know you love is lebron james oh gosh let's talk about it um where does the fascination with lebron come from and is he the goat the fascination with lebron yes he's absolutely the goat uh the fascinate lebron comes from the fact that i like to annoy people you know i'm a troll at heart i am a troll you know i like to annoy people and so a few years ago like i live in san francisco right and san francisco hates lebron because golden state warriors you know where the peak of their power for many years

and LeBron was, you know, Darth Vader, Voldemort rolled into one. He was the only one. San Francisco's been spoiled. They did what? They had the... They had the Giants, right? The baseball.

Then they went to the Warriors. Now they got the 49ers who seem to be doing pretty good. Yeah, they had the 49ers with the Colin Kaepernick era with the Buley Val. And, you know, there was an age where they had like, you know,

the Steph Curry, Splash Brothers, Kaepernick, the Giants were doing well. it was an amazing time for san francisco but you know i'm always a a bit of you know to use his overused phrase a bit of a contrarian and you know this was during the uh 2016 finals if you remember uh the warriors were up 3-1 and i made a funny post on facebook i thought it was funny i'm like you know what i'm pretty sure like lebron and uh cleveland are going to come back and win the series by the way at this time i was a fan of lebron and i'm a fan of him for a few reasons i'll get into but i just kind of said that i didn't really mean it but then you know they won

in a game uh five and then they famously won game six where steph got ejected then he went to game seven and i was like oh my gosh this could be getting real and then game seven happens lebron chases down you know you know and kairi hits a jumper and i was like oh my gosh and my feet exploded people are so mad at me and i was like wait i now have this thing which is now reliably going to annoy people and i loved it so since then it's kind of become the self-fulfilling prophecy where you know where i just love to trot out lebron because it just annoys the heck out of you know all of my you know friends and peers in san francisco i actually really i'm a huge fan of lebron for a bunch of reasons my biggest reason is um i think in any professional career

it is really easy to coast on what made you successful at first right um whatever your first thing was you i've seen a lot of people who max out because they were like i've become as good as he can be uh i'm really good at this thing i'm just going to continue doing this thing but i think it takes a certain other kind of person to continuously reinvent themselves and to always look at what the game is and stay out of the game like for example i think of you know my wife always mentions madonna in this context of always reinventing herself and if you get lebron lebron's always reinvented himself like when he came in you know he had no jump shot you know he was kind of just like you know he relied on his speed and athleticism went on this personal

journey where he went to miami was hated because of the decision um you know learned from that and then he kind of became this one sort of in the public realm this lovable figure you know working with kids in akron you know kind of becoming a spokesperson for like so many important social causes on the court became a leader changed his game and he's gotten older he's kind of like figured out how to play with that he's always been reinventing himself and staying ahead of the game like he's like you know he's like 35 now right and he's still one of the most athletic people in the league that was not a thing um back like you know like 10 years ago and that can only happen with not natural you know gifts it can only happen you constantly invent so that really inspires me

so uh i actually am a huge fan of lebron but for a different reason um his dominance on the court is undeniable right i'm not gonna uh change anyone's mind i always talk about like the goat argument of like lebron jordan kobe whoever you believe going into the conversation i'm not gonna change your mind that's who you believe knock yourself out um but the thing that is so crazy to me about lebron lebron is probably uh probably the last athlete that uh started out in an era where social media wasn't really a thing yet like it was just starting uh and now continues to play at the highest levels in like this explosion of you know basically can't walk down the street without somebody taking a video of you right and so uh at 16 years old i think it was he's on the

front cover of sports illustrated chosen one all this stuff 16 years old how many other kids you know sebastian telfer i mean i can go through them all right they were all there they were on the covers uh and they all fizzled out so one he made it right in terms of he actually fulfilled the athletic promise but two is you've never heard drugs infidelity uh doing something wrong you know partying like a fantastic role model i mean look at him you know i mean people don't criticize him for talking about his kids way too much right but he's obviously a great dad uh he's a great family but he's such a fantastic role model where it's really hard to be at the peak of your sport and to have you know all the adulation be one of the most recognizable names in like the world

really it's very very remarkable and my whole thing is just like that level of scrutiny for now you know what is it uh yeah 20 years right so probably 16 to 35 36 years old to do that and be the one of the best players if not the best player you know in the history of basketball all this crazy it's just it's really really hard to do that i think that like the average person doesn't understand those types of pressures i don't understand that type of pressure right and i don't think there's very many people listening who understand that but we've seen it over and over and over again everyone cracks right tiger woods kobe brown i mean you just go down the line right conor mcgregor recently like all these guys they all end up doing something stupid

and some of it is fame goes to their head some of it's just they make a dumb decision you know some of it's they're undisciplined whatever lebron for 20 years has been kind of untouchable and your biggest critique is uh hey he made a decision on live television donated a million dollars to like the boys and girls club okay there's there could be worse things right or he talks about his kids too much whatever so i think it's just pretty cool to see somebody kind of thrive in that environment um and it's kind of hard to hate them it is and i think there's a big lesson for that like anybody in like any normal job which is to just reinvent yourself right like and the game always changes you know for some metaphorical definition of the game uh and how do you stay ahead of the curve i

think it's true for example i talked a lot of venture capitalists uh i was talking to you know if you look at some of the great venture capitalists they've been able to have great hits across many generations um and whatever the original job was like john doerr was you know a sales vp at intel you know him you know help getting google or picking google i don't think being a sales vp at intel is going to set you up for that so you obviously kind of have to reinvent yourself stay ahead of the curve and to do that over a long period of time i think lebron's been and that's that's why he's really inspiring yeah he really annoys every one of my friends what uh what are you doing now you're doing a lot more investing in startups i'm tweeting

okay tweeting that's good casting there's a lot of that uh so uh i i've been doing a lot of investing so when when you have an active day job you know you don't get a lot of time you know and you know now i have some free time i've loved helping young founder founders and entrepreneurs so i've been able to do a lot of that uh you know so been one is doing a lot of investing uh on the early stage uh and kind of really helping shape mostly consumer companies but lots of different companies uh which is how to think about product and operations and second is just to help like other even like later stage companies with you know i call it like my war stories i'm like well i don't know what you guys should do but like these are the mistakes i've made so at least

please don't repeat the same mistake so but it's mostly been investing i gotta say that uh out of everyone that i know or have worked with you probably if you cut your experience by the types of companies the variety at which you worked at the highest levels and also what you did within those companies so product right ads etc there's not very many people who have kind of done that much right there's usually like okay i do sales i do product i'm product manager i work on growth whatever and maybe i go to two three companies and do that same thing but um my father told me this one time he said uh there's some people who get uh they work on something for 10 years and they get uh two years of experience five times right right but it's the same thing five different

times and so yeah it was 10 years basically two years of experience thank you that's very kind of you but second i mean you you know i'm not like blowing hot therapy behind it you are the living epitome of doing that like you know i knew palm back in ads at facebook and he always stood out because he was one of the smartest most like you know logical thinkers in the room and also one of the loudest voices like literally but he's one of the smartest most logical thinkers and you know i've kind of seen you reinvent yourself where well you know to bitcoin never sleeps guy i never start making fun of you for that so i think you're the living in pitonville and across industries uh so yeah i mean thank you but i think you're way ahead of me there yeah well i think that

you follow something similar that i do of just like it's where does your interest take you right and it all leads back to kind of this authenticity thing of i think a lot of people um the the joke of that like you get have 10 years but really two years experience five times is those people tend to just do what they think they're supposed to do right so it's like i'm supposed to go to do this and then i wait two years then i go do this and then after that i do join a venture capital firm as a principal and then i do this and it's like their whole life they already have like scripted out and i've always just been like well like what if i don't want to do that all right like what if this other thing is more interesting or that you know whatever and it's like the whole i have a

master plan so let me turn the tables but like if you are a young person right and you are you know for example i think the path is you get a job maybe you have a b school degree you know you You get a B-School degree, then you come in, you rise up to corporate ranks, or the Silicon Valley way, which is you become a founder and you start something. But you don't want to – how do you know what your path should be? Let's say somebody listening to you is in the middle of a company. Yeah, so I actually think the best thing that somebody can do – and there's a couple of kids. I don't want to use their names because I don't know if they'd be comfortable with me. But there's a couple of kids that I know that range in age between – I'll say they're probably 20 to 25, right?

So they're either should be in college and they didn't go for whatever reason or they're just out of school and they're all executing this very, very well. But basically what I tell them when I see them doing this is like, look, go find people that need help, whether they realize it or not, and be overly helpful. But don't go find the person that's at the entry level employee at some company. Go and talk directly to the CEOs of startups and go talk to the partners at these investment firms. and they always say the same thing like oh like that person doesn't want to talk whether they want to talk to me i'm 23 years old right and i say well they're going to want to talk to you for one or two reasons either they think that you've got really unique insights or two that you can do something to help them right and what i think that the people who i've seen do this really well is

they realize twitter is a great tool you can reach out to anyone right linkedin writing online like there's all these little hacks that you can do but very quickly like david pearl's a great example um he wrote online a bunch everyone started you know one person read it was like that's interesting another person read it and they shared it and then and next day everyone knows everyone looks over goes oh yeah that dude's smart like he gets a certain part of the world that most of us don't think about all day long like that's great um i'll uh mention another person this is not a young person um i don't think and so don't get mad uh i've never met a person uh but matthew ball i don't know if you know who this is unbelievable so he just left amazon studios i believe uh and i

his newsletter uh if you folks haven't subscribed they should he's a friend i've known him for years he's oh have you okay so i only like in the last like two to three months started uh like started seeing his stuff um i don't think i've read something that he's written that i wasn't like holy shit this dude is smart right and he's just analyzing everything from disney plus to media models like all this stuff you're just sitting there you're just like i cannot believe that this content is on the internet for free like you can learn anything and so i even think that there's people who are really good at like let me go find information let me consume it and like put it in my brain and then turn around and like regurgitate it back to somebody else right and

like if you're good at doing that and synthesizing those you know matthews 20 page write up and then turning around and helping a media ceo like put it into practice like that person's probably gonna think that you're smart i have so many thoughts on this i think first is i think a lot of people actually make fun of me for writing um because in the inside of a large company you know or you're pushing a power it's not obvious why you want to tweet or why you want to write you're like why are you wasting this time but you know it's such a real superpower when you write because it pays off in these non-linear ways that you never really understand uh when you're able to help people finding great people uh in so many ways so for example uh i a lot of people come ask me

you know i want to get into product management and i don't have either you know the right background i'm in like a different role and how do i get in do i just apply you know cold uh to this company and chances are if you apply cold you're probably not nobody's gonna look at you because some resume you're gonna get screened and not because they're not they're terrible people they only have finite amount of time and if someone has not been doing product management you just don't have enough time to go through every single person now i always say the exact same thing which is there's one sure way to get every head of product or ceo's attention which is you write a doc or a set of tweets you talk to them about the biggest things that company or

the product should be focusing on they're not doing write a strategy memo or write marks do whatever it is that you're good at and just send it to them or tweet it even better tweet it and i guarantee you the ceo the founder the head of product they will reach out to you and they will grab coffee they'll be super impressed that somebody's critically thinking about their business right yeah and and honestly they read it and they share it every single time and i know i was talking to somebody uh who wanted to break into a company and he and this person he had like no background in tech no computer science background and it is really challenging to break into product management you don't have that but he wrote this memo this you know really hot

startup founder saw that memo and got him in and you know he knows like product role so you know that's what i think and i'm not saying you need to do it just because you get a job though it's actually a really way to go get a job and have a portfolio i think it really pays off in these non-linear ways which are unintuitive uh which is why like i recommend everyone write online be it a tweet a newsletter a blog it's a living portfolio of your work and it's going to pay off for you yeah uh it's why twitter i think is so powerful um is because you it's kind of like reading somebody's conscious stream of thoughts right it's like what is that person thinking about today um polina uh usually gives me a hard time she says uh there's times where like

we'll have a conversation and 20 minutes later she sees me tweet something and she's like are you sub tweeting me yes right i have the same arty arty she's like yeah i get the same thing and it's not always about like your relationship or her it just might be a conversation that we had and she's like hey like tag me next time right first of all both of us need to stop doing that but you know i think i think you know there is a certain i think one of the hardest thing one of the things people find really hard about twitter is i think the best tweeters are on this efficient frontier of being vulnerable um but also not doing something that'll blow up their career all right like in jared diamond you know uh you know roads gunjam which has this fantastic

analogy of like a civilization which is too chaotic falls over a cliff but if you're not changing enough you know you get stale and you die and i think the best tweets are something like that where you know if you're not vulnerable you know if you're not open to people criticizing you or giving you tough feedback you'll never post anything interesting which is why you know like so many people you know who just post press releases or you know or are so scripted are not interesting people to follow um but on the other hand you know so easy to blow up your whole career using twitter and you need to find what i call that edge um but the edge is magical like nawal for example one of the best people i've found who's found that edge and there's something in

you it takes some courage because it's such an unnatural thing to be somewhat vulnerable and you're gonna get a lot of flack for it your friends are going to tell you why are you doing this is an obviously stupid idea a lot of random stages of internet definitely going to tell you it's a bad idea but there's something magical about putting out your ideas knowing they're going to be wrong but getting feedback and getting the smartest people to talk to them because when you do that when you share these ideas um it kind of pays off you find these smart people who come back to you and you gravitate towards you and you build these communities over time and that's something magical so you attract like-minded people yes uh and uh and you form these connections

which you never can and twitter by the way is amazing for that twitter is the best place to meet like-minded people around pretty much any community uh like for example i recently started tweeting uh i got interested in spy satellites uh it turns out that there is an active uh sub community of people uh who are on the world amateur astronomers or i don't know what the term is but they track spy satellites so for example so they're tracking the spy satellites to try to understand where they're positioned in the world in fact they already know where all the positions are because they can track all the launches so for example there's this guy and i actually posted a link in my recent newsletter when you remember when president trump posted this uh photo of this

iranian reactor blown up this guy who's this dutch professor he doesn't have a day job connected to satellites just using that photo and the angle of the sun computed which satellite it was and it was a previously unknown satellite and second that it had an imaging sensor that the u.s had never admitted to and he just does it using just the photo and there's this amazing blog post um you know uh where he breaks the math of like trying to analyze the sun's angle and the trajectory of the earth it's amazing and so you have this weird kind of eccentric set of people around the world to do this and they put up these little cameras on their porches at night which track satellites as they pass by and they're like well do i know this thing do i know this thing and they share

and this is email list which i joined for a period of time then it got very nerdy where they shared you know this information and it's this really let's be clear it's a very nerdy niche activity it's all the fascinating it turns out that from your backyard you can track pretty much any spy satellite from any government which i didn't even know about and i found all these people on tour i know i know follow all of them i know have a list of people who are all into uh tracking spy satellites and you're like where would you find that like where would you find that group of people if not on twitter and it only happened because i put out this tweet about you know this trump photo and then somebody else had replied added someone else and it kind of became a thing

speaking of satellites uh believer or non-believer in aliens um can i i'll answer this in a different way okay there are people ask me a question which is what are things that have changed my mind on okay okay and my top answer is always when i was a kid until five years ago i believe that meeting aliens was a good thing i know meeting aliens is a terrible thing okay why and it's and very early in life you have like one book or one moment where you know that changed your mind but i have this which is uh i'm going to butcher his name uh chixin lu who is one of the most famous one of the most awesome sci-fi writers of her time wrote this chinese sci-fi novel called the three body problem it's not the three the three body problem yes it's now this very famous trilogy it's probably

one of the most famous literary works to come out of china uh in the last 10 years it's definitely the most well-known work of sci-fi in the last like five ten years and i don't want to spoil it but the the trilogy roughly deals with uh humanity running into an alien race uh can we nerd out about this for a little yeah of course so just so you have context on the podcast uh this all started because i used to ask is there's uh such thing as alien pets so we always talk think about alien like a race right but we never think about well like are there multi-species so like are there pets and stuff so that kicked off the whole aliens thing uh i've had 200 plus people answer the question all kinds of crazy shit uh and one of i think you are now only the second or third

guest ever to uh basically uh pontificate about wait a minute every single person in the human race that has been invaded has it turned out well like like pretty much across the board the invader usually has a significant advantage so this book by the way so it sounds like that's kind of what you're talking about a little bit so the trilogy basically says it's called there's a theory and uh it's called the dark forest theory the dark forest theory yeah and i don't want to spoil it and I won't give a chance, but the rough contours of it is space is so vast

and communication takes so long and you have so little context when you're communicating that you can't assume good intentions. So, for example, I'm sure I'm butchering this and I'm sure, you know, your listeners are going to point this out,

but my interpretation of it is, you know, we often sometimes think, look, alien races are going to be so evolved that, you know, that, you know, they don't want to harm us. They're going to be beyond, like, warfare, et cetera.

i think what the book makes a very convincing argument for is alien races can't trust each other because of the very nature of space so the safest thing to do is to never being spotted by another alien race and the more you spot them is to try and destroy them and they yeah and the book is fantastic um there's a reason why it's one of the most famous sci-fi books of recent time it really reasons this out of why it's from a game theory perspective it's the smartest thing to do and so that kind of changed my mind where you know when i was a kid i loved sci-fi you know i one of my favorite works of all time is carl sagan's contact you know the steady program i used to obsess over that uh i loved sci-fi but now you know i'm like you know sending you know these

probes into space which have like basically a homing beacon on humanity is like maybe one of the most reckless things we've ever done and i'm sure a bunch of you listeners like oh my god there's somebody nerdy geeking out i just go read the book there is a very well thought out game theory perspective on why it's a bad thing it's called the dark forest problem the book is called the three-body problem three-body problem has the dark forest theory the dark forest theory okay uh before i let you go you could ask me one question but first uh what's your thoughts on bitcoin we're supposed to talk about bitcoin but uh we're gonna spend the last five minutes talking about that i heard it sleeps and naps is that true i to be honest uh so the first time i

tweeted this uh it was like i don't know some bank was down or what something happened or instagram went down or something and i was like you know bitcoin never goes down um it was probably one of the uh least thoughtful things i've ever tweeted in the sense of like it was a thought that popped in my head it was kind of like half funny but true and whatever fired it off i put my phone down i remember i like came back and was like oh my god people like that one really worked so i did it a second time i think like by the third or fourth time i did it then it like became a thing or it's like this kind of like repetition becomes a thing and uh i forget what sir it might have been twitter either no it could have been twitter maybe it was instagram again like something

went down uh this is maybe like four or five months later and i didn't tweet and i had all of these people like tweeting constantly like bob something's down and i was like all right this is getting out of hand now um and so it just like became this thing which is like it kind of like the meme is the message right but um very marshall mcluhan yeah of course well exactly which any facebook employee gets to learn about on day one i i uh i think people are surprised at the books that uh that they're given i remember uh was it sam lesson i think he gives out snow crash snow crash a big deal cox was very much into mcluhan mcluhan and the media is the message yep the medium is the message rather yeah yeah and there was one other one but those are the two that i

remember i think ready player one is very big on the vr ar side for sure uh okay okay uh one question for you wait no no hold on what do you think about bitcoin what do you think about bitcoin um well i am you know they can't avoid that question oh gosh i you promised me no crypto questions you know joe's smirking in the corner so you definitely can't uh can't avoid it well my put i have you know a not insignificant percentage of my net worth in um you know bitcoin i'm hodling uh you know nicely okay so i it's a start it's a start uh i when i had free time in past years i dabbled uh you know i wrote my own solidity apps i wrote kind of the first generation of dabs uh i even traded on many shady you know asian uh trading sites which i now can't

seem to get login back into um well what do i think um so let me kind of let a personal twist so i have a mom uh in back in india she lives in chennai and uh every every few months sorry i'm laughing because you said i have a mom we all do okay well and you know she's you know she's a little bit older now and you know like and your indian viewers would really appreciate this you know as like any good indian child i try and like send money back every once in a while yep um and it is a painful painful process like i go through this arcane you know uh very well-known companies with these arcane set of ui with like a crazy rate and it often fails for some weird reasons and uh you know i just think there's something very powerful about like changing and reinventing

and decentralizing all that so you know and look i am not you know a crypto libertarian i i definitely very interested in my technology angle like i love for example when vitalik vitalik wrote the state of crypto a few weeks ago i went under like every single paper you know he was referring to in there but i think i come back to you know why why should facebook's libra exist or what is the promise of bitcoin i come back like why is it so hard to send money to my mom right because like india and u.s are both very civilized countries with uh with sort of this financial infrastructure but for me to even send like a small amount of money is hard it has so much friction and then And she, you know, and, you know, she's almost 80 now.

She kind of has to figure out, well, how do I then convert into actual money, which she can then go spend on, which sometimes she can't figure it out. So anything which, you know, and those barriers shouldn't exist and anything which can help with that. I think so far for my mom. You are hitting on something that I think the whole crypto community has done a really bad job of, actually. And if you think about like a great startup pitch, what do they start with? The story. Here's the state of the world. Right.

and this thing is going to happen and here's how it's going to look in the future uh i think that crypto for the most part not not this isn't true in every sense but in most part uh people like to go to there's this thing and we're here we're going to change the world but like explaining what you just did about here's a problem like a real life problem that people have we can fix this problem with this product right and here's how that'll change uh i think that that's been missing a little bit i actually think that companies that have been started in the last like three or four years are doing a much better job of doing it um some of that's because you get people who have more experience in kind of the tech world and building companies etc uh but

they're being teamed up with uh people who are like very much crypto libertarian uh right and that type of i'll give an example you had i listened to your podcast with brad garlinghouse oh yeah by the way his memo fantastic also on my site i heard does he have a good one He mentioned it on the podcast, the peanut butter memo from his time at Yahoo, legendary memo. But there's something else he said on your podcast that was super interesting, where he said he often sits in these conferences and you hear, and look, I am a computer science engineer by background. You know, like I used to write Paxos algorithms. So, you know, anything which is about consensus, I love all this stuff, right? But he was talking about when he sits in this conference and he's like, but what is the actual problem you're trying to solve?

which often to an outside seems like some business or management speak but i like to think about like back in human terms like i want to send let's say bitcoin to my mom you know how do i do that how would she understand it how would she actually spend it at the local store you know around the corner she has how does all of this work but that's a real problem because i know it's how hard it is for me to do that right now with the current financial infrastructure i i would love a bitcoin to make that better yeah look i think it's going to happen at some point right i think it already let me rephrase i think it already is in some aspects so like on saturday it won't settle bitcoin will do it right so kind of the it's always up right uh there's lower fees right

okay that's great but again um is the ui perfect no can there be improvements of course right is there an education kind of obstacle for people just to understand what is this how do i transact it of course you have these india for example a very weird place with crypto right now so uh Is it legal? Exactly, right? It's super simple questions. I'm going to get arrested when I talk about this

next time I go into India. So I think you have all these incumbents who are trying to figure out what you do with this. Some countries, obviously, you have the Chinese government who are leaned in.

Others are like, well, we want to take a wait-and-see approach. So that's kind of a huge factor. Yeah. What one question do you have for me? It's a lot of fun, man.

Thank you. I want to think of a good one. I'm struggling. Okay. So... okay at this point in 2020 do you think we're 16 days in or 20 days in uh two questions who do you want nakamoto to be and do you think the world should ever find out his her their yeah identity so uh i don't even know if this is controversial anymore um i don't want to know and i think that

it one of the strongest parts of bitcoin is that we don't know and we'll likely never know and the reason it's you right no i'm not even i don't even have one percent of the intelligence of one percent of the intelligence required to create something like that um he winked at me you can't see it on you can't hear it on the podcast but he winked at me i can't even figure out how to make my cell phone work in the office because we don't have good cell service definitely not figuring that out um no but uh it's this idea i think it was marty bent was the first one that i heard say like the immaculate conception right and so if you think of like if you really boil down what is money money's a religion right and that religion is the belief that when i hand you

whatever the currency is whether it's a digital currency or physical currency whether it's fiat bitcoin whatever you accept it because you and i both believe it has value right now when you look at why does it have value except there's a whole bunch of explanations whatever but when you think about that um there's not very many successful religions meaning that there's people who subscribe to it in the world where there's a single person that is alive that everyone looks at and says that's the leader right now there's the um kind of extremist type um you know that people who end up like all drinking stuff and like mass suicide like all that kind of crazy stuff right but like a quote-unquote legitimate and i don't even know if that's the proper way to

describe it but like a mainstream religion where the person is still alive who's considered a leader if you look at fiat currencies there's no single leader right now there's in many cases like a central bank that central bank the leadership switches out every so often etc but no one thinks about like who's the creator of the u.s dollar right it's more of this like facade of an organization that you can't really touch or feel bitcoin has the same thing and i think that if it lost that right because it became very apparent and verifiable like this is the individual who is uh satoshi nakamoto um or the group uh especially if they're still alive a lot of kind of that magic goes away um and so you i don't think that it's necessarily like a fatal flaw but it definitely

causes some problems and challenges uh what i don't know is like um there's a lot of people who think how finney is satoshi nakamoto how finney's passed away so like okay maybe that still has some of the magic because he's passed away right but but i don't really know um and so generally like i don't think it matters at this point again if the person's alive i think it does right not in the sense of like all of a sudden bitcoin's worthless but like it's vitalik has what are the persons like out there you know vitalik has it with ethereum right like vitalik spends a lot of time answering questions about ethereum's progress even though vitalik is he's incredibly important he's obviously uh the creator if not you know a creator uh but it's not

only up to italic in terms of like he's not writing all the code right there's a bunch of other people vitality is interesting because he's such a good spokesperson and symbol he's just one of the smartest people that you can ever encounter yep uh what if you know he was somebody who was getting into scandals all the time going back to a lebron example huge you know what he was on like tmz uh uh you know after bender every single night like it would probably impact ethereum absolutely but i'm just laughing because i just imagined vitalik well and he's like kind of like um i mean it's a little weird right to describe it this way but he's not a mythical type figure but but he's he people realize that he's different right he's obviously incredibly intelligent the

intellectual horsepower that he has is you know bar none compared to most people uh he wears like the unicorn shirts and like like just like his whole mannerisms like you can just tell like hey that guy's different right um and so if you take that to bitcoin like i think that it's just you're 11 years in now right so you kind of take it away the part that uh i do think would be fatal is if it came out that it was a government organization so if that was um again it's very unlikely though So given, I mean, for them to be on the cypherpunk email list back then, that's... That's crazier shit that's happened, right? Fair enough.

The world is crazy. But I think that it's, again, verifiable. So not the conspiracy theories, not the like, hey, I stitched together all these photos and made a YouTube video and edited it somehow to make it look like something happened. If it was on YouTube, it's true. Very true in today's day and age. But, like, it was verifiable that it was an organization, you know, associated with a government, et cetera. I think that would be a big issue and potentially fatal.

But the other piece of this, actually, that's really interesting to me is at what level of penetration in the ownership can be known without it being an issue? So, like, forget the creator. Take the top 10 holders of Bitcoin. I don't know how many are known, but let's say five or six probably. well do we care that we don't know the other four what about out of the top 20 the top 30 the top 50 right like the if you're in the top 20 holders of bitcoin like you're probably holding more than 100 000 bitcoin like pretty big number right and so like the whole ethos of bitcoin would be that we don't ever find out who those people are but like if that becomes you know publicized there's

some people organizations like we'd be like oh shit like that's bad right not bad because the assets bad but just like i see now that there's going to be people who are upset that that person owns a lot of this right right and so i i think that there's kind of like various levels of fascinating of thought process here um but again like i always fall back then on like uh i have this theory in uh startups of like um it's uh what is it um i think it's the law of energy i don't know i'm gonna embarrass myself right now but uh basically things that are in motion stay in motion things that aren't in motion you know don't um and startups are very similar like if you find a startup and they have traction and data points and like progress and like it's

very clear this isn't just like hey we had a bunch of ad spend like it's working right it's likely that it's going to continue working right for the most part if something is like stagnant and they can't seem to like get that inflection point every day that goes by gets harder and harder to like all of a sudden that now it starts working and so i think that uh um bitcoin probably more than anything has benefited from this because it's like 11 years of being attacked in the media and technology and all these different things like it's still going it's likely that it's going to keep going regardless of what we throw at it including you know who the holders are or whatever but um i don't know it's like reflexive in the george soto sense right it yeah and i think all

of these intricacies and kind of complex questions are like why people are so fascinated with it right like like if you if you like to think about kind of these multi-dimensional problems bitcoin's like the perfect thing right you're like oh wow there's the economic part there's the technology part there's like the government and geopolitical components there's you know um all sorts of game theory involved and economics and it's like jesus christ like how you you can't possibly think through everything like you can't understand it fully and so there's always something new to learn which i think is fun well that's why they should subscribe to you i i do enough shilling of people to subscribe to me and follow me on twitter um i i have one last question for

you uh i usually don't ask people this oh my god but you you have a one-year-old what is the one thing that you've learned as a new father like what's your one takeaway from a year of having a little human to take care of oh my gosh okay that's a really hard question uh out of all the questions this is the hard one that's a really hard question uh okay i think one is it's hard because i think it turns out that all the classical sometimes pithy answers are true i think it's so dependent on your unique experience and it's also so profound that it's hard to sum up in just like a few words because such a profound uh experience uh in so many ways um what can i say so i think that okay let me i don't know whether this sum sums it up

But I think one of the things which always strikes me about being a dad is it's not often, and I'm going to sound somewhat sentimental and romantic here, and I'm sure you guys can feel free to roll their eyes. It's not often in life that you suddenly have someone that you're like, oh my gosh, I love this person without expecting anything with any transactional return. now if for a lot of us and your parents you kind of did that you had that relationship as a kid but often you know when you find a partner and you're lucky enough it's like it happens over time like nobody you know you know and maybe you're very lucky but like on day one you're like oh i'm gonna marry this person and that's it you don't have that but when you have a child like one is like immediately your heart and your your sense of who you are expands like i never thought of myself as a dad or you know somebody who loved someone that way and i was like oh my

because i'm now this person you always had a new so well and i'm sure other fathers listening or parents listening to us will definitely relate to that yeah it's really hard to explain it it's one of these annoying things where people are telling me this before and i was like yes yes i don't get it but once you kind of get it on the other side that's one second i think which is kind of interesting to me is it puts you in touch with your own childhood so every single day i know remember something i never did either it's something my own parents did with me or something like i remember like when i was a kid when i was a baby about two i used to love playing with chairs it was a silly thing every kid has their own thing i just love pretend that a chair is a train a bus

airplane i just love playing with chairs and i when i see you know uh my daughter who just turned one do this i'm like i did something takes me back and something i never remembered now because you don't have really crystal memories i don't remember this so it kind of makes you relive your own life maybe a part of your life you've forgotten which is sub four years sub five years you know and you know remember this and you know under kind of understand your own parents better that's kind of this cliche thing you become your own parents over time you don't understand your parents a lot better so that's kind of unexpected for me because i definitely expected in some ways that you know it's going to open up this new set of experiences and you know you're how you deal with tiny human

being and that you know how to kind of protect them in this crazy world we live in but the thing i didn't expect was it helps you understand yourself yeah and your own story and all these expensive you might have just forgotten so that's been very unexpected for me i don't know whether that's a great answer that's a great answer all right listen this might be the most fun i've had in a while this is so much i appreciate it thank you for coming to it thanks for having me this is so much fun sriramk.com and sriramk at sriramk on twitter that is right but not the other sriram oh not the other one that that person's evil we should not talk after all right man we're gonna do this again i appreciate it thank you this is so much fun thanks for having me

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