The Tim Ferriss Show - #331: Ann Miura-Ko — The Path from Shyness to World-Class Debater and Investor

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Starting point is 00:02:45 So check it out. Tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot. And you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out, if the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. It's been a while. Every episode, it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of different types, and that term world-class is going to come up again in this episode, so you can pay attention to the context. And this particular conversation I have with me, Ann Mira Coe, who has been called, quote, the most powerful woman in startups, end quote, by Forbes, and is a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Stanford. The child of a rocket scientist at NASA, that's a literal

Starting point is 00:03:40 rocket scientist, Ann is a Palo Alto native and has been steeped in technology startups since she was a teenager. Prior to co-founding Floodgate, she worked at Charles River Ventures and McKinsey & Company. Some of her investments include Lyft, Ayazdi, I'm going to screw these up, I know it, Xamarin, Refinery29, Joyrun, TaskRabbit, and ModCloth. Given the success of her many investments, she was on the 2017 Midas list of top 100 venture capitalists. And I just found out today, back on 2018, elbowing her way to the top to steal the crown from her partner, Mike Maples Jr. It's all good-spirited Mike. And is known for so many other things. I'm going to skip some of them because we're going to touch on the seeds of her many, many accomplishments in perhaps some of the first few minutes of the conversation.

Starting point is 00:04:31 She has a BSEE, I hope I'm getting that right, from Yale and a PhD from Stanford in math modeling of computer security. She lives with her husband, three kids, age 10, 8, and 6, very well spaced, and one spoiled dog. Anne, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So, there are so many places we could start, and I was hoping to humanize the ever-intimidating Anne Miracle, which I may only partially succeed at doing. But could we start with explaining why your brother used to introduce you or how he used to introduce you on stage? Yeah, so I had this brother, an older brother by exactly two years. We were born on the same day.

Starting point is 00:05:20 And he was one of these guys who was so confident. He knew that he wanted to stay in cars and airplanes from the time that I could remember him existing. And he was always confident with friends, and he was also confident up on stage. And so as any good Asian child would do, we played musical instruments. I played the piano. He played the violin. And we would always have to perform. And I was painfully, painfully shy. And so I would get up on stage and I would refuse to speak.

Starting point is 00:06:00 And my mother, knowing this, wouldn't let this get in the way of our performing. She would send my brother up on stage to help announce whatever I was playing. And I have this real clear memory of being in junior high and having this happen. My brother got up on stage and said, you know, this is Ann Mira. She's going to be playing a Chopin Nocturne. And go. And I looked over. And I remember thinking to myself, you know, like the mental dialogue that's happening in a teenager's mind. This is totally ridiculous. And because I'm sitting there in front of a room full of people and I felt fine playing the piano, but I felt petrified speaking. And that's one of like the clearest memories that I have of my brother and me and the difference that we had between the two of us.

Starting point is 00:06:58 Why were you so shy or nervous about speaking? You know, I've always been an introvert. So I think it comes probably directly from that. But I was also sort of, I was a strange child, I have to admit. I had a lot of different interests, but I love to do things by myself. And so I just didn't, I wasn't really that interested in talking to other people. Like one of the first things my mom actually discovered about me when I was a little kid, when I was two, I only spoke Japanese. And we were living in Michigan. And I used to be this very hostile little child. And I would walk by anyone speaking in English. And in Japanese, I would say, I wish you would leave. So, you know, I can't even. Wow. My poor mom. My poor mom. And so she was like, oh, we really should socialize, Anne, with people who speak English. And we're living in Michigan, so there's no shortage of these people.

Starting point is 00:08:12 Just to hit pause, do you still speak Japanese? I do. So I speak Japanese to my parents. How do you say, I wish you would leave, just for people who want to mutter that to people in the park or wherever they might be is do you recall or how how might you have said that as a kid do you have any idea i think i might have said let me think about it that is aggressive that's really aggressive yeah you know i was like you're not welcome in this house oh my god it was like it was i think probably more likely it was which is right right right oh wow that's even worse yeah right so, but it was always people. So, urusayna is like something that like a drunk dad says.

Starting point is 00:09:07 Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like, shut up. Yeah. You're really loud. You're really irritating. But like a little intransigent two-year-old saying that to a grown-up speaking English in her home.

Starting point is 00:09:19 Okay. I don't want to take us too far off the rails, but we may come back to that. Okay. So, we were talking about you being introverted and shy and weird. Yeah. And it was one of these things that I think it really held me back. And I knew actually it was holding me back. The strange part, though, was my mom was recently talking to me about this in a few years prior to that experience where I'm in junior high and I'm on stage, I had actually done this other thing, which was we had this summer school program

Starting point is 00:09:56 where I would go to local community college. It was Foothill College. And all these schools around the area, when they let out for summer, the students would go to this community college to take math classes and writing classes and whatnot. So a lot of elementary school students to high school students would be at Foothill College. And so my mom said, you have to pick two classes. And one class was a math class, obviously. And she said, you could pick your second class. And my brother picked a normal junior high school writing class. And I was in fifth grade at the time, so 10 years old. And I picked a negotiations class.

Starting point is 00:10:42 And it was not in the summer school program. It was an adult class. Why did you pick that? And I picked it because I remember the book was Getting to Yes. And my mom looked at me and she said, why did you pick this class? And I said, it's because they're teaching you how to get to yes. And I want to know how to get to yes. And I have this incredible experience, this community college, of having a class with, I imagine they were probably 30 to 50-year-old adults taking this class. And they were probably the most patient, wonderful people. And, you know, we had this experience where you had certain supplies that you were given on pieces of paper, and then you had to negotiate. You're on Mars, and you had to negotiate supply lines and whatnot,

Starting point is 00:11:40 and create a real society. And in the simulation, they're taking seriously a 10 year old kid who's negotiating for supplies. And I remember taking that experience and feeling like, you know, I was taken seriously in that environment. But it was a great experience because it was a small class was like 20 people. And in that setting, I felt okay speaking up. But then on stage, I didn't still. And so it was sort of these small steps that felt like I was getting closer and closer to realizing, oh, I need to actually be able to speak up. I need to be able to say things in front of a large audience. And so

Starting point is 00:12:25 there was this desire to face my fears. So what was the next step after that? How did you go about facing the fear of speaking on stage? So in high school, I get to high school, and as every high school freshman's doing, they're looking for different activities to participate in. And I decided to dive into speech and debate. And speech and debate at this time at Palo Alto High School was not a very big activity. There were probably about 20 students on the team. And I found that I really enjoyed it. And it was a really great group of students. And then not only from Palo Alto High School, but from the local community.

Starting point is 00:13:14 And I just fell in love with the idea that you could really seriously get up in front of an audience and talk about really important issues, even as a high school student. And so I dove into that activity, and I was, frankly, terrible at it. I think freshman, sophomore year, I didn't win any tournaments, didn't even come close. And that was sort of the way, though, I decided I could face that fear. What kept you going? I mean, there's the answer that, or perhaps potential answer you gave just a moment ago, which is you really enjoyed it and you loved it. But what did you love about it? What did you enjoy so much that you were able to persist through failures over those first two years? Yeah, the first thing is just the people.

Starting point is 00:14:11 Yeah, I reflect actually on the people that I met in speech and community, professors, you know, ones at Harvard in government, ones in philosophy, University of Colorado. One woman is now on the morning show on NPR. We have several venture capitalists. It was just a really interesting group of people, all in the same age group, who wanted to talk about really interesting things. I also found that the actual activity itself was something, it challenged me in a way that I hadn't been challenged before. So I was really good at math and science, and those things really came naturally to me. But getting up on stage and speaking was not something that was natural to me.

Starting point is 00:15:14 But the piece that I did love that came very naturally was competition. And I've always been this way. Yeah. No, I'm just chuckling because, yeah, I would agree with that. Right. I love competition. You put in points on anything and I want more. I want more than the next person. And I remember the coaches that we we, we didn't have teachers at our school who were able to coach. And so we had to go across the street to Stanford and find students who are willing to coach. And these, these kids, if you can get someone to cry in cross-examination, I'll buy you a slice of pizza. And so things like that were extraordinarily motivating. And if you feel like logic and arguments could get you a step further, it was just something that even though I wasn't good

Starting point is 00:16:26 at it at the time, I just loved it. And I felt like if I could just do one more tournament, I'd become even better at it. And you would see that, right? And so that's the thing that I loved. So do you have any memory? This seems like a very very very specific example that you gave the crying in the pizza did that actually happen did you succeed at making someone cry in cross-examination for a slice of pizza or is it was that just something oh yeah so could you please describe that yeah i feel like i'm not succeeding in my desire to humanize me and make myself seem like a less of a dragon lady. We'll get there. We'll get there.

Starting point is 00:17:08 But this – I want to hear this story. So let's – There are several stories. So there were points in time where I remember people would cry in the – they would crumble in the middle of cross-examination and run out of the room crying. And my coach would see that and proudly bring me a slice of pizza after. This happened multiple times. This wasn't a single tournament. And there were moments where I got, they had courtesy points too. So it wasn't just about winning. It was also whether you were courteous during that. And there were, there were rounds where I got zero courtesy points and, and my coaches, you know, they would say, they would ask why we got zero courtesy points just to really

Starting point is 00:17:57 understand if we were just being mean. But a lot of times it was just because we were, you know, and I was particularly tenacious in cross-examination. And even at the point where I had the person stumped, I would just keep going. I would keep going, keep going at it. And so it was, I remember at least, you know, four or five occasions where someone cried and left the room before the round was over. So this, this was like the Cobra Kai of debating the bad team from the karate kid. And it's my, uh, my, my six year old at one point right before kindergarten said, Hey mama, I can make people cry just with my words. And I have to say, it was like a really proud moment for me. And then I had to course correct and talk to him about that.

Starting point is 00:18:54 Now, for someone who is wondering what I omitted from the bio that I had in front of me, you had two years of not doing well. And then in the bio we have, she placed first in the national tournament of champions and second in the state of California in high school. And it goes on, I'll mention one more thing. It was part of a five-person team at Yale that competed in the RoboCup competition in Paris, France.

Starting point is 00:19:21 All right, but let's focus on the debating. So how did you go from sort of miss,ub with not succeeding in debating to getting good at debating yeah this is where i think it's the love of the game has to were your parents supportive through all of these these early trials and tribulations? No. So you have to remember, you know, I come from very traditional Japanese parents who really want me to get into a great university. And my mom at one point, right after sophomore year, looks at my record. And my parents were incredibly supportive.

Starting point is 00:20:01 They would go and judge these tournaments every single weekend, spend so much time doing it, driving us all over the state. And my parents pulled me aside and said, you know, this isn't working. You have a losing record in this activity that you're doing, and you appear to be doubling down on your time with respect to this. And if you want to get into a good college, you have to perform well in whatever you're doing. You know, it's not just about effort. You have to have results. And I remember my mom said to me, I've heard fencing is a great way to get into an Ivy League college. And I remember looking at her and I was like, how is it possible that she's my mother? She clearly does not know anything about my athletic abilities if she's suggesting that

Starting point is 00:21:00 I move into fencing at this moment. And so I said to them, point taken, give me the summer and I'm going to just work on it. I'm going to, and this is back before the internet. So working on it meant I was at Stanford Green Library reading philosophy books and reading articles about the, I think they have 12 topics, 12 possible topics that they're going to pull from for the next year. And I just studied those topics. I lived in the library. And then I emerged that year to start competing. And when they announced that first topic, I knew that topic cold. And then I could write my cases really quickly. I had already done all this research.

Starting point is 00:21:58 And I remember going into my very, very first round and had this deal with my parents. If I didn't win one of my first two tournaments, or at least place, then I would quit. And I had this distinct impression walking into my very first round of debate that fall and feeling as I looked across at my opponent, that there was no way that they could have out prepared me. And so I knew that whatever they they said, I would have five arguments against. And it was this incredible knowledge that it's not that you can be lucky and turn your luck around. You actually make your own luck. And for me, that was a profound lesson because I placed in that tournament and I placed in the next tournament. And it was like that. It just never stopped after that. And I had a losing record all through my freshman, sophomore year. And it's like I turned it around junior year very suddenly. And the not surrounded by, but certainly in the same universities and so on where debate teams existed, but I've never seen a debate competition.

Starting point is 00:23:38 What is the format? format so it's it's a bunch of nerdy kids dressed in suits holding briefcases and then maybe that's changed but that's what it was back then and then you have a resolution that's been announced nationwide and that resolution is generally has some philosophical elements to it. This is also Lincoln-Douglas style of debate. And you have... What does that mean, if you know what I mean? So it's one person against one person. So it's individual. And it's value-based.

Starting point is 00:24:17 And so you're really debating philosophy. So an example of one debate that we did, the principle of majority rule ought to be valued above the principle of minority rights or resolved that education is a really surrounding not a specific policy, but it has some application in the real world. And what you're trying to debate is a philosophical underpinning behind that statement. And what I loved about debate was you were actually forced to debate both sides. So you had to have cases ready for both the affirmative and the negative. So pro the resolution and against the resolution. And the format is the affirmative goes up and talks about this resolution and says all the reasons that they support it. And then there's a short

Starting point is 00:25:20 cross-examination where the negative then cross-examines the affirmative, asks questions of the affirmative. Then the negative gets up and talks about all the reasons that they're against the resolution, and then goes point by point against all of the arguments that the affirmative made and talks about why they're wrong. And then there's another cross-examination of the affirmative against the negative. And then the affirmative gets up for a rebuttal, negative gets up for a rebuttal, and then the affirmative does closing arguments. That's sort of shorter and shorter speeches towards the end. And how is the outcome determined? What are the parameters? Yeah, so it really depends on the tournament. Aside from courtesy.

Starting point is 00:26:12 Courtesy points. It's all about courtesy. There's two different types of tournaments, actually, when I was debating. One was where you had parent judges. And that, I would say, really the style of speaking, your flair really would come into play, your sense of humor. It wasn't really just the line by line arguments. There was also places where you would go where college students were the judges or experienced coaches were the judges. And that's where really the line by line logic becomes much more important than just the style of your debate. So it really depends on your audience and you had to read the audience correctly. And did they just then say, I choose

Starting point is 00:27:01 A or B? Or do they have to rank like sort of Olympic style one to 10 in some fashion? So you only have two debaters that you're judging and you vote for one of them. And in some of the rounds, you have just a single judge. And then in another, in the breakout rounds, the semifinals, you might have a panel of judges. And they can't confer, they're just sort of voting individually on who wins. So you may be at a point now with debate and argument that you've reached the unconscious competency phase in the sense that in skill acquisition, one framework that one could use to think about skill acquisition is you go from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence, then unconscious competence. So I don't know if this question is going to be a good one, but I'll try it anyway.

Starting point is 00:28:02 For people who want to get better at debating and structuring arguments and so on, are there any books or approaches or resources, anything, exercises that you would suggest? Well, getting to yes, I thought was always really good. I actually found the philosophical texts to be extraordinarily informative. So anything where you have that Socratic method in a book, I found really a great way of learning how people debate the greatest philosophers, Aristotle and Socrates. Even, you know, when you get into more modern literature around justice, you have people like John Rawls writing. That is actually a dialogue and a real logical debate. And I always found those examples to be really great to read how people argue philosophical constructs. You know, presidential debates, to be honest, in politics aren't real debates because it's two ships passing in the night and you don't have real conflict between people.

Starting point is 00:29:22 I've also found like the British parliamentary system, if you've ever had the chance to see that on, I think sometimes it's on C-SPAN, that's actually an interesting observation of a real world debate as well, because they will actually engage in dialogue around policy and it's not just ad hominem attacks. I find those sort of real world examples much more powerful than someone going sort of point by point in teaching you how to debate. Because I think the how is much more around how do you engage in the idea? How do you read and research both sides of an argument? And what do you believe on both sides of an argument and what do you believe on both sides? And so, you know, one way to do that would actually to take a fairly controversial topic and then actually read

Starting point is 00:30:14 a lot of literature on both sides of the argument and then understand where actually the conflict happens. You know, are there definitions that people don't agree on? Are there nuances that people haven't thought about? Is there real conflict or are they two ships passing in the night? I think you could do that with even the gun control debate, or you could do that with immigration, or you could do that with abortion and really understand both sides of an argument. And that's the way to engage in the process of pizza. I'd be really curious to know if there are any particular approaches or questions or playbooks that you find very useful in a heated argument. And I'll give you some hypotheticals, right? Let's say that you are on stage at an event, and you are doing a Q&A with the audience, and you have someone who ends up being really hostile or attacks you. Or it could be someone on stage, you're just having a contentious debate

Starting point is 00:31:33 of some type. I find it fascinating to see how people, even with no real logical advantage, shut down opponents. And I'm not saying that's you in this case. But for instance, whatever people may think of our dear current President of the United States, I do find it fascinating how effective he has been at saying, check your facts, right? And it just throws enough imbalance into the dynamic where someone's like, wait a second, maybe I did miss one piece of due diligence, that're on their heels and it opens up a window and creates sort of a, uh, an illusion of them being stymied that is really advantageous. And I'm like, wow. I mean, it's, it's kind of gross on one level, but it's also kind of brilliant. Uh, and I also have a lot of lawyers

Starting point is 00:32:22 in my family. And so one thing that they'll do, not to say they all love arguing, but a lot of them do. And you'll say something and they will go, so let me just get this straight. So I understand you're saying that X. And they'll kind of take your argument and they'll inch it a little closer to absurdity, but just subtly enough that you'll say, yeah, that's about right. And they'll say, okay, so really what you mean is X, right? And they start to edge you over before they even counter with an argument to make you contradict yourself or kind of seem ridiculous. And then they just have to kind of finish you off. But I've never taken debate. But I do find this really practical and really interesting.

Starting point is 00:33:09 So it's a long-winded way of introing. But yeah, so what are your thoughts on any of that? So it's funny. My husband has said to me in the past, and this is a lesson that I continue to try to learn and relearn, is that life is not a debate. And, you know, what he's saying, and it's funny, he was a debater as well in college and in high school. And we joke that I would still have beaten him in high school if we had actually gone head to head. But I think it's a really important point that life isn't about winning the argument. And he's also said to me in the past, you know, it's not about being right. And I think that's so true. And it's something that I'm always trying to really practice in life. And I think it's the debater in me makes it really hard.

Starting point is 00:34:17 The things that you're pointing out are what's important about it is that people have a tendency to have an inner dialogue where they're right. And instead of really listening to the other person, they're coming up with the next argument that proves that person wrong. And so, if you go back to what I really loved about debate and what I felt like I got out of it, it was actually this ability to see both sides of an argument. To really delve into a topic and understand why the side that I actually naturally believed could actually be flipped on its head. And that was a really important skill to develop. And I think that was so much more important to develop than the skill to argue for my side. Because I think in the world today, what we don't see enough of is empathy for people you might even disagree with. And we get stuck in our version of truth and what is right.

Starting point is 00:35:28 And we aren't truth seekers anymore as a result. We're truth winners. That's very true. Yeah, very true. And that's a piece that really makes me sad is that, you know, when people are like, oh, this debate skill is so great to have, because now you can like, ram people with your ideas. And, and I've never seen a situation where you shouted people down and convince them you were right. And I've seen situations where by developing true empathy for the other side, you actually create bridges and you create commonality and you create situations where you can actually work together.

Starting point is 00:36:12 And I think that's the piece I would take away from my debate experience. I would say actually making the person cry in cross-examination probably is not the skill that I should be using in real life, although maybe sometimes I do. Just when you're teaching your son the black magic. I should point out, just so people don't think I'm completely sort of drinking the Kool-Aid of the bloodlust of this, of this potential sport. Although I do find it very, very fascinating, uh, as an insight into some parts of human nature, but the book you mentioned getting to yes, which is part or a by-product of the Harvard negotiation project, as I recall, uh, is not a book about proving you're right. It's a book about getting outcomes. Yes. And there's another book,

Starting point is 00:37:06 which I believe was co-authored by one of the co-authors of Getting to Yes called Getting Past No, which I also really, really like. And it is about both of these books, any book really on negotiation is about achieving a very particular outcome or arriving at a desired result as opposed to proving that you're right. So I just want to underscore that because there is a very real world difference, as you already noted, between, say, debate and negotiation. I mean, the toolkits are very similar, perhaps, in some respects, but in debate, you're not going to have to think about, I wouldn't imagine, something like the BATNA that they talk about in Getting to Yes, your best alternative to negotiated agreement, like walkaway power or what your options are.

Starting point is 00:38:04 You don't necessarily have to go through that thought process. But when you step into the real world, you're not just trying to prove that you're right. You're trying to get someone to concede something and agree to a certain set of terms or a price or whatever it might be, or amicably trying to break up with someone or get together with someone or have a divorce or whatever it might be, you're really trying to manifest some type of outcome or damage control. It's really, really different from being a truth winner. And the world-class term that I mentioned in the intro, and I used a little bit of foreshadowing saying that I suspected it might come up a little bit later.

Starting point is 00:38:50 So in doing, in doing homework for this conversation, I read, and I don't think this is a misquote, but that your dad, even when I think you were going to be photocopying in the dean's office, would remind you to be world class. Yeah. And he would ask you if you turned in a calculus assignment, is that a world class effort?

Starting point is 00:39:19 Yeah. Could you talk a little bit more about this? And that wasn't my experience growing up. My parents certainly encouraged me to do a good job. But tell us a little bit more about your dad in this particular case and how that was used. Yeah. So my dad grew up in Tokyo right at the tail end of World War Two. And so one of his earliest memories actually is just planes coming across Tokyo and the firebombs. And he escaped to

Starting point is 00:39:58 the countryside and then came back to Tokyo for high school. His father passed away when he was in college, and he literally tutored kids. One guy was like the prime minister's son so that he could make enough cash to support his family. He had three other siblings. And he was one of these incredible academics. And so he was at the top of his class in one of the famous high schools in Tokyo, went to Tokyo University, was also then went to Toshiba, which at the time was one of these great companies to work for. And then he ran into a friend who told him, he was also a friend who was one of the top at his high school, who said, hey, there's great opportunities in America. And this person had gone off to Princeton and gone his PhD and was at that time working in one of the great labs in IBM and was also becoming a

Starting point is 00:41:10 professor. And my dad decided that he also wanted to go to the U.S. And he was the eldest son. And so having a mother who's a widow and three siblings, He had to take care of them until he had saved up enough. All of his siblings were married and his mom had the courage to say, you know what, you can go, you can go to the US. So this is sort of the backdrop for who my dad is. He comes to the United States without speaking very much English, gets a PhD in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and then is in LA ultimately as a postdoc and an associate professor. My mom comes to marry him and they are the only family members living in the United States. So really no support. So my dad eventually makes his way out to NASA at Moffett Field. And my memories of him, he was very engaged on the

Starting point is 00:42:15 academics, but he would wake up at five in the morning and go to work and he'd bring back reams of paper and would continue working late into the night. He loved what he did. And so when he turned to me on anything I ever did from the time I was a small, small child, I would be writing something. And if the handwriting wasn't neat enough, he would say, hey, is this world class? And I remember thinking to myself, you know, for a five-year-old, yeah, this is world class. But he would always push. He would always say, is this really, you know, the best that a five-year-old could ever do? And it was a constant message. And the story you're pointing to is one when I was in college, after living through a lifetime of this, is this world class question. I had a moment where I was starting my financial aid package included, you know, 10 hours of work study. And I had the opportunity to work in the

Starting point is 00:43:27 office of the Dean of Engineering. And what was really funny to me at the time is since I'm leaving to go to my first day of work, I called my parents and my dad gets on the phone. He said, make sure you do a world-class job. And I thought, my dad thought I was like really doing something important in the office. And in fact, I was just photocopying. And I said to my dad, I'm photocopying and I'm filing. There's no such thing as world-class there. And he said, well, I'd still think about it. And so I get to the office and I am actually just photocopying and filing. And I remember standing in front of this photocopy machine with a stack of papers, thinking to myself, what is world class in this situation?

Starting point is 00:44:12 And I decided it was really crisp copies, where you couldn't tell that it was a photocopy. And so I remember really trying to make, you know, the color match and everything was straight. And I spent a lot of time on the details. And when I was filing things, I didn't just handwrite it. I got a label writer and I made sure it was printed out on labels. And I really tried to do everything as well as I possibly could. And I remember I was getting donuts and I would like make sure I got the fresh donuts instead of the ones that had been standing out in the basket for a while.

Starting point is 00:44:57 So every step of the way it was, what can I do to make this experience for the dean or for his executive assistant a delight moment? And it was a real lesson for me because it was a case of real ownership. I felt so much ownership of the job I was doing, even though from the outside, I think most people would have thought it was just sort of a grunt job. And I think that's sort of, again, when I come back to you don't just get luck, you create these opportunities for yourself, to me was a real learning experience. Right. I mean, you're looking at the potential precursors of luck

Starting point is 00:45:49 and trying to set the conditions, even though they might not always produce luck. You can increase the likelihood of it happening, which I think is a perfect segue to discussion about spring breaks. Don't worry. This isn't going anywhere't worry this isn't going anywhere tricky this isn't going anywhere tricky uh this relates to shadowing i'll just that'll be my cue which might bring you back so all right where to lead into this? You were giving a man a tour around Yale. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:31 Who is this man? Why were you giving him a tour? What happened? And I actually don't know all the detail. I found two lines in a past interview. And I was like, you know what? I want to dig into this because there's more to this story. I know it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:44 So I'm a junior I'm a, I'm a junior at the time at Yale and doing this office work. And the Dean of Engineering was this, this, this older gentleman, Alan Bromley. And he had no idea who I was. I'd been working in this office for, I think, two years, but he barely knew my name. But he was just like this great, he'd worked under George Bush Sr. He was a legendary physicist. And I really look up to this man. And so one day, he pokes his head out of the office and the executive assistant was out. And he said, who are you? And I said, I'm Ann Mira.

Starting point is 00:47:33 I'm your student assistant in this office. And he said, oh, I've heard of you. I need you to go and give this friend of mine a tour of the engineering facilities. And he's like, I know you'll do a good job. Sarah's told me you're great. And so I take this gentleman and I take him on a fairly thorough tour of the engineering facilities. And we just had a great conversation. And it started off with, where are you from? And I said, I was from Palo Alto. And it turns off with, you know, where are you from? And I said I was from Palo Alto. And it turns out this guy is also from Palo Alto. And we're just sort of talking about Palo Alto and the buildings that are around us and my growing up back in Palo Alto. And in the middle

Starting point is 00:48:19 of it, he said, hey, you know, what are you doing for spring break? And it just so happened, I was going to go back home and visit my family. And he said, well, that's great, because I'm wondering if you want to come and shadow me and see what I do for a living. And in my complete self-centered moment of being a junior, I hadn't asked this guy what he did for a living. And so I said, well, what do you do for a living? And he said, I'm the CEO of Hewlett Packard. And I remember thinking to myself, I am such a moron. And I said, I think that would be amazing to be able to shadow you for a couple of weeks during spring break. And so this man, Lou Platt, invites me to just shadow him in 1997. And I am going around. Literally, you know, he didn't have a driver. He was, this was really

Starting point is 00:49:28 just the, the Hewlett and Packard era of CEOs. He drove himself around in a Ford Focus. I remember this. We would go, go to different meetings and he took me around. And one of the days actually, Bill Gates came to make an announcement about.NET with Hewlett-Packard. And so it was an incredible event that happened. I got to sit backstage and see everything that was happening. And Lou Platt that invited the photographer to come in and actually take a picture of me talking to Lou. And I didn't really think about it. But after the fact, I get back to my dorm. And Lou Platt has sent me a thank you letter saying thanks for coming to visit. I thought you would enjoy these photographs. And there's two photographs in there. I've framed

Starting point is 00:50:25 them in my office now. One is a picture of me sitting on a seat talking to Lou. And then the second picture is Bill Gates sitting exactly in that spot that I was sitting in talking to Lou Platt. And, you know, to me, like mentorship means so many different things. I've had so many different examples of mentors, but to a junior in college who, who literally is a nobody, um, he was such an incredible example of mentorship. He never asked for my resume. He never asked for my GPA. He just sort of took this girl and said, you know what? You have something and I see it and I'm going to show you something even greater.

Starting point is 00:51:21 And to me, that is such, it was such a gift. It was so incredible because I hadn't even thought about my own personal potential ever. No one had ever described anything to me, and I came back from that with my mind completely blown. I met Ann Livermore, who was an executive, and I'd never seen a female executive in my entire life. And here's someone who I could look at and see, and I can see that people around her respect her. It was just a, it's a life-changing moment. And it comes from that first, you know, comment from Dean Bromley, who says, I've heard of you. I heard you do a great job. And that's where the opportunities opened up.

Starting point is 00:52:13 You're the woman responsible for my fresh donuts and crisp photocopies. I've heard good things. Exactly. It's the little things. And tucked up filing labels now i should note you don't have to go too deep into this but in a way you were perfectly primed for doing a good job with your photocopying and labeling after spending was it summers in kanazawa in the stationary store am i making that up? Yeah, no, my first job was literally helping my uncle and grandmother sell office supplies in Kanazawa, Japan at our store, Taikido. Taikido.

Starting point is 00:52:56 Oh, man. Kanazawa is just such – I'd never been to Kanazawa. For those people who don't know, I used to live in Japan a long time. My first time out of the U.S. was a year in Japan as an exchange student, which is a whole separate story. But I never made it to Kanazawa until a few years ago. It's gorgeous. And it's not that far away from Tokyo at all. But such a cute spot with so much to offer.

Starting point is 00:53:20 What did you think? I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, it's actually incredible because it's one of the few cities in Japan that was protected by historians in the U.S. It did not get bombed in World War II because of some of the historic elements of the city. So it's almost like a smaller version of Kyoto and it has a historic Japanese garden called Kenrokuen. Yeah, Kenrokuen is unbelievable. Unbelievable. It's unbelievable.

Starting point is 00:53:49 So it's like, and summers I would spend maybe like two blocks away from Kenrokuen. So it was an incredible set of summers. But yes, I used to man the cashier register at the office supply store. So I know my pens and notebooks and stamps, like nobody's business. Do you have any favorite go-to? Don't worry, I'm not going to spend too much time on this. But do you have any favorite notebooks or pens or items of those types that you use today? Yeah, yeah, totally. So on pens, I love the Juice Up 04. How do you spell juice up?

Starting point is 00:54:28 Juice up. Oh, juice up. Okay. Yeah. Juice Up 04. You can get them on Amazon. They're super thin pens. 04, that's like 0.4 millimeter or something?

Starting point is 00:54:38 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then for notebooks, it's the Nuna. It's N-U-U-N-A. Some European brand, but I like any notebook that has the dot matrix on it. And the paper quality is really great.

Starting point is 00:54:58 I see. Dot matrix. It's not like graph paper, but there are perpendicular lines that are dotted? Yes. Yes. I'm very particular. I could go on and on. It appeals to the Dungeons and Dragons nerd in me. Anything that resembles graph paper. So the juice up 04 and the Nuna. Definitely anything European sounding with a repeating vowel, I'll pay 40% more for. Exactly. Maybe 100% more. Maybe 100%. You mentioned that you have these

Starting point is 00:55:29 photographs in your office. I'm curious. You're sitting in your office right now? Yeah. All right. So what else? I'm sure you have photographs of your family, but outside of kind of the usual suspects, what are other items that you have in your office that are important to you? Let's see. I have the original Lyft pink mustache that used to go in the front of the cars, which I love. I have also a picture and a set of laser etched metal plates that students gave to me that have sort of a word graph of all of the words that they thought they could, they ascribed to me. Students of what? What was the context for these students interacting with you? And what are some of the words?

Starting point is 00:56:26 Yeah, so I teach at Stanford. So after my PhD, what I realized was I loved teaching more than anything else. And so I stayed in contact with Tina Selig and Tom Byers over at Stanford who run the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. And they've given me the opportunity to teach a few different classes, but the one that I got these metal plates and the photograph from was the class of 2013 Mayfield Fellows Group. And they have words like thunder lizard, badass, inspiring, mother. So, you know, it's just really fun to see sort of what words they thought. What were you teaching these Mayfield fellows? So we were teaching them basic concepts behind leadership and entrepreneurship. And it's sort of the first exposure that they get as juniors and seniors into really, you know, startup ecosystem. What does venture capital do within that ecosystem?

Starting point is 00:57:46 What are the tough choices that you have to make as a leader within these types of organizations? What does growth look like in these types of organizations? So it's just sort of startup 101. But what I love about it is it's only 12 students and it goes for nine months. Wow. So if you get to be involved in it, you get to really know some of the students. And I've been mentoring students and sometimes teaching some of these classes since 2008. And you get this whole arc of the career path of young people. And I really love it. I think it's just sort of, you get to see, you know, students who start off as seniors, and then they start their career,

Starting point is 00:58:42 they might go to grad school. Then they go back and get a job, then they have, they get married. And then I think one is now about to have a kid. So you just sort of see this whole arc. And it's just about 10 years, 20 years behind where I was. And so I get to see this incredible progress that these students make over time. So it's something that I love. And Miracle, mother of thunder lizards, AKA mother of dragons. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna come back to thunder lizard because there's a whole lot wrapped around that. But, uh, I'm going to try to keep my brain somewhat focused here. Is there a reading list for that class or, uh, do you recall anything that was on a recommended or required reading list for that class? Yeah, so we actually teach a—I'm starting a class today at Stanford for the new spring quarter.

Starting point is 00:59:38 And in this class, what we're teaching is what I would call intelligent growth. It's a little bit different than Mayfield Fellows. But my hypothesis, my belief is that just like fake news in politics, there's actually something that we would call fake growth. Lots of it. We've worshipped at the altar of growth for about five to 10 years now. And what I've seen is that... And this is startup growth specifically. Specifically within startups, there's so much that we see that is fake. And no one has described actual adjectives to growth until now. And so the class that I'm teaching to

Starting point is 01:00:28 engineering students at Stanford is around what is actually intelligent growth. And so you asked about the reading for it. It's all around some of these case studies that we've seen. A great example of that to me is Qualtrics. We're going to have Ryan Smith, who's the CEO of Qualtrics, come in and speak. And I think he's a great example because I think he was at $50 million in revenues before he raised a dime of venture capital money. And so as a result, he's going to own an incredible piece of his company when it exits and it will. And capital dollars in the early days when they didn't have product market fit. So they spent two and a half years working on this platform called Zimride, knowing that they had to get to density in riders.

Starting point is 01:01:39 And Zimride was just, it was a platform where you could find carpooling arrangements and was being sold to universities and companies but we couldn't get enough density to get transactions really moving fast and it was two and a half years before they launched Lyft and in the first six weeks you could start to see that there was real traction there there. And it was only after they knew what they were doing with Lyft that they went and raised a large round with Founders Fund and then an even larger round with Andreessen Horowitz. And that story of really, really hacking value before you go out and hack growth is something that I don't see often enough in Silicon Valley. So it's something that I'm continuing to seek. And I love to see

Starting point is 01:02:34 companies, especially outside of Silicon Valley, that do that. And that's when we come back to hunting for thunder lizards, that's what I'm looking for. When you mentioned the case studies, do you have written case studies that you're using much like, uh, I don't know if Stanford uses these, but much like the Harvard business school case studies, which are these kind of three ring binder, a five to 10 page cases that are published. You use those? Yeah, we use, um, so the, the ones that we've focused on, there's a Harvard Business case on Floodgate that you can purchase off of the Harvard Business Review website. The format of these case studies is really interesting to me. And as an undergrad senior, when I took Ed Hsiao's class in high-tech entrepreneurship, which is how I met Mike Maples Jr., who's going to be a recurring character shortly, I remember how useful they were. So that's the only interjection.

Starting point is 01:03:38 Sorry to interrupt. No, exactly. So we use that case study for Qualtrics. There is one on Floodgate. So if you go to the Harvard Business Review site, you can actually just search for Floodgate or Qualtrics and it'll come up. And they're somewhere between, you know, $5 and $15. They're pretty easy to buy and download.

Starting point is 01:03:59 But I think those two in particular are quite valuable. We have then also just people coming in and speaking about some of the things that they've learned and how to grow that business from zero to one, and then one to X. And people like Michael Siebel, who is now a partner at Y Combinator, but also was part of Justin TV and Social Cam. We have Stephanie Schatz, who was the fearless leader on the sales side for Xamarin. She had 18 straight quarters of beating the stretch target. So you can only imagine how incredible she is as a sales leader, taking a company from zero to $50 million in revenues. So we have a lot of different types of people, whether they're CEOs or CROs or venture

Starting point is 01:04:55 investors coming in to talk about the kinds of trade-offs they had to make and how they decipher growth to make sure that they have the real kind and not just kind that they're buying. Right. Just to elaborate on that for people who may not be in the startup world, if, for instance, you're sitting in on an incubator investor day and you see 12 companies in a row that have 20% month-on-month growth with very similar-looking charts, there's a possibility that they have been inflating or manufacturing their numbers with paid acquisition

Starting point is 01:05:34 to raise funding or do any number of things. And it's relatively easy to spot once you know the symptoms. But there are an end. Then there are, I suppose, as Richard Feynman would say, the physicist, you must be sure not to trick yourself or fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. You can also get very caught up with what you might consider vanity metrics. But let me take a step back and just ask, well, before I ask, people definitely take a look at the case studies for both Harvard and,

Starting point is 01:06:04 if you search Stanford GSB, which is the business school case studies, you'll also find a website with these profiles of companies and not just companies, but decisions they had to face generally where you can determine for yourself what you would do in a given situation, then read about what they did, whether it's MongoDB. I'm looking at this Stanford GSB site in the case studies right now, Sonos, and so on. How did you go to investing? How did you first become exposed to, say, venture capital? And what did you think you were going to do in college? When you were in college, junior year, what did you expect you were going to do when you grew up? Yeah, I actually had multiple different paths. I started off when we were talking about my brother describing this kid who knew he wanted to work with cars or airplanes from the get-go. And guess what he's doing right now? He's in Germany working with race cars. So, you know, and I was the complete opposite. I think when I was four, I wanted to be a farmer.

Starting point is 01:07:11 And then somewhere along the lines, I really wanted to be a doctor. And I wanted to be a doctor for a fairly long period of time where in, you know, freshman year summer, I took organic chemistry. I was in this pre-med track. I think sophomore year summer, you take the MCATs if you're pretty sure you want to go to medical school. And that summer, I was with my best friend who also really wanted to go to medical school. And she is right now studying leukemia. She's a doctor at UCSF. So she's clearly gone down that path and doubled down on it. But I remember going to study for the MCATs with her and I turned to the side and I looked at her and I had this sudden realization, which was that, and this is two days before we're taking the MCATs, I said, hey, Kathy, I hate hospitals. I don't like actually being around sick people. I also don't love it when people are always complaining to me. And, and I think that might get in the way of me being a doctor. And she looked at me like I was an alien. And she said, Why are you saying this

Starting point is 01:08:34 right now? We're about to take the MCATs and we need to go study for it at Kaplan. And but you know, I was just constantly observing her and she's just this incredible human being and she continues to be. But this realization of, wow, like the actual job of being a doctor may not be something that I actually enjoy was really a hard realization when you've been all in for this long. And so, but it was, it was a realization that I really had to face. And I knew, I knew my gut that I was doing it because it was a really great path. It was a path where I knew what the next step was. I knew what next class I had to take. I knew the next exam I had to take. Then there was applications, then there was school, and then there was residency and fellowship. And it just felt like a really predictable thing to do. But the actual work at the end of the day was not something I was going to love or enjoy. And that was really disturbing to me. And so I really screeched off of that path. And it was hard because I had actually taken all of the requirements except

Starting point is 01:09:45 for biology. And the pre-med requirements did not actually overlap very much with electrical engineering. So I'd taken a lot of extra classes to make it a possibility, but realized also it wasn't for me. And that's where I was sort of in this state of not knowing what I wanted to be. And could I pause for one second? Yeah. So what you just described illustrates a degree of self-awareness, but also decision-making that I think is rather uncommon in the sense that I know a lot of people who have gone on to become doctors or lawyers or fill in the blank that has a lot of prerequisite training and schooling because of, say, succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy.

Starting point is 01:10:34 Like, oh, God, I've put in so much time. Even though I have this intuitive feeling I'm not going to like it, I really should do it. And what was the conversation or the background that allowed you to step off of that path and not to beat the like Asian kid drum too hard, but, but let's be real, right? I mean, you're also, I mean, that's, that would be a very admirable, well-respected, happy-to-share-at-a-dinner-party-with-friends type of path for your parents, I would assume. Yeah. All the more uncommon that you would step off of that track. How is that the case? Why were you different? So I think it goes back to actually the moment in debate where my mom is telling me,

Starting point is 01:11:29 you should do fencing instead of debate. There was this realization of, oh, my parents really love me, but they don't know me. And they don't actually, no one really knows me in terms of my capabilities and what i feel like i can get done no one knows that better than i do and um and it was a it was an important lesson for me because one other fact that I didn't mention is that as a kid, there was no sign that I was special except for these weird characteristics where I would go learn negotiations. But I failed the IQ test multiple times, and the school district insisted I was not gifted or talented. My mom had to fight for me to be part of this gifted and talented program. As a two-year-old, after I was really hostile to people who spoke

Starting point is 01:12:35 English, my mom stuck me in, tried to put me into preschool to socialize me, But I ended up biting the person who was interviewing me for a preschool slot, and they put me in special education. And I was one of those kids who got picked up in a short yellow bus from our house and taken to a state- program for, for, for special children. And, and I think for a long time, my mom wasn't really sure what I was, but she just decided to be all in on the fact that I was gifted and talented, even if I wasn't. And she was really worried that I was, I was one of these special children. And so I had sort of an environment around me way before Yale where I knew what I was capable of, even if the test score showed that I wasn't. And I knew that I knew what I was capable of, even if my parents didn't see it in me. And I think there's sort of this, this moment in time that people need to have where,

Starting point is 01:13:53 where you realize that there's no test for human potential. There's no, um, recognition for that. It's something that you have to find inside of yourself. And I think for me, you know, that one of those tests was actually going back to, am I going to be a great doctor? And if I revisit this question that my dad had always asked me, can you be world class? I knew I couldn't because I looked at Kathy and she was going to be world class because she loved helping people and she loved helping people from that kind of caretaking perspective, which is not where I was going to be world class. But I felt like there was something in me where I could be great at something that just wasn't it. And how did you have that you have all this technical training by this point,

Starting point is 01:14:53 you have the chemistry, but you certainly also have the let's see here at that point, the electrical engineering, probably. Yeah. How does finance and investing or startups, I don't know which came first, enter the picture? Yeah. So having grown up in Palo Alto, I was actually exposed to a lot of startups as a, even as a kid, my, I used to babysit for a serial entrepreneur. Um, and he was always tinkering around in his garage. And I remember thinking to myself, oh, he works for himself, which is very, very cool. I also, on my debate team, was Lisa Brennan Jobs, who I didn't really

Starting point is 01:15:35 realize she was the daughter of Steve Jobs until I was in her house. And we were talking about debate. I was a senior at the time, and I was helping her through learning the, the ropes of speech and debate and Steve Jobs sort of appeared out of nowhere. And I remember thinking to myself, what, what is Steve Jobs doing in this house? Um, and so, you know, it was just sort of, it was all around. And, and so venture capital was something that actually a friend of mine had brought up when I was still struggling with this notion of what should I be. And he was a real finance guy. And he said, you know, you're really good at technology and you're now interested in business because of this exposure to LeuPlat. You know, have you ever thought of venture capital? And I remember kind of reading about it and having heard a little bit about it growing up, looking into it and realizing, oh, you have like all this work experience you need to have. I talked to a couple of former Yalies who were venture capitalists and sort of had that in the back of my head. And so, you know, I went off to work at McKinsey as a consultant for three years.

Starting point is 01:16:50 And then in the process of trying to figure out what to do next, I met a venture capitalist by the name of Ted Dintersmith. And in that interview with him, we spoke about, not about technology, not about the research I'd done or my work experience, but he wanted to know what books I was reading. He wanted to know about the music that I loved. And in that period, I was really into modern American literature, so I was really into E.L. Doctorow. And there are a few books that I just absolutely loved. And we talked about that for a little while. And then when we turned to music, I've played piano, classical piano since I was four. And he and I talked about the classical musicians that I really loved. And he happened to be an English lit major,

Starting point is 01:17:46 along with being a physics major. So he loved books as much as I did, maybe even more. And then he was an opera nut. And so we had all these things that we could talk about. And two hours into that conversation, never having touched upon technology, he then basically said, how would you like to come work with me? And I was living out in Palo Alto at the time. This is an opportunity in Boston. And I remember not even hesitating, knowing that I wanted to work with this person, this human being sitting across the table from me, I jumped at that opportunity. And it wasn't the fact that it was in venture capital, but rather, I really wanted the chance to be working around someone like Ted Dintersmith at that time.

Starting point is 01:18:38 Let's talk about that interview for a second. So that, I think, would strike some people as a very unusual interviewing style. Do you think in retrospect, and maybe you know that he had already decided you were fully capable of doing the job, therefore didn't have to check that box and just wanted to make sure that he could work with you and spend time with you? Was it that he was using that interview to sell you so that when he made the offer, you would say yes. What do you think was going through his mind before, during or after, or I suppose before and during that conversation? You know, I think Ted is a very unique human being in that when I used to have this perception that networking was work in a room and like you shake a lot of hands and hold a lot of babies and you learn a few names and you move on. I learned from Ted that networking is actually a deep curiosity about the human being who's sitting across the table from you. So I don't think he necessarily had that kind of purpose in mind, but that

Starting point is 01:19:47 he was just really interested in what I was interested in. And we happened to find commonality and he was trying to understand how my mind worked and what I was interested in. And I I've taken that as a real lesson because I love the way he would network. He, he learned so much about people in that process. And, um, and, and that's how he ministered to his entrepreneurs. He also was capable of providing advice at the right time because he really knew those people. And so for me, I felt like it was a really unique interview. It stood out from all the interviews I've ever had. But I think he was learning more about me than most other technical interviews could have gotten to. And then, you know, his other partners, I think Isar Armani gave me sort of more of a case study and could dive into that. But Ted always had a deep curiosity about the human being and not necessarily just the skills. What else did you learn from him or in that position, in that job?

Starting point is 01:21:12 I thought that Ted was also an incredible first principles thinker. So my second day of work at CRV was 9-11. Oh, my God. And so it was you went from kind of a bad economy to a horrible black hole economy. And so it was a really terrible time for Venture. And they had just raised this $1.4 billion fund. And so that's, I mean, for Vent venture, that's a huge amount of money. And it's a huge accomplishment to convince so many investors to invest in your venture capital firm at that amount.

Starting point is 01:21:54 But then Ted took the time to actually start to do analysis with me on how much capital had gone into venture capital at that moment. And then the exits had stopped. There were no more IPOs. No one was acquiring companies. The economy just came to a screeching halt. And he decided, along with the other partners in this firm, to give back most of the money. So they reduced their fund from $1.2 billion to $450 million. And the reason why that's so interesting and impressive is that the way a venture capital firm makes money, the way you have any salary or the operating money that you have for the firm is a direct percentage of the fund that you raise. And so by shrinking the size of the fund,

Starting point is 01:22:48 you're shrinking the size of the management fees that you get pretty dramatically. Oh, for sure. Very dramatically. I mean, for people who don't know, I mean, you hear very often, it's not always the case, but in venture capital, 2 and 20, 2 and 20, and that means 2% management fee based on the sort of assets under management, meaning that particular fund, and then 20% of the upside for people who don't know. really impressive because you're facing down a really terrible economy. Not only are you shrinking the size of your fund to reflect that, you're also shrinking the size of your management fees, and you're taking that blow. And so things like that, I learned. I learned also how to shepherd companies through that kind of difficult time and how to be a true partner to an entrepreneur. And so I think it was a really important lesson to learn because

Starting point is 01:23:53 I would argue most people haven't seen real cycles. People seem to think 2008 was a real significant dip in the economy. But anyone who lives through 2001 knows that 2008 was a blip compared to a real downturn. And because we've had a, you know, raging bull market for such a long time, that memory and that knowledge of having survived, you know, 2001 as a crisis period is something that I hold with me, really, in my war chest. I know how to get through that kind of time period, and I don't think a lot of people do. Yeah, it makes me think of a lot of what I heard in Silicon Valley, still here, you know, before moving to Austin, which makes me think of, I'm going to paraphrase this, but it's a quote from Sir John Templeton, I think it is, which is the most expensive words

Starting point is 01:24:50 in investing are, this time it's different. And it has been quite the bull run. You mentioned first principles thinking. I want to tie that into something you mentioned related to your class, tough choices for leaders. What are some of the toughest choices for leaders? I suppose in this context, CEOs or high level execs, co-founders of companies, what are, what are some of the, the toughest decisions that nonetheless seem to come up fairly commonly? I think the most difficult thing for a startup founder, CEO, leader, is that especially when you witness multiple phase changes in a business. And so if you imagine you're going from absolutely nothing to something, that's what I call the zero to one phase. You're searching for product market fit. You're trying to find the best customers. You're trying to find where your 10x advantage is truly valued. That's a very different business process and truth seeking than when you're going from

Starting point is 01:26:08 one to X, which is now that I know what my value proposition is, I'm going to add to that, but I'm also going to pull on some of these growth levers. The fundamental job of a VP of marketing who is in that zero to one phase changes dramatically in one to X. It changes dramatically for the salesperson in zero to one to one to X. And you go through this incredible Bermuda Triangle where you have to navigate that change. And so, so what, what I see challenging for, for startup founders is actually being comfortable with your fundamental job shifting from every three months, you would have a massive shift in what you need to focus on and how you need to develop. And I think, you know, a company is a multi-dimensional thing. And in Silicon Valley, we spend so much time thinking about product and product market fit

Starting point is 01:27:14 that we forget that there's this huge emphasis you might want to place on the fact that a company is also an organization. A company is also a category that you're building. A company is also a business model. You know, a company is also a team. And so it's the skill set actually to balance all of those things. And knowing when you fundamentally need to change out the talent in your team, knowing when you actually need to let go of a product, and knowing actually, to me, this is probably the hardest piece, knowing the difference between a winning strategy versus a strategy not to lose. Could you elaborate on that, please?

Starting point is 01:28:09 Yeah. So to me, a strategy not to lose is a lot of different things. It's to not to lose to a competitor, not to lose talent, a strategy not to lose out on revenue. So it's all these fears that you have of captured ground or the fact that you might have someone take over something that you want to do, a competitor who's breathing down your neck versus a strategy for winning is about where do you double down on? What do you do to capture ground, to be aggressive, to play offense and not defense? To me, there's a huge difference between that strategy of I'm going to win in this market versus I'm not going to lose. And not losing often involves a lot of hedging. And when you feel that urge to hedge, you need to focus and you need to be offensive. What, what, in what ways might that hedging manifest? What would be examples you've seen or hypotheticals of the symptoms of a defensive strategy in the form of hedging?

Starting point is 01:29:26 Great question. It might manifest itself in, I am going to go after two very different customer segments. One is large enterprises, the other is small medium businesses. And the reason why that's really hedging is you have two completely different ways of selling to those organizations. And you're afraid to pick one because maybe you have some revenue in both. Right. But in that situation, by not choosing to focus on one group or the other, you're probably a short changing your team because you don't have a specialized team to go after that opportunity. You're short changing your business model because you aren't pricing your product correctly. And you're short changing the

Starting point is 01:30:18 opportunity because probably your product isn't optimized for that customer set. Your customer service isn't optimized for that product set. And your team is ultimately confused because you're heading in two completely different conditions and directions. And so I believe that that's one of the most common ways that I see people involved in a strategy of not losing instead of we're here to win it. Yeah, all of those things you mentioned also contribute to lighting money on fire, right? I mean, that's that split focus. The bonfire.

Starting point is 01:30:56 The bonfire of funding, or cash flow, depending on where it comes from. This is really important. and you know this, but I want to underscore it for people listening and give a few other examples that might be worth, people might enjoy exploring. So this winning versus not losing distinction seems really subtle, but you can get an intuitive feel for it

Starting point is 01:31:24 in a few different ways. One is there's actually a, I think it's a three-part miniseries podcast called The Making of Oprah. And it talks about the rise of Oprah. I know this seems like an odd segue. Oprah impresses the hell out of me in a million different ways. And after you listen to this, you'll understand exactly why that's the case. But she would constantly tell her team, many of whom wanted to respond to say Donahue, who was the 800 pound gorilla at the time, like, we need to race our own race, in the sense that if you're on a thoroughbred horse, and you're in a race, you need to focus on your race, you can't be looking side to side at the competitors, the racers next to you, or you get yourself into a lot of trouble or you get really injured.

Starting point is 01:32:09 And the second is if people want to Google Dan Gable on aggression, there's a short video I put on my blog that hits this point exactly. And I'm giving examples from different disciplines because it is cross disciplinary. It's not just investing in startups. Dan Gable is the most legendary wrestling coach, certainly of the last, I would say, 100 years in the United States. Also won a gold medal in the 1972 Munich Olympics without having a single point scored on him. That just does not happen. And this video will show you a lecture that he's giving one of his athletes after his athlete tied. And he said, you lost to him twice before. You just didn't want to lose. He said, you never win that way. You got to tie. And that's

Starting point is 01:32:59 exactly why you got to tie. And the difference is is just so powerful and it's it's worth i just thought taking a second to to underscore it because i think uh it's it's it's really a critical distinction that you brought up uh it's also like i think about it i love to ski and i i had this instructor once i was complaining about going through powder and I was saying how it really hurt my thighs. He's like, my thighs are burning. And he looks at me, he said, it's because you that moment when you lean forward because you feel like you're gonna fall and yet it gives you so much more control and it gives you so much it's so much less effort counterintuitively definitely and that to me is like the perfect example of oh like you have to actually have a little bit of aggressiveness in order to have the win. I think you are well suited in that respect. How did you meet the man who

Starting point is 01:34:21 so famously tries to trick, not trick, that sounds too strong, who so commonly will say something like, well, I'm just a Southern boy. Maybe you could slow down and explain that one more time, which by the way, if you ever hear anything like that, like really stop and pay attention because you're, you are about to be tricked or misdirected. I've actually borrowed that and I use that for Long Island a lot. I'm like, you know, I'm just a slow Long Island boy. Take a second. Maybe you can explain that to me again. How did you meet Mike Maples Jr.? Yeah, so this actually happened in one of the classes that I was teaching at Stanford.

Starting point is 01:34:57 He was one of the mentors for a bunch of teams? So we had all these teams who were creating business plans for their own version of a startup company. And we had incredible mentors to each of these teams. We had, I think, someone who was the former CEO of VeriSign. We had, I think, Diane Green might have been a mentor to one of the teams. Can you explain to folks who Diane Green is, for those who don't know? Diane Green is now the head of Google Cloud. She was also the CEO of VMware. Big deal. Big, big deal. So big deal. Big deal. And what we did was we would team up some of these entrepreneurs or people in Silicon Valley with a student team, and Mike was one of them. And for people who know Mike, he's just this charming guy, boy from Oklahoma. He calls himself sometimes a washed-up enterprise VC or washed-up enterprise entrepreneur, but he's not. And so he came to our class and he was mentoring this team,

Starting point is 01:36:15 but he was actually being too nice. And so this team was having like all sorts of weird issues. They were fighting and they came to my office hours and one of them started to cry. Spotting a theme here within proximity of... Right. I did not make this team member cry. It was they were making each other cry. And spotting a theme here within proximity of right. I did not make this team member cry. It was they were making each other cry. And so I was just kind of I was really I was kind of mad at Mike because part of the the role of the mentor is to help shepherd them through these tough points. And he was just kind of checked out on that front. And I emailed him and he said, Oh, yeah, my team's doing great. And I said, Well, I kind of beg to differ. They were just in my office, and one of them started to cry

Starting point is 01:36:57 and they're fighting. And right now, if they don't pull it together, they're really going to fail the class. And he just wrote me this message that said, well, I think they're going to get an A plus. And so I said, well, so far not tracking. And so we just sort of had this friendly banter. And actually, the team does turn it around, and they ended up getting an A plus in the class. And did Mike intervene, or did he just throw some turtle shells on a desk and divine his way to that outcome? I'm not really sure, but I actually take full credit for the turnaround, because had I not pointed it out to Mike, then the team would have just imploded. And so, based on that interaction, a few years later, I was starting to get to a point in my PhD where I was thinking of starting my own company. And I had started my PhD in computer security exactly because I knew that it didn't matter when I graduated, there would be a computer security problem out there.

Starting point is 01:38:04 And I wouldn't be at risk of market timing. And it was sort of a perfect opportunity because just as I was going through my research, it was from 2003 to 2007 at this point, we had transformed from this world of where security used to be a bunch of vandalism problems to now there were companies involved and like real money was being involved. And so real crime was being created here. And then towards the end, there was really like nation state warfare starting to happen. And so my research was really in risk management of computer security. And I knew that this was becoming a huge issue. And so I started to think, I'm going to make a company.

Starting point is 01:38:57 And so at that moment, I turned to some of my advisors. And my advisors were nice enough to say, hey, if you're thinking about starting a company, you've been in the ivory towers for literally four years. So you should get out of the classroom and go check out some angel investors. And then Mike was one of the first people I turned to and I asked him if I could see his deal flow. And he was nice enough to say, sure, why don't you just come in and take a look at my deal flow on Wednesdays. And so we would sit next to each other and look at companies. And deal flow means

Starting point is 01:39:35 the the top of the funnel companies that he's considering potentially investing in. Right. They would come in and pitch for between 30 minutes and an hour. And then at the end of that, I think it was, you know, March of 2008, he calls me as I'm actually going up to Tahoe to ski. He calls me to say, hey, Anne, I have this great idea. I just raised my first fund. It's $35 million. And I think that you should drop out of your PhD program and join me. And it's not the venture-backed startup that you've been thinking about, but it's now a backed venture startup. Let's go. Oh, I like that. That's really good. Now, was that an immediate yes or was it a let me sleep on it? I actually thought he was crazy because first of all, you know, I was literally, again,

Starting point is 01:40:40 I was a nobody. I'm a PhD candidate. I don't even have my degree at Stanford. So there's like all these business school students, there's great, you know, angel investors milling around. The major question was like, why does this guy think that I would actually be a good investor? And then the second piece was there weren't a ton of venture capital firms that were being started up. So even when I went back to people who were my mentors, some of them said, why would you go to a no-name VC? Why won't you go and be an associate at Kleiner Perkins or Accel or Sequoia? And I don't really have a good answer. Yeah. And just to set the stage for folks who don't know maybe the recent history in Silicon Valley, at the time that Mike had proposed this to you, sort of micro-cap venture capital was

Starting point is 01:41:37 barely a thing, right? I mean, there are a lot of funds of all sorts of different sizes now, but at the time, this was very unusual. Yeah. And so it was, you know, at this point in when we get to 2018, there's probably, you know, 30 funds being pitched a week to a limited partner who invests into these venture capital firms. But back then, there was very, very few. And so it was really a question of, is this the smart thing to do? And I think this is sort of where, you know, when you turn to an entrepreneur, this is the feeling that they get. What I what I sensed was there was actually a major change afoot. All of the students around me at Stanford didn't need

Starting point is 01:42:26 $5 million to start a company. And that's what venture capital was offering to startups at that point. They would say, I will buy 50% of your company for $5 million. Right. It was predicated on the entry costs being very high in some respects. Very, very high. And at that that point, you know, we suddenly have open source software. We really have what's starting to look like cloud computing. We have all the shared resources. So even though I was helping to run servers in the closet at my grad school in our lab, that was starting to become something that we didn't need. There was actually, you know, services that you can use where you could rent services. And so to me, there was a dramatic

Starting point is 01:43:14 change that was happening. And so you had to change the financing environment. And so I felt like I could see something that everyone else didn't see that Mike was also seeing. And he used to say 500,000 is the new 5 million. And then the second piece for me was this guy, Mike Maples, had a skill set I had never seen before. Maybe in like one or two other people in my entire lifetime. But he was this incredible marketer. And I used to believe you either built things or you sold things. Everything else just seemed like an extraneous skill set to have. But Mike was incredible at storytelling and positioning and strategy, like real strategy for how do you create a new category

Starting point is 01:44:09 and how do you build that category and how do you create the king of that category? And as an engineer, I hadn't thought about what you do after you build the product. And so this magic of category creation, to me was something that almost felt like magic. And so I looked at Mike, and I thought, I really need to learn from this person. And not only is it a great skill set that I'm learning from, he is also genuinely one of the best human beings that I've ever encountered. And so it was just sort of this magical combination of someone whose values really aligned with me and how I wanted to build a firm and the things that I wanted to do with that and how I wanted to treat entrepreneurs and a person who was a mad genius. And so that combination to me was irresistible.

Starting point is 01:45:07 And so a couple months into it, I said, sign me up. A couple of months. All right. So question number one, just for people who are wondering, and I know a lot of people, you seem very good at avoiding the sunk cost fallacy. And this is so, so, so key, this cognitive bias. When you were looking at the quitting of the PhD program, did you, I don't know how it works at Stanford, but did you realize you could kind of, you didn't have to quit? I did not quit. So that first year and a half of my life at Floodgate was crazy because at that point, I joined Floodgate and I have an 18-month-old child, my daughter, Abby. And then I think it was four or five months into it, I am pregnant with my second child.

Starting point is 01:46:02 I've promised my mother, as any good Asian daughter would that I will finish this PhD if it's the last thing I do. So I'm waking up at like four o'clock in the morning, doing research until, you know, seven when she, my daughter wakes up, then taking her to daycare and then working from like 8.30 to 6.30 at Floodgate, and then coming back doing dinner, and then working on my PhD again, rinse and repeat. And then I got pregnant with my second child a few months into that, and then decided I was going to defend my PhD. They set the date for six weeks after I gave birth to my son. And so, you know, I not only did my first set of investments, but also had gave birth to a child, cared for another one and managed to stay married and finish this Ph.D. all between 2008 and 2009. And so, you know, to me, like, that's like the

Starting point is 01:47:08 most creative and probably productive period of my life ever, and probably will be but but also showed me that I can actually do a lot of things that everyone around me was like, why would you do all of those things at the same time? How does, how does this is going to seem like a non sequitur kind of is, but how does, how does your mom say your name? Because Ann is sort of an unusual first name.

Starting point is 01:47:38 Oh no, but that's not my first name. My first name is Reiko. Reiko. Yeah. So how does my mom say it? She's like, Reiko! Reiko-chan. Reiko-chan, sugoi ne?

Starting point is 01:47:50 I can barely... That's another word everybody should look up and learn. S-U-G-O-I. Sugoi na? And that just means sort of awesome, impressive, a whole sort of things. Because I can barely manage to brush my teeth and shower on a daily basis and yet you're doing all these things

Starting point is 01:48:09 simultaneously I have to pause at this point just to try to fill out some of the colors of who Reiko-chan and Mirako is

Starting point is 01:48:24 what have you struggled with? Have you had any dark, really, it doesn't have to be dark, but difficult times, dark times that you could tell us about? And were you really struggled? Or is that not part of your sort of lexicon? No, I think we all have struggles, right? So I think even in this moment of like the PhD and caring for my kids and caring for myself and my husband, my family and all, and trying to do a good job at work, like things slip, right I, I struggle with this still today. And this is where the darkness comes in is like, am I doing anything? Well, like, am I a good mother? Am I, you know, I didn't, I wasn't today, my six year old is on a field trip. And he asked me, why is it that you never get to come on a field trip. Like those are all these moments where you wonder,

Starting point is 01:49:26 like, am I failing at being a parent? Or, you know, I'm not able to get to the dishes. And I had a moment where my front door neighbor is actually a Japanese woman, a nosy Japanese woman. And she went up to my mother and she said, you know, your family is so strange. I always see the husband doing the dishes, but never the wife, never the wife. That is the most nosy Japanese neighbor thing to say ever. It's like I spent two days like in that front window doing dishes. And at some point, I was like, Oh, screw this. But, but it's like, you know, it is this constant battle of how do I figure out what my priority is, so that I have like minimum viable, you know, progress on some fronts, and then the thing that

Starting point is 01:50:24 really matters, I'm going to make massive progress on. And so so that that's where the darkness creeps in. I think, you know, for me, my my really loser moments have been things like, you know, early on, I just described to you early how there were tests that always said, like, I wasn't that smart. There were, you know, lots of examples where I wasn't good at a lot of different things that other people found very normal. Like I was horrible at standardized tests. Only until I got to like senior year or junior year in high school, did I finally figure it out? Like, there's so many places where so many people said, distinctly average, maybe not even that smart.

Starting point is 01:51:14 And, and I think for me, it's been learning to tune out the naysayers. And knowing that there are certainly a lot of things I'm not going to be good at, but there are things that I can actually be great at. A really good example of that actually is my PhD. I remember when I got to my PhD at Stanford and I'm starting, first of all, like I took a math class and there were high school or college freshmen in this class and it felt like the math teacher was speaking Greek and the freshmen are flying through this material because they're like little kid geniuses. And I remember thinking to myself, well, clearly I should not be getting a PhD in math. And thank goodness this is an operations research. Then I had this second experience where the professor, a new professor came in across

Starting point is 01:52:13 the hall from me. His name was Ramesh Johari. And he was my age because I had taken five years off to start my PhD. He was literally my age and he was incredible. He could remember things about different papers and theorems and how they were proved from like years past, compare and contrast them. He just knew things that I struggled to remember. And I remember looking at him and being in one of his seminars and thinking to myself, that is world class as an academic. And I'm okay at it. But I would have moments where

Starting point is 01:52:53 I was like, I'm actually not even good at it. And then I would go to a conference. And like, when you compare yourself against the world of PhD students, then you start to develop a little bit more confidence. Then you go back to Stanford and you see what world class is. And I was thinking to myself, this isn't the path. And there's a place where I actually can use the skill sets that I do have, where I can be really good at the things that I'm doing. And so if I'm sitting here saying, you know, I was always good at everything that I'm doing. And so if you if, if I if I am sitting here saying, you know, I was always good at everything that I did. That's just not true. There are so many moments where I realized it's like being a doctor, I said, I would not be good at being a doctor, I would not be great at

Starting point is 01:53:40 being an academic, I would not be great at a lot of different things. Just knowing and having the self-awareness of where I would double down is, I think, what I was good at. And so it makes this emergent life where I was going from one track to another. I was going to be a doctor. And then I went to McKinsey. And then I went to VC. And then I went to be a doctor. And then I went to McKinsey, and then I went to VC, and then I went to get a PhD. And then I went back to VC. This is all self discovery, rather than a stated path that I had career plan for a long time. Well, it strikes me also that, and maybe I'm trying to create a narrative where there isn't one or a connection, but it seems reasonable that Mike's superpower or one of his abilities to help create categories and then sort of mint kings within a given category is actually a different species of something that you're also good at, which is kind of Jack Welchian in a sense, and that is you're looking at the different paths you could take,

Starting point is 01:54:53 and if you can't be, say, number one or number two in that thing, it just gets rolled out, and you're asking this world-class question over and over again. And one way is to find something where you can dominate and really be world-class question over and over again. And one way is to find something where you can dominate and really be world-class. And the other is to create an entirely new category, in a sense. So it seems like you and Mike are very complementary in that way and have that shared programming. I've heard people describe you as an investor, one of your strengths, as being technical,

Starting point is 01:55:25 which I suppose seems self-evident given your background, but how would your colleagues, how would Mike, let's say, describe your, if I asked him, what are Ann's superpowers as an investor? There are a lot of investors out there. What is Anne's superpower or set of superpowers? What would he say? I think for me, the superpowers I have are a few folds. So one is because of the technical capabilities that I have, when someone is describing particularly anything that has to do with math, and luckily for me right now, math is having this incredible resurgence in artificial intelligence and in cryptocurrency, I can get that piece. I can get that piece better than I would say probably 99% of the investors out there. And so if I get a math paper,

Starting point is 01:56:27 that's something that I love to dig into. And that technical insight is something that I think I'm better at than most other investors out there. And then from there, I can also start to piece together what that company will look like around that technology. And so it's not just, I'm looking for great R&D projects, but ones that are ripe to be big D and little r. And I think that's a superpower, especially at the very early stage. So one of the companies that I invested in back in 2010, Ayasti, they've gone over $100 million in financing at this point. And I found them when they were, they didn't even have a business plan. They had four math papers

Starting point is 01:57:18 that they sent to me. And so to me, that's something that I double down on and it's a part of the types of investments that I like to do that's very different from the task grab, it's is I feel like I have a pretty good sixth sense about the people dynamics within an organization. So I can tell when there's actually infighting happening. I can sense when an executive is starting to disengage. And those are things that I work on with a lot of the CEOs that I work with. And then the last piece that I think I really love to engage in is the fundamental data behind the business. And so I love looking at the cohort analysis and really engaging on data because that's a piece of the puzzle that I feel like I'm also good at encoding, unencoding. What are you looking for now? And what are thunder lizards? We mentioned hunting thunder lizards earlier, and I promised I would come

Starting point is 01:58:38 back to it. So maybe we define that first. And perhaps you could tell us what you're looking for at the moment. Yeah, so a thunder lizard is inspired by Godzilla. It's a term that Mike, my partner, used to always tell the story, which is that we are inspired by entrepreneurs who are like Godzilla. And so what is Godzilla like? He's born from radioactive atomic eggs. So the DNA of that entrepreneur is already fundamentally different. And then he swims across the Pacific Ocean. And depending on if you're Mike or me, he lands in either the Bay

Starting point is 01:59:26 Area or Tokyo and starts to wreak havoc and eats trains and automobiles and buildings, and then proceeds to crush that industry and creates disruption and then build something out of that. And, and so, you know, that that idea of disruption is something that that I always liked that imagery of like the journey across the Pacific Ocean born from something fundamentally different, and then really starting to turn things over. And so so when we say, okay, what are we looking for right now in terms of where do we think the new thunder lizards will exist? There's sort of two different areas that comes back to the math that I'm really interested in. One is I do think that artificial intelligence is about to disrupt a lot of different types of enterprise software. I think that enterprise software still sucks. And if we're going to be able to really transform the

Starting point is 02:00:35 way a business is actually operated, we have to take the software that just basically records data and spits it back out to you into something that's actually more intelligent, that tells you something that you didn't know, that gives you superpowers. And I think that we're going to see more and more of that in the industry. And so as an example, like baseline examples, why do we spend millions of dollars on Oracle or NetSuite when the CFO still has to make a budget for next year? Why doesn't that financial planning just automatically, automagically generate itself based on all the history that it knows, plus all the data from the external world? So I think things like that, we're going to start to see happen more and more. I also think, you know, fundamentally, the scientific method may also be dead. Like we used to have the scientific method was developed

Starting point is 02:01:36 in a time where we didn't have enough data and data was actually the fundamental bottleneck in scientific research. Well, that's just not the case anymore. And so why is it that we form a hypothesis, then look at the data, and then come to a conclusion? We should have all of the data, then have an analysis of that that leads us to a hypothesis or a belief system that we fundamentally test further. So I think these massive changes are coming. And you see it even in cryptocurrency. There's also really philosophical, interesting debates happening around, well, you have this massive pull towards centralization, whether it's in AI and ML, where you have to have all of that data in one place in order to really train.

Starting point is 02:02:28 ML being machine learning. Machine learning. Or in cloud computing, you're also putting the data into more data centers. In cryptocurrency, we believe that there's going to be more decentralized software. And so how do you reconcile those two types of systems? I think there's lots of really interesting themes that are just at the start of being discovered. I'm really excited about what's going to happen with autonomous vehicles and the technology that's going to be required to make that a reality. And so all of those areas, I think, are just fascinating. And so

Starting point is 02:03:13 it feels like a period of real intellectual abundance and that we're headed into a period of real great creative energy. End of time where a lot of your philosophical training and reading will be put into practice in the real world, right? Where we have, if you look at the, people can look up the trolley scenario or it's typically thought of as a thought exercise, but if you're programming, not take us too off on a tangent, but if you're programming for autonomous vehicles and there's some type of act of God of hailstorm, a huge boulder falls in the middle of the street and the car has to swerve left and hit two school kids or swerve right and hit five geriatrics. And how does it make the decision? What is the logic embedded into that machine? It takes a lot of these philosophy 101 thought exercises and translates them very

Starting point is 02:04:19 directly into the real world with real consequences. It is a fascinating time. And how much, it's also like, how much do you want to know, right? So in deep learning, it's actually very difficult to know what's happened inside of this black box. And so there's more of a demand for, let's know what's actually happening inside of this black box, especially if lives are at risk or billions of dollars are at risk and we need to be able to audit these algorithms. I think there's real interest in new technologies now that we can actually audit and know what's going on inside the box so that if the trolley example happens, we actually know how the machines will make their decisions.

Starting point is 02:05:03 And so I think there's a lot of work to be done, a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of thought that needs to go into how we want to regulate all of this. Tricky, tricky, tricky. Yeah. Well, it's going to be going to be exciting. Very, very interested to see how all these things coalesce, right? Also, you're looking at these gigantic companies, the Facebook's, Google's, the Fang's, right, that are more and more so converging onto the same territory to see how that resolves, if it does, in some fashion, is also really, really exciting to me. Or how something like Y Combinator, just to do a little bit of inside baseball, can say, we are interested in this type of company, or this particular aspect of engineering, or fill in the blank, and kind of steer the attention of thousands or tens of thousands of would-be entrepreneurs into a particular sector right

Starting point is 02:06:05 or type of project is is also just really interesting to think about from the the ramifications five years down the line right but anyway maybe we have i mean like i think we have so many incredible societal problems that need to be solved and And I believe that the private sector is most capable of solving these problems, right? Whether it's energy or health or, you know, the fact that we have so much trash, how do we solve that? How do we get clean water to people? It's not just about the next social network and how do we deliver better advertising to people. But, you know, the, the beauty of, of this type of entrepreneurship is that there are huge societal problems that still need to be solved that I think, you know, is, is a

Starting point is 02:07:02 really exciting opportunity also to build great businesses around. And so I think that's also what gets me up in the morning and makes me believe that what we're doing is important work. Yeah, it is important work. I don't think that sort of collective interest and self-interest have to be misaligned, right? They're not mutually exclusive. You can solve, and there's a long history of solving public problems with private sector technologies and companies. And let me just ask, I know we've gone a little bit longer than expected, uh, which I should have expected. Let me ask you just a few more questions and then we'll wrap up with where people can find you and learn more about what you're up to besides getting to.

Starting point is 02:07:54 Yes. Are there any books that you've given a lot as gifts or reread a lot yourself? Um, oh gosh, for me, you know, right now, there's a couple books that I think are super interesting. So my mentor, Ted Dintersmith, just wrote a book called What School Could Be. And this goes back to sort of education as a critical societal question. How do we fix education? And what he did was he went on a 50-state tour to look at schools and discover that the answers are actually already there. And our incredible school teachers

Starting point is 02:08:46 throughout our country are already finding solutions to teaching our kids the most important skills they need to have. And I think reading that book has not only given me hope, but also a desire to see real change in the public school education system. But I think that's a really important problem for all of us to actually engage in. And so that's one book that I would really push on to other people. The other one that is completely on the opposite end of the spectrum, but it is a fiction book, it is by Khalid Hosseini, who also wrote Kite Runner. He wrote this book called A Thousand Splendid Sons, and probably one of the most beautiful books that I've read in a long time in terms of fiction writing. And I would encourage people to read it because it gives you a sense of

Starting point is 02:09:43 Afghanistan's incredible history and the role women have played within that history. And I just loved that book because it just was eye-opening to me in a very different way. So two very different types of books. None of them like straightforward business books, but ones that I think are meaningful for our society to read today. What School Could Be in 1, 1000 Splendid Sons? Yeah. Is there any purchase of $100 or less? It's kind of arbitrary, right?

Starting point is 02:10:14 But just not a Bugatti or something that is most positively impacted your life or positively impacted your life in recent memory? $100 or less. It could be. I mean, look, if it's like a foldable kayak that you got for 400, that's fine too. But it could be anything. It could be $2, it could be free, it could be any recent addition to your life.

Starting point is 02:10:38 Oh my gosh. So it's actually a foldable chair. So I go to my daughter's soccer tournaments a lot and there's this incredible foldable chair. I don't know what it's actually a foldable chair. So I go to my daughter's soccer tournaments a lot. And there's this incredible foldable chair. I don't know what it's called. You can get it on Amazon. But it has this flip over sunshade that goes over your head. And for any parent who has been at a swim tournament or anything, this is life changing because oftentimes I'm just baking in the hot sun and you can be anywhere and you have your own personal tent that like folds over your head. It's been, it's like saved me on multiple weekends. My husband bought two of them. I love it.

Starting point is 02:11:20 Can you send me a link to that and I'll put it in the show notes if you can track it down. So for people wondering, I'll put that in the show notes at Tim.blog forward slash podcast and you can find this miraculous foldable chair. If you could have a giant billboard anywhere with anything on it. So metaphorically speaking, getting a word, a quote, a message, a question, anything out to millions or billions of people can't be an advertisement. What might you put on that billboard? Wow. Hmm. I wonder if it's like not losing does not equal winning.

Starting point is 02:12:00 Sort of one of my themes these days. I like that. Yeah. It's sort of one of my themes these days. I like that, yeah. And I think actually finding your world-class life is probably the other one that I would think about. We'll give you two. Find your world-class life. And I think the reason for that is, to me, everyone is capable of that. And I think oftentimes we forget it. And for every person, it's different. That's the beauty of humanity.

Starting point is 02:12:32 So what do the characters for Reikul mean? Oh, my gosh. So it means it's a small round bell. And the reason for my parents naming me that was they were originally going to name me something more like, you know, really beautiful child or, you know, genius child. And my mom, my mom took one look at me when I was born. She's like, No, none of those. She said, your face was so perfectly round. When you were born. It reminded me of this, like, perfectly round bell. And I'm like, Mom, like all these other friends that I have, especially Chinese friends, they're like super intelligent, like world class dominating dictator for life CEO child, you know, and I'm like, small bell child. And where can people find you online? Say hello, learn more about what you are up to? I think professionally the best place is to see my Twitter, which is Animaniac. A-N-N-I-M-A-N-I-A-C.

Starting point is 02:14:00 Or on Instagram, it's a M I U R a. You'll see more of my life there. A Miura. Yes. Three bays. Is that what that means? Miura? Something like that.

Starting point is 02:14:14 Maybe. So Twitter, Twitter, Animaniac, Instagram, a Miura, M I U R a and best website. Floodgate. It's floodgate.com. Floodgate.com. Why Floodgate? What is a Floodgate? Or why is it called Floodgate? Yeah, because we think we're at the forefront of like the headw headwaters of, of innovation. And so, and, and, and it sounded, I don't know, kind of big and audacious. Good enough reason. Audacious, audacious. Yes. Audacious, aggressive, but still the mother of dragons. There is a nurturing mother-like den mother quality to Ann Murica.

Starting point is 02:15:11 I call myself like a mama bear. I'm very protective, but also I'm going to push my kids and people around me to be the best they can be. Just don't get in between the mother and the cub. Good guideline. And I will say for anybody who's wondering, what would it be like to just go sort of mano a mano with? And I would say, you know, you're one of the few people, I would put Sam Harris in this category, where if you are willing to engage in a public debate with either of you, you just have to make sure that you have practice defending against having your face ripped off in the most logical, complimentary way possible. I'm just very impressed by you, Anne, and I've really wanted to have you on the show for a long time. Thank you. I've wanted to have you on the show for a long time, and I'm thrilled that you were willing to carve out a few hours to spend chatting.

Starting point is 02:16:10 And it's always fun chatting. It's always fun. Tim, you've been there from the very get-go. You were the person behind my very first investment in TaskRabbit, so I have a lot to thank you for as well. Well, the adventure shall continue. And I will certainly, I'm not as involved as I used to be in the tech scene, but I'll be cheering from the sidelines. Is there anything else that you'd like to say or suggest or mention? Any parting words before we wrap up? No, I hope that the your audience uh enjoyed this and if they got anything out of it that they

Starting point is 02:16:48 if they want to contact me I'm always open to more conversations and uh hope that some of my story shows that even if people tell you you can't do something that that you can you can indeed just got to spend the summer reading up on those 12 topics. That's right. You can't always out-talent everyone, but if you out-prepare them, you might as well have out-talented them. Maybe the billboard sign is effort matters. Effort matters. Because it really does. It does. Well, Anne, thank you so much again. This has been such a treat and a gift. And I look forward to hearing what people have to say on the interwebs. And perhaps we'll do a round two in person during one of, what was the name of the, was it the Tim Ferriss Wine Hour? What was the treat? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:17:46 At the offices. They call it Ferris time. That's what Mike calls it. Ferris time. Which was the little wine, a pair of teeth, just smooth out the edges. We could describe that. He just grabs a glass. He's like, I think it's Ferris hour. I'll take it. I will take it. And Anne, I will talk to you soon. See you soon, I hope.

Starting point is 02:18:20 And to everybody listening, you can find links to everything we discussed, the books, the fold-out share, and much more, getting to yes and so on in the show notes as you can with all episodes at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week.

Starting point is 02:18:57 That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom, which more than 2 million Americans have used to help start their businesses. Past guests even, such as, well, WordPress lead

Starting point is 02:19:45 developer, CEO of Automatic, Matt Mullenweg, now valued at more than a billion dollars, have used LegalZoom to help with their business needs, specifically in his case, to form his company. But LegalZoom isn't just for launching your business. Their services include everything from helping you to manage changing tax laws, reviewing contracts, creating NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, important stuff, handling lease agreements, and assisting with really any other legal challenge, hurdle, inconvenience that typically takes time and effort away from running your business. The best part is that you won't get charged by the hour because LegalZoom isn't a law firm, so they won't be running the clock up and spinning circles just to raise your

Starting point is 02:20:26 bill. Instead, they just ask you to pay one low upfront price for whatever it is that you're looking to get a la carte style. So visit LegalZoom.com and check out their business section for all of their services. And if you want special savings, that's the terminology in the copy that they suggest. I don't know what the special savings is, folks, but it's titillating. If you want special savings, enter promo code TIM, T-I-M, at checkout. Capital T, lowercase I-M. Again, take a peek, LegalZoom.com, and enter promo code TIM. This episode is brought to you by WordPress.com. I love WordPress. I have used it for so many years.

Starting point is 02:21:08 It's my go-to platform for blogging and creating websites. I use WordPress.com for everything, every day. My site, Tim.blog, is built on it. The websites for my books, including Tools of Titans, Tribe of Mentors, it's all on WordPress.com. And the founder, Matt Mullenweg, one of my close friends, has appeared on this show many times. Just search Matt Mullenweg, Tequila Ferris for quite an exciting time. Whether you're looking to create a personal blog, a business site, or both, you can make a really big impact right out of the box when you build on WordPress.com.

Starting point is 02:21:42 And you'll be in good company. It's used by the New Yorker, Jay-Z, Beyonce, FiveThirtyEight, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, and Time, just to name a handful. And one of my friends at Google, she'll remain nameless, has told me that WordPress.com offers the, quote, best out-of-the-box SEO imaginable, end quote. And it's one of the many reasons that nearly 30% of the internet is run on WordPress. You do not need experience or to hire someone. That's perhaps the best part. WordPress.com guides you through the entire experience. They have hundreds of designs and templates that you can use, and it's easy to get started. There's no need to worry about security, upgrades, hosting, any of that. They offer 24-7 support, and they're very, very responsive to your questions.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #331: Ann Miura-Ko — The Path from Shyness to World-Class Debater and Investor

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