This Week in Startups - Reid Hoffman on the Joby Aviation SPAC, lessons from early Airbnb & Facebook bets, passing on Stripe & SpaceX, investment thesis & more | Angel S5 E6

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

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scale your stack your stack your business. Your first app is free forever and right now Odo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at O'Doo. do.com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Angel, the podcast I do alongside of this weekend startups. And we thought for our fifth season, we would talk to what I call Super Angels. People who have invested in dozens and dozens of startups had massive exits and who really understand the business. And today we have just a titan in our industry, somebody who, you know, has built companies, invested in companies, and even does a really great podcast that

all of you listen to, Master of Scale. You probably know him best from his time at Apple or Fujitsu or Social Net. I kid, those were his jobs that led up to the incredible LinkedIn and co-founding LinkedIn in, I think, 2003 hasn't been on the pod for about seven or eight years. I think the last time you officially came on the pod was what, 2014 or something. Yeah, and we did it at LinkedIn. I remember it was fun. Did it LinkedIn in the conference room and you've become a podcaster, but you also did a lot of angel investing. And now, how do you spend your time now?

You're still on the board of Microsoft? I am. And so, you know, it's a combination of, you know, kind of boards, most of which are for Greylock, you know, kind of things like Aurora and Convoy and Cota and other Nauto and other kinds of things. You know, Microsoft, the, we just announced today that I'll be joining the Joby board if that if that deal. Oh yeah, Joby the vertical takeoff and landed.

My friend Sky Dayton is involved. Exactly. And you're spacking. Oh, are you spacking it? Yes. I was going to ask you about the spacks. And I just swore in my group chat with my poker buddies that Joby was going out. Explain to people what Joby is and the bet you're making there.

Yep. So Joby, you know, it's like, you know, people like Peter Thiel have made the claim that, you know, we've had tech stagnation. because we were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters. And actually, in fact, it's the flying car. It's the, you know, it's the electric VTAL, you know, car that is very far along in its certification process. It's, you know, flown over a thousand test flights and has been worked on for 10 years. And, you know, the whole idea is to open it up to everybody to make it part of, you know, what you could do is commute or going to the airport or, you know,

obviously in urgency going to a medical appointment. And it's, you know, Sky Dayton has been a backer for years. You'd probably know how many more years. I've actually got to know Sky through this. And we just announced. Pretty great. Pretty great. Yeah, stealthy executive. Like, no, he doesn't like people to know what he's doing.

He keeps his head down. He, I think he hasn't been on the pod since the first 10 episodes. When we used to play poker in LA, he used to come on the pod. So for Joby, I guess the question I have for you is, which will happen first? will we take a joby Vitol from

you know San Carlos Airport in the peninsula or wherever to Napa or will we or to SFO whatever

or will we take a self-driving car with no steering wheel which will occur first for the average citizen for the average citizen I think it'll be Joby why

well so look I think look, I've also heavily invested in autonomous vehicles. I led the investments in Aurora and Nuro and Nauto for Greylock. So I'm not a huge believer in this. This is not a disbelief in autonomous vehicles. But among the things that you suggested is that the cars will be manufactured without a steering wheel. Yes, that was my...

Made it very easy. Yes. Because I actually think that before we get to the real cards on a steering wheel, I think we'll have the autonomous vehicle. that are out there that also have a steering wheel. Among other things, it's a fallback, right? So it's kind of a question of, you know, like, all right, does it work? Oh, shit, it's not working.

Okay, I can drive it, right? Et cetera. And so when you start getting to that scale manufacturer without a steering wheel, I think by that time, you know, there will be, you know, Jobian EVTol flights, you know, in lots and lots of places. And part of actually the thing that people don't realize, they think, oh, EV tall, that'll be like, helicopters. Aren't those for the really rich high-end folks? And the thing is, once you begin,

just like Uber transformed transportation, and, you know, Joby bought Uber Elevate actually in fact and it's got the lines with Uber for this, once you do that, you start using it a lot. And a simple way to think about it is like, for example, you're down in L.A., think about just going to the airport, especially during commutes, right? Yeah. It'll just be a constant flight cycle, and it will help alleviate. You take on all the risk of the highways and going at one mile an hour and all the right, and you get there. And so, and then, and that'll be available. It'll be at such a price. It'll be like an Uber like price, which, you know, will be available to most citizens. It's amazing how this technology has advanced very quietly, but people have

been flying in these. In China, there's a company. that I was tracking. I forgot the name of it, but they've been putting humans up in these. Has Jobi been putting humans in them yet? And under what circumstances and for how long? Ehang was the company, I think, in China. Yep, I'm familiar with Enhang.

So Jobi has had, oh, it's like over a thousand test flights. It's a piloted vehicle. So you have the pilots. But also, for example, my partner, Michael Thompson, as part of our due diligence, went and gotten one and flew around in it in order to see, when I talk to my friends, they're all like, sign me up.

I want to be on the next flight. You're like, okay, I'm happy to do that. I've got to figure out what the, what the, what the, what the, what, you know, how we make it work, especially in these odd pandemic times. But they've taken up a number of people. So they, you know, they have safety protocols and all the rest. And, you know, part of, you know, how like there's safety, noise and cost. And all of those things, Joby is better on.

Safety. You have the modern software, you know, kind of multiple rotors on, on, on sound. Actually, in fact, if you go and listen to the launching, we have a Joe Ben Bevert, who is the visionary and the CEO and the founder of this talking while Jobi is taking off behind him. Wow. You can hear how quiet it is. And then obviously, cost, which is, you know, kind of like, well, no, actually, in fact, as you begin to run these things as a service, actually brings the cost way down. Yeah. And they're battery powered, so they're not polluting. And I think the concept with these is, wherever the station is, they land,

And the battery pack comes out to get charged and a new battery pack comes in. Is that one of the secrets to this quick, you know, turnarounds in terms of them going from an airport to wherever, downtown L.A.? Exactly. Multiple secrets, but yes. That seems to be. I remember, yeah, when Travis at Uber was talking about them, he was really high on them, no pun intended.

When do you think these will be operating and people will be able to take them for a ride? because it does seem like over water, because it's regulation. And in a bay city like Sydney or, you know, the Bay area, you could fly over the water and there's no noise issue. Nobody's going to get hurt. If it does need to land, these things could have pontoons or whatever. I'm assuming they can safely land in water.

And the test flights for Jobi, I think, were over water if I've seen some videos. So when do you think if we had to pick a random year, in the United States, we would see one of these from Joby or another company allowing consumers to do test flights like at the Grand Canyon or over Lake Tahoe.

So I have seen Joby test flights overland already. And, you know, I'd hope, you know, I think the company is planning 2024. There's obviously FAA FAA certification. One of the things that people don't realize is that actually, in fact,

there's lots of places where there's helipads where the helipads don't operate because the noise is prohibited. And so when you bring the safety and noise. So for example, I think there's some kind of regulation. I haven't tracked this down, but there's some kind of thing like if you build skyscrapers in L.A., they have to have a helipad on top of them.

And so that means you guys have helipads all over L.A. Everywhere, yeah. Yes. And so what that means is actually there will be a bunch of places where these things could land and take off as part of it, given that they have safety and noise. So long way of saying two or three years, you might be able to take one of these. Yes, exactly. That's just astounding because it does seem to me with self-driving, you're correct. You know, if you drive a Tesla today and you're going from the peninsula up to the city, 80% of your ride, 90% is perfect.

But on the surface streets, you know, people jumping out in front of cars all the randomness that occurs in San Francisco, you don't want to have it on autopilot in the city. Yes. Still going to be seven, eight, nine, ten years for that to work, you think? or inclement weather conditions, right? I mean, you should be attentive to when you're using, you know, current, you know, driver assists. Because, you know, the stakes are high, not just for you, but for other people. Yeah. And this means the idea that a driver would be removed from an Uber or a lift is a long ways off because you're going to need somebody to be able to take over.

So it's a 10-year-plus vision, right, I think? Yes. That's pretty amazing. Now, explain to me, is this? Were you doing the SPAC with Pinkus too? Yes. So you and Mark did this. And you guys have been

collaborate, Mark and I've been friends forever. You guys have been collaborating since the social networking days. Yep. People don't know, but you did social, was it social net? Or social. Dot net.

I can't remember. Socialnet.com. Wow. So to just think about how far we've come in branding. Yes. Yes. Socialnet.com. No dash.

Yes. It was a dating site. You started with a dating site in 97, 98. Is that right? It was primarily a dating site, although I did have the idea of it being a platform for also not, you know, finding romantic partners, but also like roommates and activity partners like tennis and golf and other kinds of. And then I had this thing. It was part of it called Working Network, which is part of what gave me the idea for LinkedIn because when I went, okay, this isn't working, I had a bunch of bad ideas. What would I do?

And part of what I've come to realize in designing entrepreneurship is you want to do things that are contrarian but right. I said, which of these services was the most broken, didn't work, but most critical. And it was the working network. It was the working part of social net. I was like, okay, so that's what I'm going to focus on with LinkedIn. If you're an accredited investor, you need to understand what a special purpose vehicle is. This is how I have made my career. What is a special purpose vehicle?

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That's the number one thing for a founder. They managed the entire process over the life of the investment, and you are going to get 20% off your first SPV. What a great deal. Assure.com slash angel. That's assure.com slash angel to get 20% off your first SPV. During this time, people don't remember, let's say, the early 2000s, 2003 to 2007.

You actually, maybe through PayPal, I guess, knew Sean Parker. And am I correct that you're the one who introduced? introduced Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel for that famous investment. Tell us that story of the first time you met Zuckerberg and introducing him to Peter T.L. So actually, and Sean has a bit of a role in this because Sean and I had met in the very early days of LinkedIn because he was doing Plaxo. And so we had introduced and we talked about our visions and what we're doing. And Sean's obviously crazy smart. And was like, oh, that's interesting.

And then when Sean left Plaxo and I had helped him on various things, he called me and said, oh, this is this awesome thing called Facebook, or the Facebook, I think it was at the time. And you should really think what it at best. And I was like, oh, I've already tracked it. I'd be super interested. But it's in Boston. He's like, no, they're here. I was like, oh, well, I should beat them.

And so, as we talked about it. And then I had gotten a lot of a grief from investing in Friendster with kind of a have your cake and eat it too, because people didn't really understand how separate social and professional was at the time. So I said, well, look, I should do this. It's important in having integrity, not just to have it, but to seem to have it is actually an important thing as well as having it.

And so it's like, I'll introduce this to Peter, and then Peter and I can both invest in this. And that way we can not have this, oh, you're having your cake and eating it too by investing in Facebook. And so I arranged the meeting with Zuck and Sean Parker and Peter and Matt Kohler.

and myself. Wow. That was working for me at the time. And that meeting was at, um, uh, at his offices at the B of A tower in San Francisco. Wow.

Uh, and that turned out to be like, perhaps one of the greatest investments in the history of angel investing, an early stage investing. Yes. It was, uh, uh,

spectacular. Yeah. I mean, it would be a 10,000 X if you held on to it, 20,000 X. Yeah. Maybe even more. Maybe even more if you held it today, right?

Because we're talking about an $800 billion company. Yes. And at the time it was, that first round was five or $10 million or something. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I think I think my investment turned out to be a $10,000. I'm about to spit out my Bundabberg. It's like, I thought I didn't give it my $5,000 on Uber.

10,000 X. Hey, look, this is the kind of high class problems. If anyone's got a 10x or a 20x investment, that's a, you know, that's great. Yeah, it's very weird to think about the scale at which these companies have grown to because 20 years ago, when we were building them, and you and I before we were, you know, investors were kind of building stuff. You really didn't expect it to get that big because at that time, the footprint of users was desktop users. There were no mobile users. There were desktop users on varying degrees of broadband. And people didn't think that these things could get past 10 million users.

There's 20 million users. Today, we're looking at a footprint of two or three billion. Do you think that we're going to see this same level of growth in internet companies? Or do you think we're sort of hitting a ceiling in terms of the number of users? You know, everybody's got a smartphone. Everybody's got a broadband connection. We're a three billion. I think Facebook has three billion people on the platform across the various things now.

So do you think that there's still an opportunity here? Is it more of an opportunity? Well, I think there's definitely opportunities and opportunities to grow to X billion. Now, obviously, you're beginning to approach the population of the planet, and the population of the planet, while it grows, doesn't grow in that kind of compounding fashion. And so I think it'll be other vectors, you know, engagement, value, other kinds of things that will be part of how you continue to seek strong growth. But also, of course, one of the things that we have going on in the world is various forms

of tech nationalism. And so that will be another thing because, you know, you only get a, you know, three billion folks on on the Facebook ecosystem, you know, because of global. Right. And if global becomes more challenged, then that, which I really think it should be, but if global becomes more challenged, then that all those results also become more difficult. Which I think brings us to China. And I'm curious because do you talk about your politics much publicly? Because I know that you've done a lot of donations and you're pretty active. Do you like to talk about it publicly or do you try to keep your head down?

I'm totally comfortable. I actually, in the last couple of years, I actually have started speaking out pretty publicly because I actually thought it was important for business leaders to realize there are themes they should speak out on that I completely respect and honor the desire to say, look, the business is business. And so don't create divisions. Like, you know, for example, don't talk religion X versus religion Y or politics X versus politics Y. And all of that makes sense for, you know, inclusivity in the workforce, inclusivity in customers, inclusivity in shareholders, partners, all the rest. But there's times when you go, well, actually, in fact, business is about, you know, integrity and rule of law and

anti-corruption and civility and other kinds of things that are actually all pro-business topics and not they shouldn't be red versus blue they should be you know just no no the business of america is business and this is the kind of or why and that they should speak up in those cases because that is not only good for business but is also an obligation because business leaders especially in America but generally in the world are also leaders and how do you play a leader in society so I've been I've been vocal on the topics, including, of course, if I actually haven't sent you a copy of my my trumped-up cards game, dropping your address and I'll send it to you, but making a knockoff of cards against humanity, specifically mocking Trump, you know, as part of being very vocal.

And Trump really was, I think, a stress test, right? It's sort of like he was this trolley problem for business. Like, what do you do with this unique individual? you know, to be generous, who is acting in a way that is completely irrational, unpredictable, dangerous, and then what do you do if you're trying to be inclusive, like let's say, Zuck at Facebook, or your, I remember Travis said Uber was on one of his boards, or even, you know, somebody who is incredibly progressive like Tim Cook, who is fighting for the right fights. He, every time there was a business meeting, he's standing, sitting next to Trump.

Now, what do you think the right way to deal with that is to just disengue? or to try engage them? And what do you, I mean, how do you rate Zuckerberg's performance in this, which he seemed to be. And I don't know if he's right wing or not. Obviously, Peter is. But I think suck is principled. And a lot of people say that he's defending the free speech because it's the economic basis of Facebook. I actually don't agree with that.

Yeah. I do think that I have points which he and I've talked about where I kind of have a different interpretation of freedom of speech. And I think freedom of speech is important. I defended it myself. In fact, it was my very first television performance ever was firing line in 1996, talking about the government's ability to regulate speech on the internet. And so the, and so, you look, I think that the, I think it's important to speak up.

And I think the question is when you speak up, like, and sometimes that speak up, it's like I'm speaking up in opposition to Trump, right? And the fact that you're going to take that as, partisan is your problem, not my problem. Right. And the reason is your problem is because as long as I'm speaking up very, like, I'm speaking up saying, oh, all Republicans bad, then you're like, okay, well, that sounds partisan. But if you're speaking up saying, look, we had an election that was run with high integrity by literally every third party watcher. It was done with a president who was in full command, a Senate that was Republican.

and it was done at high integrity. Somebody who is then decrying those things is actually attacking our democracy, is attacking the rule of law, is attacking stability. And surprise, you get people who are going, who go to the Capitol,

storm the White House with nooses, do violence, kill police officers. Because they say, hey, I'm following what my president told me to do. Yeah. And the Capitol building, yeah. The Capitol building.

Yeah. And surprise. And like words matter. This is not just partisan. Like, oh, well, it's just, you know, that's politics as usual. It's like, no, you guys have blood on your hands. And you have and and and and and that, by the way, business leaders, which I think a lot of them very, very thoughtfully stood up early and said, look, this is a good election. You know, we should, we should, we should, we should, we should, the business of America is to move on and build our business and and have civility and have rule of law and have that. And that's super important. And business leaders can do that without. saying, I'm not saying anything about red versus blue. It's irrelevant to me. It did seem like that was the breaking point. And then all of a sudden, I think that gives a very easy off ramp for, hey, listen, if Trump is actually inciting things that result in people dying and the capital during the certification process of our democracy being, you know, infiltrated, taken over,

etc. Like, and people were literally shot and killed. I mean, this is, this is deadly serious, like literally deadly. And so, you know, you have no choice but to speak up in that regard. And I think that was an easy way to take them off the platforms. I think everybody agreed that that de-platforming was justified. But now, Facebook is going to put this to a test with their oversight board for the first time. I don't know if you knew about that.

I'm assuming you do. Yes. And Twitter is now going to also have to. to make a decision. What do you think the right decision is? And then we'll get off Trump because it's, you know, I'm tired of talking about it, but I'm interested in your opinion on this, which is, should they reinstate him after being in the penalty box for 90 days? Or is it just too risky to put someone like that on the platform? If you were the CEO of Twitter or Facebook, let me phrase it that way, would you feel comfortable putting Trump back on the platform

knowing that if he says, you know, you got to fight like hell, it could result in more people dying. So I would only put someone like Trump back on the platform if I believe that I could have a deal with them that they would keep, that they would now abide by, for example, our anti-incitement to violence rules, right? And if we had confidence that he would do that, then I would consider it seriously, because it's kind of like, hey, look, you know, poutly box and then back in and then off. On the other hand, I think that when you look at Trump as a specific individual, he basically doesn't keep deals, right? You know, like, you know, literally everybody who knows anything about Trump knows that he never pays his final bill. And so, you know, he always stiffs the small businesses that work for him and, you know, all the rest of this stuff.

And so, you know, he doesn't keep his deals. So then that, then since you know he doesn't keep his deals, then I wouldn't put him back on the platform. Yeah, it seems like a pretty easy decision. The New Year is here. and that marks a fresh start for your small business. It's a fresh start for us at launch as we're hiring a bunch of new team members, a video editor, customer support person, producer, and more community manager. We need people.

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so easy. It's so elegant and it's so effective. You want to save time and you want to save money and you want to get the right person. You need to do that all by going to linkton.com slash angel. Thanks again for supporting season five of Angels. And speaking of LinkedIn, let's get back to Reid Hoffman. He knows something or two about LinkedIn. I know that you missed Stripe. That's your anti-portfolio. Yes.

But you hit Airbnb. Yes. So tell me those two stories as an investor. And I believe this is, you know, when you're a VC at Greylock. Yes. Tell me, yeah, both of them. Tell me about meeting the company and saying yes to one and saying no to the other and why you made those decisions.

They both have wonderful, colorful narratives. Which one do you want to hear first? Let's go with the pain first so that we can have the pallet cleanser of the success after. So it's not lingering. Yeah. So I get this email from Paul Graham, who we all respect massively in writing and leadership and YC and all the rest of the stuff saying, hey, there's these two young, you know, Irish brother, entrepreneurs who are doing this thing that's going to reinvent banking and you should meet them

given PayPal and so forth. And I said, okay, look, I totally respect Paul. Sure, I'll meet with them. And I met them. That was when I met them the first time. And he said, hey, we got this, we got this real, we're starting a tech up. So we're building a payment service where it's kind of just the tech for it. Make it super easy to use, super easy to integrate.

None of the classic hackney tech that comes from banks. We've already got a whole bunch of YC people using it. We'd love it if you would put some money in and do it. And I said, oh, I'd love to put money in. And they said, okay. And here's the terms. And I went, oh, that's not those aren't, this is that classic. Those aren't the terms that I invested.

And I was like, well, that's a high price and a low percentage that you're expecting me to come on this journey and work with you on. And look, you guys seem really great and spectacular. And I'm just going to get to know you. So look but to be friends and I'll help out as I can and so forth. But, you know, nah. So you passed on valuation, which was probably what, 15 or 20 million coming up. Yeah. You know, so at the time to just give people an idea, the benchmark at that time, coming at a YC, 6, 7, 8.

would be the typical valuation and they were looking for three times it. Yes, three times. And also not like three times it, give me $5 million at $20. It was giving me $750K. Right? So the percentage is like tiny.

And so you're like, okay. And like I like to, like I like to be an active helper. And so I like to have the like to have enough of, of a skin in the game in order to be like, like, hey, you call me at at at 7 p.m. And say, I got to talk to you today. And I call you before the end of the day.

Right. You know, like that kind of thing and being helpful. and it was just like, that should the economics aren't right now. Of course, if you had known that that Stripe was going to become the giant who was going to become, it was like,

oh, the economics were just fine. But that was, you know, that is the challenge of angel investing is, especially even at that time, I don't think we actually thought that these companies could easily become worth

$100 billion that we're seeing now many, I mean, Airbnb, Stripe, Uber, door dash is worth, I think, 40 or 50 billion. We actually didn't think they could become worth what they're worth today, or they could grow as fast. So we had a fundamental misunderstanding of valuation at that time, do you think? Yes. Also, by the way, part of it is understanding that just like there's all these things

where we don't, we kind of take current as too steady state. Like frequently, TAMs are understated because the TAM grows. We take the connectivity of the whole populace, not anticipating mobile. And a bunch of other things, you know, as for earlier conversation when we were talking about international, right? International, a bunch of other stuff. And so we just don't, and by the way, valuations follow those things. And that's part of the reason why, among other things, with these tech companies,

you see them continuing compound revenue and customers and engagement at these massive scales because actually, in fact, it follows this just massive connectivity and massive availability so that you can reach customers with your products and services. as part of what happens. And so I think that was, you know, part of it. But, you know, because you try to be a professional investor. You said, well, I invested X and there's going to be Y more capital and dilution and exits will look like Y.

And so I have to be in this kind of price range and this kind of ownership in order to make it happen. And then you don't realize that other coefficient is really is over the 10-year horizon or 15-year horizon that you do in the success cases of angel investing. Right. Any of the success, the big success cases, the goalpost is getting taller. Yeah, it's super fascinating because we had a moment in time where people said the percentage ownership is what matters.

And it was, I think, largely driven, correct me if I'm wrong, because I don't have like major LPs. The largest LPs I have is a $10 million LP in my fund. I don't have any of the big, big ones. When you, those LPs, I think, became obsessed with ownership. because they had seen Sequoia, you know, or Kliner before them, hit these big hits and have 20% ownership, 15% ownership at the IPO. But that actually is bad advice because the LPs maybe have a different driver. Is that right?

How did that advice become so cemented that the ownership percentage are so important? It was much earlier and actually, I don't think it was the LPs. The LPs just tend to be the return on capital, make multiples on your capital. what happened is it goes back to the very earliest stages of venture, which is to say, okay, in order to be worth it, given the risk coefficient, the things that go to zero, et cetera, and what the exits look like, what percentages do we need to own at the exits, right, for the rest of the portfolio, because it's just portfolio to go to zero, and then you'd begin doing financial modeling of that. And when you look at like in the 1970s or 80s, the average IPO prices, you know, what acquisitions look like and other kinds of things. He said, well, these kinds of things look like the range of exits. And so in those exits, we need to own 20 to 30 percent to have the economics to make the fund a great fund, given the other things being holes.

And that's the analysis. These are just like, deliver us good multiples on capital. Do it however you're going to do it. What is, so if you were to look at your pass, and then we'll go on to the big win. But if you were to look at the pass, $750 at $2.20 million would have given you roughly an ownership of 4%. If you got diluted 50%, you'd be at, or you got diluted, if you got cut in half, that would be 2%. And it's worth $100 billion now. So it'd be $2 billion off of a million dollar investment roughly. So it would have been over 2,000 X cash on cash.

Exactly. And that fund that you were investing at the time was $150 million fund, $200 million fund? No, it was, I think we, part of it, Greylock 13 was the very first fund, was the Airbnb fund as well. There was a, we moved to a billion dollar fund because we wanted a range of all states. But by the way, that also means lots and lots of investments. So even if you made a 750K investment there and you get $2 billion back, that's still, that's a, that's a two X in the fund. That's still, like, great funds are, you know, 10x and so forth. That's actually in fact. And, you know, if you think about the tax of a $1 billion, that means you're making $9 billion

above the billion investment. Wow. So the lesson you learn from that is what? How do you take that forward when you're – because you have new partners at Greylock. You now, you know, are not the, you know, 30-year-old kid, 35-year-old young adult trying to figure this out. You're now training a bunch of 25 to 35-year-olds, I take it. What do you teach them from your mistake on that one when you do your post-mortem on it? Well, so it's hard to have known ex ante because that's the lesson you don't take.

But what you do say is, hey, if you've got, like what I would have probably done now is said, look, I can't join the board for, you know, I don't know if they would have wanted me to or not. I have a great relationship with them today. But like, I'd love to invest and help. And why don't, why don't we do, well, do the investment and I'll help out some, but I won't, I won't join the board for this and see if we can get to a deal there. because having some places, now part of his adventure, you say, well, that will, that will block you from doing square, a lot of block you from doing, you know, kind of competitive investments. You have to pay attention to that. Because that's one of the things I'm sure the callousins would have asked for in that, in that investment. That's one of things you have to weigh. Also to look at, sometimes when you say, look,

while it's still, generally speaking, for the exits, a good to target that's kind of 20% plus ownership because, you know, it's a small number that go to this astro. Yeah. You know, the high orbit and, you know, break escape velocity. But the, but so you still do it. But on selected cases, you say, look, there's actually, in fact, a real chance at this, then that's fine. And, you know, that's, that's, that's something that you should, that you should ask

yourself that question and make an active decision about whether or not sometimes doing that small percentage is important here because you could still get a venture result. Right. As someone who's invested in over 250 startups and advised many more, I want to talk to you about a serious pain point that we see all the time and that's reducing your burn. You need to conserve your capital. You need your money to go far so that you get time for product market fit. how much money are you spending right now on various software products? And how much time does it take to integrate all of them? Let me take a guess.

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That's O-D-O-O-O-com slash... twist to get that $1,000 credit. That's really interesting, too, when you think about if you make this bet, now you can't make these other bets because in Silicon Valley, it's incredibly poor taste, at least for a venture firm, maybe not for angels as much, but certainly for a venture firm that's on the board, you can make one bet per category. So if you do Uber, you can't do Lyft. If you do a Lyft, you can't do Uber.

And correct me if I'm wrong, founders are aware of this, and it matters to them. Yep. What I would say is it behooves investors and founders to have the up-front conversation, right? And I think it's reasonable to say if you haven't had the upfront conversation, then the founders are reasonable to say, look, there's some competitive space around me that you're not going to invest in because you're going to be all in on supporting me. And that's especially true for venture firms, you know, like Greylock, where we have, you know, engineering recruiting and customers and other services that we use to amplify the success of companies, that you say, look, you want those resources to us. We want those resources like, you're going to hire the best engineers for us, et cetera. And so that's reasonable. Now, if you have, I find, and I recommend everyone do this, both founders and investors, to have an explicit conversation about what counts as competitive, you know, where it's okay to do it,

you know, that kind of thing. And so, and by the way, when you do that, sometimes you can end up with great results. So, like, for example, take autonomous vehicles. So I invested for Greylock and Aurora and I'm on the board. And then Neuro came along. And neuro is another of the superstar teams at El Wemo. And so I called Chris Germson and I said, look, like the neuro guys seem really great.

You know, I'd love for Greylock to be able to invest in them. You know, is this okay? And he said, oh, they're really awesome. I'd love to be able to invest in them. And I said, okay, so what's the deal? Well, can we? And he said, well, look, it would be uncomfortable for me if you were on the board too, you know, there. But Greylock can invest.

And as long as you guys, you know, you and, you know, John Lilly is on the board for us now, as long as you guys, you know, do a good job of not spreading, you know, confidential intel from one to the other, which, you know, we're good at because it's part of, you know, the thing, that'd be great. We'd be delighted. And then when I went to Nero and explained the same thing and said, hey, you know, I can help you. I can't help you with anything that I know from Aurora, but like you asked me to come to a board meeting or talk to your team or, you know, tell you about what I see going on with OEMs and other kinds of things. I can help with all that stuff. And they said, great, let's do this. And so Greylock has the virtue of being in both Aurora and Neuro. And not surprisingly, you know, Neuro has a big grand vision, but is doing this specific vehicle that not what Aurora is doing. And, you know, Aurora is doing something else. And so they're like, hey, this is all this is great. This works. really well. Noro is,

for people who don't know, they're doing this, like weird looking, almost like a minivan that will drive up with your groceries or your packages. You take your groceries out. And so it's not for passengers.

And it's a design, yeah, not for passengers, which means it's kind of ultra-safe and designed around maximum human safety, earliest to road. And by the way,

the module, the car is a platform. So you have your groceries, but by the way, it could also be the hot pizza. Oh, yeah. Now we're talking. Yeah,

Get burritos. Okay, so let's go on to the win. You meet Airbnb again. Let me tell you the whole story. The whole story is fun, and this is, you know, being angels. I learned a bunch of lessons with Airbnb. Unfortunately, the Lofto have been an investor and along the ride with a spectacular team doing an amazing transformation in the world.

But the very first person who pitched Airbnb to me, who I will not name because I don't want to, you know, this is a negative thing. Pitched Airbnb is couch surfing. thing. They said, oh, it's this great thing because you can rent people's couches. And I went, oh, that's a terrible idea. I'm not interested. Terrible idea. And so, and so literally, when other people came and say, hey, the Airbnb people want to meet you, they know that you have this deep expertise in marketplaces and that you yourself did design at Apple and, you know, they think it's right thing. I don't want to meet them. No, I don't want to meet them. Wow.

And, and, and so, and, and, and lesson number one, don't allow the negative, reference from a third party who may be desperately misframing the thing to cloud your judgment. I literally should have gone, I heard you, and I got it there in the neutral vault, as opposed to the update. So then, you know, a couple close friends of mine called me and said, hey, these are super great founders. You should meet them. And I said, okay, you know, I'll go meet them.

And I brought them in on a Sunday. This is when Greylock's offices were actually in San Mateo. And they sit down and two minutes into the pitching because it's kind of like it's eBay but for space on this whole range. And it goes, of course, it can't include a couch, but include a room, an apartment, a castle, the whole thing. And I went, I'm going to make you an offer to invest. Let's spend the rest of this time working together.

So you get a sense of me. Let's bring your challenges out, put it down on the table. Now, here's where the story continues to get interesting. This is Sunday. They came in on Monday. They pitched the partnership on Monday. And by the way, this is such a quick turnaround. I didn't have a chance to do what VCs normally do in this process,

which is they condition their partnership. They write a memo. They talk about the risks that are mitigated, the upsides. So this was cold. This was like partnership like, hey, by the way, there's going to be a company in here pitching tomorrow that I really want to do. And I'll tell you about it when they show up. Right.

Yeah. And so they showed up. They did it. You know, Brian and Joe and Nate did a great presentation. But obviously, back things. everything was tiny, it was very small. It was like, wait, someone's going to rent a room or apartment from someone they don't know and what's going to happen. And oh, my God, is that really going to work?

And neighborhoods and cities are going to allow that and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so here's what the story got some fun color to it. Because David Z, who is a storied investor, right? You know, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pandora, now Roblox, that had just a... Yum. Yes, exactly. You know, just massive returns for Greylock LPs. And my most valued board member at LinkedIn is the reason I'm at Greylock is David. David looks at me and says, look, that's never going to work. But, you know, every VC has to have a deal they're going to fail on. So go ahead and do Airbnb as your learning deal. Wow. Because David's so smart, I'm sitting there going, oh, shit. Right, by very first deal. Now you get nervous. Yeah. Like, shit, is this right? And I was like, wow.

Look, I got conviction. I really need to do this. You know, maybe it'll be the one I'm going to learn on. But, you know, like, I really like Brian and Joe and Nate. Their vision is great. And I really think the world would be so much better off of this works. Now, to David's credit, six months later, the numbers that we really think, Airbnb is this kind of classic hockey stick, which is years of very slow numbers growth.

Six months later, numbers hadn't changed very much. David came to me and said, you were totally right. I was totally wrong. What did you see that I didn't say? How do I update? Because this is one of things that's great about venture partnership. is you're learning and you're sharing your learnings together. So you're updating your calculus about, you know, what kinds of things work and don't work and how to do it and how to build companies and which investments to make and what's going on in the world and technologies and government regulation.

I said, look, you were totally right. There could be a really bad event on the Airbnb platform that could quell it. There could be, you know, banning from city governments that don't understand it. Don't understand it. Don't understand it could be really valuable to citizens. You know, that do, that, all of the risks that you tried out were totally. And it's so strange initially. Like, like, it's like, what is that?

I, you know, it's not, it's only a small group of really passionate about it and it has to grow into a feeling of normalcy. The thing that I believed that you didn't, as I said, this is part of being contrarian and right. That if you, that if, that, like, smart people would go NFW, like you. Yeah. And if it turns out to be right, then it's huge. Right. It's society changing. Right.

This is the key, isn't it? Yes. When you, if everybody, if there was consensus, it should already exist in the world. And it's probably not going to change the world all that much because it's such an obvious idea. And there is an arc, I think, in hearing your talk of where something goes from being everybody doesn't believe it's going to happen to everybody thinks it's completely obvious and anybody can duplicate it. Like, oh, well, Uber's an interesting thing. That's a nice app.

I can make that app. Or Airbnb's nice. So it's a nice. I could make that website. But Chris Saka himself passed on Airbnb because he thought, well, something bad's going to happen. Yes. And this is very instructive, isn't it? Because something bad always happens in every company.

Robin Hood, which we were lucky enough to be angel investors in, had a rough couple of weeks. Uber had a rough couple of years. Airbnb had some, there was some meth party that occurred. Yes. A criminal stole a credit card, rent an Airbnb lease and just trashed it, right? I don't really know, meth party, whatever,

whatever reason. It was a meth party, I remember, yeah. It was a memorable tech crunch headline. It was like, we've been waiting

for this headline. We've had this in the drafts folder. And by the way, that's part of where you see founders because it's a little bit like there's this expression that we use a lot of this nonprofit for entrepreneurs

that I'm on the board of called Endeavor. It's global entrepreneurs. It's like, when the times get tough, the tough get going. And that was exactly what you saw with the Airbnb founders because they went, okay, and literally they said, everybody for the next six

weeks, we're working on trust and safety. Whatever your job is, figure out the trust and safety analog, and that's what we're working on the next six months. We are turning into this, we are solving this problem. We are going to be great for our community because that's what really matters and we're going to be there for them. And that was like, yep, those are the kinds of founders you back. In a way, it's people think that these are like these incredible founders who are visionary and they just come out of the, you know, the eggshell perfect. And it, no, it's these moments where entrepreneurship is forged in fire and pain and suffering and pressure. And you think you're going to quit, right?

Whether it's Airbnb 10 years ago when this happened or, you know, the game stops off. Or April 2020. Well, I mean, let's talk about that. Are you still on the board of Airbnb or? No, part of the fact that, because by the way, maybe one of the things I learned from the Stripe stuff was to say, hey, accept a lower percentage. And so the deal that I struck with Brian is, hey, look, I'll invest for a lower percentage. But I'll be a board observer. And then when you go public, I'll drop off the board because I, you know, and it's like great.

And so, and, and so anyway, so I'm not on the board. But that was actually part of, again, changing up the model some, right? Right. Yeah, there's all these heuristics that we were told. We're critical and, you know, we're not operating in a static environment as investors. It's dynamic. It changes. Just like mobile changed everything.

Global changes everything. And then how governments respond. I mean, the overwhelming consensus for Uber and Airbnb was these are too dangerous to operate in the real world. Why would you not just make software? Why operate in the real world? And now a lot of the great investments are rocket ship companies. Yes.

were you at PayPal when Elon was there? Oh yeah, no. Elon and I are pals. Yeah, yes, absolutely. I think I was the second person he pitched SpaceX too. And there's a funny story there. Let's go. That I don't think is a failure of investment given how Elon pitched it to me.

But there was a fool in the room and it wasn't Elon. It was me. And so Elon said that we sit down at the left bank in Menlo Park. I think we're having, I think it was lunch, might have been breakfast. because I remember roughly the table we were at. And we were talking and he said, oh, I got this great new idea. I'm going to be the first.

I'm going to send life to Mars. I was like, sending life to Mars. The original idea was kind of debating between a turtle and a gelatinous cube with plants in it that you could kind of grow something in. And I was like, Elon, that's not a business. And what's more, the rocket business, you're competing against these like subsidized,

You know, Russians. Russians who hire, you know, we're Lockheed and et cetera, higher X Air Force kernels to lock down the pipe chain and all the rest. And like, you know, like this is just brutal as a space to get into, you know, and like, look, I get it that you have these, you know, great ideas and these things out there, but reusable rockets and cost of it and importance of getting to space. And, you know, you're like, you're a visionary and you're driven. and no, anyone could make it happen to you, but, you know, that doesn't attract me as a commercial investment. Aha. Yeah, he was originally also thinking about putting a biosphere in the atmosphere to back up.

When he told me about it, it was back up the biosphere. Let's put this in space. The Airbnb investment, I'm assuming you put a couple million bucks into that, it becomes worth $100 billion. That means you return $5, $10 billion to LPs, something in that range. Yeah, more on the more on the smaller side of that. But yeah, that's a range. That's got to be the greatest feeling for you as an investor, your first time up at bat, you hit a grand slam that basically goes like two states over.

I mean, has that ever ever happened in venture capital before that somebody the first time up at bat hit a hundred billion dollar company? Oh, it's probably not the first time of bad, although, you know, I had done Facebook as an angel and so forth. So it wasn't like, you know, my first rodeo. And look, look, it does feel great. But part of the thing about these things is that part of what you're doing in investing in a portfolio is you're playing for a portfolio, for luck, you know, making sure luck, like trying to allow luck to break your way. Like, you know, like could I have told you for sure it was going to be that? Of course not.

No. Right. It would have been crazy, right, to do that. lose all these places where things could break on the way. And, you know, one of the things that we unfortunately make is the decision, actually, you know this because you're an expert poker player, is this whole like resulting thing, which is you're a genius of the results good and you're an idiot at the result's bad. And actually, in fact, it's a process at how you do it.

And you have to allow that serendipity of what, and you're the poker player, but what's in the flow and what, you know, what's dealt and everything else as part of this. And so you, so sure, it feels great. That was the first thing. But part of, like, when I talk about investing, I say, look, if you're not making both type 1 and type 2 errors, you're probably not investing intelligently. Right. Explain type 1 and type 2. So, false positive, it's false negatives, right?

Right. You know, like, ooh, I invest, like the portfolio and anti-bra, I invested in that and it didn't work. And I invested in that. I passed on that, and it did work. Right. And if you're not making both investments, you're probably not, you're not making both errors. You're probably not investing smart. Now, what you want to do is enough of the right, you know, of true positives, right?

That's the really key thing. The other thing that people don't understand about this business frequently is they go, oh, well, you know, you invested $10 million in that, and do you regret losing it? And you're like, you never regret the $10 million. You regret the $10 million you didn't put into Stripe or into, you know. Twitter. Evans, like, yeah, if you want to angel invest in TTR, I could, yeah. Exactly.

Those are the message. SMS? I remember him showing it to be over breakfast with Biz. And I'm like, he's like, now type in what you had for breakfast. And now Biz has had, you know, tofu scramble and then you have Webas for Chairs. And I was like, you just cost me five cents. Like I get 200 of these SMS and one. Like, this is so dumb.

Why isn't this a website? Like, you're going backwards in your career, Evan. You went from a blog post to now the headline of a blog post. If this succeeds, it's going to be a cacophony of idiocracy. I was right, but I was wrong. Exactly. You were both right and wrong. It's like one of the most humbling professions because, yeah, you're, you miss things

and then you hit things and you don't know until what year five, six, seven of an investment, how you did. Frequently, yep. So when you're training young investors, what is the process that you think is the winning process here, as we said here in 2021, um, for being. a world-class investor? So there's actually multiple smart ways of playing the game, and it depends on exactly which game you're in.

So, for example, Greylock has, like, amongst the strongest enterprise practice of any of the venture firms. I mean, I literally put our enterprise team pound for pound up and services, like finding customers and heads of sales, and other kinds of things against any other venture firm in the world. And that, by the way, is highly disciplined. It's price on entry matters, percentage still matters, you know, kind of, you know, what is the way? Because you can actually map out like this amount of capital.

You can do diligence on, do the customers like you call them and find out, will they buy it, will it work? How do you amplify it? All the rest of the stuff. And that's one style investing. And by the way, it's not only, you know, enterprise. It also is like e-commerce is more this way. There's a stack of these things. And by the way, you can make a great vendor fund just in these kinds of things.

of investing because you lose money rarely, right? And you have a predictable high outcome. Now, the kind of investing I tend to do and it tends to be the, you know, this is my side on the, on the Greylock side is the, well, if it works, Airbnb, it's going to be huge. And if it doesn't work, it's probably zero. And it's probably not going to work. Just so we all agree going in. So I'm going to have a portfolio of these things. And so that's, of course, part of the reason why, like, you know, the autonomous vehicles, you know, is me. crypto is both me and Josh McFarland. So I did Zappo and Josh McFarland did Coinbase.

And so, you know, you get some spread out. It's not just me doing the, well, who knows? You know, kind of investing. And so on those, it's a funny parallel, which is your most successful investment is probably worth more than everything else combined. Your next most successful investment is worth more than everything else combined. And so you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're really playing for the grand slams and then how those come together.

And then making that possible. And that's that's that contrarian but right. And how do you tune that? And then that's both art and science, but there's a lot of art to it is part of how, you know, I do it. And, and, you know, some other partners are great luck too. Yeah. I feel like that.

You and I are sympathico in that, which is when you're looking at a company like this, there's so many things that can go wrong that I just write those things down. And I'm just, I rip up that piece of paper, I throw it away. I'm like, who cares? Who cares if like, you know, like, yeah, sure. Somebody could stop it in Vegas. They could stop Uber because they don't want it there. But that's not the only city in the United States.

It's like we don't need to win Vegas in year one. Vegas can be the last city to fall, right? Like, you don't have to, you just need to get some things right for these things to just change the world. When you look at something like Clubhouse, it has like some great traction. I don't know if you had a chance to, or if you were in the running for that. I know Bill Gurley and Inreson were like the two going hardcore on it in the final stages. Mike DeBow with Greylock was actually there as well. And so I did some events on it.

I have one of the early test accounts, you know, doing it. So you guys were around the rim. It bounces off the rim, $100 million round, or more, $10 million investment. The founders are taking a little bit of money off the table. It's not the standard investment. In fact, it reminds me of your description of what happened with Stripe, right? Like, this is non-standard. non-standard terms, weird moment like that, there's only 2,000 VCs on the beta, and it goes for 100 million.

Did you want to make that bet in 100 million? We actually, I think, we're one of the first term sheets in. Well, not higher, but we're in the first term sheets in because part of being fast and all the rest of the stuff. And, you know, the partnership was like, wow, you know, it's very early and it's very, it's kind of a, it's a very high valuation. but, you know, Mike had deep conviction and we were supportive. And we looked at it and said, look, this could be one of the interesting social platforms. And, you know, just, I don't know how much your, your listeners know this. But, you know, Greylock has a big history of doing, you know, social platforms.

Because, you know, not only obviously LinkedIn and Facebook, but also, like, current portfolio is discord and next door and Roblox. And so. Yum. Yeah, we have a lot of, a lot of kind of capabilities and kind of, you know, juice in this area. And so we looked at and said, okay, let's take the bat.

And, you know, I don't know exactly which mechanics. I know we still have a great relationship with the founder. But the, but, you know, we, we were in the running. Now you look at the second bet.

A couple of months later, $100 million out of billion. Now, does that give you pause that we're in a bubble or that this is a little bit crazy? Or does this make total sense to you since getting escape velocity, as we talked about before it's so hard that,

you know, hey, six months or whatever it is, having been there for Facebook and having a front row seat for Nextdoor and other, you know, and obviously having created LinkedIn itself, you've seen this before. Yeah. Crazy bat or crazy brilliant? Well, this is kind of like we're at the resulting questions.

The question is percentage. So it has above zero percent chance, clearly, with attraction of being one of those things. And, and, and I think that the, the bull theory of it is, it's got that magic right. People are joining it. It's hitting the curve. It's part of a portfolio. You should take the bet.

Price doesn't matter other than the fact that the, you know, go on the bet, even though it seems like a crazy price for or to do it. And that would be the bull case. The bear case would be, look, most of these really successful social platforms tend to be more asynchronous than synchronous in terms of how they platform apps and will clubhouse get there. I'm sure they have plans to. And so, you know, you can have,

And that's where you've got to go to is the price right on it. And I think, you know, classically, people are going to judge it by the results, but I don't think it was a dumb bet to make. I don't think it's a dumb bet either. I'll be totally honest. I think it's so rare that a paradigm shift happens. And we've witnessed them that you have to make the bet, whether it's, you know, images when Instagram, video with Snapchat and now this. You just have no choice but to make the bet because owning whatever they own now, 20% of it, I guess they got $10 million and then $100. So they're pushing 20% of it.

If it becomes worth $10, $20, $30 billion, it's a no-brainer bet. Have you, I'm assuming you went into quarantine in early March, like the rest of us? Yes. Have you, and now we're getting on close to a year now, but vaccines are coming. And it's obviously we're in the end game now. I think everybody would agree. And if you're looking this as a historical document, we've been doing, like, we've had days of over 2 million shots, and Israel is kind of on the other side of it.

and this miracle vaccine is truly a miracle and probably undersold. Have you met with any founders in person or are you doing all your investing over Zoom? Or do you do like a walk and talk with them? Because the whole business prior to this was about that Sunday where you took out the book and said, let's jam. Let's jam on a Sunday in San Mateo. Yes. So I have been completely bio-bubbled. Me too.

So I have done, well, there is. is a stealth investment that I joined. I'm out on the board of that we made, I think, early this year. We're closing it in December. I have yet to meet the founders in person. They have yet to meet me. We have many a great Zoom conversation. And so, yes, that's where you're doing investing.

And then the other thing I would say is, look, I have strong hope of getting back to you know, kind of the, you know, being in person in all kinds of ways. I think there's lots of virtues to it. One thing is, despite the fact, and by the way, I think it's a miracle pro-globalization of how the vaccines used to be done in years, now being done in months. We're even probably figuring out how to do the safety protocols with 100% the same safety, but quicker for future kinds of issues. Now that being said, given unevenness of vaccine manufacturer,

unevenness of distribution, that contributing on a global basis to variants of COVID and having different variants running around and some of these variants, the vaccines we find against, some of the vaccines, the variants of vaccines will be less sign against and all the rest. You know, I just want to kind of caution everyone to think a little bit too much like, oh, my God, it's just a couple of months and then we're good. And you're like, no, no, we're going to be in turbulence for a while and plan on that. because and so personally I think I'll be like I will be a late adopter to emerging from the bio bubbles because I can work perfectly safe for both myself and and contributing the rest of the world in this kind of you know in this virtual simulation reality we literally are now in a simulation in Zoom room all right we're wrapping up here just what does it mean for the future of San Francisco where people have fled young people don't want to come to San Francisco anymore in large part they don't see the need And then getting a CFO or, you know, somebody who's like,

you've been at big companies for 20, 30 years to move their family to San Francisco or the Bay Area is really hard. Right. And they're just like they don't see the point of coming here and they want to work from Utah or Miami or Austin or L.A. They don't, people don't want to be here anymore. It's kind of broken. What happens to San Francisco in the wider Bay area? And do you think you need to be here? Because like you said, you're doing everything over Zoom.

What is the future of Silicon Valley? well i think you know look when you have a brand and a position and a you know kind of a like like people know who i am i run this podcast and yeah i've done these investments i don't like i think i could do this you know through zoom to 100% yeah we're ongoing but like part of the definition is the is the young turks the you know the the women and the men who are coming with hunger you know in their hearts in their bellies and so forth and and and and and and every available manage for doing it. And that will be, like, there'll be less, like, sanguine about, is it through Zoom or is it in person? It's like every available edge. And so I am a very strong believer that Silicon

Valley broadly itself will, will bounce back, will be super strong. I think San Francisco has some ongoing problems between the kind of the city and the people and the government kind of not really liking the fact they have a tech industry there, which I think is kind of a little I'm not sane. It's like every city is fighting to court the tech industry, except the one that already has it. And they're trying to drive everybody out. It's so weird. Exactly. It's a level of dysfunction nobody could ever anticipate. So there's a difference between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I think Silicon Valley will be back to the races. Now, my hope is that with some of this diaspora, we will see many more growing great tech centers. I mean, you know, L.A. and

Boulder and Denver and Seattle and, you know, and New York and all there, that will all benefit from that. And so as opposed to Silicon Valley, literally taking all the oxygen, there'll not be multiple areas. And by the way, I think that will ultimately be better for Silicon Valley. I think that region competition will also be, I think, a strong benefit. So I'm hopeful that the answer is really both. Okay.

As we wrap, you have done better than you could have ever anticipated, I assume. Yes. we're both now over 50, if you can believe it. Yes. I don't know if you're starting to feel old or tired, but you seem more enthusiastic than when I met you 20 years ago. What do you think that you know, you got this last, you know, whatever we got? Hopefully we got 20, 30 good years left.

Yes. You want to just keep going this way? You're going to run for president. What do you think? Definitely not running for president. Why not? You'd be great. Look, I try to support the people who who jump on the public service grenade.

and you know I am more of a technology and a company builder and so forth. So I try to support those folks who go into this this melee. Like a friend of mine was thinking about running for a president. I said, look, you will go from celebrated CEO to suspected criminal in, you know, one announcement from this sort of stuff. And so, like, you want to do that. And what did Zuckerberg say? That wasn't Zuckerberg.

I don't think Zuckerberg has an interest in this. But I don't know. I don't think so. And so, you know, for me, like, how do we build the future? And I'm trying to help, like, for example, all this craziness around the tech clash, like, no, no, technology is how we build the future. There may be challenges of technology. There may be things that are broken that we need to fix.

And the way we fix it is through technology. Yes. Have you not been paying attention? So, like, look, it's don't stop. It's not the answer is, no, no, don't do X to Y. Like, why more than X? Like, do it this way. Like, optimization, tweak it.

Yes. And maybe even strong improvements, but it's not stop. It's do this instead. Right. Like, how do we do this? Because it's so easy to be a critic. It's like, well, be a politician and don't lie. And it's like, well, okay, politicians have to assemble a coalition.

So they are sometimes going to fudge the truth in various ways. And that's unfortunate. And the good politicians really hate doing it. But you can't say, like, stop. Right. No, no, no, no, no. Do it this way. So, for example, like, say, okay, say where you disagree, but, like, articulate the positiveness and try to get people on board, you know, that kind of thing.

And so, anyway, the same kind of thing around the tech clash stuff. And so, you know, for me, you know, part of what I see is I see, the way I describe myself is I'm a tech optimist, not a tech utopian. Just because you build a technology doesn't mean that there's necessarily a good result, but you can shape the technology to amazingly positive outcomes. This is one of the reasons why I admire Black Mirror, I find it painful to watch because you're like, well, I know how to fix that. Like, I know how to make, I know how to make that happen. Just get rid of the follower account. Yes. Just don't put that when that person, yeah, puts all those likes.

Don't put that at the top of the feed. Yes. That's a fixable problem. We could sound that. Yes. And so, and so, you know, that's the reason why I still have the fire in my belly and the hope for the future. All right. Well, there we have it.

folks, podcaster, investor, entrepreneur, but most importantly, tech optimist. Hey, let's do it again next year, not seven years from now. Can we do that? Can we put it on the calendar now? We loved having some time together. Cannot wait to see you in person again in the after times as opposed to the before times. Reed Hoffman, if you're building a company, gosh, Greylock is a great firm. And it goes beyond Reed. I've got to know many of your different team members and what an amazing crew you got over there. You've really developed some talent. That's why I wanted to ask you about all those talent developing questions.

You've done great. And if you want to read about Reed Hoffman, readhoffman.org. And if you want to hear his last appearance in November of 2014, episode 490, and Masters of Scale, just a great podcast. Really well done. All right, I'll see you soon, brother. Jason, always an honor and a pleasure.