This Week in Startups - The Definitive History of VC with "Power Law" author Sebastian Mallaby | E1550

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Huge interview today. "Power Law" author Sebastian Mallaby joins the show to break down some of the most important moments in VC history and his lessons from writing the book, including: the youth revolt (14:18), KP vs Sequoia (27:02), what makes a legendary VC (38:40), and more! (0:00) Jason tees up today's interview with "Power Law" author Sebastian Mallaby (1:42) Sebastian explains how and why he wrote a book on the history of VC (13:13) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist  (14:18) The virtuous cycle of luck early in a VC career, youth revolt in startups, Zuckerberg spurning Sequoia (26:02) Embroker - Use code TWIST to get an extra 10% off insurance at https://Embroker.com/twist  (27:02) Tom Perkins and the Kleiner Perkins rise and fall vs Sequoia's sustained dominance, KP's Genentech investment (37:18) Harmonic - Get $4000 off at https://harmonic.ai/twist (38:40) What characteristics make a legendary VC? (56:29) Why are institutional LPs allocating more capital to VC, what happened with China's interest in the industry? Other investable industries other than software FOLLOW Sebastian: https://twitter.com/scmallaby FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood BUY "Power Law": https://www.amazon.com/Power-Law-Venture-Capital-Making/dp/B094PSKDZV

Okay, everybody, it's Thursday. Quick intro. Sebastian Malaby, the author of the power law, is going to be on the pod. We do a deep dive into the history of venture capital, all the great firms, all the great moments. Sebastian did an insane amount of research for his book, which is a great book. He spent five years writing at 250 people in our industry. He interviewed, and we talk about all the legendary VC firms and what they learned. It's important, important.

if you're a founder or you're a capital allocator for you to listen to this episode. And please buy his book as well. Stick with us. It's going to be a great episode. This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist.

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very excited because at long last, we have Sebastian Malaby joining us to talk about his book, The Power Law, which I have been calling your favorite VC's favorite book about VC. Sebastian Malibia, of course, is a journalist and senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington Post columnist since 1999, worked for the economist. He's written other books as well that are just, you know, I mean, this is sort of a triumph of research and access and is, as we will talk about in our interview, a defense of our industry and a realistic look, I think, at the history of it and what vegans. your capital can and cannot do. So welcome to the program, Sebastian Malby, super excited to have you here. Thanks, guys. Thanks for coming on. I heard maybe Keith Rabein mentioned the book when he was on this pod. And I was like, you know, I know the history of Silicon Valley. I've read all the books. I got, why do I need to read this book? But I got it anyway, because it's a good, you know,

judge of like, what's a good book? And I was absolutely delighted by a couple of things about your book. Number one, you picked the right stories. And two, you threaded them together very nicely and you focused on what matters. Why each of these venture firms were formed and what impact they had on the valley. And as you read the book, you know, if you're in Silicon Valley, I've been investing for 11 years. I've been in the industry for 30. I knew 60% of the story, 70%. But the way you threaded together just created a nice mental model for me and framework

and filled in a couple of stories I never heard of. I was a little not knowledgeable on the Cisco drama as but one example. And the book is so good that with the 11 people I have on our investment team, I said, listen, I could tell you these stories over the next couple of years on an investment team meeting. everybody read the book and take notes per chapter. And we're all going to just talk about it. And we're going to put it to bed so everybody understands the history of Silicon Valley and how we got here. So just congratulations.

The book is just writer to writer. It reads very quickly. It's a great listen, by the way, and incredibly informative. So why did you write the book and how did you pick which stories to include? Because the book does move briskly, which is great. That's what you want in a history book like this. So you can cover a lot of territory. But you had to make some hard decisions, I think, on what to include and what not to include.

So how did you pick which to include? Well, thanks for that. Great intro of both of you. I wrote the book for two reasons. One was to explain the thought process in venture allocation. As you know, it's not like public markets. There are no quantitative metrics. I had written a book before about the history of hedge funds.

And intellectually, that was a fascinating challenge for me to understand. understand how at an early stage when you've got no price to book ratio, no price earnings ratio, none of that stuff, and you're making judgments on people, how do you think about that? So that was the first thing to get inside the minds of venture investors by hanging out with them, by hanging out with the entrepreneurs that they funded, and by taking time, I always take four or five years on these books, and that gives me enough time to really absorb the culture. And then the other thing I was trying to do is show what the impact of venture capital is on tech ecosystems. Because there's always this question, does venture create innovation or does it just show up for innovation?

And there's a lot of cynical people who just think the investors are there, you know, leaching off the entrepreneurs and don't contribute to anything. And I think I kind of had an open mind before, but when I done the research, I was convinced that, you know, the network effects that VCs create by connecting people, money, and ideas are huge in terms of explaining innovation. And it's instructive that the only rival to the Valley, really, as a major tech ecosystem is China. And they started with the same venture capital. In fact, the same companies, like Sequoia China is the biggest in China as well as the biggest in Valley, right? So it was the same connecting up of people and ideas and money combined with, you know, an investor who's seen multiple start-ups get started up before. And you marry that with a passion and commitment and hard work and vision of the entrepreneur.

And you get magic. So those are the two things. And you're right, Jason. I had to kind of pick stories. There's too many stories. You can't tell all of them. And I guess I went for stories that I thought would resonate with. with a lot of readers, you know, if it's a name that people have heard of, you know, the funding

of Apple, the funding of Google, the funding of Facebook. Those stories were obvious draws because I think it's tough to get people to read things about companies they never heard of. I made one exception, which is, you know, in the early internet, there was a company called UUNet. Nobody's ever heard of that today. But back in the day, it was very important getting the hardware built for the internet. And it kind of illustrated how people sometimes say, well, the government created the internet or the Defense Department, DARPA created the internet.

And that's kind of literally true in the sense that the early internet was like that. But the user-based for the internet around the time the private sector took over was probably a million people or 100,000, something very, very low. What took the internet from being, a niche product for scientists into being a household thing was venture capital. And Axel's backing of UUNet, along with a couple of other investors and Menlo Ventures.

Mitch Kepor. Right, right. I'm on the board of a company with. And so I didn't know that whole story of his history. And so this was like just an amazing moment for me. UUNet was very famous because companies wanted to get on the internet, but they didn't know how to get on the backbone. And Bitnet and Arpinet were suddenly allowed to. put companies on, and Mitch Kepoor flying around on his private jet, trying to get an allocation. And I was like, wow, that's, you know, that's 20 years when I was just starting the industry

before I kind of got started and investing, whatever. And so this is like one of the great moments for me in the actual book. I was mountain biking in Lake Tahoe listening to this. I reround the, I restarted the chapter so I could listen to it twice, just because I wanted to absorb everything there. So I, I, I, you did a really good job on the character study. just talking about books again, and then Molly, I'll let you in here. Sorry, I'm getting a little excited. But I'm just curious on the formation of the book.

How many people did you talk to for, let's say, you know, over an hour? So five years to make this book, it's like, that's a tremendous commitment. And I like this idea that you let it kind of stew a little bit. You let it brew and, you know, really think about in your mind what's important. But I'm curious the effort that you put into the book in terms of the number of people you talk to

and then how many hours you spend with them? I don't have exact numbers, but I think I would probably have spoken to, say, 250 people for one hour plus. And then there were some people who I went back to and back to and back to and back to. And then some people who were not necessarily in the story, but were kind of adjacent to it and knew it.

And those were people who I would, you know, I would meet them once maybe, and then I would follow up on email whenever I had, I was stuck on something. There was a terrific academic called Steve Kaplan at the University of Chicago whenever I had a data issue on, because as you know, understanding the right benchmark to use to compare VC performance is a debated topic. And he's like, he's written academic papers on different kinds of benchmarks. So I went back to him repeatedly.

That's one example. But it's a bullpocket at 250. Yeah. Talk about at what point, you know, as you just mentioned, you go into this with an open mind, you're collecting this kind of series of stories. I embarked on a very, you know, one, one millionth version of this at Marketplace to try to sort of explain this weird black box of financing that's so incredibly influential. And I wonder at what point in your research did threads start to emerge? Because, you know, your ultimate conclusion is that there is 100% a lot of luck here,

but not entirely. And I wonder, like, you know, how far into the history did you get where you started to say, okay, I'm starting to do some patterns here? Well, I remember going on my first trip, reporting trip for this book. I don't live in Silicon Valley. I would go in there for like a week and stack up as many meetings as I could. And I came back from the first one, having been told a bunch of stories, I would say, I would meet an entrepreneur, and I would say, I went to see Jerry Yang.

And I said, so why did you take money from Sequo? and Michael Moritz and not from somebody else. And you said to me, well, Mike had soul. I'm like, so, what do you mean? That's so, that's so vague. You're like, that's not finance. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's not finance.

That can't be the source of alpha. And then I went and saw on the same trip, I think it was, Patrick Connoisse, another Mike Morris investee. And I said, tell me the story about how you got funded by Sequoia. And he starts describing this meeting. where it all hinged around his bike, which he had tied up outside the Sequoia office, and as Maritz escorted him outside onto the kind of threshold of the building, after the interview, and he spots this bike that's not normally there.

He says, oh, is that your bike, Patrick? Patrick said yes. And he says, what's your time on the old Honda climb? And Patrick gives him some time. And Mike is impressed, and, you know, that's a pretty good time. So it shows he's got grit. And again, I'm like, I can't really write a whole book about people. investing based on bicycle times, right? That's just, you know. And so I got a bit discouraged. I came back. I was kind of telling friends I wasn't sure I would do this thing because it just

felt so random. And it was only after going back a few times and starting to hear sort of stories around the value out after the investment. That was part of it. And stories around sort of the the way that, you know, you come at things with a different mindset, I think, if you're a tech investor from, it's not how people are normally disposed to think. So I spend a huge amount of time with Vinod Kossler early on. And the sheer ambition of this thinking, that kind of power law mindset where, you know, you, you see the internet coming, you see that, you know, connectivity needs to be speeded up and broadband, I mean, the bandwidth has to be broader. And instead of thinking, yeah, it needs to be five times bigger, you think to yourself,

is going to be 500 times bigger. And that sheer ambition that allows you to take that big leap forward in imagination terms. So I started to kind of get tuned into the mindset, and that's when I got hooked on the subject. If you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud, then you need to be SOC2 verified from a third party if you're going to close big deals. No SOC2 compliance, no closing major customers. No lighthouse customers for you. Oh, no.

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That's right. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's v-a-n-ta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock too right now. It's really interesting. You know, one of the things you point out is early luck in VC and deal flow. And it just got me thinking about my own career. I was lucky enough to have invested early in Uber. And you mentioned in the book, how a lot of the studies show, hey, if you get lucky early,

you get better deal flow. You get better deal flow. And you get a reputation. You get more LPs. You get more LPs. You can write bigger checks. You have more influence. And thus, the defining characteristic of a great venture capitalist is getting lucky early.

And Michael Moritz was one of those. And he came from journalism. You also got into Don Valentine's crew. Did you get to meet Don Valentine, who obviously passed recently, and did you get to spend any time with him? It was a funny story because, you know, like actually many of the Sequoia people I ended up becoming friends with, Don Valentine's first response to me kind of getting in touch was, you know, get lost and then double get lost, you know.

You basically didn't want to meet you talk. And finally, I got some friend of his. I forget who it was, but somebody from. from his own era, contacted him and said, hey, no, I've spent three hours with this guy. It's worth of time. So he agrees to meet me. And he lives living outside Phoenix in Arizona. It's not exactly on the beaten path from me.

But I went there. And I was coming from a dialogue conference, actually, in Arizona. And I got this long Uber ride up to Phoenix. And as I was approaching, I wanted to be sure I actually understood exactly how the car should get into. where he lived. So I called him up and he said, you know what, I decided not to do this meeting. And he starts sort of yelling at me. And it is totally pointless, totally pointless. So I kind of calm him down on my cell phone in the back of the Uber. And, you know, I'm still talking, kind of calming him down as the Uber pulls up outside his house. And I walk out with this phone

on my ear and I give him a big smile. And then he's like, okay, he's caught. He's late. I'm there. So at the end of two hours, we were great friends. So I did get to see him. And it was fun. Talk about his influence on Silicon Valley. I think maybe, you know, Maritz and Doug Leone, who, you know, were mentors to me and, you know, Rule Off and, you know, the Scouts program and everything. I got to meet those gentlemen and really took a lot of notes. Let's leave me with that. But they took notes from Valentine.

And you talk about Valentine's very unique ability to jump in the hot tub, quite literally. Quite literally. Yeah. Talk about Valentine and what made him so unique as an individual and his impact on venture capital. Well, yeah, the jumping in the Hop-Tab reference is that when he founded Atari, which was the original video game maker made Pong, for example, which was kind of like a table tennis thing on your screen. The crew at Atari were a pretty wayward bunch. You know, you walked into the factory when he went around there. It was a converted ice skating rink. And he was coughing a bit.

And the thick smell of marijuana smoke was something that he found it difficult to fight his way through. And so, you know, he gets this, you know, the founder is known in Bushnell. He's this wild sort of, you know, Hugh Hefner for tech kind of figure with his board meetings take place in his hot tub. and if you wanted to kind of be part of that, you had to take your clothes off and get in the hot tub with him. And so Don Valentine was invited to do that. And the good thing was that he'd been a former water polo player for the Navy. So when he took his shirt off, his authority went up, not down. And he got into the hot tub and he ended up doing the investment, whereas the guy from Fidelity Ventures,

who didn't take his shirt off and didn't get in the hot tub at the same meeting, did not invest. And I mean, the serious point here is that to, you know, founders can be brilliant. They can also be crazy or wayward or whatever, anarchic, mercurial. And if you've got the personality of a former Navy water polo player and with a physique of that, but also a bit of the personality that might go with that, and you're tough enough to not be intimidated by that kind of person, it opens your aperture to investments that maybe other people could do. And of course, there are lots of ways in which people can have a wide app and, you know, EQ comes in lots of forms. And it doesn't have to be the Don Valentine tough guy variety

at all. But I think the point of, you know, this is a human to human sport. This is like, this is not being a hedge fund person and staring at your screen. This is a out there with people kind of job. Deals are closed in the hot tub or on the bike or skiing or whatever it is. Right. We're at Burning Man, not in a spreadsheet. Correct. Exactly. That's the point I was making. Yeah. Yeah. And it is interesting because over and over and over, I mean, listen, like, you point out at the end of the book that they're like, I'm not getting in a hot tub with some strange man, right?

There's going to be versions of this that do not involve, you know, Katrina Lake talks about this actually with Chris Zaka and his attempt to have this sort of hot tub meeting culture and her being like, I'm a woman and I'm pregnant, so I'm not doing it. So it's really interesting to sort of fast forward to the part where the industry does need to change in this one way and say, like, what is this going to look like in the future? Because there is a version of looking past, I mean, over and over in the book, you talk about how bad Steve Jobs smelled. And then Mark Zuckerberg, one of the stories I'm obsessed with is this kind of the youth rebellion in which a generation of founders becomes profoundly skeptical of venture capital. says we think they're vultures. This is sort of the reason that YC gets founded in the way that it does. And you tell this story that I had never heard before about Zuckerberg showing up to a venture meeting in pajamas to Sequoia, exactly, to meet with Sequoia, who is a lead, I mean, Sequoia looms large throughout the entire book as legend full stop, except in this one case

where Mark Zuckerberg comes in there with his co-founder in his pajama pants and basically is like, No, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, they didn't win all of them. And in some sense, you know, one of the effects of being the big guy in the valley is that people end up getting up against you if you're not carefully, you're too arrogant. And there was that moment where that was particularly the case. I didn't exactly know.

I had this theory, which you guys may have a view on, which is that the effect of the tech bubble in the 90s was that VCs didn't. not retire, right? Because they were making so much money, it was going so well. And so probably the average age of VCs crept up at the end of the 90s. And then at the same time, along comes, you know, cloud and the ability to do software startups, which took less capital. And you, you could be younger like Zuckerberg was and still make a huge success of it. You didn't have to be an experienced hardware person. And so founders' age just went down right at the same time that funders ages went up. And that, I think, exacerbated this culture clash, which was expressed both through the founding of Y Combinator, which was a sort of revolt against the big check VCDEM,

and in the name of Founders Fund, which was started the same year, 2005 as YC, founders fund obviously being, you know, we'll never fire the founder, will be founder-friendly. And that whole vibe became the mantra. Yeah, it's distinctly what happened. I was maybe 34 years old when this was all going down and hanging out with the principals. And it really was, there was a third thing that happened, which was angel investing culture had started to emerge. Now, in the early days of angel investing, as you talk about in the book, they were like 10, like in the country. And they wrote very small checks. But then a bunch of us got together, Naval, myself, Chris Saka, you know, in that time period, it started writing 2550K checks. And then, then why Combinator was doing their thing, and Naval turned venture hacks into Angelist. So that kind of group then were able to put 250,500K hacks into companies and get them going. And so whenever you go before the VCs is very disruptive, because now you've built the relationship with the founder. And that's kind of what I built my career on.

That's what Paul Graham built his career on. And the analogy I've used is there was this great orchard of trees, Nolan Bushnell, Tom Perkins, all these people were going and picking apples from the trees. And then all of a sudden, the VCs got disintermediated. They stopped going to the orchard where it's kind of messy and you've got to do a bunch of work. And they just started buying the apples when they graduated from Wycommodator, when they got their seed funding. And once they relinquished that hard work, the whole industry changed.

So it was actually the insertion of that third group of people who kind of got in front of it. And that's, you know, in some ways it's changed everything. And then in other ways, it's created more inviagnation. inventory, and since they have bigger funds, they can still get their 10% if they need to. But it did change the dynamic where instead of Nolan having the relationship or Michael Moritz having the relationship with Yang or Nolan having, Nolan Bushnell having it with Valentine, now you had Peter Thiel as an angel getting the relationship with Zach, or even before that, Sean Parker, or me with Travis and Uber and Saka with Travis and Uber, you know, right on down the line,

right? And that was, that had happened very few times. It did happen also with Apple, obviously, and it happened with Dropbox. I think you covered Dropbox as well. And kind of that Mitch Kapoor story that you were mentioning, right? He was the one who found UUNet. The UUNet founder didn't really like investors. He wouldn't probably have taken money straight away from a full-blown venture capital partnership, but he was willing to make friends with one person, one individual, Mitch Kippur, and then that became the bridge to series A funding. Really, I have to say Sean Parker gets a, does doesn't get enough recognition of it.

Sean Parker was punk rock. Napster, you know, just partying and just how we thought. And Zuckerberg was the biggest fish. So you have the punk rock kid who got punked by Maritz with Plaxo. People don't know that story. Maybe you could tell that a little bit. And that really kind of, that was the pivot moment or I don't know how you talk about it, but a paradigm shifting moment.

That's the word to use. So I guess when you look at Venture, that was the paradigm shifting moment, you think? I think it is. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, Molly raised the story about the pajamas. And the preceding story was precisely what you just said. In other words, Sean Parker had been kicked out of Plaxo. And Mike Moritz and Sequoia had been instrumental in that.

And so when Sean Parker got to know Zach, you know, his message was, don't go near Mike Moritz, don't go near Sequoia. So when Sequoia showed up, when Sequoia tried to invest in Facebook, book, Zach showed up with a slide deck, which, you know, he arrived late, and he arrived late on purpose. He arrived in his pajamas. And he had this slide deck, which had 10 reasons why you should not invest in my company. And one of them was Sean Parker is a partner in it.

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All right, thanks, Embroker. You do a great job over there. They do my insurance. That's all you need to know. Talk about Tom Perkins. It's another person who most people, know him by some of the stupid stuff he said at the end of his career, where he was talking about his watch being worth more money than, you know, 10 Rolex is,

and he bought the biggest penthouse, and he kind of said a bunch of dumb things. But he also was, like Don Valentine, very aggressive, and he also created companies and originated companies. Maybe we could talk about his impact, because now we have all these venture studios, trying to originate ideas, but that kind of was Tom Perkins, what, in the age? 70s? I mean, that's the amazing thing. Yeah, both kind of Perkins and Sequoia started in 1972. And the two big innovations in venture methodology were, first of all, you know, roll your sleeves up, get involved with the founder and be tough if you have to be tough. And that was

sort of the Don Valentine thing. But the other big thing was stage by stage investing, the notion that some things are just too risky at the beginning to write a big check, but you can write a small check. And you can do what Tom Perkins described. as being taking the white hop risks off the table. So the best example of that would be Genentech, where somebody who'd been an associate at Kleiner Perkins as a young guy actually got fired, but we're still working out of the KP offices. And he had the idea of doing a biotechnology gene splicing, recombinant DNA company.

And that was going to be Genentech. He identified a scientist who would be his partner, who was a leader in the field. And he came to Perkins for funding and he said, you know, I need, I think it was half a million bucks to get started here, which in the 70s was quite a lot of money. And Perkins said, look, you know, who knows that this is going to work? If it does work, the upside is massive. So I want to be part of this. But let's put a little bit of money in.

And instead of setting up your own lab, you can contract with a few of the existing academic labs to test the technology, to show me that we can get across the first hurdles. And he did this also with tandem computers, which was, you know, an innovation because it was a fail-safe system where if one part of the computer crashed, the other part kept it going, which was essential for stuff like, you know, financial applications where you really couldn't have the computer go down at all. And he incubated these inside Kleiner Perkins, as you described. They kicked around, you know, ideas around over the table in the Kleinit-Berkin's conference room. And it was a very hands-on thing. Tom Perkins himself had founded a laser

startup. So he was an entrepreneur as well as an investor. And so I think, you know, I was struck while I was writing the book that, you know, there was this narrative at Andrews and recent Horowitz that it was a huge innovation to have only people who had been entrepreneurs become general partners. By the way, of course they dropped that later. But it wasn't even new in the first place because that was pretty much the KP model way back when. Right. Well, and I actually think that, you know, there is this tale of these two giants woven throughout the book, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, where Sequoia emerges as this utterly dominant

firm and John Doer, who has a phenomenal reputation, who is really, you know, I think, I would say all over again having a second or third or fourth, however many acts he's on, having yet another act in the VC world right now. but the kind of decline of Kleiner and a bit of an implosion of John Doer compared to Sequoia's extremely consistent success is really, really interesting. Can you walk us through that? Yeah. I mean, when I got into the research, you know, I was thinking about what are the factors that make a successful partnership really survive and endure. And, you know, there's sort of obvious things around, you know, you have to have good deal selections, so being deliberate about your methods for

that you have to add value afterwards and so forth and so on. But the thing I kind of underweighted was the glue within partnerships and paying attention to the internal dynamics and managing those actively. Either in a benchmark kind of way where you say, okay, we're going to have an equal partnership and therefore by definition when you would bring in a new partner who has an equal carry to the older ones, the older ones are financially incentivized to invest their own time in helping the new person get started because they're going to share in whatever profits that new person can generate. So it kind of creates an incentive to be helping each other. You know, Sequoia does it in a different way. They've got this steward framework with people

at the top with the title of steward and they don't do much in the way of investing. What they do is they manage the company. And that is a much more deliberate hands-on sort of, you know, thing where someone like Mike Moritz when he was steward would sit down with a a partner who was new to the firm and say, let me see your calendar. I want to see your time management skills. And so down to that kind of minutiae, how are you managing your time? Did you need to take that meeting? So really being delivered. I'm only smiling because Jason does that to us. Now I know where it came from. Speaking notes, thank you. Prepared mind, having a prepared mind. Right. So I think, you know,

Sequoio has endured so well because it has paid attention to that sort of internal management and sort of internal strategy, like, do we want to be a global firm? Do we want to be just Series A, or should we be thinking about an internal hedge fund, which they've done? You know, so whereas Kleiner Perkins was kind of by default by around 2003-4, being run by John Doe, just because he was the best sort of flashist, kind of most charismatic investor, not because he was wanting to be a manager. And that turned out to be a terrible mistake. stake. In 2001, if you looked at the Forbes Midas list, the number one investor in the world was Vinod Costa of Klaner Perkins, and number three was John Doer of Klaner Perkins. So they were

really dominant. And by 2021, 20 years later, you could not find, I think it was only one person in the top 100 who was at Kline of Perkins, and that was John Dor like around 73 or something. And so they really went from hero to zero. And the reason is this is that John, you know, for all his fantastic vision as a technologist and his ability to kind of market that vision messianically and, you know, charizamatically, he just didn't have the sort of attention span or the bandwidth to sit down with somebody and tell them how to manage their calendar. He would delegate and then be gone and, you know, just moving at a million miles an hour. And one thing which he did, which, you know, I write about quite a bit in the book is that he

had this view that, you know, the industry needed to hire more women. And of course, he was right about that. And I think it came from the fact that his wife was one of the few women engineers in the Valley in the 70s. You know, I'm married to a very smart wife. It tends to happen that she has lots of good friends and, you know, you hang out with terribly smart women all the time. And I'm always kind of like the dumbest person in the room. And I think John probably benefited from who he was married to and having a teenage daughter. And he just took women more seriously than most of his contemporaries in the industry. How did that go so wrong for him?

Well, he hired these women, and then he failed to do the work of persuading his male partners to actually create a culture where they would thrive. And so they were not given any guidance about how you learn the business. And they were kind of left to sink or swim, and they got frustrated, and they were not well treated. and there were sexual harassment suits, as you know. And so I think it shows if you don't manage the partnership actively, you're not going to stay on top. There's that great story even actually about Sequoia when it sets up its China office.

Mike Moritz, I think, gets a call that there's a dispute between the two partners who are running Sequoia, China, and goes out there and says, all right, this guy's doing great. This guy's not doing great. They're fighting. Not doing great. You're out. Fixed it. Like, you know, actively. He had this quote.

say, you know, the main job of running a venture capital firm is to prevent the principles from killing one another. And the other day, I was meeting with the head of a very large venture partnership in the Valley. I can't say which one who came up to me and said, that was the best quote in the book, because that's what he feels he's doing the whole time, preventing principles from killing each other. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. If you don't take the time to mentor that next generation. It can become Lord of the Flies. It could become mediocrity. You really do as best as I can tell. And this is what I really loved about your book. And really where journalism and storytelling is at its best, I think, and its role in the world is it makes people think, right?

And it's really made me think about what matters running my own firm. And one of the things I came to the conclusion of, you know, a couple of years ago, looking at my own early success and trying to figure out how, oh, how don't I replicate this now? You know, like, oh, my God, you hit three unicorns in your first seven investments. You got to figure out, hey, is it all downhill from here? Are you going to be able to put up any kind of numbers, right? It's really a curse in some ways. What I realized is you don't have any control over, you know, the luck you have, you do have control over the process. And so when I looked at the process and I read your book, and I listened to it, I'll listen to a number of chapters over and over again. I plan on listening to it every year or two,

maybe just to reinforce some of these thoughts. And there's books, you know, that take any one of your chapters and just tell the full story, right? So it's, I think, a really great jumping off point if you wanted to double click on some of them to just do the story of Google or do the story of Yahoo, et cetera. But process is what's important. Okay, everybody, I want to tell you about an amazing new database I am using at launch and at Inside to find more companies to invest in and to find more advertisers for this

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You can search their previous companies, their exits, previous raises. And you can track metrics like maybe the headcount growth, maybe LinkedIn, Twitter growth. If you thought your best customers, your best investments came in the seed stage, you can search just there. But if you thought, hey, you know, I need series B companies and greater, I can search just there. Maybe you need people with under 50 employees. Maybe you need companies with over 500. All of that slicing and dicing you can do with this incredible database. Here is a video of us using this advanced search feature to find SaaS companies and to find pre-seed companies. This is a place we like to invest, right? We like to get in early. But more importantly, I want you to try it because my team

is over the moon about it. Visit harmonic.a.i slash twist and you're going to get $4,000 off your company sourcing and monitoring, h-a-m-n-I-C-D-A-I-S-T for $4,000 off. Great job to the harmonic team. It's a beautiful product, by the way. I'm curious your thoughts on what are the heuristics that make legendary venture capital? So we have Nolan Bush, you know, his ability to connect with people at high EQ. Then you had the founders fund. You had Peter Thiel.

This guy is not exactly high EQ to his own admission. you know, maybe he's on the opposite on that spectrum, but highly intelligent, but had a thought on, hey, I'm going to back founders relentlessly. That's going to be my brand. You know, then you have Sequoia saying, hey, we're going to really work on the partnership and time management and really being ruthless about our resources and building a culture here. What in your estimation are the heuristics that make a legendary venture capitalist? One thing I'd say is that it strikes me that most of the people, I met who were really successful, had two out of three characteristics. The three are you founded

your own company. You have some kind of technical skill. Engineering is the obvious one, but it could be that you're really, really seriously going to go to market, or it could be kind of a business skill. And then sort of embedding. And then sort of embedding. in this. In other words, having been to Stanford or Y Combinator or some sort of thing that gives you a network. And I think those, you know, you have to have all of them, but having two out of three is very good. Found a company, have an important skill, like having some virtuoso skill, perhaps, and then having a network. I think that's accurate. Now, there's some mechanical things then that also impact this. And so on the mechanical side, maybe you could talk to when you

make the investment, when you get in, ownership and control, because that comes up as a theme over and over again. How much, you know, when did you get in the investment? When did you get out of the investment? These two things define, you know, when we start talking about metrics, the return, the investor gets, the multiple on capital, you know, the IR, etc. So those two factors seem very important. Then the percentage of the ownership seems extremely important as well, and then power and control. So looking at those four things, time in, time out, percentage ownership, power and control, how did these things factor in? They're very tactical, they're very mechanical, I would say, actually.

What heuristics can you tell us, or what made the brilliant investors' investments with those four variables? Well, what strikes me is that, you know, those variables have been played in different ways over time. And so, you know, an obvious example is with Astoria, they had been Series A investors from the get-go. And the innovation that came as they watched Yahoo in particular was that they figured out that if they could hold on longer and exit later,

in a tech bull market, that's going to be very profitable. And so they held Yahoo stock after the IPO. And that sort of started them on the road. towards writing bigger checks in growth deals, but also doing a public markets fund. And then, you know, ends up with their more recent thing of, you know, we'll be the partner to entrepreneurs from seed till forever. So they've sort of stretched their view of how long they want to be in it. So they haven't been stuck with one opinion.

I'd say also that, you know, if you compare benchmark, right, which has remained, classic series A player with Tiger Global that only does growth or until recently only did growth. I think you see two fundamentally different kinds of thing. In hedge fund parlance, you'd call it alpha or beta really. I mean, alpha meaning highly skilled specific selection of companies investing huge amounts of effort into each one. That's the benchmark thing.

and really caring about your board service and the governance you provide, the guidance you provide, limiting the number of deals you do because you don't have the capacity to do more than seven or so boards because you're devoting real time to each one. Versus the Tiger Global thing where you have a formula where you just sort of pick areas that you think are going to work and you get some management consultant to tell you who are the three market leaders in that particular niche. whether it's, you know, e-commerce in Southeast Asia or right hailing in Latin America or whatever it is. And you go out and try and back the two market leaders.

And, you know, you're super quick. You don't really need to diligence it much beyond basic numbers. It's not a personality game anymore. And so then you can churn out masses of volume. And in dollar on dollar terms, you know, that alpha strategy that benchmark does can be painful because you're putting so much effort into, each deal. And even if the multiples are amazing, the dollars may be less than Tiger Global

can generate by writing way bigger checks, getting smaller multiples, but on a much higher base. So I think the answer, Jason, is that, I mean, maybe you've got a better answer than I have, but mine would be, you know, you can play this game in different ways. Yeah, I mean, having so carefully set up the idea of these disciplines, the management, the personal relationships, getting in the hot tub, thinking very careful. carefully about how to maximize your return, then all of a sudden, income, Massa, and Yuri Milner, and Tiger Global, and this kind of, and we've been talking about this this week on the show, the very distorting effect of what eventually becomes rampaging capital. And then how you have

firms having to respond, Sequoia saying, you know, we were our benchmark saying we were always going to stay a small fund, and now we have to become a big fund because that's just what's happening. Talk to us about how that may have swept away discipline in both investing and founders. Yeah. So, I mean, as you began by saying on the podcast, this is a pro-hedge fund book. I do believe, I mean, sorry, a pro- venture capital book. I do believe that venture capital is. Who hedge funds, yay, VC. Just kidding. I believe venture capital is genuinely contributing to innovation. And I tell that story both in the U.S. and for China. But I also think, that growth equity investing lost its way. And I described this through the story of Uber,

you know, way after Jason invested and we work. And what I mean is that, you know, the game became, you know, you've got this founder who by the growth stage has probably already created a unicorn. So you defer to this founder because they've obviously already demonstrated genius, you think. And right at the point where frankly the founder may be becoming a bit too pleased with probably himself, not herself, but either way, when hubris might kick in, you say, I defer to you, I'll do whatever you like, and I don't need a board seat, and in fact, I'll vote all the shares I buy with you at every time. I'll never get rid of you or fire you or vote against you. I mean, that's not oversight. And I think that everybody

is better with some checks and balances and tough questions. being asked and partners who push them. And I think that's true of writers who, you know, ought to be happy when editors tell them how to fix their prose or restructure their book or whatever it is. It's painful, but you need it. And I think it's true of entrepreneurs who create companies and sometimes they need to be told, look, you've done great, but the next step you're about to take could be a mistake. And I think particularly since we know for a fact that managing a unicorn is fundamentally different

to creating a startup and going from zero to a billion. So it would be kind of surprising if without guidance, the same person takes the company without any stress or difficulty or hiccup all the way through. Now, there are people like the Collison's who appear to do it without, you know, breaking a sweat. But, you know, I think other cases, oversight by investors will be important. And so I think that the Uri Milner DST model or the Massa model or the Mesa model, or the Tiger Global model, which explicitly says it will not exercise governments, is a bad thing for tech and brings disrepute on the sector and encourages critics to say, well,

all of venture capital is a mess because look at, you know, look at we work, which is unfair. I mean, actually, as a series of investment, benchmark did a good investment. But the later stage guy is messed up because in that case, it was J.P. Morgan and these banks that wanted a relationship with Adam Newman and they were not going to say boo to him. And that's the problem. What do you think about, not to jump you here, but what do you think about Adam Newman getting $350 million just? I must say, I was astonished.

I won't say more than that. I haven't studied it in any depth, but I mean, goodness. Yeah, you'd have thought that one time of behaving like that would be enough. Yeah. for me, an obvious bet for injuries in Harwitz for a couple of reasons, which, you know, build on your book. What a great marketing exercise like Founders Fund for them to put out in the world. We don't care what happened previously other than did you build a unicorn in a big company and take it public, which is, you know, what Adam Newman did. And they have downside protections, they have big amounts of capital. So just as

a branding marketing exercise, if they just return their 350, about it. or they double their money. Now, every founder knows that, you know, not only will we never oust the founder, we will be a home for wayward ousted founders. It's kind of brilliant when you think about it, Sebastian. Yeah. Do you want to be a hand for a wayward ousted founders?

Maybe. I do. Yeah. Actually, oh, 100%. Bring me the mutant X-Men who are behaving badly, and I will reform them and get incredible returns. Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is news to me.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. I mean, I'm not talking about criminal behavior. We're not talking about somebody who committed actual crimes. Oh, heaven, help us. But, you know, if, you know, if I had an opportunity to invest in Travis or Adam Newman or an ousted Elon Musk, you know, from PayPal, I mean, hell hath no fury like a founder ousted. I mean, you can look at Adam Newman, Travis, and Elon, and then what's, who else got ousted famously? trying to put this car. Oh, Sean Parker, but he really never went on to build another company.

But the guy from Lippling, Rippling, Parker Conrad, you know, coming back with Rippling after his first company, Zenefits. Okay, okay, but Jason, let me ask you a question. So you would happily go for these guys and back them, but wouldn't you want to see some oversight over them? Yeah, I mean, come on. When that announcement. I'm trying to answer honestly. was made. When the Newman investment was announced, you said it is important to see whether you learned his lesson. You did say that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, no, I think there should

be, I've always believed in proper governance. And in fact, you know, one of my strategies has been to companies before they would normally do board meetings and have a series A, you know, investment, seed stage companies. I've said, hey, let's do four board meetings a year of one hour or each just so you learn how to run aboard so you're venture worthy. And so I actually believe strongly in great governance. I also believe that when you oust the founder, in all likelihood, the best days of that company might be behind them. So you have to be very careful. And founders, you know, it's a bit of a dance because you look at a company like Twitter, no founder owned over two or three percent of that company, you know, by the time it was public. And so there was no

Evan Williams coming in or Jack and saying, here's how we're going to do things. And then people saying, well, I think we should run in for profits. I think we should do this. You know, there's just nobody, you had eight people on the steering wheel. And that's no way to drive a car. Was it a mistake to ask Travis and have Dar. What do you think? No, I think it was the right thing to do.

Yeah. So right to find how. Morally right, cleaning up the company or stock price rate? Stock price right. I think that if Uber had not changed leadership at that point, just like with WeWork, the IPO would have had to be canned and they would have had to have a retort. Either you go right up to the wire with an IPO with a founder who's not really IPO ready, which is what WeWork tried to do. And then they had to pull back and change the leadership and regroup and be very embarrassed. Or you kind of get it over with a little bit earlier and you make the transition and then, you know, there are.

could take it through to IPA. Yeah, I would have, not only would I have, I did back Travis to stay in the seat. So I was 100% team, Travis. And the reason is, I believe that when you look at founders, they're made through these crucible moments, as Rulov calls them, these really challenging moments are what make the founder. Now, I would love to see Travis, after Dara has done a good job and sometimes a great job in stewarding Uber.

So I think they've done actually amazing. If you look at the cleanup process and you look at the growth, it's been great. But does it have the sizzle? Does it have the vision? Does it have the new products that it would have under Travis and the audacity? Obviously not. Right. And so that was your point earlier.

Like, you know, does the audacious founder, the pirate, have the ability to run it operationally? And I think Steve Jobs is the perfect analogy to Travis, which is he got ousted and then he came back. And which were the best days? The best days were when Steve Jobs was there. Now, was it messy? Sure.

Was Steve Jobs difficult? Absolutely. Travis, difficult, hard driving? Yes. I would love to see Travis come back and run Uber and Cloud Kitchens together. And I think it would be, if Travis was running Uber right now, the stock price would be double. If Travis and Cloud Kitchens merged with Uber, which I would love to see happen. I don't think it's going to happen, but I would love to see that.

I think the company would be worth $150 billion right now I think Sebastian's cat vehemently disagrees Okay Sebastian you look like you're in shock I love Sebastian's like after all that stuff I love this conversation I love that Sebastian

But honestly I want to hear Sebastian's response to my response Yes totally Does this track with everybody that you've talked to in venture capital what Jason's saying right now I think it's, look, the ideal is you've got a founder who has both the audacity and the discipline and understands that audacity should not be applied to your compliance function or your, you know, financial reporting function. That was what, you know, Gurley was saying to Travis.

And I think Gurley was right. And had Travis listened, he would have stayed in the job. but if he wasn't going to listen, in the end he had to leave. Now, could he come back and be fantastic? Because he learned the lesson through the crucible moment. Yes, I agree with that. I think it, I think, and in that sense, I get what you mean, that Adam Newman might be, you know, no venture bet is sure, but maybe it's a good venture bet to back in the second time,

because you learn from being kicked in the teeth once. I mean, I do, I feel like after having talked to 250 people in Silicon Valley, you can't be shocked to hear from Jason that someone would back Travis again or Sebastian again. I mean, right? Like you're talking about exceptional, difficult, sometimes extremely smelly people. Steve Jobs, you mean. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs and that can't have to be mistaken for Steve Jobs. That's nice for your question. No, no, no. I just meant, you know, when you line them up, it's like the, it seems to be that a big message. in your book is overlooking a lot about founders. Yes, you're right. You're right. I'm suitably corrected. Well, I'm still not arguing it's a good idea to invest in Adam Newman.

Don't get me wrong. It's certainly incredible. No investment is sure. I think, you know, he's, yeah. I mean, it feels like, you know, heads you might make, 25x and tails you lose one X, right? So on that basis, give them a chance. That is the, you know, as defined, the power law. And, you know, you chose to name the book the power law, which is your success in venture is defined by your outlier hits, period, full stop. If you get a

bunch of singles and doubles, nobody cares. The returns are going to be de minimis or, you know, okay, but, you know, nothing to write home about. You could have just put your money in an index fund if you were an LP. I'm curious what you learned about LPs and why they're so attracted to this space, and then what you think the future of venture capital is, given the massive innovation we saw with Y Combinator, angelist syndicates, angel investing becoming like a, you know, more of a sport and a practice, you know, from just a small number of people to tens of thousands of people doing it. you know, maybe even crypto and some of those innovations, if you think they're going to be

sustainable. What's, what do you see going forward here? Yeah. Well, as you know, I mean, if you look at the period from the dot-com crash through to the 2022 crash, the endowments that did the best were the ones that had the most allocation to venture. And so, Borden or, you know, some quite sort of outlier colleges, you wouldn't have necessarily predicted, would be superstars became that because they really focused on allocating to venture. And I think that's a lesson that won't be forgotten quickly. So, you know, some people have made an analogy between the winter in the valley between 2000 to 2003 or four.

And I don't think that's going to repeat itself because I think this time around the LPs are more locked in. they've had great returns for 20 years and they're going to forgive, you know, a bad fund. So if you ask me, you know, Tiger Global, what's the future? The future is more of the same. They can be down 50% or whatever it is. It won't matter to their fundraising, I predict, because it's a model that worked for so long before it went wrong. And then the question is whether the LPs push into other horizons. And my sense from chatting to LPs is yes, they are hungry to try crypto, to try backing angels, to try backing solo VCs to push the envelope.

And, you know, the other thing is that for an endowment, these are small checks. So you can afford to think in that parallel way. And there's a knowledge that if you get in on the ground floor with a new solo VC and it works, you know, you'll be kind of grandfathered into the next seven funds. If you say no early on, you may not be let in later. And so I think there is this risk hungreness, which hasn't gone away just because of a market correction. I was curious your thoughts on China. China, yeah.

They seem to have stolen the, and Sequoia seems to have imported, you know, this entrepreneurial model. Xi Jinping seems to be less enthralled with the concept of competing with Jack Ma for his curating and, you know, being lauded by the citizens. Yeah. The populace of China. So fascinating. Yeah, the way that you build that up and Jack Ma has now been like disappeared and Xi Jinping went to Silicon Valley and visited.

Like the way that you set that up to Jason's point, contrasting with what's happening now to venture back companies in China is fascinating. Yeah, I mean, if you think about COVID-Zero in Shanghai and the willingness of the Xi regime to court, you know, serious disaffection from this really wealthy middle-class city by just forcing people to shut down and, you know, be barricaded into their apartments and sometimes not have food available.

I mean, I was told a story. I was hanging out with some Chinese, venture people a few months ago who had managed to get out of the country somehow. And they told me the story about Kathy Zhu, right, who's one of the investors in my book. And she has done fabulously well as a venture investor. And she lives in Shanghai. And she sent out these wee chats saying, hey, I don't have enough food. Anybody got any food I could be spent?

And they went viral because like this billionaire is saying, I got not enough food. And so the willingness of the regime to do something which is, you know, economically crazy and suicidal and in a way socially and politically quite risky, because you don't want to lose faith and buy Western vaccines is huge. I mean, they're willing to go a very long way to kind of maintain what they see as the sort of pure political path that they want. And if you think about that zero COVID mentality, and you map that onto tech, I'm not sure that anytime soon they're going to walk back from their current clamp time. I feel like it's just sort of visceral for them that you can't have entrepreneurs being entrepreneurs and deciding what company they want to build and being independent and building up wealth and building up power and having a voice.

And they just don't like that. So they want to tell the whole tech sector, look, here are the areas you're supposed to play in. You can be in the AI sandpit, you can do, you know, semiconductors, all you like. And, you know, up to a point, VCs and entrepreneurs can work inside those sandpits. But we all know that innovation consists of that lateral step, that you're going along a path, you're doing AI and suddenly you see a way of going sideways and applying AI to something different. You're not allowed to do a natural step, or at least there's a lot of political risk for you if you take that lateral step. So I think it's sort of in the short term, there's enough momentum in the Chinese technology

juggernaut that it'll carry on steaming ahead. But in the medium term, I think it's going to just be less innovative, inventive. People can't just walk out because, you know, technology investors, technology entrepreneurs, they have, they're locked in, they've got illiquid wealth in the country. They can't just take it with them. but over time they can and over time they can tell their mentees, hey, if you

want to make a career, you might think about Canada. I wonder, speaking of kind of sandboxes, you make this really interesting point. I was happy to hear as a newly minted climate investor, a pretty impassioned defense of climate tech investing in your

conclusion in particular. And you also talk about what has become almost a myth in VC, that that software is the only thing that venture capital can invest in. Talk a little bit more about that. I mean, certainly go all the way back to obviously semiconductor investing in the very beginning, but this trap that says these are the only investable categories. Yeah. So through the arc of my book, I describe how, you know, in the 60s with Arthur Rock, the first successful West Coast VC, when you did a series investment, he expected 45% of the equity in the company. In the 70s,

it went down to 33%. With Google, it was 25% in 99, I think it was the Series A. When you get to Facebook in 2004, it was one-eighth. So through this narrative, you have a smaller and smaller show of the equity being taken by the Series A investors. And that made sense because, you know, software companies didn't need so much capital. software companies could scale unbelievably quickly and create enormous multiples. So if you could get a massive multiple on a smaller piece of ownership, that was okay. But to rediscover hard tech, deep tech hardware stuff, I think people need to escape that software template and rediscover the old template that used to exist back in the 70s or 80s when hardware investments were normal, when venture investors.

meant back in Compact, back in Cisco. And there, you know, a third or so of the Series A equity was deemed to be appropriate as a share. That's such an interesting point that the equity has driven, because I noticed that. I mean, that was very striking to me in the early chapters of the book, these giant chunks of equity that these BCs were taking. Was the lowered equity, do you think, the result of kind of the backlash against B.C.? And then we found ourselves in a situation where VCs were taking less equity and then really ended up, you know, biasing towards software multiples? No, I think, I think, you know, the software became attractive to VCs because the multiples were so big that they absolutely dwarfed the problem of having lower ownership share.

I mean, you'd rather have, you know, one-eighth of fate of Facebook than a quarter of most things. So I think VCs saw a good deal. And the whole youth revolt pushed back against VCs and kind of like the greater competition that Angels introduced into the ecosystem helped through competition to force down the share that Series A investors could try to grab. But you could only push it down because VCs were willing to take less in the end when push came to shove. and that was because the multiples appear to be so big.

I think, you know, the problem now is there's a bit of stickiness in the mindset, right? People think that taking 12% of the equity at Series A's might be normal. On that basis, it's harder to do, you know, longer duration, deep tech. And therefore, you might not do it at all. I think that's a pity for the world. You want people to be doing hardware stuff because of, you know, you know, fighting climate change. So I think that has to be rediscovered.

I kick this around, actually, with Josh Rolf of Lux Capital, who does deep tech. And he didn't really agree with me that it was a good idea to go back to a higher share. But so, I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there are other ways of structuring this where you just have more rounds. And the founder might end up with the same dilution at the end of it. but it would be through doing more iterative rounds. But I don't really see why that's better than having a smaller number of investors who are more committed to your path.

Do you ever think about becoming a petro-capitalist while you're reading this? No, I mean, no, I don't. I mean, I always go through the same cycle, but I know myself well enough that, you know, when I'm writing about hedge funds, you know, I get into that headspace and I think about what it was like to look at the world through those lenses. And when I'm writing about Vegi Capital, I do the same thing. And it's super exciting and fun for me as a writer to think my way into that. But I don't make the mistake of thinking I'll cross the line and becoming a master.

So like a character actor or a character author, you start thinking like a serial killer. And then you're like, you know, I don't want to be a serial guy. I don't want to get to where Jason is that he would back Adam Newman again. I don't want to become that monster. If you wanted to when we started the interview, you no longer want to. Listen, this has been absolutely fantastic. I bought 25 copies of your book. It's absolutely a fantastic book.

Must read if you're in the venture business. Must read if you're on the entrepreneurial side. So congratulations on buying what I think will be a seminal book in the space. And really well done. Just author or author. You're a great writer. It moves at a brisk pace, as I said in the beginning. it's a great listen

and it's incredibly informative because you tease out what the important lessons are. We pulled a couple of them out here. I'd say what we did today on the pod is about 5 to 10% of what's in the book. So if you listen to this and you enjoyed it, you just go over to Amazon right now and go over to Audible or your local bookstore

and just buy a copy and let it sit on your shelf until such time as you have a moment to read it, but buy it right now because you will not regret it. Five stars from J-Cal. Congratulations, Sebastian. on just a great, great book and great guests on the pod.

Appreciate you coming on. Yeah, thanks. Having me on. Great. Thanks so much, Sebastian, for joining us. What an amazing interview. I could have gone for two more hours. But just about the book.

You got about 5, 10% of what was in the book. Tomorrow we have a really fun Friday variety show for you. A little bit of Ask Jason, a couple of founder interviews, and of course everybody's favorite producer Rachel doing OK Boomer. See you tomorrow, everybody.