This Week in Startups - The power of the SOD/EOD plus Bill Maris on early Google stories, origins of GV, bioterrorism & more | E1236

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

First, Jason does a "Founder University" segment on the benefits of remote managing using a SOD-EOD format (1:31). Then Bill Maris joins to discuss what working at Google was like when Bill started GV (25:28), why Google didn't win on social (38:49), bioterrorism risks (1:07:39) & more.

Hey, everybody, we've got a great show for you today. What a treat. Section 32's Bill Maris is on the program. He founded Google Ventures, and he has amazing stories about Uber, Tesla, and everything that happened at Google during the formative years. A tremendous guess, can't believe we waited until our second decade to have him on the podcast. Yes, we've been doing this podcast now for over 10 years. Crazy when you think about that.

And I love it. My God, for me doing this podcast, it's just like, It's like a little bit of a mental workout for me. So, three, four, five days a week. I like to work out and do this show. I wish I could do that on the actual physical workouts. I'm trying to get there. This weekend startups is brought to you by Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs.

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File now for just $169 at BrainBase.com slash Twist using code. twist. I wanted to continue this new format that we started here based on the Founder University program. So these are our little fun segments, Founder University new segments. And today I want to talk about something that is incredibly important, which is how to manage remote workers, how to give people autonomy, freedom, and responsibility. And I started this program called the SOD EOD. Start of day, end of day, reporting, maybe three or four years ago, maybe four or five years ago in my organizations, remote organizations like Inside.com, which I run.

And then I moved it over to launch, which was an in-person organization, but we increasingly had remote workers in Canada and other locations because we opened up a Canadian office and we wanted to make sure we stayed in touch with them and knew what they were doing and we could help them. So if you implement this SOD, EOD reporting system, start of day, end of day, on your Slack or whatever chat you're using to manage your company. I suspect everybody's using Slack now. You're going to really have four main benefits as the owner,

manager of the company, founder. Number one, you're going to be able to identify the high performers in your organization, which is critically important. And sometimes you know the obvious ones because they're extroverts and they tell you all the great things are doing. But other times you might have these sleepers, people in the organization who are doing much more work in some cases than their bosses. and their bosses are getting paid 50% more.

And then you look at it and say, well, maybe that person should be the boss. Huh? Interesting. Number two, it's going to identify who shouldn't be in your organization. Who's not a culture fit? Who's not getting it done? Who's not doing the work? And number three, it's going to reduce stress and it's going to increase productivity. Because if people know they did a great day's work, they earned their keep at your organization,

they earned their dollar. In fact, maybe they earned more than you paid them. That's going to actually reduce stress. And when everybody sees what's getting done, it actually kind of motivates everybody. And then finally, it's going to eliminate a bunch of meetings and confusion. And of course, people say all the time, the number one thing we need to fix in our organization is communication. The highest communication organizations and the lowest.

So, okay, you might have seen my startup math segment last week on episode 1,2,31. Yes, 1,231 episodes of this week in startups. It's actually a little higher because we didn't count some episodes that were in full episodes or part of the Angel podcast. We're calling these Founder University new, just because they're new content that we're making. That's our internal name for it, and the acronym is fun. So hopefully you'll have fun with these. They're basically to supplement the 17 or 18 classes of Founder University we had in person.

This was a two-day course we did prior to the pandemic and then we moved it online. You can go see that course at Founder. Dot University. It's free. We just did this to increase our deal flow to meet more founders earlier. On episode 35 of the All In podcast at the 53 minute mark, I talked about a management style here I use at launch. And I want to go more in depth on that because a lot of you have been asking me questions about it. It's basically called start of day, end of day.

And there's two other things we do that we added to it, the start of week, S-O-W, and the E-O-W, end of week, from Monday morning and Friday at the end of the day. It's had a huge impact at my companies. And I'm hearing from some of you that you've been implementing it and having, like, incredible results. Chrison told me on Twitter, and we'll pull up the tweet here on YouTube. The SODD-EODD Slack Update idea on the recent pod was genius. I'm going to implement this across my entire organization and the boards I sit on. Effective immediately, a great way to manage remote and manage remote work, environment, and culture. So let me get into this, how I came up with it and how you can implement it.

And I hope that you take it and build on this idea. This is not exactly a new idea because obviously people did stand-ups and all kinds of other meeting formats. I just did this for myself to come up with something lightweight because I hate managing people. I don't like micromanaging people. And I have a habit when things aren't going well, like many founders who have a high standard of falling into micromanaging mode. I don't want to be a micromanager. This is something that sometimes employees at companies don't understand. Your manager would rather everything get done and not micromanage you because that takes a lot of effort and time and it creates stress. And it's kind of dysfunctional when somebody has to

micromanage somebody who's being paid to do a job, isn't it? Nobody really wants that situation. There might be some weird people who wanted, but certainly founders who want to succeed are not interested in micro-managing. So I wrote a blog post back in January of 2019 where I highlighted this. And it's a very simple concept. And I've been iterating on it, as I said. But it really promotes responsibility within a team. And it really encourages, just high performers to deliver increasingly higher results, because if you can measure it, you can manage it. People who record their speed at running the mile, people who weigh themselves every day, people who calorie count or do portion control, they get better results. This has all been

proven over and over again in studies. And when this is done right, it gets rid of that micromanagement and it makes the high performers want to be at a company and people who low performers sometimes raise their hand and say, I'm opting out, bye, I'm leaving, which is a good thing. Or they say, I feel like I'm not doing enough. Can I take on more work? So this is really simple. At the start of the day, when you have your cup of coffee or tea, whatever you're having, you fire up your slack and you just write down. Here are the three things. Sometimes it's five. sometimes it's one, that I need to get done today. No excuses. I'm going to move the ball forward. I'm going to get these things done. And when there are hundreds of things you could possibly do today,

the SOD and the EOD forces you to prioritize. So take five minutes to think it through. And, you know, founders can have ADD. They can want to start a lot of projects. And so if their team members are doing an SOD and they're saying these are the three or four things that need to get done, that allows the founder to go, oh, my people need time. So we're doing this event. We're doing this off-site meeting. We're launching this new sales program. Whatever it is, marketing program.

They need to get it done. So you can actually see what they're doing. Just like some people do a point-based system for developers. This is just bringing it to the whole organization, but even in a lighter way. For instance, I will sometimes ask people if I want to drill down, do me a favor. Just tell me how long these things took. Now, this sounds like, oh-oh, micromanaging, punching the clock. I'll just say, you know, tell me how long it took to write the newsletter.

And what we found out inside was some people were spending six hours writing a newsletter, some people were spending 90 minutes. And that allowed us to be curious and investigate why. And was there a correlation between a six-hour newsletter and a 90-minute one? In some cases, the 90-minute one was performing better. That was really interesting. And, oh, this person's being inefficient for these reasons, et cetera. So these are all the unintended benefits.

So I asked, as an example, Prash, who is our associate here at launch, when we did Angel University, when it's one month out, just tell us the total number of RSVPs, the target number of RSVPs for our Angel University program in your EOD and SOD. What that did was it got the whole organization behind a key metric, right, and an objective that we had. So if the target number was 500 and we had 200, Prash would put that he's 40% of the way to goal, then I would ask them, hey, how many days are left and how many people do we need to sign up? So if we have 300 and there's 30 days left, we've got to sign up 10 people a day. So this allows people to be accountable, not to me, but to themselves.

And the target goal they set. And this gave people the ability to stop doing things that were not important in the company and get focused on what was important. This also let the other team see it and say, hey, I have some ideas for you where they might not have known what he was going to do. When they saw he was behind one time, we just basically did a barn raising, a sprint, and we said, hey, everybody, let's come up with ideas, let's help them out. So we don't have to panic and feel like everything's last minute. It just makes everybody's stress go down. Even if we're behind, we can say, okay, we're behind, but we know we're behind, right?

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companies with dozens of exits. Again, the Auerkraut account is free. Just go to O-U-R-C-O-W-D.com slash twist. So you simply list what you're going to do. You put bullet points. I suggest this is the first thing you do in the day. And when I first implemented this, some people didn't do it. Then I started replying to them.

And this is a great management technique. If you're replying to them or you're doing emojis in Slack and just giving people a thumbs up, a high five, boy, this lets them know, hey, we actually are recognizing. You're giving recognition. And it's only five minutes. I tell people, if you're taking more than five minutes, then I as the manager or your manager or the company has not given you clear instructions.

If you don't wake up, go to work and say, I know what I'm going to do today. Whose fault is that? Is it your fault or is it your boss's fault? I think it's probably the latter. And so this creates clarity between management. How many people say, my manager, you know, gosh, darn it, he or she never gives me clear instructions. I don't know what they want.

I can never please them. Well, if you're all in agreement, these are the three or four things you're going to get done today. And this week, boy, does that create clarity? And it removes a whole set of tensions. Then I said to folks, hey, you know, we're using notion and we're documenting everything we do. We're moving to a written culture from a meeting culture. As I talked about with Des Traynor, and a lot of us in the pandemic did this. Well, I say, like with Prash in this example of the Angel University, can you link to

the notion page where we have our checklist. Remember I always talk about that book, The Checklist Manifesto, which had a great impact on me. A great book. As an aside, you should read it. If he links to the checklist, well, then everybody in the organization can go see his checklist, find items on his checklist that maybe should be on their marketing checklist, right? And then those links are really helpful. Then with the podcasting team, I told them, can you put what episodes we're taping this week, and then what the publishing schedule is, and linked to the episodes and link to the show notes from them. What that did was, the sales team didn't know what episodes were coming.

They would have to ask. Now nobody has to ask. They know where that information is on the notion and in the Slack. And this has created a flywheel like you wouldn't believe. We are all in sync. And the linking to work makes it super easy to educate your team members. And that goes back to the number one complaint people have in businesses. we the communications is the biggest problem everybody says communications is the biggest problem in every

marriage friendship work relationship family because we as you know these primate monkeys chimpanzees we are socially driven communication can dictate how we feel we are also problem solving monkeys right that's what we do we solve problems and it's every day a couple little problems you get a little bit of work done, it makes us feel good. So what makes humans feel good? Accomplishing something and certainly accomplishing something with a team that you respect or a family member or friends that you love and respect. This is when we're our best selves, I believe, when we're chimpanzees in a group, you know, apes together strong as per planet of the apes. When we do stuff together, we feel good. And this end of day, start of day, end of week, man, does this make you feel good about work?

because you're moving the ball forward and you're getting stuff done. The other thing I like about it is, it's so easy. And if somebody feels like they're not contributing, my belief is overwhelmingly 99% of people out of 100. 99 out of 100 people, 99% same thing. That is what people want. They want to be a good contributor. There's nobody who comes to work and says,

I want to put into bad days work. I want to sandbag it today. Is that a thing? I don't think that's a thing for anybody. So the other thing I found was this leveled the playing field between remote employees and in-person ones. The in-person ones were getting all my attention and the remote ones weren't. But when everybody does this, oh boy, now it's a level playing field. Another thing that happens is there are some people in your organization when you implement this who will fight it.

and they'll feel like you're micromanaging it. And I had somebody in one of our organizations fight me on it and said, I'm willing to do an EOW. I should have taken that to fire the person immediately. And man, all the downstream problems I had with them were all this very, like, selfish, I don't want to say what I'm doing. And it turned out they really weren't contributing as much as their peers

or some of the people who were below them getting paid a fraction of what they were getting paid. If somebody fights you on this, it's likely the reason they're fighting you, is that they're not getting it done. They're not doing the work. They're not keeping up with everybody else. And that's okay. They belong at another organization.

If you can't run with the seven, eight mile per minute team, you should be running with the nine or ten mile team. Also, how unfair is it when your boss takes credit for your work? Man, that used to make me when young J-Cal, when I was starting out, When my boss would take my credit for my work and then Mike Savino, my boss's boss, would find out I did it because we would go out and have a drink after work.

When that person left at 530, that middle manager who I hated, you know, he was phoning it in. This program would have exposed him and would have shown who was actually doing the work and who was taking credit for it. So I'm a believer in anybody being able to do the work and take on work. I don't believe in hierarchies. I believe in performance and achievement. So this is a great equalizer. The same people who fought me on doing the end of work, end of day, and said, I'll just do an end of a week,

there's the same people who wanted unlimited vacation and wanted to go home at 4.30 and, like, not check their email. You can't not check your email on the business I'm in. We're in the business of closing deal. So if I don't check my email and Andreessen Horowitz does or Ycombinator does or some syndicate does on Angelus, you know who gets the deal? They do. I'm in a competitive space. If you are closing your deal for your startup and I'm not fast, you know what? Even with my reputation and how much people want to have me on their cap table in most cases,

and some people definitely don't want me on their cap tables, but most people do. I can lose a deal. So this has been incredible for me realizing who is performing and who is overperforming. Additionally, when somebody leaves your organization, the managers then take all the end of weeks. We put them into a Notion page or a Google Doc. And then we look at what that person was actually doing and we say, okay, there seems to be over the last five weeks, this is what this person was doing. Can we take this person's responsibility and chop it up and give it to the other five people? One of the people who wasn't getting it done, when they left, I just looked at their end of week and I just said to some of the the other people on the team, hey, I'm going to give you guys a raise and give you some of their

salary. And then we're going to hire another person. And we just reorganized because we knew what that person was doing or in that case, how little they were doing. So this helps you stay focused. It lets you get 5% better every day. And when somebody starts the next effort, right, and we start to see something repeating over and over again, like pressure is starting a new angel university because we do it every three or four months, he can go back and look at what he was doing. doing how he was tracking in the previous one. And if Prash were to leave to go start his own company, well, then I could just tell somebody, look at Prash's end of W's and S-O-Ws and you know what you're going to do. Right? See how easy that is? And it focuses people on those key goals. What is the goal? What is the

task you're working on? Why are we doing that? How are you tracking that progress? What metrics are you knowing to say this project is on track? And when you reach a roadblock, who are you going to ask? So you're investing all these time in all these projects. You want to get that data into your end of week, your start of week, even your SOD, EOD. As an example, we were tracking, hey, how is the podcast doing? How are our Twitter followers going? Because you have to write something down, that lets you remember it. And it also focuses you on that's what your job is and what's important.

So for a salesperson, what deals you closed is important. for, you know, a producer of the speaking startups, what guests you're booked is important, right? Because we're only as good as the guests. Well, maybe that's not true. But, you know, sometimes I can make lemonade even with the bad guests, I'll be totally honest. But I would rather have Dara from, you know, Uber on or Keith Rabeoy on. That really helps, you know, the show do well. So it also creates a friendly competition among high performers, I'm told. I didn't set out to make this a competitive thing. But when people see how. much great work other people are doing and how impressive their EODs are or end of weeks are,

a person who wants to move up in the organization from a researcher to associate, they're going to say, you know what, I need to pick up the pace here. That person's getting more rebound, scoring more points, they have a better free throw shooting percentage than me if we're going to use a basketball analogy. They can run faster. They can, you know, jump higher. They've got less body fat, you know, all these things that professional athletes would track. Well, when they started tracking that stuff in the NBA, then you started to see the three-pointer and people's ability to shoot it go to all positions in the NBA. It used to be like you had shooting guards shot the three. And then we had, well, you know, maybe we have a Comgo guard, the point guard

can shoot the three. Oh, you know what? It'd be great if the power forward or the small forward could shoot a three. And they're like, what would happen if a center could shoot a three reasonably well? Oh, boy, is that disruptive in spreading the floor? You can also run your meetings when you do have a weekly meeting. You can look at the EOWs and use those to make the meetings go faster, go faster. And it lets you also know, I think, where people should double down and what's not working. And maybe we should scrap this process. And as an example, we did a chart of how many calls were being taken by the investment team

in our weekly meeting. And I could see each of the associates, how many meetings they were doing week over week. In some cases, they were sitting in on meetings because they were being trained. But we could track, hey, we're at 50, 60, 70 meetings a week. and all those meetings are on the notion. And then people are linking to the deal memo so I can jump into our notion at any time and look at the 50 companies we met with this week. And I can watch the video of the Zoom. Man, this is incredible for me and the company. So once again, to make this super easy for you, it allows you to identify and reward high performers. It identifies who

shouldn't be in your company because it's not a match or they're not pulling their weight. It reduces stress while increasing productivity and eliminates a bunch of meetings. Those reasons alone, you should do it. And just as a little technical thing, what I like to do is people do their EOD five minutes and their end of day, they reply to their SOD and then check that box in Slack that puts it into the channel so the reply gets in threads so people could have a thread about your day or you could have a thread asking questions or they can just see it go by. It also, in this day of always working because there's no commutes, it allows you to start and end your day, which is great for everybody. The ability for you to say, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

starting my day, I'm ending my day. Boy, is that beneficial psychologically? We used to have commutes to do that. Now you can use the EOD and the SOD. Now I know some people go, oh my God, you're punching the clock. You're counting the hours. No, nobody is looking at the timestamps of these things. We have left the concept of, you know, time in, time out, because we're not, we don't have a camera on you in your home office. I mean, I literally have a camera in my home office, but it's not on all day. And we're not screen recording people, although I have read about company screen recording their employees at work all day. That's crazy.

I mean, with the exception of maybe a call center. That being said, if the person did four hours of work and it was colossal and they did a two-hour gym session, they took a nap for an hour and they went to lunch for an hour, does anybody really care? Probably not. They just care that the work's getting done and the ball is moving forward. And now people are looking at the compensation of the team in aggregate. Okay, we got 10 people.

we're spending this amount per year. The company's making this amount. Fine. Let's move on. So efficiency, a spree to corpse. It's just a wonderful program. I hope you try it and tweak it. And now on to our interview. Today, many small business owners are busier than ever, don't I know it? And because they're so focused on managing and growing their business, they can't always spend time on one of the most critical functions. Some might argue the most critical function at any company recruiting. That's That's why LinkedIn jobs has made it easier to find and hire the best candidates for free. I can tell you I have had a tremendous experience finding amazing talent on LinkedIn because they put the jobs you're trying to fill in front of the right people,

both active searchers and passive searchers. I have landed some amazing talent who weren't actively looking for a job, but LinkedIn put something in front of them that got them on the hook. And then they said, you know what, maybe I would consider switching jobs and doing something more exciting, like working for J-Cal. And that has been amazing for me. So why have we had this amazing experience on LinkedIn? Well, 740 million professionals all over the world.

They have the biggest global footprint. And finding amazing people around the world is a massive, competitive advantage. They have incredibly simple tools. They filter and prioritize all the top candidates to set them up for interviews. And you're just going to get qualified, motivated, skilled people. So they're going to give you a free job posting. I kid you not. Your first job posting is free if you go to LinkedIn.com slash twist. LinkedIn.com. It's already in your browser history slash TWIST. You need to get back to work.

You're only as good as your people. And this is where you find the great people on LinkedIn. LinkedIn.com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week in startups. We've got an amazing guest for you today. Bill Maris is with us. He is the founder of Section 32. Before that, he ran Google Ventures. their venture arm. Bills had investments to date that resulted in over 150 exits and more than 50 companies that have grown to over $1 billion in value. Welcome to the program, Bill. Thanks for having me. So you were at Google Ventures. Did you found Google Ventures or were you part of the founding team? For better or worse? Nope, I founded it. Yeah. What was the founding story

there? Because, you know, we had Intel always had a venture arm, but they put like a million dollars into companies I kind of followed on. And Google Ventures, Google invested from their balance sheet, but then they set a GV or Google Ventures to be this independent arm. What was Larry and Sergey's idea there when they put you in charge of Google Ventures? Yeah, it's super confusing a story. There's a short, medium and long version of this. Yeah, give you the medium one, yeah.

Yeah, the medium one. So I, I, there's nothing about me or my background that would distinguish me as a potential venture investor or even successful at. it. So I really just kind of shoehorned lucked my way into Google. I'd started an internet company in the 90s, late 90s, a web hosting company, sold that. Then I did a bunch of nonprofit work. But my very first job out of college was I shared an office with Ann Wigiske. And we were both fresh-faced, just trying to figure it out, working in New York City, had no idea what we were doing, as is the theme here, super unqualified for the jobs that we had. And, and

And through Anne and our friendship that grew, I got to know Larry and Sergey in the kind of 1998 after I had started my own company. And I thought, well, this is, you know, I met them in the garage. I thought, well, this is cute. They've got their rollerblades. But I have a real business doing real revenue. And so I did my own thing. And then Ann and I have been really good friends for a long time.

And I got to be good friends with those guys as well. And then after I found myself in the, you know, 2007 or so kind of between what am I going to do next, I started talking to them about Google and they thought, oh, maybe we should have a venture arm and talk to Eric about it. And, you know, they just said, well, why don't you kind of interview for this open role? And I thought, okay, well, this is probably just a slam dunk. 23 interviews over like a nine month period. Wow. Well, I sort of landed a desk in corporate development.

And it was typical Google at the time. I didn't know who my boss was. I didn't have any assignment. It was just sort of you're in charge of whatever you claim to be in charge of. So I just decided, well, kind of work on venture investing. And started to put together a business plan. I just kind of introduced myself to John Doer and Mike Moritz and everyone on Sandhill Road who wouldn't meet with me except for the fact that Google was on my business.

card and I was not like I didn't have a title. It's not like I was a senior person. In fact, at the time, I was sitting next to an intern who was developing this app called Bourbon that he was really excited about. And I encouraged him like, you know, you got to go do this someplace else. Was this at the pier on the Embarcadero? No, this was in Palo Alto. Oh, in Palo Alto. In Mountain View. In Mountain Mountain. Okay. Yeah. And so he was just sitting next to me and he's working on this ad. I mean, that's Kevin Sistram. He ended up being Instagram. And, you know, he got passed over for promotion because he wasn't technical enough. And it was kind of a weird time.

And so I, you know, put together this plan and through a bunch of just kind of talking and those guys thought it was a great idea, Eric kind of ordained me and said, you know what? You should, if we were going to do this, you should do it. I'll have the benefit of knowing really soon, or eventually at least, whether you're any good at it. And so here's $100 million. And so I was joined by at the time, Ronnie Conway, who was a... Sure. Ron Conway's son. Ron Conway's son.

It was on Megan Smith team, which was New Business Development. And Rich Miner, who a great friend and returned to great investor, who was kind of like, you know, the other kind of co-founder, if you will, of Google Ventures. And we just started making investments, meeting people. And Rich was in Boston. I was in California. And, you know, Rich had had experience. at Orange Ventures and co-founded Android. And there's a lot that happened between there and here,

but basically grew it from that to what it was when I kind of retired from there. And like I said, there was nothing about it that would have marked it as being successful. It was sort of laughed at initially. Well, yeah, and also a little bit confounding because everybody thinks, so strategics, why are they doing it? A lot of times that people pop up a strategic venture fund for, some project and then the person leaves the company and it goes away and they're kind of flighty. And they also, when they make an investment, have probably some ulterior motive.

And so that's what everybody was reading into with Google was, oh, is this to build a mode around search? Is this to get intelligence to copy products? How did you mitigate that? Because Google, you know, at the time and continuing today is a big presence. How did you manage people reading into what the motivation was because my understanding was they told you financial motivation the end. Actually, the reverse, you know, you put your finger on it. We spent about a year, Rich and I really studying venture and corporate venture in particular, what worked and what didn't.

And that really informed what we thought Google Ventures should look like. And credit to Eric Beyer and Sergey, who basically gave us carp watch, you know, set it up in the way that you think makes sense, that makes this. a real thing. And kind of the, the, the, the, the rules of the of the road at that time seemed like, one, we're going to invest for a financial return. Any other metric is impossible to measure and therefore won't succeed. Like, if you can't measure it, especially at Google, it's like, we'll never know if this is working and it'll get shut down. So we're going to invest for financial return, which is the best measure of whether, you know, a commercial enterprise is having an impact in a sense.

The second, the people that work here should get paid like venture capitalists. They should have the same financial incentives because we had seen what happens is if you don't have that, especially in a corporate setting, the great people get offers and go somewhere else, leaving behind the people who probably can't or won't go somewhere else. And then your returns suffer as a result. And the third was, this is not Larry and Sergey your sandbox. So I need complete autonomy over the investments. you can't kind of dip your kind of your nose in and say, well, you should invest in this Zeppelin company and so forth. We're going to do our own thing. And you've got a balance sheet to do other kinds of investments.

And it needs to be set up as a venture fund, separate entity that is not controlled in a sense. And, you know, again, credit to them. They agree to all those things. And I think in part, it's like, well, this is de minimis money to Google. and the risk reward, you know, the rewards could be huge and the risks are kind of minimal. So, and so we got started. And the rewards did pretty well. I think probably some of these have turned out to be extraordinary.

I think you put 500 million into Uber at some point or 250 million. Yeah, I mean, we've generated, you know, I think that kind of eight or nine of the investments I did alone have generated, you know, billions of returns. Uber, Nest. We invested in a company called Upstart. which is, you know, 100x return. So Dave Gerard's company. So, yeah, we've found our niche at the time. And Nest you wind up buying, Uber you wind up having a, obviously, Google winds up

having a super contentious relationship with an employee issue. Then, you know, Robin Hood, Slack. People argued maybe Google should have bought Slack. Obviously, you did buy NASDA. I said Google should have bought Slack. for sure. You did, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, Stewart's a friend. Why didn't they? The same reason I think that Google didn't buy Instagram, didn't buy Shopify.

It's just at the price was, price was too high. But of course, the price is always too high for the good things. And I really argued that that that was incorrect. And the price only goes up for, has only gone up from there. And I think it was a mistake. I heard that when Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp, Larry went bonkers and was like, how did we lose these? We need to get our act together. We need to move faster in M&A. True story?

I think that anytime a competitor gobbles up something, there's always a little bit of that regret, you know, kind of non-buyers remorse for why didn't we buy it? But those were on our radar. We had, I won't say we had opportunities in the sense that you'd have to come to an agreement, but there were opportunities to have those conversations. and I certainly raised those as targets. Yeah.

When a company misses, you know, buying it, why does that occur and why does Zuckerberg do so good at that moment in time, do you think? I think there's two reasons I can think of. One, there's, you know, fear around the price. No one wants to look stupid. So, oh, we completely overpaid for this asset. I mean, if you think of what Facebook paid for WhatsApp at the time, $18 billion or something, that's a big number.

A lot of potential to look dumb. And people in big positions don't really like to look dumb. So that's kind of one reason. And I think the other reason is especially big companies get so entrenched in that it wasn't built here mindset that we're working on these five other things that are technically better or they're going to get traction and we have distribution. And there's a million reasons why. But I think it loses sight of the fact that it's really hard to displace an incumbent. And so, you know, betting on the number two or three in the market is not always the smartest way to go. So if you have a chance to take out the market leader and bring it down to your platform,

and I just think it takes courage. And I think Google showed that courage with YouTube. Oh, yeah. I mean, they bought YouTube for what, $1.6 billion when it had this crazy, like, incredible lawsuit coming down like a sword right about to hit them on the neck and like Google comes in and like stops the sword from decapitating. Yeah, no, I think Sala Khamgar, is an early Google employee, good friend, gets a lot of credit. There should get a lot of credit for that acquisition. But I think, you know, Google in some ways kind of lost its nerve to buy big things. And I think you've seen a struggle with Allo and these different kind of chat phone and buzz.

And, I mean, there's an endless list of things Google has launched that have failed to catch. Every startup needs to ensure they own their intellectual property. You got to file your trademark. Listen, I'm not being conceded here, but a lot of people will watch what I do over the years and copy it. Well, that's not cool. If you file your trademark, then it's a very simple conversation. Do you know how this goes down? You literally

send them a link to your trademark. Or you send their attorney a copy of the trademark. You know what that big company does? They back off immediately. Oh, you got the trademark. We're done. I'm telling you in a dozen out of a dozen times, that's probably what's happened. The person immediately goes, okay, you're right, Jake Al, you got the trademark, you got us. But

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trademarks approval. No one likes dealing with trademarks, but BrainBase file makes it easy. Head over to brainbase.com slash twist and enter the code TWI-I-S-T. At checkout, when you file that first trademark, you're going to do it for just $169, a 15% discount. Brainbase, B-R-A-I-N-B-A-S-E.com slash twist. It's an amazing product. It's the product that I've always wanted. thanks to BrainBase for making it. Why did they never get anything to work in social, do you think? I don't think. And to this day, I don't think there's any social, right? Nothing's ever worked. No, I think I think you have to really understand and be social to get social. Now, I'm not social. I'm on like no social media really. And so I won't say, you know,

it won't say I don't understand it, but it doesn't appeal to me. But I think, uh, in particular, I don't know that to the, you know, at least the then current leadership at Google, that was well understood. I mean, if you look at Google Plus, that was not a well thought. It was not a thought out product. I was going to say not a well thought out, but it wasn't thought out.

It was just, we're going to compete. And you can't really launch a top-down social product. You need to have momentum. And I also remember Buzz, Google Buzz was so well done when it was integrated into your Gmail because it instantly knew your social network because you were emailing with people.

And I remember they had kind of, been like maybe that's a little too overreaching. And Zuckerberg never meant met any friction. He was not in favor of removing. And who cares if people's privacy gets compromised, whatever. You want to add somebody to a group? Go ahead and add him. You know, if, and he basically said with groups, you can add anybody to any group. And if your friends add you to a group that you shouldn't belong to, well, maybe you should have different friends with his quote basically, paraphrasing here. Whereas you guys were like, oh, you know what? Yeah. If somebody's X is in their mailbox and we add them to their thing.

Oh, yeah, that feels overreaching. And basically shut down Google Buzz. Is that also like Google just cared too much and was too considered? I think cared more than startups need to and probably cared more than other companies did. At the time, at least, there was a very real, to give the devil as to do, a very real sense of responsibility around data, user data, how it's treated, at least among the group of executives and engineers that I was working with, that, yeah, you need to be really careful about that. And that makes it really hard to launch a product like TikTok or Buzz and make those

things successful because you can, you have this treasure trope of data. It's attempting to use it. It's so much easier to use it, but it was not, it was not Googly to do so. How close did Google come to buying Tesla do you think? I mean, there's been obviously a lot of people talking about it and it's been publicly out there. I don't know how much I should say, but not close. Eli talked about it. Yeah. Yeah.

It was a real discussion. Yeah. What would the world have looked like if you guys had gotten that done? Well, I mean, there are two ways to look at it, right? We could imagine the world is the same but enhanced as it is. Or you could imagine look at the things Google has purchased and how is it done with that. And would it have managed through Tesla's challenges the same way it did as a private company? I would argue no.

I would say that that that would have been very challenging for. Google to see it through all of those challenges. And then to commit to gigafactories and all the other things that Elon has committed to and to also be the, you know, the entrepreneur of the century out there, you know, sort of as the as the front person for the technology. Yeah. It would have been hard. But it would have been $20 or $30 billion.

It would have been an incredible price when you think about it. It would have been if we assume the outcome was the same. But what if Google had, we don't know. Right? That's the thing about regret. You don't know. It could have been much worse. Could have bought it and it could have just died on the vine. Elon could have said, I'm not interested in this anymore. I can't work with you. And then it's dead. Wow. But then you look at YouTube and Android and both of those have changed the world and become. I think those are different. Those were much smaller startups run by their founders who are very collaborative, Chad and Steve and Rich and Handy and that team. were interested in Google's platform as Google was growing itself.

Google wasn't the big, bad giant that Google was kind of the quirky fun tech up and comer in a sense. And joining the company then seemed like, okay, we can grow together. And I think now it's seen as like this giant gobbling things up. And if you gobble up Tesla, that probably feels a lot different. Also, those are software businesses in large part with, you know, YouTube has a hardware data center component, but Google is great at that. Yeah. Building things in the real world, like making cars.

That's a whole, there's a reason why GM is great at making cars. It's very hard. Supply chains are really difficult. Yeah. I learned this with Nest, like very, very hard. Yeah. I mean, Nest now makes a great product, but it was a little shaky there in the early days. Yeah.

Oh, it was, yeah. I was on the board, you know, and there were scary moments. So when we were sort of shipping the thermostat for sure of leaving the factory and I was on a board call and I said, guys, what if like these things don't work? Like, what if they get in everyone's house and like there's some glitch that's not software related? You know, that happens. Like, we're done. And sort of like cross our fingers and hope the testing was thorough. And so, yeah, there's a whole.

The only reason I thought that was a good bet with Tony and Matt and that team was they had done it before. you know, if they hadn't done hardware before, that is a very difficult to do a hardware and software stack and manufacture and distribute. And even Tony, I think in a sense, tapped out. It was like, okay, I've taken it to this point. Let's have someone else take it from here. And but still great products to this day. Yeah.

What do you think about self-driving? Waymo has been just very conservative in their approach and slowly, methodically, you know, sort of getting to market. But we've been in a perpetual. you know, two to three years? I would say, have them been getting to market? I don't know. I feel like they have something in Arizona, right?

They have some minivans in Arizona driving people around. But I feel like that it feels like that technology has been stalled out for five plus years. Like, where is the progress, you know, from here? I'm an investor in a company called Aurora. Yeah, she said the founder on. Yeah. Okay, Chris is great. And I was friends with Chris at Google.

And so that's a great example. So Chris was at Google. So he was doing this. Something happened that caused him to feel like he needed to do it on his own. And he's created $10 billion, $20 billion, $30 billion. Who knows how much value doing it. And so when the question, the other question is to why doesn't Google, why didn't Google buy X, Y, or Z? It's like, well, they're having trouble even holding on.

When you're a big company, it's very difficult to hold on to innovators. And so I think there's obviously a ton of potential. I'm an investor. It's a huge, huge market, but I feel like Chris and his team have a definitive lead. Yeah, Aurora was episode 1228 just this month, in fact. And they're doing, he said, trucks first, and they're going to try to make that work, obviously, highways are a more finite set. But if you had to guess, knowing what you've known, investing in the companies you have,

everybody says, oh, two, three, four years, we'll be there, self-driving. And we've literally been saying that for 10 years. Right. And here we are 11 years later and you're still not there. You massively kind of like massively overestimate progress in the short term and massively underestimated in the long term. So, yeah, we're still, I would, it's, I would say we're still years away. I would say we're still, yeah, I think you'll see it in closed circuits, you know.

Sure. Airports and golf courses or wherever, you know, is sort of closed routes on trucking, that, that kind of thing. But this is the thing with step functions. When would you see those close routes? Soon, I would think, in the next couple of years, I would think. I mean, from what I know. But this is the thing with exponential growth and step functions. It's sort of like if we were on our star tax and you said, well, when am I going to have a software-enabled app-based phone?

And be like, well, what are you even talking about? And then it appeared. So it's really hard to say, like, it's probably going to happen and look in a way that we can't predict because it's like this. It's like from 256 to 512. It's not from 256 to 257. Right. It's going to just double. And which comes first?

The V-TOLs? Because watching Joby and some of these other, you know, basically drones with humans on them, just giant-sized drones. And I know I think Larry invested in three of them. I don't know if you've invested in any of them. Or did you invest in any of them at Google? No, I've looked at them. I haven't invested in them.

And so those arrive before. full self-driving in the Bay Area? You know, what is... I think what it comes down to is what is society's toleration going to be and which society for accidents? So one person gets killed by a self-driving car, you know, how will we measure that risk? Will we do it rationally and scientifically versus the people that didn't die because cars are driving themselves versus, you know, some flying, you know, flying taxis, which don't

exist? So it's like, what is our toleration for errors there? It's not going to be zero. The things will crash and things will break and things don't work. Yeah, people will die. And so right now, for whatever reason, we've accepted 30 to 50,000 people a year can die in car crashes and we're kind of okay with that. I would argue we shouldn't be.

And I think Chris would argue the same. And Sergei definitely would argue that. And I think that's how all those projects started. So what is our toleration for death or errors as it relates to self-driving? capability and how we and as a society as a population we're terrible at measuring risk and accounting for it and you know the pandemic is a great example of that so so i think the when and how these things roll out sort of like we may not even see it in the u.s first i think there's much less a toleration for new technologies failing than there are in some other you know yeah no i mean

in an authoritarian country they'll just launch it out literally it's not a big deal and in fact i've seen, there's a company in China that, I forgot the name of it, they're going public, and they are literally running humans in tests and going pretty high. Ehang, I think is the one, E-H-A-N-G. Doesn't sound like, that's not the right name. Do you want to fly my E-Hang? I'm going to fly my E-Hang. You hang, but I mean, the videos are pretty compelling.

You've worked on a lot of healthcare stuff. There was some company at Google, was a Calico? Calico. Calico. What was? Calico. That's a company I started. You started it.

And that was for life extension. Was the general idea? Yeah, that was the general idea. The pitch was as follows. It didn't go. It has not gone the direction I wanted it to go, but, you know, lots of creators can say that about their creations. Dr. Frankenstein included. But Calico.

What was the original vision? And, yeah. It was basically, if I were, to write down on a blackboard the symptoms of aging, but not tell you that it was about aging. It would look like many other diseases. It would look like a disease state. If I describe, we described what happens as someone ages. And so it seemed clear to me at the time, this is more than 10 years ago now, that their aging is, it's all genetic based. It's sort of like it's based on the proteins that are expressed that are encoded by your genes. So the only difference that

differentiates you, kind of 40-year-old you from 20-year-old you, is the status of your genes and what proteins they are expressing. And so it seemed like we're at a time then where, well, we can read the genome and we are rapidly developing tools. I invested in a company called Hyperion and another called Editas and so forth where, okay, now we can actually alter the genome. So we should be able to understand the genetic basis of aging. And if we can do that, we can cure a lot of disease, prevent a lot of suffering. And, you know, that's kind of the holy grail for, I mean, literally. That's the holy grail, right?

It's literally, the purpose of the holy grail was to live forever. So the goal wasn't, hey, let's live forever. It was like, okay, this seems like something worth doing. And so I wrote up a business plan and I was going to fund it via Google Ventures. So I was going to kind of do the Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk kind of mini version of it. Okay, I'm going to start this company as well. Right. And in doing so.

So I talked, collaborated really with Ray Kurzweil and my friend Annie Conrad, who is now running Verily over at Google and a number of other folks. And in talking to Larry and Sergey and John Doer, who's on the Google board, why don't we do this inside of Google? Like, we'll fund it inside of Google. And the things funded inside of Google makes me, should we do that? But ultimately, we decided, okay, let's do that because Google can write a really big check. And so we wrote, just presented it to the board that funded it with a billion dollars.

I brought in Art Levinson, who was the former Genentech CEO to be CEO. And it was off and run. I think since then it's taken a decided turn towards pharma development, developing drugs, but also hasn't been as open. The idea was this is going to be an open project. So that science is based on openness and collaboration. and they've kind of done the up of the Google thing. We're like, no, we're super shut down.

We're not going to share. Yeah. Google does that with certain things and then other things they're open. So when it comes to the algorithm and how things are ranked, it's very close. When it comes to Android, very open. How do they make that decision to be open or closed? I think sometimes people think that Google has this master plan and there's a strategy behind, strategy behind everything.

Yes. And my experience was that. that's not the case at all. It's sort of random. It's sort of, you know, why did Google have Chrome and Chromium and Android and are they competing? And it's just sort of like, you have these teams that have ideas and they're empowered to start things. And whether it's a new way to fix the bikes on campus or it's, I'm going to build a new kind of browser. And there, in a lot of cases, we're allowed to run with them. And so, yeah, there's often competing factions even within Google, you know, because, you know,

because it's such a big behemoth. And that's Larry and Sergei's idea is a little bit of chaos or competition is better than some top-down control. I think it's, yeah. And I think it probably comes from, you know, like a Montessori background where it's like, oh, we'll just put all the toys out. You know, what gets played with? Who's going to build what with these blocks?

And, you know, and it's worked pretty well in a lot of cases. I mean, there was just a New York Times story about Sundar yesterday. with 15 unnamed execs, who feared retribution. I'm like, really, New York Times? 15 execs are scared of Sundar and retribution. It's like, it's so silly that they're allowed to write these stories with 15 unnamed sources, like, just be on the record.

I mean, force people to be on the record. I think I know what the media is doing when they do that. They're basically like, we would like juicier quotes. So how about you're off the record? I've gotten a lot of those calls where it's sort of, that's exactly what it is, which is I have an idea for a story. the Sundar is failing. Let me talk to a bunch of people.

And when you've got a company with, I don't know, Google must have 200 VPs. I don't know. You're going to find 10 or 15 who are unhappy for whatever reason. And I've got nothing negative to Sundar is such a great guy. And he takes it very personally. He's working really hard. You can take objection to like, maybe you shouldn't do this or we should make this other decision. But it's not an easy job.

And yeah, I don't love the unnamed sources. The company is doing phenomenally well on all accounts. You would agree? Right. I would agree. I just think in any population you could find, you know, out of 1,000 people, five people who are really unhappy. 100%, especially if you are running a Montessori classroom where everybody is welcome to do projects.

I mean, you need only look at the profitability and the amount of cash this business is throwing off to know they're doing things correctly. Right. It's a triple I think since Sundar was CEO. it's values, but you know, tripled. Now, of course, it's a great flywheel. So I think their argument would be, oh, instead of tripling and doubling headcount, we could have kept headcount the same and quintupled.

But who knows? You know, but it's hard to argue with like the second, maybe second most valuable company in the world. Like, it's not an easy act. Yeah, I just saw the story and I was just like, rolled my eyes. I was like, I don't even need to read a New York Times story at this point with 15 unnamed sources in it to know that this is just an agenda-driven story that is maybe 20% true. at best. But isn't this what we do now? We build people up. You know, whether it's Mark Andreessen or Sundar or unit until it's time to take them down. And that's the cycle. And that's

why I've never wanted to be built up in that way because I don't want to be taken down. Well, you did leave to start your own firm. I think you told Carr, Swisher, you know, things were running at a high functioning level and it was time to do that. But you just wanted to be out of the mothership and have complete control or what was the thinking? Yeah. I mean, I think there are two things happening. One, I mean, I probably won't get into it, but I think I mentioned there was someone I was working with at Google where I was forced to work with, but I didn't really enjoy to work with. Yeah. It makes sense. Life miserable for a lot of people unnecessarily. And I just didn't agree with the way

business was being done, you know, in that sense. And so that was one piece of it. And the other piece was, you got to know when the cake is done, right? So it's like, well, I kind of did all the stuff there. And the one thing I hadn't done was own the man. company. Like, it wasn't, I was in charge, kind of like could be dictator and all that. But at the end of the day, I was still working for someone else. And that's not something I had done most of my career. And so Larry and Sergey stepped away. Eric was stepping away. Bill Campbell, unfortunately, passed away. Yeah. Salar and all of my kind of Tony left, Tony Fidel, kind of all my friends and were all stepping back. And it just seemed like, you know,

I could tolerate a lot of pain, but I don't want to be lonely. And it seemed like, it seemed like, It seemed like, okay, this seemed like the time. And I had thought about it a year prior and then been asked, you know, can you stay another year because, you know, Tony just left and so, et cetera, et cetera. And then, you know, you just, when you know, you know. Yeah. And you just raised a billion dollars, just emailed a couple of friends and boom, a billion shows up.

What's that like when you've got your track record and then you say, I'm starting a fund? Does Google just say, hey, we'll anchor it or something on the way out? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I think it was easy and difficult at the same time. And in a sense, if I had set the bar lower, I think it would have been, you know, kind of a snap in a sense. Yeah, we've raised over a billion dollars now. But I had a lot of momentum coming out of Google, track record and so forth.

And that helped a lot. At the same time, when it comes down to it, it was time for LPs to sign the LP agreement. And, you know, I was asking for pretty premium terms because it's like, well, that's the only way I want to do this. some balked. You know, I had one very large name brand. Prebub terms being like, you want a 30% carry or something? Carry, control, no concentration limits, you know, all of the, you know, things that I wouldn't even maybe use, but I felt like, well, if I want to do this, like, let me like, let me ask for what Sequoia gets, you know? Yeah. And so there was one, you know, in particular one very large

LP who at the last minute said, we're good to go, make, you know, kind of cornerstone LP, but here's a side letter. We want preferential economic terms. We want reduced carry, reduced fees. We want to see your pipeline and sign this and you can't give it to anyone else. And you can't tell your other LPs. Yeah, that's gnarly. That felt not nice. And I wasn't going to do that. And so I did no side letters, booted them. Well, they walked really. So I'd like to think I booted them, but I said, I'm not going to do that. Yeah, it sounds like you didn't accept their last minute ultimatum. It was a, I think it was described as like one of the,

one of the crazier things for an LP to pull up the last minute. And I, you know, I don't, I know you play poker, but I have played, but I don't bluff. It's sort of like, no, I'm not going to, they said, well, it's the day before. What are you doing on Tuesday night? We're having a game. You're invited. I think you have money. Come to the game.

You can learn. We can teach out of bluff. That's who you want to play with. Yeah, people who have money can. Yeah. It'll be a, it's going to be an. It's going to be an. It's going to be an.

expensive two or three years, but you know, you'll have a couple of laughs and some good wine. You know, I, yeah, that's right. If you don't know who the sucker at the table is, you know. New bestie. Welcome to the team, Bestie. Speaking of besties, you, you backed my bestie Friedberg a bunch of times and you guys are besties for in the real world. I love that guy.

Yep. You backed climate. You backed Metro Mile. What's unique about Bestie Freeberg? Well, he and I, you. He's got a Google background, so I hate to keep using that word. But there's a certain at the time that people were there, you learn a certain way of tackling problems, a certain way of doing postmortems and things go wrong.

It's just a really familiar way of doing business. And he's a great person, super science-driven, very principled, really brilliant. I learn every time I talk to him. I feel like I learned something. What was it like at Google when you met him for the first time? I really only got to know him well at climate. And so that's when we really kind of built a relationship because I joined the board there. He was very much the same, very high energy, very engaged deep on.

I mean, this is why he was great at Google, right? That's who Larry and Sergey well, people who are deep on multiple areas and then are fact-driven and not BS artists. You guys passed on Theranos. You met Elizabeth Holmes. You and I both called it. If you have the technology, you would show it. What are the lessons we can learn there and what was it like meeting with her? I mean, there's so many, right?

That's a great example of the media just by deciding we like a story. This will be a good story because the parameters of it look nice. It looked good on the cover of a magazine. But doing no research, like not actually taking the test and then taking a quest or lab core test and comparing the results. That's all I did. That's all you needed to do. You literally asked her, can I see the results and compare them? What was her response?

intermediary. I didn't even take the meeting. No, the answer, here are the lessons. When a startup has, in science or in life sciences, has a board full of former government of former government officials, no one experienced in the life sciences, former generals, great people, they know nothing about what's going on when they've got armed guards at the, at the entrance, literally like armed guards. Tracked. They won't answer any questions.

Like, they were all of the signs. This should not have been a surprise. And that's why there are no life science investors. Because those of us in the know know that, like, it's not just the technology. There's regulatory issues. There's all kinds of things. And it's like, if it smells too good to be true, come on, this is vaporware. Yeah.

And you're right. I mean, you know, just in terms of signaling for the media, people forget this is at a time when people are like, hey, how come there aren't female CEOs of billion-dollar companies who have received hundreds of millions of financing? And I think it's not inaccurate to say that Elizabeth Holmes hacked that system. I'm saying this. Like, she knew that they wanted her to be on the cover because they needed a female CEO to trumpet and put on the cover and to say had raised a hundred million.

And here is the golden child who is going to change Silicon Valley. A disservice to all of those who would follow, all the especially female founders in science and tech that want to do things. And especially in that area of diagnostics, really like poison the well a little bit. And yeah, I think it was a good story that wanted to get the kind of wanted to be promoted and told. But, you know, I didn't seek to take down Theranos. I was asked at a conference on stage, what do you think?

And I said, I loved it. It's complete nothingness. Like, wouldn't touch it with a hundred foot pole. And then I was like pilloried on Twitter apparently. It's like, Bill doesn't like, you know, female founders and why is he talking about this? I'm like, look, you ask me a question. I answered it. Don't make this about me.

Make it about the technology. I would have loved to have been wrong. That would be great. Absolutely. I'd have wrong a lot. I would have no problem being wrong. But in that case, I was pretty sure I wasn't. It really does speak to this effect where, you know, if you're in the no about a specific vertical

and then you see media coverage of it, you would. or if you're the subject, and there's a name for this effect, I forgot what it's called, where if you read a story about yourself or a company you worked for Google or a topic you know, biotech, whatever it is, you realize how little the journalist actually knows and how could they? They're a journalist. They're not a PhD. And then you see her on the cover of all these magazines.

It was just so obvious. If you had the technology, you would show it. Yeah. And I was just on CNBC. Especially in science. That's how science works. And Elizabeth wasn't a scientist. She dropped out of Stanford, which is a badge of honor if you start a tech company, but not everyone who drops out starts a great company. Like there's a lot. There's like a bias there that, oh, she dropped out of Stanford. It must be a thing. But no, in the life science is, science is collaborative. You show it in the

open. That's not how this works. Correct me if I'm wrong. Also, science is really complex and takes years to learn, as opposed to say Zuckerberg coding and he drops out, like, yeah, Zuckerberg can learn to code better than his teachers at Harvard. So him dropping out or Bill Gates dropping out because they're moving faster than the computer science program, that's one thing. But for biotech and working with blood? You can also push a new rev of software and fix a lot of problems and adjust the algorithm. And you can see that out.

You don't need to see Google's algorithm to have Google. prove that it's, that it works. So with Elizabeth's, you know, and the promise of Theranos, it's like, well, show us that it works and it was so clear that it was obvious. You know, there was no magic in saying this is nonsense. It literally was on CNBC yesterday talking about tether, which is for people who don't know, just a stable coin, but they wouldn't produce their audit. They won't subject themselves to the audit and just nobody knows any information. And I'm always amazed that journalists or the public can't put together that when people have the goods, they can show it. And when people don't, they filibuster and say they're being persecuted and attacked where they deflect.

It's just classic behavior. And it's not about Elizabeth. It's about show, show, it's about show not tell. That's how science. And even venture works. It's just so much better to show. Don't talk about it. Show me the thing.

Like open up the machine. Let's see how it works. And you didn't, like, that's the thing you mentioned journalism. It's gone because the news cycle is so fast. It's all become opinion pieces. And it's, and no disdain on journalists, but it's like, it's, it moves so quickly that you have, everyone has to have an opinion rather than doing research and, uh, and actually like explaining things and seeking to understand. It's just we have an opinion. The Theronos thing is great.

It's going to change the world. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Yeah. Well, I have a fairy tale too. But like, that one's not true. Yeah, that's fiction. I mean, if you just think about how it used to work, you would spend 10, 20 years on a beat. You would have mentors who were 10, 20, 30 years on the beat. So you at least had a time to build up some knowledge of a vertical. And now they just have no money. And then also there's a young generation who look at journalism as activism. And I think that's sort of changed everything. I'm not sure how you feel about it. It's a very broken system. Science isn't activism. Journalism, I don't think should be activism. It should be, you know, and that's why we're kind of stuck in this. place, at least in this country, where what is facts? What is true anymore? And we can't, if we can't agree on that, how are we going to do anything? What's happening in science in that

regard, the sort of search for truth and facts? And what did you learn through this pandemic about the nature of it? I think your bestie David Sachs said it really well, so I'm going to paraphrase him. It seems to me we're in a race between technological advancement and innovation and the disintegration of political and social systems. And hopefully, the first thing goes faster than the other two. Because we're creating, so take biology and biotech tools. We have this great world where these tools exist, but there's no tool that's ever been created that hasn't been used by someone who's not well

to do harm. So it's really hard, as you know, I think you talked about this a few weeks ago, to create a nuclear bomb. It takes a lot of people, a lot of materials, they have to refine them. But you can 3D print. you can print, DNA print a lot of things now. So Canadian researchers, yeah, they recreated the horsepox virus using mail order DNA, a kind of an extinct virus and very close relative to smallpox and for $100K,000,

and that was years ago. So we are now these tools that are available to large populations that are not difficult to use, are kind of extinction level tools. And we are so far behind the curve of where we need to be in understanding that and preparing for it. And that's why kind of bioterrorism is one of the areas that I'm most interested in as an investor is where there's a lot of opportunity to hopefully avoid that terrible scenario where someone who is not well decides, well, instead of shooting a gun and killing one person, the bullet doesn't keep going. I'm going to release this virus.

It doesn't have a viral coefficient. Correct. If bullets had viral coefficients, we were in it. It has a R not of one, right? Exactly. I mean, I mean, people would argue, AR-15s and others are, you know, but they work more effectively, but they certainly don't have a viral coefficient. Are the anecdotes keeping up in our technology to build those and, you know, counter what

could be bioterrorism? How is that going? Are people actually building things to? I think that. the tools exist to create the mayhem and the destruction and the death, we are not at all taking seriously. We are no better prepared for the next pandemic than we were for this one. We might even be worse, we're kind of worse prepared because this was the most benevolent form of a benign pandemic. Even though it's terrible, a lot of people died and didn't have to be that way. It's as

benign a version of this. So, you know, SARS is about a 10% mortality rate. MERS was about 30. H5N1 flu is 60%. So if someone decided to weaponize that and make it more contagious, you know, we are in a lot of trouble because, you know, one or two percent mortality rate, terrible, but society continues. 30 percent plus mortality rate, I don't know if society exists. The power grid goes down and, you know, chaos and chaos and we're just not, I'm not trying to be, I think there are things we can do. So I'm not trying to be doom and gloom, but we're not taking it seriously. in any way, at a government level, and governments aren't talking to each other the right way, and it's probably with climate change, one of the largest existential threats, I think, that we face.

And we can see it coming. Shouldn't climate change be solvable, given, you know, the advances we've made new nuclear, solar, and then also carbon sequestering? Shouldn't we be able to solve it? Is it, it feels like the technology is there, but maybe not the will to deploy the technology. Am I correct? Well, I think all of these, both of these problems are very solvable and addressable, but the will, as you said, is the hard part, getting people to agree on the problem, number one, and then the solution. And then, as you know, as an entrepreneur, just doing things, like start to execute. So I think part of the challenge with climate change, for example, is many of the

same people who believe that climate change is real and is a real threat are the same people who are very opposed to the next generation of nuclear technology. But it is our best bet right now to generate a lot of power and keep society going without contributing to this problem. And so we're at a standstill there in a sense. How much safer are the nuclear reactors that Gates is working on and other folks are working on, I don't know if you have investments on it versus, you know, the reactor that was below sea level in Fukushima? Yeah. I think there were obvious a lot of problems with challenges with that design.

I think the next generation, and we haven't really built new nuclear plants in this country for a long time. 73 or something? Yeah. And I think the ones that, like you said, Gates is working on. Those are incredibly safe designs. Now, of course, it gets back to your first question, which is, or your earlier question on, what risk tolerance do we have as a society? Are we willing to accept that, you know, what percent chance or likelihood that something goes wrong? And what is the outcome if it does, using kind of new nuclear versus, you know,

going the route that we're going, which is, okay, we're going to basically extinct ourselves if we continue on this path. And we've been on this planet for this very tiny sliver of time. We're doing a great job making sure that like our branch of the evolutionary tree ends. And so I think it's a major concern. And yeah, we we can solve the problems. But getting people to agree and understand is very challenging. It's just so weird. And there are so many economic tools you could use to make nuclear work. I don't understand why we don't give some sort of dividend to the people who live near a nuclear reactor. So if a group of people said, hey, yeah, we'll put this in this suburb of Texas, we'll put this one in this suburb of Ohio or wherever, you can just tell

people there, so you're going to get $1,000 a month for living in this own or we'll pay to relocate you, whichever you prefer. There are dozens, if not hundreds of nuclear reactors floating around in the oceans and under the oceans. We launched them into space on satellites. I think that we understand this technology well enough that it's not perfect. You're referring to bombs, I take it. No, I'm referring to the reactors on worship. Oh, on submarines. Yeah.

Yeah. Certainly, at the bombs, now we're into the tens of thousands probably. But there's satellites that go up that are nuclear powered. And I just, I think we're stuck because there's been an unwillingness or maybe not a right. It comes down to incentive structures, giving great incentives for even politicians to take this on. You know, why would you take it on? It's, you know, it's like, because your opponents will, you know, just kill you with it. And you'll lose the 70,000 coal miners in two states who, you know, are going to lose their $45,000 a year jobs that we could pay for with a fraction of the benefit.

And let's look at like the pandemic. So if we had been willing to do challenge trials where you infect a couple hundred people, volunteers who are willing. And there were many, many people willing, who are healthy and with a very low likelihood. of a bad outcome, we could have done those trials in weeks, not six months, and had these vaccines rolled out much sooner. In March April. So let's say even if one percent of those volunteers had a bad outcome, we would have saved tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives.

Hundreds of thousands of lives. And it would be no different than putting like astronauts or people who are pilots or test pilots. After 9-11, a lot of great people volunteered and said, this is a cause I want to fight for. This is the same. People are dying. This is a cause. I am willing to take the chance I understand the risks.

And adults should be allowed to make those decisions. And I don't even think there was a real discussion in this country around a challenge trial. Yeah, who would take people actually understanding it as well. It also seems like the science community is so precious about this not doing harm that they've not been able to take the risk reward into account. I think it's about not getting sued, honestly.

I think science is. willing to take chances, but I think it's about not getting sued. What other chances should we take in science, do you think, that we're not taking? Well, I think if you look at how we spend our money, like, that's a good way to look at it. You know, if we look at what we spend at NIH, it's been $43 billion a year, and at CDC, we spend $6.5 billion a year, which is down from $7.5 billion. And on defense, we spend $720 billion a year. And I would argue that bioterrorism or even natural pandemic threats are at least as great a threat as a conventional war and maybe greater. And it would take very little.

I mean, so here's an example, a universal flu vaccine to protect against H5N1. And I think there's a better, I think it's estimated, there's a better than 50% chance that can be done over a five to 10 year period or much less. the five to 10 year estimate, by the way, comes out of time when the traditional vaccine development was thought to take 10 years. And now we have multiple vaccines that are efficacious and safe that were developed in a very short period of time. So if we put, I don't know, a billion dollars towards a universal flu vaccine, we would save so many lives that and so much lost productivity would be saved, but for people getting the flu,

that it's a no-brainer to do that. But you need government-level incentives to do these things because the market incentive to create a vaccine that will be given away for free is zero. The reason why we have great vaccines now for COVID is the incentives got aligned with the outcome. And the government said, we're going to give you a bunch of money if you do this. The reason why the distribution was screwed up

is that the government didn't say to CVS, we're going to give you 50 bucks for every person you vaccinate. It would have been a no-braner. You would have seen, we were screaming, you know, kind of a vaccination rate. They would have been on the street in front of CVS. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, come on in and have a cup of coffee.

We got donuts. I would have been in there. Yeah. Exactly. And so it's all about, it's in most cases, aligning incentives. So to your question, we just need to align the incentives with the outcomes that we want. So if we want climate change solved or we want a bioterrorism or the next pandemic address, we need to create incentives and government level incentives in some cases are the best

way because there's no market for a vaccine that's free. And so Farmer doesn't have a reason to work on that. I think about how many trillions we spent on stimulus that if we had just done the challenge trials, which would have required, you know, hundreds of people, we could have shorten the pandemic by six months. It would have saved so many trillions. Let's say that we've spent four trillion dollars so far. Yeah. Which is a mind-boggling number. But let's say that before this pandemic or before the next one, because the next one is coming guaranteed. It might be tomorrow, it might be 10 years or not, but it's coming. Let's say that we spent $10 billion to build two world-class hospitals in every U.S.

state, 50 states, that's $500 billion. And let's say we gave them each $5 billion to run for the next five years. Okay, so that's $5 billion times 50. That's another $250 billion or up to $750 billion, which is barely a down payment on what we spent on the response to this pandemic. And you and I both know most of that money was wasted. Like, tons. Most of that money went to nonsense. It went, you know, and it's, you know, the fact that, like, the government of California is giving away cash in lotteries to that's right. The incentive that creates, by the way, is, next time, I'm going to wait to get paid before I get vaccinated.

Yeah, the last people in. Talk about a stupid way to deploy a strategy. I mean, it's like, yeah, last person gets the best price. There's so many decisions in this pandemic that boggle the mind. But if you look at that $4 trillion, it sort of comes out of time where prior to this, the argument was, we have no money. We can't provide universal health care. We have no money. Suddenly, when votes are at stake, oh, we can print $4 trillion. So we know providing health care or vaccines or solving climate change, we know that money is not the limiting factor.

It's the will. It's creating the incentive structure. It has nothing to do with money. And I personally believe every baby born in this country deserves top quality health care, clean water, good nutritious food. And we are rich enough to provide that. But instead, it's super simple. And why we're not doing those things is just heartbreaking. The housing one is also frustrating.

It's just we're sitting here saying, like, why don't we have enough houses? It's like, we didn't build enough. Right. The end, like, we don't have enough of them. This is simple supply dependent. And housing is not that hard to build. We've been building houses for a long time. We've been building modern houses for hundreds of years.

It's not a difficult thing to build a house. Yes. It's about incentives. Just look where the money is going. And that will tell you what problems are being solved or not solved. And that $4 trillion, what a shame because we are no better prepared. This is a country where we couldn't get, you know, PPE, you know, masks to people. completely. And so why would anyone have thought the vaccine roll out would go well? Yeah.

I mean, it is amazing that this vaccine has worked so well. Is that shocking to you? Because it was shocking to me just how quickly we got the vaccine out and how quickly we kind of beat the pandemic. I looked at Moderna years ago, MRI vaccine ideas and technology have been around for quite some time, but caught in this, you know, kind of this nether world where the idea was, It takes billions of dollars in 10 years to develop a vaccine, the liabilities for creating it, meaning you could get sued, give you a real disincentive to create new vaccines. And that's why we just didn't see any new vaccines. So magically, when the ability to sue and it goes away and the incentive structure is created,

it's not magic. You know, it's like, oh, suddenly we have all these. It's amazing breakthrough kind of technology when you think about how the world has worked 100 years ago or 5,000 years ago. Yes, it's amazing, but I'm not shocked at all. I knew this was lurking. And there's a lot of things like that lurking in labs and in science that are just waiting for the government to get out of the way and the right incentives to be created. All right, listen, we're going to have to have you back on again. And soon, an hour of Bill Morris, everybody. Continued success. And we'll see you next time on this weekend service. Bye-bye.

Thanks so much.